tions, as they appeared to the
poet himself; secondly, the insertion of accidental circumstances, in
order to the full explanation of his living characters, their
dispositions and actions; which circumstances might be necessary to
establish the probability of a statement in real life, when nothing is
taken for granted by the hearer; but appear superfluous in poetry,
where the reader is willing to believe for his own sake. . .

"Third; an undue predilection for the _dramatic_ form in certain poems,
from which one or other of two evils result. Either the thoughts and
diction are different from that of the poet, and then there arises an
incongruity of style; or they are the same and indistinguishable, where
two are represented as talking, while in truth one man only speaks. . .

"The fourth class of defects is closely connected with the former; but
yet are such as arise likewise from an intensity of feeling
disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects described,
as can be fairly anticipated of men in general, even of the most
cultivated classes; and with which therefore few only, and those few
particularly circumstanced, can be supposed to sympathize: in this
class, I comprise occasional prolixity, repetition, and an eddying,
instead of progression, of thought. . .

"Fifth and last; thoughts and images too great for the subject. This
is an approximation to what might be called mental bombast, as
distinguished from verbal: for, as in the latter there is a
disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts, so in this there is a
disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion. . .

"To these defects, which . . . are only occasional, I may oppose . . .
the following (for the most part correspondent) excellencies:

"First; an austere purity of language both grammatically and logically;
in short a perfect appropriateness of the words to the meaning. . .

"The second characteristic excellence of Mr. Wordsworth's works is--a
correspondent weight and sanity of the thoughts and sentiments, won not
from books, but from the poet's own meditative observations. They are
fresh and have the dew upon them. . .

"Third; . . . the sinewy strength and originality of single lines and
paragraphs; the frequent _curiosa felicitas_ of his diction. . .

"Fourth; the perfect truth of nature in his images and descriptions as
taken immediately from nature, and proving a long and genial intimacy
with the very spirit w