olicy--has struck into the
sequestered vale of humble life, sought out the Muse among sheep-cotes and
hamlets and the peasant's mountain-haunts, has discarded all the tinsel
pageantry of verse, and endeavoured (not in vain) to aggrandise the
trivial and add the charm of novelty to the familiar. No one has shown the
same imagination in raising trifles into importance: no one has displayed
the same pathos in treating of the simplest feelings of the heart.
Reserved, yet haughty, having no unruly or violent passions, (or those
passions having been early suppressed,) Mr. Wordsworth has passed his life
in solitary musing, or in daily converse with the face of nature. He
exemplifies in an eminent degree the power of _association_; for his
poetry has no other source or character. He has dwelt among pastoral
scenes, till each object has become connected with a thousand feelings, a
link in the chain of thought, a fibre of his own heart. Every one is by
habit and familiarity strongly attached to the place of his birth, or to
objects that recall the most pleasing and eventful circumstances of his
life. But to the author of the _Lyrical Ballads_, nature is a kind of
home; and he may be said to take a personal interest in the universe.
There is no image so insignificant that it has not in some mood or other
found the way into his heart: no sound that does not awaken the memory of
other years--

"To him the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

The daisy looks up to him with sparkling eye as an old acquaintance: the
cuckoo haunts him with sounds of early youth not to be expressed: a
linnet's nest startles him with boyish delight: an old withered thorn is
weighed down with a heap of recollections: a grey cloak, seen on some wild
moor, torn by the wind, or drenched in the rain, afterwards becomes an
object of imagination to him: even the lichens on the rock have a life and
being in his thoughts. He has described all these objects in a way and
with an intensity of feeling that no one else had done before him, and has
given a new view or aspect of nature. He is in this sense the most
original poet now living, and the one whose writings could the least be
spared: for they have no substitute elsewhere. The vulgar do not read
them, the learned, who see all things through books, do not understand
them, the great despise, the fashionable may ridicule them: but the author
has created himself an