e is jealous of
the rhetorical declaimers and rhapsodists as trenching on the province of
poetry. He condemns all French writers (as well of poetry as prose) in the
lump. His list in this way is indeed small. He approves of Walton's
Angler, Paley, and some other writers of an inoffensive modesty of
pretension. He also likes books of voyages and travels, and Robinson
Crusoe. In art, he greatly esteems Bewick's woodcuts, and Waterloo's
sylvan etchings. But he sometimes takes a higher tone, and gives his mind
fair play. We have known him enlarge with a noble intelligence and
enthusiasm on Nicolas Poussin's fine landscape-compositions, pointing out
the unity of design that pervades them, the superintending mind, the
imaginative principle that brings all to bear on the same end; and
declaring he would not give a rush for any landscape that did not express
the time of day, the climate, the period of the world it was meant to
illustrate, or had not this character of _wholeness_ in it. His eye also
does justice to Rembrandt's fine and masterly effects. In the way in which
that artist works something out of nothing, and transforms the stump of a
tree, a common figure into an _ideal_ object, by the gorgeous light and
shade thrown upon it, he perceives an analogy to his own mode of investing
the minute details of nature with an atmosphere of sentiment; and in
pronouncing Rembrandt to be a man of genius, feels that he strengthens his
own claim to the title. It has been said of Mr. Wordsworth, that "he hates
conchology, that he hates the Venus of Medicis." But these, we hope, are
mere epigrams and _jeux-d'esprit_, as far from truth as they are free from
malice; a sort of running satire or critical clenches--

"Where one for sense and one for rhyme
Is quite sufficient at one time."

We think, however, that if Mr. Wordsworth had been a more liberal and
candid critic, he would have been a more sterling writer. If a greater
number of sources of pleasure had been open to him, he would have
communicated pleasure to the world more frequently. Had he been less
fastidious in pronouncing sentence on the works of others, his own would
have been received more favourably, and treated more leniently. The
current of his feelings is deep, but narrow; the range of his
understanding is lofty and aspiring rather than discursive. The force, the
originality, the absolute truth and identity with which he feels some
things, makes him indifferent to s