he, perhaps, for aught we know, was born
Not half a furlong from that self-same spring.

But now here's neither grass nor pleasant shade;
The sun on drearier hollow never shone;
So will it be, as I have often said,
Till trees, and stones, and fountain all are gone."

"Gray-headed Shepherd, thou hast spoken well;
Small difference lies between thy creed and mine:
This beast not unobserved by Nature fell;
His death was mourned by sympathy divine.

The Being, that is in the clouds and air,
That is in the green leaves among the groves,
Maintains a deep, and reverential care
For the unoffending creatures whom he loves.

The pleasure-house is dust:--behind, before,
This is no common waste, no common gloom;
But Nature, in due course of time, once more
Shall here put on her beauty and her bloom.

She leaves these objects to a slow decay,
That what we are, and have been, may be known;
But at the coming of the milder day,
These monuments shall all be overgrown.

One lesson, Shepherd, let us two divide,
Taught both by what she shews, and what conceals,
Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels."

Mr. Wordsworth is at the head of that which has been denominated the
Lake school of poetry; a school which, with all my respect for it, I do
not think sacred from criticism or exempt from faults, of some of which
faults I shall speak with becoming frankness; for I do not see that the
liberty of the press ought to be shackled, or freedom of speech
curtailed, to screen either its revolutionary or renegado extravagances.
This school of poetry had its origin in the French revolution, or rather
in those sentiments and opinions which produced that revolution; and
which sentiments and opinions were indirectly imported into this country
in translations from the German about that period. Our poetical
literature had, towards the close of the last century, degenerated into
the most trite, insipid, and mechanical of all things, in the hands of
the followers of Pope and the old French school of poetry. It wanted
something to stir it up, and it found that some thing in the principles
and events of the French revolution. From the impulse it thus received,
it rose at once from the most servile imitation and tamest common-plac