and poetry. But my special purpose is to decide what is the
true nature of poetic diction, and to define the real poetic character
of the works of Mr. Wordsworth, whose writings have been the subject of
so much controversy.

At school I had the advantage of a very sensible though severe master. I
learned from him that poetry, even that of the loftiest odes, had a
logic of its own as severe as that of science, and more difficult,
because more subtle. In the truly great poets, he would say, there is a
reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of
every word. In our English compositions he showed no mercy to phrase,
metaphor, or image, where the same sense might have been conveyed with
equal force and dignity in plainer words. In fancy, I can almost hear
him now exclaiming: "Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean!" Nay,
certain introductions, similes, and examples were placed by name on a
list of interdiction.

I had just entered my seventeenth year when the sonnets of Mr. Bowles
were made known to me, and the genial influence of his poetry, so
tender, yet so manly, so natural and real, yet so dignified and
harmonious, recalled me from a premature bewilderment in metaphysics and
theology. Well were it for me, perhaps, if I had never relapsed into the
same mental disease.

The poetry of Pope and his followers, a school of French poetry
invigorated by English understanding, which had predominated from the
last century, consisted of prose thoughts translated into poetic
language. I was led to the conjecture that this style had been kept up
by, if it did not wholly arise from, the custom of writing Latin verses.
I began to defend the use of natural language, such as "I will remember
thee," instead of "Thy image on her wing, Before my fancy's eye shall
memory bring;" and adduced, as examples of simplicity, the diction of
Greek poets, and of our elder English poets, from Chaucer to Milton. I
arrived at two critical aphorisms, as the criteria of poetic style:
first, that not the poem which we have read with the greatest pleasure
but that to which we return with the greatest pleasure possesses the
genuine power; and, second, that whatever lines can be translated into
other words of the same language, without diminution of their
significance, are so far vicious in their diction.

One great distinction between even the characteristic faults of our
elder poets and the false beauties of the moderns is this. I