mpassioned, but undistinguished. He sinks too often,
too abruptly, into the language of prose. The second defect is a certain
matter-of-factness in some of his poems, consisting in a laborious
minuteness and fidelity in the representations of objects, and in the
insertion of accidental circumstances, such as are superfluous in
poetry. Thirdly, there is in certain poems an undue predilection for the
dramatic form; and in these cases either the thoughts and diction are
different from those of the poet, so that there arises an incongruity of
style, or they are the same and indistinguishable, and then it presents
a species of ventriloquism. The fourth class includes prolixity,
repetition, and an eddying instead of progression of thought. His fifth
defect is the employment of thoughts and images too great for the
subject; an approximation to what might be called mental bombast, as
distinguished from verbal.

To these occasional defects I may oppose the following excellences.
First, an austere purity of language both grammatically and logically;
in short, a perfect appropriateness of the words to the meaning.
Secondly, a correspondent weight and sanity of the thoughts and
sentiments, won not from books, but from the poet's own meditative
observation. They are fresh, and have the dew upon them. Third, the
sinewy strength and originality of single lines and paragraphs; the
frequent curious felicity 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 which gives
the expression to all the works of nature. Like a green field reflected
in a calm and perfectly transparent lake, the image is distinguished
from the reality only by its greater softness and lustre.

Fifth, a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with
sensibility; a sympathy with man as man; the sympathy of a contemplator,
from whose view no difference of rank conceals the sameness of the
nature; no injuries of wind or weather, of toil, or even of ignorance,
wholly disguise the human face divine. The superscription and the image
of the Creator still remain legible to him under the dark lines with
which guilt or calamity had cancelled or cross-barred it. In this mild
and philosophic pathos, Wordsworth appears to me without a compeer.

Lastly, and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of
imagination in the highest and st