having been the eloquent eulogist of Milton, afterwards panegyrized Laud. It may be, however, but fair to remember in the case of Wordsworth, as in that of the youthful pantisocratists Coleridge and Southey, that, after fifty years of political progress, the youthful radical may appear, without blameable inconsistency—a steady conservative. In such a lapse of time, others have arisen to carry on the work of reform still further, and its earliest and most ardent supporters seem now to be laggards in the rear.
Wordsworth underrated the critical faculty, and certainly possessed it in but a niggard measure himself. His views on great political and social questions, on which Dr. Wordsworth appears to lay so much stress, are very far removed from being either sagacious or profound. Indeed, if we judge his intellectual powers by these, we shall be induced to suppose that a premature senility clouded his capacities, and that, after his wayward boyhood was over, he had passed from youth to age without the intervening period of manhood, that he was an old man at the time of life when others are young, and an old woman when he should have been an old man. He had all the faults of one who lived in a little world of his own, and reigned in that petty kingdom supreme.[1] While his unfamiliarity with what was to other men familiar
- ↑ This was written before the Authors had seen the able article in the "Quarterly" before alluded to. They find almost the same view there stated. "The notion he (Wordsworth) had imbibed of the latent capabilities of insignificant objects, led him in the true spirit of system, to select them in preference. Hence sprung some of the merits, and many of the defects of his verse. He brought into prominence numerous neglected sources of delight; convinced that he possessed that poetic stone, the touch of which would turn lead to gold, he not unfrequently adopted trivialities which it was beyond his alchemy to transmute." And elsewhere the Reviewer more tersely expresses the same idea. "His doctrine, that the business of a Poet is to educe an interest where none is apparent, engaged him in efforts to squeeze moisture out of dust."
