"
AN ESTIMATE.--The great amount of verse Wordsworth has written is due to
his estimate of the proper uses of poetry. Where other men would have
written letters, journals, or prose sketches, his ready metrical pen wrote
in verse: an excursion to England or Scotland, _Yarrow Visited and
Revisited_, journeys in Germany and Italy, are all in verse. He exhibits
in them all great humanity and benevolence, and is emphatically and
without cant the poet of religion and morality. Coleridge--a poet and an
attached friend, perhaps a partisan--claims for him, in his _Biographia
Literaria_, "purity of language, freshness, strength, _curiosa felicitas_
of diction, truth to nature in his imagery, imagination in the highest
degree, but faulty fancy." We have already ventured to deny him the
possession of imagination: the rest of his friend's eulogium is not
undeserved. He had and has many ardent admirers, but none more ardent than
himself. He constantly praised his own verses, and declared that they
would ultimately conquer all prejudices and become universally popular--an
opinion that the literary world does not seem disposed to adopt.
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