SOURCE: “Lyrical Ballads.” The Spectator 64 (April 5, 1890): 479-80.

In the following review, the anonymous author praises Edward Dowden's reprint edition of Lyrical Ballads, asserting that Wordsworth's literary influence has been more enduring than that of Coleridge.

This reprint of the first edition of the joint production of Wordsworth and Coleridge is valuable, of course, more as setting up a visible monument of a great era in the history of English literature, than for its restoration of a few obsolete readings of some of the most remarkable poems in the English language. There is something gratifying in possessing and physically handling a volume identical with that which our grandfathers or great-grandfathers read without in general being at all aware that it was the signal of a greater change in the tendencies of English poetry, and (one may almost say) of English faith so far as faith is affected (as it...