SOURCE: "Poetry," in The Age of Wordsworth, 1897. Reprint by G. Bell and Sons Ltd., 1930, pp. 146-284.

In the following excerpt, Herford discusses the poetic styles of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey and comments on the influence that the three poets had on each other.

[Wordsworth and Coleridge] were at once profoundly akin and strikingly different, and both their points of kinship and their points of divergence go to the heart of English Romanticism. It is therefore necessary to define these with some care. On a first glance the two men seem, physically and psychologically, of wholly different make. Wordsworth, a rugged North-countryman, somewhat ascetic and austere, constant in all relations, with a rigid framework of character behind which intellectual passion 'burnt like an unconsuming fire of light;' Coleridge, a Devonian, of softer, but more richly sensitive, fibre, every vibration of which stirred or shattered purpose, or started imagination...