Mr. Wordsworth’s genius is a pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age.  Had he lived in any other period of the world, he would never have been heard of.  As it is, he has some difficulty to contend with the hebetude of his intellect, and the meanness of his subject.  With him “lowliness is young ambition’s ladder:”  but he finds it a toil to climb in this way the steep of Fame.  His homely Muse can hardly raise her wing from the ground, nor spread her hidden glories to the sun.  He has “no figures nor no fantasies, which busy passion draws in the brains of men:”  neither the gorgeous machinery of mythologic lore, nor the splendid colours of poetic diction.  His style is vernacular:  he delivers household truths.  He sees nothing loftier than human hopes; nothing deeper than the human heart.  This he probes, this he tampers with, this he poises, with all its incalculable weight of thought and feeling, in his hands; and at the same time calms the throbbing pulses of his own heart, by keeping his eye ever fixed on the face of nature.  If he can make the life-blood flow from the wounded breast, this is the living colouring with which he paints his verse:  if he can assuage the pain or close up the wound with the balm of solitary musing, or the healing power of plants and herbs and “skyey influences,” this is the sole triumph of his art.  He takes the simplest elements of nature and of the human mind, the mere abstract conditions inseparable from our being, and tries to compound a new system of poetry from them; and has perhaps succeeded as well as any one could. “Nihil humani a me alienum puto”—­is the motto of his works.  He thinks nothing low or indifferent of which this can be affirmed:  every thing that professes to be more than this, that is not an absolute essence of truth and feeling, he holds to be vitiated, false, and spurious.  In a word, his poetry is founded on setting up an opposition (and pushing it to the utmost length) between the natural and the artificial:  between the spirit of humanity, and the spirit of fashion and of the world!

It is one of the innovations of the time.  It partakes of, and is carried along with, the revolutionary movement of our age:  the political changes of the day were the model on which he formed and conducted his poetical experiments.  His Muse (it cannot be denied, and without this we cannot explain its character at all) is a levelling one.  It proceeds on a principle of equality, and strives to reduce all things to the same standard.  It is distinguished by a proud humility.  It relies upon its own resources, and disdains external shew and relief.  It takes the commonest events and objects, as a test to prove that nature is always interesting from its inherent truth and beauty, without any of the ornaments of dress or pomp of circumstances to set it off.  Hence the unaccountable mixture of seeming simplicity and real abstruseness in the Lyrical Ballads.  Fools have laughed at, wise men scarcely understand