them.  He takes a subject or a story merely as pegs or loops to hang thought and feeling on; the incidents are trifling, in proportion to his contempt for imposing appearances; the reflections are profound, according to the gravity and the aspiring pretensions of his mind.  His popular, inartificial style gets rid (at a blow) of all the trappings of verse, of all the high places of poetry:  “the cloud-capt towers, the solemn temples, the gorgeous palaces,” are swept to the ground, and “like the baseless fabric of a vision, leave not a wreck behind.”  All the traditions of learning, all the superstitions of age, are obliterated and effaced.  We begin de novo, on a tabula rasa of poetry.  The purple pall, the nodding plume of tragedy are exploded as mere pantomime and trick, to return to the simplicity of truth and nature.  Kings, queens, priests, nobles, the altar and the throne, the distinctions of rank, birth, wealth, power, “the judge’s robe, the marshall’s truncheon, the ceremony that to great ones ’longs,” are not to be found here.  The author tramples on the pride of art with greater pride.  The Ode and Epode, the Strophe and the Antistrophe, he laughs to scorn.  The harp of Homer, the trump of Pindar and of Alcaeus are still.  The decencies of costume, the decorations of vanity are stripped off without mercy as barbarous, idle, and Gothic.  The jewels in the crisped hair, the diadem on the polished brow are thought meretricious, theatrical, vulgar; and nothing contents his fastidious taste beyond a simple garland of flowers.  Neither does he avail himself of the advantages which nature or accident holds out to him.  He chooses to have his subject a foil to his invention, to owe nothing but to himself.  He gathers manna in the wilderness, he strikes the barren rock for the gushing moisture.  He elevates the mean by the strength of his own aspirations; he clothes the naked with beauty and grandeur from the store of his own recollections.  No cypress-grove loads his verse with perfumes:  but his imagination lends a sense of joy

  “To the bare trees and mountains bare,
  And grass in the green field.”

No storm, no shipwreck startles us by its horrors:  but the rainbow lifts its head in the cloud, and the breeze sighs through the withered fern.  No sad vicissitude of fate, no overwhelming catastrophe in nature deforms his page:  but the dew-drop glitters on the bending flower, the tear collects in the glistening eye.

  “Beneath the hills, along the flowery vales,
  The generations are prepared; the pangs,
  The internal pangs are ready; the dread strife
  Of poor humanity’s afflicted will,
  Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny.”

As the lark ascends from its low bed on fluttering wing, and salutes the morning skies; so Mr. Wordsworth’s unpretending Muse, in russet guise, scales the summits of reflection, while it makes the round earth its footstool, and its home!