Possibly a good deal of this may be regarded as the effect of disappointed views and an inverted ambition.  Prevented by native pride and indolence from climbing the ascent of learning or greatness, taught by political opinions to say to the vain pomp and glory of the world, “I hate ye,” seeing the path of classical and artificial poetry blocked up by the cumbrous ornaments of style and turgid common-places, so that nothing more could be achieved in that direction but by the most ridiculous bombast or the tamest servility; he has turned back partly from the bias of his mind, partly perhaps from a judicious policy—­has struck into the sequestered vale of humble life, sought out the Muse among sheep-cotes and hamlets and the peasant’s mountain-haunts, has discarded all the tinsel pageantry of verse, and endeavoured (not in vain) to aggrandise the trivial and add the charm of novelty to the familiar.  No one has shewn the same imagination in raising trifles into importance:  no one has displayed the same pathos in treating of the simplest feelings of the heart.  Reserved, yet haughty, having no unruly or violent passions, (or those passions having been early suppressed,) Mr. Wordsworth has passed his life in solitary musing, or in daily converse with the face of nature.  He exemplifies in an eminent degree the power of association; for his poetry has no other source or character.  He has dwelt among pastoral scenes, till each object has become connected with a thousand feelings, a link in the chain of thought, a fibre of his own heart.  Every one is by habit and familiarity strongly attached to the place of his birth, or to objects that recal the most pleasing and eventful circumstances of his life.  But to the author of the Lyrical Ballads, nature is a kind of home; and he may be said to take a personal interest in the universe.  There is no image so insignificant that it has not in some mood or other found the way into his heart:  no sound that does not awaken the memory of other years.—­

  “To him the meanest flower that blows can give
  Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

The daisy looks up to him with sparkling eye as an old acquaintance:  the cuckoo haunts him with sounds of early youth not to be expressed:  a linnet’s nest startles him with boyish delight:  an old withered thorn is weighed down with a heap of recollections:  a grey cloak, seen on some wild moor, torn by the wind, or drenched in the rain, afterwards becomes an object of imagination to him:  even the lichens on the rock have a life and being in his thoughts.  He has described all these objects in a way and with an intensity of feeling that no one else had done before him, and has given a new view or aspect of nature.  He is in this sense the most original poet now living, and the one whose writings could the least be spared:  for they have no substitute elsewhere.  The vulgar do not read them, the learned, who see all things through