of his poetry.  His language may not be intelligible, but his manner is not to be mistaken.  It is clear that he is either mad or inspired.  In company, even in a tete-a-tete, Mr. Wordsworth is often silent, indolent, and reserved.  If he is become verbose and oracular of late years, he was not so in his better days.  He threw out a bold or an indifferent remark without either effort or pretension, and relapsed into musing again.  He shone most (because he seemed most roused and animated) in reciting his own poetry, or in talking about it.  He sometimes gave striking views of his feelings and trains of association in composing certain passages; or if one did not always understand his distinctions, still there was no want of interest—­there was a latent meaning worth inquiring into, like a vein of ore that one Cannot exactly hit upon at the moment, but of which there are sure indications.  His standard of poetry is high and severe, almost to exclusiveness.  He admits of nothing below, scarcely of any thing above himself.  It is fine to hear him talk of the way in which certain subjects should have been treated by eminent poets, according to his notions of the art.  Thus he finds fault with Dryden’s description of Bacchus in the Alexander’s Feast, as if he were a mere good-looking youth, or boon companion—­

  “Flushed with a purple grace,
  He shews his honest face”—­

instead of representing the God returning from the conquest of India, crowned with vine-leaves, and drawn by panthers, and followed by troops of satyrs, of wild men and animals that he had tamed.  You would thank, in hearing him speak on this subject, that you saw Titian’s picture of the meeting of Bacchus and Ariadne—­so classic were his conceptions, so glowing his style.  Milton is his great idol, and he sometimes dares to compare himself with him.  His Sonnets, indeed, have something of the same high-raised tone and prophetic spirit.  Chaucer is another prime favourite of his, and he has been at the pains to modernise some of the Canterbury Tales.  Those persons who look upon Mr. Wordsworth as a merely puerile writer, must be rather at a loss to account for his strong predilection for such geniuses as Dante and Michael Angelo.  We do not think our author has any very cordial sympathy with Shakespear.  How should he?  Shakespear was the least of an egotist of any body in the world.  He does not much relish the variety and scope of dramatic composition.  “He hates those interlocutions between Lucius and Caius.”  Yet Mr. Wordsworth himself wrote a tragedy when he was young; and we have heard the following energetic lines quoted from it, as put into the mouth of a person smit with remorse for some rash crime: 

 ——­“Action is momentary,
  The motion of a muscle this way or that;
  Suffering is long, obscure, and infinite!”