I was in my twenty-fourth year when I had the happiness of knowing Mr. Wordsworth personally, and by that time the occasional obscurities which had arisen from an imperfect control over the resources of his native language had almost wholly disappeared, together with that worse defect of arbitrary and illogical phrases, at once arbitrary and fantastic, which alloy the earlier poems of the truest genius.  There was only evident the union of deep feeling with profound thought; and the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world, around forms, incidents, and situations of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dewdrops.

To find no contradiction in the union of old and new, to contemplate the Ancient of Days and all His works With feelings as fresh as if all had then sprung forth at the first creative fiat, characterises the mind that feels the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it.  To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood, to combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar—­this is the character and privilege of genius.  And it is the prime merit of genius, and its most unequivocal mode of manifestation, so to represent familiar objects as to awaken in the minds of others that freshness of sensation which is the constant accompaniment of mental, no less than of bodily, convalescence.

This excellence, which constitutes the character of Mr. Wordsworth’s mind, I no sooner felt than I sought to understand.  Repeated meditations led me to suspect that fancy and imagination were two distinct and widely different faculties, instead of being, according to the general belief, the lower and higher degree of one and the same power.  Milton had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful, mind.  The division between fancy and imagination is no less grounded in nature than that of delirium from mania; or of Otway’s

      Lutes, laurels, seas of milk, and ships amber,

from Shakespeare’s

      What!  Have his daughters brought him to this pass?

IV.—­The Philosophical Critic

As materialism has been generally taught, it is utterly unintelligible, and owes all its proselytes to the propensity, so common among men, to mistake distinct images for clear conceptions, and, vice versa, to reject as inconceivable whatever from its own nature is unimaginable.  If God grant health and permission, this subject will be treated of systematically in a work which I have many years been preparing on the Productive Logos, human and divine, with, and as an introduction to, a full commentary on the Gospel of St. John.