“The fourth class of defects is closely connected with the former; but yet are such as arise likewise from an intensity of feeling disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects described, as can be fairly anticipated of men in general, even of the most cultivated classes; and with which therefore few only, and those few particularly circumstanced, can be supposed to sympathize:  in this class, I comprise occasional prolixity, repetition, and an eddying, instead of progression, of thought. . .

“Fifth and last; thoughts and images too great for the subject.  This is an approximation to what might be called mental bombast, as distinguished from verbal:  for, as in the latter there is a disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts, so in this there is a disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion. . .

“To these defects, which . . . are only occasional, I may oppose . . . the following (for the most part correspondent) excellencies: 

“First; an austere purity of language both grammatically and logically; in short a perfect appropriateness of the words to the meaning. . .

“The second characteristic excellence of Mr. Wordsworth’s works is—­a correspondent weight and sanity of the thoughts and sentiments, won not from books, but from the poet’s own meditative observations.  They are fresh and have the dew upon them. . .

“Third; . . . the sinewy strength and originality of single lines and paragraphs; the frequent curiosa felicitas of his diction. . .

“Fourth; the perfect truth of nature in his images and descriptions as taken immediately from nature, and proving a long and genial intimacy with the very spirit which gives the physiognomic expressions to all the works of nature.  Like a green field reflected in a calm and perfectly transparent lake, the image is distinguished from the reality only by its greater softness and lustre.  Like the moisture or the polish on a pebble, genius neither distorts nor false-colors its objects; but on the contrary, brings out many a vein and many a tint, which escape the eye of common observation, thus raising to the rank of gems what had been often kicked away by the hurrying foot of the traveller on the dusty high-road of custom. . .

“Fifth; a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with sensibility; a sympathy with man as man; the sympathy indeed of a contemplator, rather than a fellow-sufferer or co-mate, but of a contemplator, from whose view no difference of rank conceals the sameness of the nature; no injuries of wind or weather, of toil, or even of ignorance, wholly disguise the human face divine.  The superscription and the image of the Creator still remains legible to him under the dark lines, with which guilt or calamity had cancelled or cross-barred it.  Here the Man and the Poet lose and find themselves in each other, the one as glorified, the latter as substantiated.  In this mild and philosophic pathos, Wordsworth appears to me without a compeer.  Such as he is; so he writes.