which I found it. His Harold and Manfred had the same burden on them
which I had; and I was not in a frame of mind to desire any comfort from
the vehement sensual passion of his Giaours, or the sullenness of his
Laras. But while Byron was exactly what did not suit my condition,
Wordsworth was exactly what did. I had looked into the Excursion two or
three years before, and found little in it; and I should probably have
found as little, had I read it at this time. But the miscellaneous
poems, in the two-volume edition of 1815 (to which little of value was
added in the latter part of the author's life), proved to be the precise
thing for my mental wants at that particular juncture.

In the first place, these poems addressed themselves powerfully to one
of the strongest of my pleasurable susceptibilities, the love of rural
objects and natural scenery; to which I had been indebted not only for
much of the pleasure of my life, but quite recently for relief from one
of my longest relapses into depression. In this power of rural beauty
over me, there was a foundation laid for taking pleasure in Wordsworth's
poetry; the more so, as his scenery lies mostly among mountains, which,
owing to my early Pyrenean excursion, were my ideal of natural beauty.
But Wordsworth would never have had any great effect on me, if he had
merely placed before me beautiful pictures of natural scenery. Scott
does this still better than Wordsworth, and a very second-rate landscape
does it more effectually than any poet. What made Wordsworth's poems a
medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward
beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under
the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the
feelings which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source
of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasures, which could be
shared in by all human beings; which had no connection with struggle or
imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the