"_North_. Be it so: I must humor the fancies of some of my friends.
But had that man been a great poet, he would have produced a deep and
lasting impression on the mind of England; whereas his verses are
becoming less and less known every day, and he is, in good truth,
already one of the illustrious obscure ...

"And yet, with his creed, what might not a great poet have done? That
the language of poetry is but the language of strong human passion! ...
And what, pray, has he made out of this true and philosophical creed?
A few ballads, (pretty, at the best,) two or three moral fables, some
natural description of scenery, and half a dozen narratives of common
distress or happiness. Not one single character has he created, not one
incident, not one tragical catastrophe. He has thrown no light on man's
estate here below; and Crabbe, with all his defects, stands immeasurably
above Wordsworth as the Poet of the Poor ... I confess that the
'Excursion' is the worst poem, of any character, in the English
language. It contains about two hundred sonorous lines, some of which
appear to be fine, even in the sense, as well as the sound. The
remaining seven thousand three hundred are quite ineffectual. Then what
labor the builder of that lofty rhyme must have undergone! It is, in its
own way, a small Tower of Babel, and all built by a single man."

Christopher was surely in the dumps, when he wrote thus: he was soured
by an Edinburgh study. After a run in the crisp air of the moors, he
would never have written such atrabilious criticism of a poet whom he
admired highly, for it was not honestly in the natural man. Neither his
postulates nor his inferences are quite correct. It is incorrect to say
that the poet's creed was a true one; that, with it, he might have been
a great poet; but that, from not making the most of it, he was a bad