simply enough, it took more and more the character of a rhapsody, until,
as if lifted off his feet by the deepened and stronger undercurrent of
his thought, the writer dropped his personality and repeated the words
which "a certain poet sang" to him.

This little book met with a very unemotional reception. Its style was
peculiar,--almost as unlike that of his Essays as that of Carlyle's
"Sartor Resartus" was unlike the style of his "Life of Schiller." It was
vague, mystic, incomprehensible, to most of those who call themselves
common-sense people. Some of its expressions lent themselves easily to
travesty and ridicule. But the laugh could not be very loud or very
long, since it took twelve years, as Mr. Higginson tells us, to sell
five hundred copies. It was a good deal like Keats's

"doubtful tale from fairy-land
Hard for the non-elect to understand."

The same experience had been gone through by Wordsworth.

"Whatever is too original," says De Quincey, "will be hated at the
first. It must slowly mould a public for itself; and the resistance
of the early thoughtless judgments must be overcome by a
counter-resistance to itself, in a better audience slowly mustering
against the first. Forty and seven years it is since William
Wordsworth first appeared as an author. Twenty of these years he was
the scoff of the world, and his poetry a by-word of scorn. Since
then, and more than once, senates have rung with acclamations to the
echo of his name."

No writer is more deeply imbued with the spirit of Wordsworth than