and elevate mankind, in defiance of his crotchets, just as Luther,
Henri Quatre, and other living impersonations of poetry do, despite
all quaint peculiarities of the attire, the customs, or the opinions
of their respective ages, with which they were imbued. The spirit of
truth and poetry redeems, ennobles, hallows, every external form in
which it may be lodged. We may "pshaw" and "pooh" at Harry Gill and
the Idiot Boy; but the deep and tremulous tenderness of sentiment,
the strong-winged flight of fancy, the excelling and unvarying purity,
which pervade all the writings of Wordsworth, and the exquisite melody
of his lyrical poems, must ever continue to attract and purify the
mind. The very excesses into which his one-sided theory betrayed him,
acted as a useful counter-agent to the prevailing bad taste of his
time.

The Prelude may take a permanent place as one of the most perfect of
his compositions. It has much of the fearless felicity of youth; and
its imagery has the sharp and vivid outline of ideas fresh from the
brain. The subject--the development of his own great powers--raises
him above that willful dallying with trivialties which repels us in
some of his other works. And there is real vitality in the theme,
both from our anxiety to know the course of such a mind, and from
the effect of an absorbing interest in himself excluding that languor
which sometimes seized him in his efforts to impart or attribute
interest to themes possessing little or none in themselves. Its mere
narrative, though often very homely, and dealing in too many words,
is often characterized also by elevated imagination, and always by
eloquence. The bustle of London life, the prosaic uncouthness of its
exterior, the earnest heart that beats beneath it, the details even of
its commonest amusements, from Bartholomew Fair to Sadler's Wells, are
portrayed with simple force and delicate discrimination; and for the