of definite views, and of a living interest, which characterizes all
his writings subsequent to that change, when compared with those of
an earlier time. It was Wordsworth's wayward fate to be patronized and
puffed into notice by the champions of old abuses, by the advocates
of the pedantry of Oxford, and by the maintainers of the despotism not
even of Pitt but of Castlereagh. It is already felt, however, that the
poet whom these men were mainly instrumental in bringing into notice,
will live in men's memories by exactly those of his writings most
powerful to undermine and overthrow their dull and faded bigotries.
Despite his own efforts, Wordsworth (as has been said of Napoleon) is
the child and champion of Jacobinism. Though clothed in ecclesiastical
formulas, his religion is little more than the simple worship of
nature; his noblest moral flights are struggles to emancipate himself
from conventional usage; and the strong ground of his thoughts, as of
his style, is nature stripped of the gauds with which the pupils of
courts and circles would bedeck and be-ribbon it. Even in the ranks of
our opponents Wordsworth has been laboring in our behalf.

It is in the record of his extra-academic life that the poet soars his
freest flight, in passages where we have a very echo of the emotions
of an emancipated worshiper of nature flying back to his loved
resorts. Apart from its poetic value, the book is a graphical and
interesting portraiture of the struggles of an ingenuous and impetuous
mind to arrive at a clear insight into its own interior constitution
and external relations, and to secure the composure of self-knowledge
and of equally adjusted aspirations. As a poem it is likely to
lay fast and enduring hold on pure and aspiring intellects, and to
strengthen the claim of Wordsworth to endure with his land's language.

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