Wordsworth himself believed in a sympathy he asks us--upon such
grounds!--to believe in? Did he think his faith to be worthy of no
more than a fictitious sign or a false proof?

To choose from Wordsworth is to draw close a net with very large
meshes--so that the lovely things that escape must doubtless cause
the reader to protest; but the poems gathered here are not only
supremely beautiful but exceedingly Wordsworthian.


YOUTH AND AGE


Close to the marvellous Kubla Khan--a poem that wrests the secret
of dreams and brings it to the light of verse--I place Youth and
Age as the best specimen of Coleridge's poetry that is quite
undelirious--to my mind the only fine specimen. I do not rate his
undelirious poems highly, and even this, charming and nimble as it
is, seems to me rather lean in thought and image. The tenderness
of some of the images comes to a rather lamentable close; the
likeness to "some poor nigh-related guest" with the three lines
that follow is too squalid for poetry, or prose, or thought.


THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER


This poem is surely more full of a certain quality of extreme
poetry--the simplest "flower of the mind," the most single magic--
than any other in our language. But the reader must be permitted