Mere necessity of action forced him to decide."
-- Thomas De Quincey's `Essay on Style'.
--

Wordsworth exhibited in his poetry, as they had never before
been exhibited, the permanent absolute relations of nature
to the human spirit, interpreted the relations between
the elemental powers of creation and the moral life of man,
and vindicated the inalienable birthright of the lowliest of men
to those inward "oracles of vital deity attesting the Hereafter."
Wordsworth's poetry is, in fact, so far as it bears upon
the natural world, a protest against the association theory of beauty
of the eighteenth century -- a theory which was an offshoot of
the philosophy of Locke, well characterized by Macvicar,
in his `Philosophy of the Beautiful' (Introd., pp. xv., xvi),
as "an ingenious hypothesis for the close of the eighteenth century,
when the philosophy then popular did not admit, as the ground
of any knowledge, anything higher than self-repetition
and the transformation of sensations."

Coleridge's `Rime of the Ancient Mariner' is an imaginative expression
of that divine love which embraces all creatures, from the highest
to the lowest, of the consequences of the severance of man's soul
from this animating principle of the universe, and of those
spiritual threshings by and through which it is brought again
under its blessed influence. In his `Cristabel' he has exhibited
the dark principle of evil, lurking within the good,
and ever struggling with it. We read it in the spell the wicked witch
Geraldine works upon her innocent and unsuspecting protector;
we read it in the strange words which Geraldine addresses