lifts its proud arch in heaven but to mark his progress from infancy to
manhood; an old thorn is buried, bowed down under the mass of
associations he has wound about it; and to him, as he himself
beautifully says,

The meanest flow'r that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

It is this power of habitual sentiment, or of transferring the interest
of our conscious existence to whatever gently solicits attention, and is
a link in the chain of association without rousing our passions or
hurting our pride, that is the striking feature in Mr. Wordsworth's mind
and poetry. Others have left and shown this power before, as Wither,
Burns, etc., but none have felt it so intensely and absolutely as to
lend to it the voice of inspiration, as to make it the foundation of a
new style and school in poetry. His strength, as it so often happens,
arises from the excess of his weakness. But he has opened a new avenue
to the human heart, has explored another secret haunt and nook of
nature, 'sacred to verse, and sure of everlasting fame.' Compared with
his lines, Lord Byron's stanzas are but exaggerated common-place, and
Walter Scott's poetry (not his prose) old wives' fables.[2] There is no
one in whom I have been more disappointed than in the writer here spoken
of, nor with whom I am more disposed on certain points to quarrel; but
the love of truth and justice which obliges me to do this, will not
suffer me to blench his merits. Do what he can, he cannot help being an
original-minded man. His poetry is not servile. While the cuckoo
returns in the spring, while the daisy looks bright in the sun, while
the rainbow lifts its head above the storm--

Yet I'll remember thee, Glencairn,