the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous
imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image,
and half of abstract [5] meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the
head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.

The reader must make himself acquainted with the general style of
composition that was at that time deemed poetry, in order to
understand and account for the effect produced on me by the Sonnets,
the Monody at Matlock, and the Hope, of Mr. Bowles; for it is peculiar
to original genius to become less and less striking, in proportion to
its success in improving the taste and judgment of its contemporaries.
The poems of West, indeed, had the merit of chaste and manly diction;
but they were cold, and, if I may so express it, only dead-coloured;
while in the best of Warton's there is a stiffness, which too often
gives them the appearance of imitations from the Greek. Whatever
relation, therefore, of cause or impulse Percy's collection of Ballads
may bear to the most popular poems of the present day; yet in a more
sustained and elevated style, of the then living poets, Cowper and
Bowles [6] were, to the best of my knowledge, the first who combined
natural thoughts with natural diction; the first who reconciled the
heart with the head.

It is true, as I have before mentioned, that from diffidence in my own
powers, I for a short time adopted a laborious and florid diction,
which I myself deemed, if not absolutely vicious, yet of very inferior
worth. Gradually, however, my practice conformed to my better
judgment; and the compositions of my twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth
years--(for example, the shorter blank verse poems, the lines, which
now form the middle and conclusion of the poem entitled the Destiny of
Nations, and the tragedy of Remorse)--are not more below my present