themselves with deciding, that the author had been successful in
proportion to the elevation of his style and subject. Not a few,
perhaps, might, by their admiration of the Lines written near Tintern
Abbey, on revisiting the Wye, those Left upon a Yew Tree Seat, The Old
Cumberland Beggar, and Ruth, have been gradually led to peruse with
kindred feeling The Brothers, the Hart-leap Well, and whatever other
poems in that collection may be described as holding a middle place
between those written in the highest and those in the humblest style;
as for instance between the Tintern Abbey, and The Thorn, or Simon
Lee. Should their taste submit to no further change, and still remain
unreconciled to the colloquial phrases, or the imitations of them,
that are, more or less, scattered through the class last mentioned;
yet even from the small number of the latter, they would have deemed
them but an inconsiderable subtraction from the merit of the whole
work; or, what is sometimes not unpleasing in the publication of a new
writer, as serving to ascertain the natural tendency, and consequently
the proper direction of the author's genius.

In the critical remarks, therefore, prefixed and annexed to the
Lyrical Ballads, I believe, we may safely rest, as the true origin of
the unexampled opposition which Mr. Wordsworth's writings have been
since doomed to encounter. The humbler passages in the poems
themselves were dwelt on and cited to justify the rejection of the
theory. What in and for themselves would have been either forgotten or
forgiven as imperfections, or at least comparative failures, provoked
direct hostility when announced as intentional, as the result of
choice after full deliberation. Thus the poems, admitted by all as
excellent, joined with those which had pleased the far greater number,
though they formed two-thirds of the whole work, instead of being
deemed (as in all right they should have been, even if we take for