appetite of the first love, they had seemed to him neither to need nor
permit. The occasional obscurities, which had risen from an imperfect
control over the resources of his native language, had almost wholly
disappeared, together with that worse defect of arbitrary and
illogical phrases, at once hackneyed and fantastic, which hold so
distinguished a place in the technique of ordinary poetry, and will,
more or less, alloy the earlier poems of the truest genius, unless the
attention has been specially directed to their worthlessness and
incongruity [21]. I did not perceive anything particular in the mere
style of the poem alluded to during its recitation, except indeed such
difference as was not separable from the thought and manner; and the
Spenserian stanza, which always, more or less, recalls to the reader's
mind Spenser's own style, would doubtless have authorized, in my then
opinion, a more frequent descent to the phrases of ordinary life, than
could without an ill effect have been hazarded in the heroic couplet.
It was not however the freedom from false taste, whether as to common
defects, or to those more properly his own, which made so unusual an
impression on my feelings immediately, and subsequently on my
judgment. It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the
fine balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in
modifying, the objects observed; and above all the original gift of
spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height
of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations, of which,
for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up
the sparkle and the dew drops.

This excellence, which in all Mr. Wordsworth's writings is more or
less predominant, and which constitutes the character of his mind, I
no sooner felt, than I sought to understand. Repeated meditations led
me first to suspect,--(and a more intimate analysis of the human