sense of the word interpenetrates the physical, and serves to make us
see and feel it.

Poetry, if it is to be good for anything, must help us to live. It is
to this we come at last in our criticism, and if it does not help us to
live it may as well disappear, no matter what its fine qualities may be.
The help to live, however, that is most wanted is not remedies against
great sorrows. The chief obstacle to the enjoyment of life is its
dulness and the weariness which invades us because there is nothing to
be seen or done of any particular value. If the supernatural becomes
natural and the natural becomes supernatural, the world regains its
splendour and charm. Lines may be drawn from their predecessors to
Coleridge and the Wordsworths, but the work they did was distinctly
original, and renewed proof was given of the folly of despair even when
fertility seems to be exhausted. There is always a hidden conduit open
into an unknown region whence at any moment streams may rush and renew
the desert with foliage and flowers.

The reviews which followed the publication of the Lyrical Ballads were
nearly all unfavourable. Even Southey discovered nothing in The Ancient
Mariner but "a Dutch attempt at German sublimity." A certain learned
pig thought it "the strangest story of a cock and bull that he ever saw
on paper," and not a single critic, not even the one or two who had any
praise to offer, discerned the secret of the book. The publisher was so
alarmed that he hastily sold his stock. Nevertheless Coleridge,
Wordsworth, and his sister quietly went off to Germany without the least
disturbance of their faith, and the Ballads are alive to this day.