externals as could be easily caught and copied, yet it was the fashion,
down even to the last generation, to advise young writers to form
themselves, as it was called, on these excellent models. Wordsworth
himself began in this school; and though there were glimpses, here and
there, of a direct study of nature, yet most of the epithets in his
earlier pieces were of the traditional kind so fatal to poetry during
great part of the last century; and he indulged in that alphabetic
personification which enlivens all such words as Hunger, Solitude,
Freedom, by the easy magic of an initial capital.

"Where the green apple shrivels on the spray,
And pines the unripened pear in summer's kindliest ray,
Even here Content has fixed her smiling reign
With Independence, child of high Disdain.
Exulting 'mid the winter of the skies,
Shy as the jealous chamois, Freedom flies,
And often grasps her sword, and often eyes."

Here we have every characteristic of the artificial method, even to the
triplet, which Swift hated so heartily as "a vicious way of rhyming
wherewith Mr. Dryden abounded, imitated by all the bad versifiers of
Charles the Second's reign." Wordsworth became, indeed, very early the
leader of reform; but, like Wesley, he endeavored a reform within the
Establishment. Purifying the substance, he retained the outward forms
with a feeling rather than conviction that, in poetry, substance and form
are but manifestations of the same inward life, the one fused into the
other in the vivid heat of their common expression. Wordsworth could
never wholly shake off the influence of the century into which he was
born. He began by proposing a reform of the ritual, but it went no
further than an attempt to get rid of the words of Latin original where