scrupulous abstinence from any attempt to win the suffrages of the
multitude by means unworthy of his high vocation. He could never,
indeed, have written poems which could have vied in immediate
popularity with those of Byron or Scott. But the criticisms on the
first edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_ must have shown him that a
slight alteration of method,--nay even the excision of a few pages
in each volume, pages certain to be loudly objected to,--would have
made a marked difference in the sale and its proceeds. From this
point of view, even poems which we may now feel to have been
needlessly puerile and grotesque acquire a certain impressiveness,
when we recognize that the theory which demanded their composition
was one which their author was willing to uphold at the cost of some
years of real physical privation, and of the postponement for a
generation of his legitimate fame.




CHAPTER IX.


POETIC DICTION--"DAODAMIA"--"EVENING ODE."

The _Excursion_ appeared in 1814, and in the course of the next year
Wordsworth republished his minor poems, so arranged as to indicate
the faculty of the mind which he considered to have been predominant
in the composition of each. To most readers this disposition has
always seemed somewhat arbitrary; and it was once suggested to
Wordsworth that a chronological arrangement would be better. The
manner in which Wordsworth met this proposal indicated the limit of