Wordsworth's lines need to be read in direct context--

"I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy,
The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride;
Of Him who walked in glory and in joy
Following his plough, along the mountain-side:
By our own spirits are we deified :
We Poets in our youth begin in gladness:
But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness."

Hazlitt who had shown an early enthusiasm for Wordsworth,
but was instinctively and by natural bent much nearer Burns,
has in one of his lectures drawn a measure between the two.
"Nothing," he says, "can be more different or hostile than
the spirit of their poetry." Burns's, he describes as "a very
highly sublimated essence of animal existence." As for Words-
worth, he is a recluse philosopher, and in his poetry there is
"a total disunion and divorce of the faculties of the mind from
those of the body; the banns are forbid." Elsewhere, Hazlitt's
praise is, allowing for his temperament, generous if by no
means unmeasured or overstated. With Wordsworth, we may
think the converting of the lyrical to the sublyrical, the verse
of sung-melody and pure vocal rhythm to that of reflective
and meditative expression, was complete. It remained,
however, for two poets of more vigorous melic impulse than
his--Shelley and Swinburne--to give new effects, new rhythms,
new cadences struck out of the rapture and sympathy of the
soul in and with nature, to English poetry, which should
compensate it for the loss of the old singing verse.

To understand Wordsworth's feeling for his art, and the
theory he laid down in regard to it, we must turn to his own
account of the influences that went before him and the new
deliverance he sought. It is stated duly and philosophically
in the much debated Preface to Lyrical Ballads ( 1800). There
he puts his own case with an argument for the natural idiom
in poetry which might be based on the actual verse-practice
of Burns--

"The Reader," he says, "will find that personifications of
abstract ideas rarely occur in these volumes; and, I hope,
are utterly rejected, as an ordinary device to elevate the
style, and raise it above prose. I have proposed to myself to

-289-