William wordsworth the critical heritage, volume i 1793 1820

His prefaces and essays, his letters, his dictatednotes, records of his conversation, his sister Dorothy’s Journals, haveall been potent in elucidating the nature of his poetry: of cours

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH: THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Volume I 1793–1820

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE SERIES

GENERAL EDITOR: B C SOUTHAM, M.A., B.LITT (OXON)

Formerly Department of English, West field College,

University of London

The Critical Heritage series collects together a large body of criticism onmajor figures in literature Each volume presents the contemporaryresponses to a particular writer, enabling the student to follow the forma-tion of critical attitudes to the writer’s work and its place within a literary

tradition

The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history

of criticism to fragments of contemporary opinion and little published

documentary material, such as letters and diaries

Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included inorder to demonstrate fluctuations in reputation following the writer’s

death

For a list of volumes in the series, see the end of the book

First published 2001

by Routledge

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

Compilation, introduction, notes © 2001 Robert Woof All rights reserved No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission

in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data William Wordsworth / [compiled by] Robert Woof.

p cm – (Critical heritage series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1 Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850 – Criticism and interpretation.

I Woof, Robert II Series.

PR5888 W44 2001

821′.7 – dc21 00–045941

ISBN 0–415–03441–8

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.

ISBN 0-203-16902-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-26436-3 (Adobe eReader Format)

(Print Edition)

General Editor’s Preface

The reception given to a writer by his contemporaries and contemporaries is evidence of considerable value to the student of litera-ture On the one side we learn a great deal about the state of criticism atlarge and in particular about the development of critical attitudestowards a single writer; at the same time, through private comments inletters, journals or marginalia, we gain an insight upon the tastes andliterary thought of individual readers of the period Evidence of this kindhelps us to understand the writer’s historical situation, the nature of hisimmediate reading public, and his response to these pressures

near-The separate volumes in the Critical Heritage series present a record

of this early criticism In each volume the documents are headed by anIntroduction, discussing the material assembled and relating the earlystages of the author’s reception to what we have come to identify as thecritical tradition The volumes make available much material that wouldotherwise be difficult of access and present-day readers will be in aposition to arrive at an informed understanding of the ways in whichliterature has been read and judged

Dr Woof ’sfirst Wordsworth volume, running from the earliest reviews

of 1793 to The River Duddon volume of 1820, treats a vast body of

criticism, including journal reviews, satires, parodies and imitations,together with fugitive comments in private letters and journals, some

of which material has not been seen in print before

The strict chronological arrangement of the material, together with

Dr Woof ’s illuminating Introduction and the extensive headnotes,provide us with an invaluable perspective on Wordsworth’s toweringpresence amongst his contemporaries and enable us to follow the stages

of his poetic growth and change over the years

BCS

Abbreviations and Note on References xx

Introduction with Select Bibliography 1

I EARLY NOTICES AND OPINIONS, 1793–1801

Descriptive Sketches and An Evening Walk 17

2 Unsigned review, Analytical Review, 1793 18

5 Unsigned review, European Magazine, 1793 22

9 Review signed ‘Peregrinator’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 1794 28

10 Unsigned notice, New Annual Register 1793, 1794 30

11 samuel taylor coleridge, note to poem, 1795/6 31

17 samuel taylor coleridge, letters, 1796–1798 36

vii

20 edward ferguson, letter, 1798 39

21 elizabeth rawson (née threlkeld), letter, 1798 40

23 william hazlitt, reminiscences, 1798/1823 41

28 elizabeth rawson (née threlkeld), letter, 1799 49

II LYRICAL BALLADS: OPINIONS, NOVEMBER 1798–JULY 1800

36 hannah more, comments recalled by Joseph Cottle,

viii

III LYRICAL BALLADS: REVIEWS, OCTOBER 1798–APRIL 1800

47 robert southey, unsigned review, Critical Review, 1798 65

48 Unsigned review, Analytical Review, 1798 68

49 Unsigned notice, Monthly Magazine, 1799 69

50 Unsigned notice, New Annual Register 1798, 1799 70

51 Unsigned review, New London Review, 1799 70

52 charles burney, unsigned review, Monthly Review, 1799 74

54a alexander thomson, The British Parnassus at the Close of

the Eighteenth Century, 1801 83

55 w heath, unsigned notice, Anti-Jacobin Review, 1800 84

56 daniel stuart, reviews & comments, Morning Post &

IV LYRICAL BALLADS: OPINIONS, AUGUST 1800–FEBRUARY 1801

57 samuel taylor coleridge, letters, 1800–1801 89

59 thomas clarkson and catherine clarkson, letters and

70 john wilson (‘Christopher North’), letter, 1802 108

72 richard warner, Tour through the Northern Counties of

73 samuel taylor coleridge, letters, 1802 116

ix

75 fanny allen, reminiscence by her niece, 1802 119

78 samuel taylor coleridge, letters, 1803–1804 124

79 sir george beaumont, letters, 1803–1806 126

81 francis jeffrey and francis horner, exchange, 1804 127

V LYRICAL BALLADS: REVIEWS, FEBRUARY 1801–APRIL 1804

84 john stoddart, letter and unsigned review, 1801 137

85 Editorial notice, British Critic, 1801 143

89 francis jeffrey, unsigned review of Southey’s Thalaba,

90 daniel stuart, notices, Morning Post, 1803 159

91 Unsigned review of Remarks on Scotland by John Stoddart,

Anti-Jacobin Review, 1803 160

92 ‘T N.’, essay, Edinburgh Magazine, 1803 160

93 robert southey (with wordsworth and coleridge),

unsigned review of Poems by Peter Bayley, Annual Review

VI POEMS, 1807: REVIEWS, 1807–1811

94 byron, unsigned review, Monthly Literary Recreations, 1807 169

95 Unsigned review, Critical Review, 1807 170

96 Unsigned review, Records of Literature, 1807 176

97 Unsigned review, Le Beau Monde, or Literary and Fashionable

98 francis jeffrey, unsigned review, Edinburgh Review, 1807 185

99 Unsigned review, Satirist or Monthly Meteor, 1807 201

100 james montgomery, letter, unsigned review, memoir and

x

101 lucy aikin, unsigned review, Annual Review, 1807 215

102 Unsigned review, The Cabinet, or Monthly Review of Polite

103 francis jeffrey, unsigned review of Crabb’s Poems,

105 Unsigned notice, Poetical Register and Repository for Fugitive

VII POEMS, 1807: OPINIONS, 1806–1814

108 john taylor coleridge, letters, a review and

109 Wordsworth answers his critics, letters, 1807–1808 245

112 Some painters’ opinions Diaries, letters and writings,

113 elizabeth vassal fox, lady holland, journal and letter,

117 robert morehead, Poetical Epistle, 1808/1813 261

119 samuel taylor coleridge, The Friend, 1809–1810 284

120 john wilson and alexander blair, The Friend, 1809 287

121 byron, reviews, comments and correspondence,

122 Unsigned lampoon, Satirist or Monthly Meteor, 1809 293

123 walter scott, unsigned essay, Edinburgh Annual Register

xi

128 henry crabb robinson, diary, 1811–1814 302

130 Anon., Modern Poets A Dialogue, in Verse, 1813 319

132 francis jeffrey, unsigned reviews, Edinburgh Review,

133 rev francis hodgson, Leaves of Laurel, 1813 327

135 thomas barnes, essay signed ‘Strada’, Champion, 1814 340

136 j h reynolds, letter and The Eden of Imagination, 1814 345

VIII CONVENTION OF CINTRA:

REVIEWS AND OPINIONS, 1809–1833

138 james montgomery, unsigned review, Eclectic Review, 1809 353

140 samuel taylor coleridge, The Friend, 1809 357

141 henry crabb robinson, unsigned essay, London Review,

144 samuel taylor coleridge, Table Talk, 1833 361

IX THE EXCURSION: REVIEWS, 1814–1820

146 Unsigned notice, New Monthly Magazine, 1814 365

147 william hazlitt, unsigned review, Examinier, 1814 366

148 francis jeffrey, unsigned review, Edinburgh Review,

149 charles lamb, unsigned review, Quarterly Review, 1814 404

150 james montgomery, unsigned review, Eclectic Magazine,

151 Unsigned notice, Monthly Magazine, 1815 437

152 john herman merivale, unsigned review, Monthly

xii

153 john taylor coleridge, unsigned review, British Critic,

154 Unsigned notice, La Belle Assemblée; or, Bell’s Court and

Fashionable Magazine, 1815 457

155 charles abraham elton, unsigned review, British Review

and London Critical Jourrnal, 1815 458

156 Unsigned review, The Philanthropist or Repository for Hints and

Suggestions Calculated to Promote the Happiness of Man, 1815 469

157 Unsigned notice, Literary Gazette, 1820 484

X THE EXCURSION: SOME OPINIONS, 1812–1818

162 henry crabb robinson, diary, 1814–1815 493

165 mary shelley and percy bysshe shelley, journal, sonnet

168 thomas babington macaulay, letter, 1815 503

170 sir george and lady beaumont, letters, 1814–1818 505

173 samuel taylor coleridge, letters, 1815 511

XI POEMS, 1815 and THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE:

REVIEWS AND OPINIONS, 1808–1820

177 Unsigned review, Theatrical Inquisitor, 1815 521

178 john scott, review signed ‘S*’, Champion, 1815 522

xiii

179 Unsigned review, British Lady’s Magazine, 1815 528

180 Unsigned notice, New Monthly Magazine, 1815 531

181 Unsigned review, Augustan Review, 1815 531

182 francis jeffrey, unsigned review, Edinburgh Review, 1815 539

187 Unsigned review, Gentleman’s Magazine, 1815 568

188 josiah conder, unsigned review, Eclectic Review, 1816 569

189 rev william rowe lyall, unsigned review, Quarterly Review,

191 Unsigned review, European Magazine, 1816 592

XII LET TER TO A FRIEND OF ROBERT BURNS:

REVIEWS AND OPINIONS, 1816–1817

196 Unsigned review, Critical Review, 1816 600

197 Unsigned review, Scots Magazine and Edinburgh Literary

198 john wilson, letters, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine,

XIII ‘THANKSGIVING ODE’: REVIEWS AND OPINIONS, 1816–1817

201 josiah conder, unsigned review, Eclectic Review, 1816 619

203 john scott, unsigned review, Champion, 1816 623

204 Unsigned review, Dublin Examiner, 1816 630

xiv

XIV ‘PETER BELL’ AND ‘THE WAGGONER’:

REVIEWS AND OPINIONS, 1819

207 Unsigned review, Literary Gazette, 1819 641

208 leigh hunt, unsigned review, Examiner, 1819 651

210 Unsigned notice, Gentleman’s Magazine, 1819 655

211 Review signed ‘J B.’, European Magazine, 1819 656

212 Unsigned reviews, Theatrical Inquisitor and Monthly Mirror,

213 Unsigned review, Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review,

214 Unsigned notice, Monthly Magazine, 1819 669

215 john taylor coleridge, unsigned review, British Critic,

217 Review signed ‘H St John’, Kaleidoscope, or Literary and

218 josiah conder, unsigned review, Eclectic Review, 1819 695

219 Unsigned review, Literary and Statistical Magazine for

221 Unsigned review, Edinburgh Monthly Review, 1819 708

223 Unsigned review, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1819 714

224 Unsigned review, Literary Gazette, 1819 715

225 Unsigned review, European Magazine, 1819 722

226 Unsigned review, General Review or Weekly Literary

227 Unsigned review, Theatrical Inquisitor and Monthly Mirror,

228 Unsigned notice, Monthly Magazine, 1819 730

229 Unsigned notice, Gentleman’s Magazine, 1819 730

xv

230 Unsigned review, Monthly Review, 1819 731

231 john taylor coleridge, unsigned review, British Critic,

XV ‘THE RIVER DUDDON’: REVIEWS AND OPINIONS, 1820–1821

233 Unsigned review, Literary Gazette, 1820 751

234 Unsigned review, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1820 755

235 Unsigned review, London Magazine, 1820 759

236 Unsigned review, European Magazine, 1820 764

237 Unsigned review, Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review,

238 Unsigned notice, Ladies Monthly Museum, 1820 769

240 Unsigned review, Literary and Statistical Magazine for

242 Unsigned notice, Gentleman’s Magazine, 1820 787

244 john taylor coleridge, unsigned review, British Critic,

XVI LATER OPINIONS, 1815–1820

248 william lisle bowles, ‘The Two Sailors’, 1815 822

250 walter savage landor, letters, 1815–1822 824

251 mary barker, Lines Addressed to a Noble Lord, 1815 828

252 mary bryan, a Dedication to Wordsworth, 1815 829

253 john gibson lockhart, letters and essays, 1815–1821 832

254 mary russell mitford, letters, 1815–1819 842

255 thomas noon talfourd, writings, 1815–1835 844

257 byron, letters and writings, 1815–1821 896

xvi

258 benjamin robert haydon, letters and diary, 1815–1817 911

259 leigh hunt, letters and writings, 1814–1818 922

260 john hamilton reynolds, letters and writings,

263 john keats, letters and writings 1817–1819 972

266 percy bysshe shelley, letters and writings, 1817–1822 986

268 peter george patmore, writings, 1818–1823 995

271 robert morehead, ‘Observations on the Poetical

274 Unsigned biographical account, New Monthly Magazine,

276 richard henry dana, sr., review of Hazlitt’s Lectures on

the English Poets, North-American Review, 1819 1033

279 john scott, unsigned review, London Magazine, 1820 1042

280 thomas samuel mulock, report of a meeting, 1820 1057

281 the etonians: W M Praed and H N Coleridge,

xvii

I would like to thank the many librarians over many years who havegiven me access to their collections, both of periodicals and of archives.The biggest debts are to the British Library and to the WordsworthLibrary, but, as will be evident from the sources cited, private ownerswere always generous I would like to acknowledge the assistance

I received from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and theLeverhulme Trust in making research possible over the years

I would like to thank Sally Woodhead for her accurate and thoughtfultyping of the text; Peter Regan for encouraging me to think that thebook might be a finishable project; Alan Beale for translating andidentifying foreign quotations; and my wife, Pamela, who, thirty yearsago, thought the project an excellent idea It is, and always was, her book

xix

Abbreviations and Note on References

Abbreviations have been kept to a minimum Whenever possible, fullreferences are given with each of the extracts

Wordsworth’s texts are difficult to cite There has been no completeedition of his poems since the work of Ernest de Selincourt and HelenDarbishire in the mid-twentieth century The admirable Cornell’s

Wordsworth, general editor Stephen Parrish, will be the basis of a future

edition

After the name of the poem, the reader is referred to the deSelincourt/Darbishire text Because the revisions are particularly radical

in Wordsworth’s early work, such as Lyrical Ballads, 1798 and 1800, and

Poems 1807, additional references are given to those volumes.

LB (1798) &

LB (1800)

Lyrical Ballads: Wordsworth and Coleridge The text of the 1798 edition with the additional 1800 poems and the Prefaces edited with introduction, notes and appendices,

R L Brett and A R Jones (London, Methuen and Co.Ltd, 1963)

Poems 1807 Wordsworth: Poems in Two Volumes, 1807, ed Helen

Darbishire (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1914)

PW The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed Ernest de

Selincourt, volumes I–V, 1940–9 Second edition (ofVols I–III), ed Helen Darbishire, 1952–4)

PW, I Volume I, ed Ernest de Selincourt, 1940, revised by

Introduction with Select Bibliography

‘He strides on so far before you he dwindles in the distance.’

This was Coleridge’s explanation for the failure of intelligent men, inthis case his patron, Tom Wedgwood, and the Whig and one-timeradical, James Mackintosh, to recognise Wordsworth’s power It wasColeridge who enunciated the principle (one also shared by Words-worth) which later defended Wordsworth from the attacks of hisearliest critics: ‘every great and original writer, in proportion as he isgreat or original, must create the taste by which he is to be relished;

he must teach the art by which he is to be seen.’ Much of ourunderstanding of Wordsworth springs from Coleridge, but, perhaps to

a surprising extent, it depends also on what Wordsworth himself hastold us about his art His prefaces and essays, his letters, his dictatednotes, records of his conversation, his sister Dorothy’s Journals, haveall been potent in elucidating the nature of his poetry: of course,intentions are no substitute for great poetry, but if the poet is indeed

as great as Wordsworth was, his insights about his own work cannot

be ignored

Yet it is still a valid question whether or not Wordsworth’s publishedwritings about his verse were a help or a hindrance to the growth of his

reputation during his lifetime The seminal Preface to Lyrical Ballads,

1800, has insights which scholars and poets still delight to debate, andWordsworth himself came to see that it was sometimes difficult for hiscontemporaries to understand his new emphasis on a poetry that wastrue to the very nuance of human feelings About Coleridge’s remark in

the Biographia Literaria, 1817, that the theory had been the first object of

the critics’ attack and had got in the way of the poetry, he commentedwryly:

In [the Biographia] there is frequent reference to what is called Mr W’s theory

& his Preface I will mention that I never cared a straw about the theory –

& the Preface was written at the request of Mr Coleridge out of sheer good nature I recollect the very spot, a deserted Quarry in the Vale of Grasmere

1

where he pressed the thing upon me, & but for that it would never have been thought of.

(Marginalia in Barron Field’s Memoirs of Wordsworth, 1839,

ed Geoffrey Little, Sidney, 1975, 62)

There is truth in the notion that some critics did see the Preface as a stickwith which to beat the poet – not, one notes, immediately after publica-tion but over the next few years, when it had settled, after revisions in

1802 and 1805, upon its revolutionary foundations Indeed, there were

few immediate reviews of Lyrical Ballads with its Preface (1800); the

edition was generally regarded as a re-issue of the 1798 volume, an oldpublication

In these early years there was a special vital audience which nurturedWordsworth – a fit audience but few – which consisted of his family –Dorothy and Christopher in particular, but also his sailor-brother Johnwith his future wife Mary and her sister Sara Hutchinson adding theirvoices There was also Elizabeth Threlkeld, later Elizabeth Rawson,whose letters through fragmentary comments show how the Words-worth cousins were taking a warm interest And then, outside theimmediate family, was the acquired ‘family’ – friends such as the youngPinneys, sons of a Bristol sugar merchant; Francis Wrangham, Words-worth’s co-author in an imitation of Juvenal’s Eighth Satire; BasilMontagu, whose child Wordsworth and Dorothy looked after By 1797/

8, the Bristol circle had enlarged to include some who were better known

to Coleridge than to Wordsworth – Joseph Cottle, Thomas Poole, JamesTobin, John Estlin and James Losh and his clerical friend, RichardWarner, who were settled at Bath, the former suffering from ill health.Losh in 1798 lent his fellow Cumbrian his cottage at Shirehampton andnot only sent Wordsworth new books but was one of the earliest to listen

to Wordsworth reading his new poems aloud John Thelwall was a morenotorious figure, whose retirement to the Wye Valley, by way of a visit toAlfoxden in 1797, simply reminds us of the network of support Words-worth and Coleridge possessed Thelwall was a weakish poet, and onlywith exaggeration could he be called a fellow writer: still, his letters

written from the Wye Valley in 1798 – (see Towards Tintern Abbey,

Grasmere, 1998, 80–2), express sympathies for the teaching power ofnature some four months before Wordsworth wrote ‘Tintern Abbey’.Even William Godwin, the radical philosopher in London, thought in

1797 of recommending the two poets to the Wedgwoods as possibleresearchers for a proposed education project There were other livelyfigures – such as Dr Thomas Beddoes and his brilliant young assistant,

2

Humphry Davy; Davies Giddy, Cornish MP and patron to both Davyand Thomasina Dennis, the latter a young writer who became govern-ess to the family of the second Josiah Wedgwood; Thomas, Josiah’sphilosophically-minded brother; and the Allen family who linked theWedgwoods and Sir James Mackintosh, since the second Josiah andMackintosh married sisters A key London friend was Charles Lambwho, from 1797, became one of those lifetime presences, attentive toWordsworth’s authorship through the years A year later the youngHazlitt was to journey to Alfoxden and Nether Stowey from Shrop-shire: he was to brood for seventeen years before publishing the first ofhis commentaries and a further eight before he published the scintil-

lating On My First Acquaintance with Poets in Leigh Hunt’s The Liberal,

1823 Hazlitt’s future brother-in-law, John Stoddart (the future editor

of The Times, ruthlessly satirised as Doctor Slop by William Hone),

was a cold-hearted Godwinian rationalist (according to Lamb) whotypified one group of reviewers – lawyers who took time off their legalstudies to appraise and often roast a poet Denman, Lockhart, JohnTaylor Coleridge and the redoubtable Francis Jeffrey were all practisinglawyers

It was one of those lucky/unlucky chances that Wordsworth suaded his London friend, John Stoddart, staying at Grasmere on hisway to Scotland (where he was courting Isabella Moncrieff), to review

per-Lyrical Ballads for the British Critic (1802) Stoddart had become (after

severe initial doubts) somewhat intemperate in his advocacy of his Lakefriends, both in print and in conversation, and seems to have irritated agroup of young Edinburgh Whigs about to begin a new quarterly, the

Edinburgh Review: Francis Jeffrey became their leader, but the circleincluded Mackintosh, Sydney Smith and Francis Horner

Wordsworth and Coleridge put on the title-page of the 1800 Lyrical

Ballads the Latin motto, ‘Quam nihil ad genium, Papiniane, tuum!’,

which means ‘not exactly to your taste, o lawyers’, and this carried animplicit challenge to the reviewers who were indeed lawyers hoping togain an extra penny to their often scanty purses They took on a review ofbooks, often in bulk, rather as if they were taking on a brief They werecutting, scathing and entertaining Francis Jeffrey, whose first reaction to

the anonymous 1798 Lyrical Ballads was favourable, was, from 1802, to

make Wordsworth’s poetry the subject of some powerful attacks There

is a spurious reasonableness and liveliness about Jeffrey’s essays thatsweep a reader on, and yet, when Jeffrey was faced with the ‘Ode: Intim-ations of Immortality’, he can only dismiss it in 1807 as ‘the most

3

illegible and unintelligible part of the publication’ And The Excursion in

1814 was received by Jeffrey with a contempt of celebrated proportions:

‘This will never do’; in this way Jeffrey buried in his ironic manner eventhe small vestiges of praise that he allowed the poem Two years later his

review of The White Doe of Rylstone began,

This we think has the merit of being the very worst poem we ever saw imprinted

in a quarto volume.

Jeffrey fought his way against Wordsworth by means of these essays, andsuch opening sentences declared the tone Robert Southey observed thatJeffrey could not spoil the laurels of Wordsworth and Coleridge andhimself, though he might mildew their corn Whatever the effect onSouthey’s corn, Wordsworth’s sales were slow, and undoubtedly Jeffreywas in some measure responsible Southey, the weakest of the threepoets, was himself perhaps one whose presence among the Lake poetsveiled Wordsworth’s excellence and originality from his readers FrancisJeffrey found that by attacking the Lake poets as a school, he couldsweep all their separate faults together and so tar and ridicule theirreputations Wordsworth and Coleridge in fact were different enough,and Southey was never a serious party to their collaborations Arguably,Wordsworth never accepted Southey as a major poet, though he didadmire him as a good man and as a neighbour Coleridge thought of

Southey as a prose writer, and his late comment in Table-Talk (in

manu-script but never published by him) that Southey’s poetry had as muchrelation to poetry as dumb-bells do to music echoes that undercurrent ofdistress that both Wordsworth and Coleridge always felt about South-ey’s poetry: even as early as March 1796 Wordsworth declares Southey’spoetry to be the work of a coxcomb

But it is not just that Stoddart, by his extravagant praise, poisoned thewater between the Lake poets and the Scottish reviewers – he probablyhad a positive effect and laid the basis for the more favourable appreci-ation that Wordsworth received from Walter Scott Wordsworth’sfriendship with Scott was established by William and Dorothy’s tour toScotland in the late summer of 1803 Scott is one example of anindividual reaction Much of the commentary that follows comesfrom domestic or private views and these complement those in thepublic magazines Unpublished letters and journals have been searchedout; commentary often comes from writers who might, in the firstinstance, have seen Wordsworth and Coleridge as possible rivals: most

of them became admirers Indeed, most of the truly great writers of

4

Wordsworth’s age saw him clearly and saw him whole Coleridge wasthe closest – and perhaps significantly, one must apologise that theone great work that is not included in these volumes is Coleridge’s

Biographia Literaria, 1817; this is the most systematic appreciation of

Wordsworth’s work, setting it in the context of Coleridge’s own difficultphilosophical move from Locke to the German transcendentalists;

Wordsworth was presented in the Biographia as one who showed the

organic power of the faculty of the Imagination; and Wordsworth’sposition is not the less enhanced by his being placed beside only oneother poet, and that is Shakespeare Although Wordsworth’s defects areacknowledged, his quintessential originality is insisted upon The impact

of Coleridge’s commentary can be detected in the increasing interestwithin the universities – William Whewell, for instance, the futureMaster of Trinity, was forced to reconsider Wordsworth’s poetry in thelight of Coleridge’s remarks Again, Coleridge’s impact comes throughmembers of his family, such as his nephew, the lawyer John TaylorColeridge, and later his brilliant daughter, Sara, who was to take up herfather’s torch and place Wordsworth’s pre-eminence before the reader.Interestingly, what both Wordsworth and Coleridge especially seemed

to fear was the parodist and the satirist They were aware of the impactthat William Gifford’s sniping Baviad had had in the 1790s WhenPeter Bayley published in 1803 some fairly modest parodies, the poetstook extreme action to try to get him attacked in the press Parodists andsatirists were, from time to time, to produce, and even orchestrate, wintryresponses to Wordsworth Clearly, some of it derived from Jeffrey’smocking superiority, which can seem to be an attitude rather than anargument; in truth, Jeffrey’s argument from decorum had a sociologicalbasis in that he felt that Wordsworth took up unsuitable subjects for onewho had aspiration to be a great poet Jeffrey could not stand the newsympathy for the weak, the poor, the oppressed; not for him the revo-lutionary and democratic idea that Wordsworth expressed in his letter toCharles James Fox, January 1801, when he declared that he wanted toshow that ‘men who do not wear fine cloaths can feel deeply’ Jeffrey’s

attitude was to lead to Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1808)

– a work in which Byron took up the same cudgels, not because he hadread Wordsworth closely, but because it was more fun to imitate Jeffrey’sand Gifford’s bravado attacks Byron’s style here is that of an irritatedsuperiority, touched by a sense of aristocracy, and has few fine percep-tions Byron was aware of the opinions of his radical acquaintance, Leigh

Hunt, whose Feast of Poets (first published in 1811 but frequently

5

revised), presented Wordsworth and his friends scornfully expelled fromthe Feast by Apollo himself However, part of the turbulence thatWordsworth caused in critical circles is illustrated by Hunt’s beingforced to see Wordsworth for himself, rather than through the window

of Jeffrey’s mind Thomas Barnes, the great and future editor of The

Times, had instructed Hunt (while the latter was in gaol for libelling the

Prince Regent) on Wordsworth’s excellencies; thereafter, Hunt spoke

more appreciatively of Wordsworth in successive editions of The Feast

of Poets, 1814 and 1815 Hunt progressively revised his poem until

Wordsworth was not only accepted but elevated – to Byron’s disgust – to

be ‘the prince of the bards of his time’ Byron became himself the trueheir to Jeffrey’s tradition, so that he not only attacked Wordsworth inimitation of Jeffrey, but brought into play his own sense of the absurdity

of the Lake poets’ claims As well as pointing out that Coleridge hadtaught metaphysics to the nation, and wishing that he would ‘explain his

explanation’, Byron fell upon Wordsworth’s Excursion:

Wordsworth’s last quarto, by the way, is bigger

Than any since the birthday of typography;

A drowsy frowzy poem called the ‘Excursion,’

Writ in a manner which is my aversion.

(Don Juan, III, 845–8)

But, as Macaulay observed, ‘though always sneering at Mr Wordsworth,

he [Byron] was yet, though perhaps unconsciously, the interpreterbetween Mr Wordsworth and the multitude What Mr Wordsworthhad said like a recluse, Lord Byron said like a man of the world.’ Cer-

tainly parts of the popular Childe Harold, III (1816), were a direct result

of Shelley’s persuading Byron to read Wordsworth for himself; it was atemporary phase for Byron, but many readers notice the ‘plagiarisms’from Wordsworth – low-keyed and inadequately explored as some ofthem are Byron may have stolen his enemy’s clothes and, having triedthem on, decided to reject them, but his very concern with Wordsworth,even to attack him, seems to have done Wordsworth no harm

Wordsworth knew that the attackers, the parodists and the plagiaristscould be useful as well as dangerous There must have been some core ofsignificant truth in Wordsworth’s news and advice in 1817 to his friendSamuel Rogers: ‘Why don’t you hire somebody to abuse you? Formyself, I begin to fear that I should soon be forgotten if it were not for

my enemies’ Whether Wordsworth was exactly pleased that he should

be attacked anonymously by John Hamilton Reynolds with his witty

6

‘Peter Bell: A Lyrical Ballad’, in 1819, is not recorded But Reynolds was

one who, some five years before, had sought Wordsworth’s approval bysending him his poems; he had received Wordsworth’s sensible criti-cisms with disappointment, and turned his real understanding of thepoet to comic effect In this he resembles James Hogg, whose Poetic

Mirror (1816) provides blank-verse tales written in the manner of The Excursion: the parodia, or imitation, is so good that the necessary bathos

for comic effect is extraordinarily minimal Shelley’s Peter Bell the Third(1819), posthumously published in 1839, is more an essay on the poetthan a parody of the poem (which Shelley in Italy had only read about in

Leigh Hunt’s review in the Examiner).

All the controversy about Wordsworth’s theories and his supposedapplication of them had sparked off a great critical debate; and theimpressive thing about the criticism of Wordsworth in his own lifetime,despite the many baffled responses, is the way that the major writers rose

to the challenge he presented

Coleridge, as we have noted, was the greatest to illuminate his

con-temporaries about Wordsworth’s powers: his Biographia (1817) is a

treatment not only of himself but also of the nature of poetry and ofWordsworth’s work as an illustration of that theory More, and this weare able to show in the following pages, in his letters and conversations,Coleridge worked like a secret agent to further Wordsworth’s fame.And so, too, did others, though on a different intellectual level LadyBeaumont, the blue-stocking wife of the painter, Sir George, couldembarrass her husband (and the poet) with her fervent advocacy HenryCrabb Robinson, indefatigable diarist, though he published little, minis-tered remarkably to Wordsworth’s cause; in coach or in drawing-room,

in London, the provinces or in Germany, he would draw out a copy ofthe poems and read aloud Charles Lamb published a favourable review

of The Excursion in the Quarterly Review of 1814 (alas, sadly mutilated

by the editor) but he also constantly recorded a bold and detailedresponse to Wordsworth in his letters William Hazlitt stands out as one

of the most interesting of Wordsworth’s public advocates He shared withHunt (and Byron and Shelley) an aversion to Wordsworth’s later politicsand had little liking for him as a man And yet, throughout Hazlitt’swriting, there is a shrewd apprehension of the great Wordsworth, wartsand all:

He sees nothing loftier than human hopes; nothing deeper than the human heart This he probes, this he tampers with, this he poises with all its incalculable weight of thought and feeling, in his hands; and at the same time calms the

7

throbbing pulses of his own heart, by keeping his eye ever fixed on the face

of nature.

(from The Spirit of the Age, 1825)

So, armed with instinct, commonsense and a certain hostility, Hazlittteases out the significance of Wordsworth, and if there is no point of rest

in Hazlitt’s thinking, it is because Wordsworth cannot be dismissed orcategorised; there is no magic, as Rumpelstiltskin discovered, when athing can be precisely named Hazlitt’s criticisms were to fall on thereceptive ears of John Keats: but Keats’s intelligence is sufficiently inde-pendent and his commentary is part of a larger concern with his poeticalidentity But for all the creative writers – Lamb, Walter Scott, DeQuincey, Shelley, Keats, even Clare, the late Blake and the early Tennyson– Wordsworth had become one of those mountains which had to beclimbed because it became increasingly impossible to go round him Thiswas even to be the situation of lesser poets who might be described asliterary journalists: the fair-minded non-conformist James Montgomery,who was both a reviewer and a rhetorical verse-writer, and, again, themore talented but, to Wordsworth, the unreliable figure of Leigh Hunt.There was enough written on Wordsworth’s behalf during his ownlifetime to fill several feet of library shelves Leisurely articles, long andoften anonymous, appeared in periodicals by such minor writers as John

Scott, the editor of the Champion and the London Magazine; Thomas

Noon Talfourd, lawyer and poet; Thomas de Quincey and John Wilson(from 1820 Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University),not to mention the growing fullness of American admiration – thepainter Washington Allston, the Unitarian W E Channing, the youngHarvard professor George Ticknor, prelude to editors such as HenryReed; another powerful voice, as yet confined to a personal journal, wasEmerson’s, who had aspirations to be a great poet It was this massing

of many recognitions that led, eventually, to Wordsworth’s becomingPoet Laureate in 1843 on the death of his neighbour, Robert Southey.The enterprising new University of Durham had, in 1838, noted that

he was in the area and promptly gave him his first Honorary Doctorate,but it was one year later, on 12 June 1839, at a great reception at theSheldonian Theatre in Oxford, when Isabella Fenwick, the friend of hislater years, and the recorder of all his own notes on his poems in the1840s, recorded in her letters:

No such acclamations had been heard excepting on the appearance of the Duke

of Wellington – these however did not much move him – but when the public

8

Orator spoke of him as the Poet of humanity – and as having through the power

of love & genius – made us feel as nothing the artificial distinctions which separate the different classes of society and that ‘we have all one common heart’ – then he felt understood & recognised – & was thankful.

(Ms Wordsworth Trust)

Robert Browning’s melancholy view of Wordsworth in ‘The LostLeader’ (1845) owes something to the paranoid (and sometimesbrilliant) comments by the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, and to

Elizabeth Barrett (see my essay in Benjamin Robert Haydon, Grasmere,

1996) Certainly, Browning’s view of Wordsworth contrasted with that

of the ardent John Ruskin who, on the same day, was awarded theNewdigate Prize for Poetry Browning’s dramatised portrait, for which

he later apologised, has also some of its origins in what Browningdiscovered of Shelley’s disappointment with Wordsworth The critiques

of Browning and Shelley, both written in verse, represent one of the realdifficulties for a volume concerned with this poet’s critical heritage: forwhen a poet has absorbed a great writer from his own or from a previousgeneration, the very admiration that the younger poet feels will also betinctured by the deepest level of rivalry and criticism which affects thewhole of the young poet’s work If, for instance, one were to consider

Alastor (1816), a poem in which Shelley was becoming for the first timethe master of his own voice, one would find there a wonderful presenta-tion of a Wordsworthian kind of poet, one who certainly has failed inhis mission but whose failure is both honourable and heroic Shelley

famously cites Wordsworth’s own lines as an epigraph to Alastor – ‘The

good die first, / And those whose hearts are dry as summer’s dust, / Burn

to the socket’ [The Excursion, I, 500-2] Shelley was rightly sceptical

that an early death proved moral worth

But the full nineteenth-century story will have to be the work of avolume other than this publication, which concludes in 1820 This

avoids the massive reviews of Ecclesiastical Sonnets and Memorial of a

Tour of the Continent 1820, published 1822, which assured us that

Wordsworth had, with this least memorable of his poetry, found arather drear coincidence of taste with the reviewers and reading public.Wordsworth in his later poetry became a muted spokesman for theChurch of England He had been confronted by niggling critics such asJohn Wilson (‘Christopher North’) or his own nephews about possibleheretical touches in his notion of pre-existence in the ‘Ode: Intimations

of Immortality’ He had stiffened some of the theological and religious

references in his revisions of The Prelude before its posthumous

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publication, but it would seem that one of the triumphs of his poetrywas that it would provide for many readers of different beliefs, as

it did for Mill, a near-religious experience: the American Unitarian,

W E Channing, used Wordsworth along with the Bible as a spiritualsource The Quakers, influenced by Thomas Clarkson’s Portraiture of

Quakerism (1806), found Wordsworth a moral teacher John Sterling, the

friend of Carlyle and of Mill, was to recommend Wordsworth’s poetry assoftening the ‘dry hard spirit of modern unitarianism’ People were tocatch sight of Wordsworth’s wish to show, as he had put it to CharlesJames Fox, ‘that men who do not wear fine cloaths can feel deeply’; or, as

he put it in ‘The Cumberland Beggar’: ‘we have all of us one humanheart’ John Keble was to claim that Wordsworth, ‘whether he discoursed

on man or nature, failed not to lift up the heart to holy things, tired not

of maintaining the cause of the poor and simple, and so, in perilous timeswas raised up to be a chief minister not only of noblest poesy but of highand sacred truth ’ But beyond such democratic and humane senti-ments, tribute should be paid to Wordsworth’s capacity to construct alanguage, newly coined, whereby to express his natural theology: phrasessuch as ‘something far more deeply interfused’, ‘soul of all my moralbeing’, ‘Wisdom and spirit of the universe’, ‘Presences of nature’, or, notleast, ‘The mind of man married to this goodly universe’ were to havefar-reaching reverberations Religious commentators of quite differentpersuasions did not find Wordsworth too difficult to fit into theirown organised systems of belief Here, perhaps, lay, and still remains,Wordsworth’s importance: that somewhere along the line of people’sbelief, he touches, develops, enlivens their consciousness of things asthey are, and not always in expected ways His very research into the waypeople live (an element emphasised by Dorothy’s Grasmere Journals,1800–1803) marks him as a writer with a novelist’s sensibility, eventhough that is to name only one aspect of his poetry His matter-of-factness is combined with a capacity to generalise, as if, out of hispractice of keeping his eye on both people and nature, he earned theright to give intimations of human order; even of immortality

At his death, the obituaries, the reviews of The Prelude (1850) and of

Memoirs of William Wordsworth (1851) by his nephew, Christopher

Wordsworth, politely crowded in; but no great critic emerged at thispoint Most unusually, Emerson spoke of Wordsworth’s ‘orientalabstraction’, thus suggesting in a phrase Wordsworth’s massive capacityfor significant meditation Emerson indeed sent a private letter to HenryReed who had asked for his ‘opinion of Mr Wordsworth’s Genius’:

10

I have been in New York two days, & there is no time in Philadelphia, I find, for a stranger; – no time there to sit & sum his obligations to the solitariest & wisest of poets, I do not know but I must defer it altogether to a silent hour, by &

by, far from cities It is very easy to see, that to act so powerfully on this practical age, he needed, with all his oriental abstraction, the indomitable vigor rooted in animal constitution, for which country men are marked Otherwise he could not have resisted the deluge-streams of their opinion with success One would say, he

is the only man among them who has not in any point succumbed to their ways

of thinking, & has prevailed I mean, not consciously consented, – for his Church and State, though genuine enough in him, I look upon as the limitations & not the excellence of his genius.

Rather than not write, I will send this rude note, reserving my right to municate a more considered ballot, as soon as I find a quiet halfhour to rejoice in

com-my remembrances of this old benefactor.

(Ms The Wordsworth Library, dated 1 January 1854: see also Transactions of Wordsworth Society, 1883, V, 124.)

But The Prelude was largely mistaken for a repetition of The Excursion,

and its appearance was muffled by the publication of In Memoriam, thework of Tennyson, the rising star, soon to be the next Poet Laureate.Wordsworth’s presence was felt by Tennyson and, interestingly, waspromoted by Tennyson in helping Francis Palgrave to make a selection

of Wordsworth’s lyrics in The Golden Treasury (1861): ‘You will see’,

Palgrave told Christopher Wordsworth, ‘that WW has given us morenumerically & quantitively than any other poet’

Stephen Gill’s admirable Wordsworth and the Victorians (1998) rightly

points to the 1870s as the moment when Wordsworth’s reputation andachievement become the subject of serious debate It is at this point that

John Stuart Mill publishes his Autobiography (1873), an impressive

per-sonal testimony to the kind of power that Wordsworth’s poetry couldhave, a power which Matthew Arnold had already named a healingpower in his ‘Memorial Verses’, his elegy on the death of Wordsworth in

1850 Mill explains that in 1828 he had experienced ‘a crisis in mymental history’ It was then that he discovered the healing power ofWordsworth:

Wordsworth would never have had any great effect on me, if he had merely placed before me beautiful pictures of natural scenery Scott does this still better than Wordsworth, and a very second-rate landscape does it more effectually than any poet What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of.

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This is the account of a writer outside the Christian tradition and,indeed, the very phrase, ‘a medicine for my state of mind’, echoes a line

from the madman’s speech in Shelley’s Julian and Maddalo (1 355): gone

is the context of suffering and humiliation of Shelley’s madman; in Mill’sworld the medicine for his mind is the Wordsworthian world of internalfeelings influenced by beauty

Along with Mill’s Autobiography there is the subtle essay by R H.

Hutton, originally published in 1857 but collected in 1871 as worth and His Genius’; Walter Pater’s ‘On Wordsworth’ (1874) wonder-fully presents Wordsworth’s coherence in his capacity to convey thetrue voice of feeling; and, differently, the sceptic Leslie Stephen, incontrast to, say, Matthew Arnold, determined to show that he could

‘Words-explicate ‘Wordsworth’s Ethics’, and did so in the Cornhill Magazine,

1876 Arnold was to provoke passionate responses by concluding hisessay on Byron by stating that ‘Wordsworth and Byron stand out bythemselves When the year 1900 is turned, and our nation comes torecount her poetic glories in the century which has then just ended, thefirst names with her will be these.’ Swinburne, who much preferredColeridge and Shelley, would have none of this (see ‘Wordsworth and

Byron’, Nineteenth Century, 15, April and May, 1884) Alfred Austin, the

future Poet Laureate, had found Wordsworth as presented by Arnold

to possess little achievement as a poet, since Wordsworth ‘does not treatGreat material and he totally lacks Character, Action, Invention andSituation’ (see Gill, 1998, 218)

The public discussions in the 1870s and 1880s interestingly stillincluded the leading writers of that time: but, significantly, the newapproaches of textual scholarship and of biographical research were athand William Knight – the first Secretary of the Wordsworth Society,founded in 1884 – later was to have his work mockingly characterised byhis twentieth-century successor, Ernest de Selincourt, as ‘the reign ofchaos and old night’ Yet it was William Knight, along with ErnestDowden, who was to lay the foundations for the exacting editorialapproach made possible by access to Wordsworth’s worked, and re-

worked, manuscripts Readers had to wait for Emile Legouis’ The Early

Life of William Wordsworth 1770–1798 (1896), nearly half a century after

Wordsworth’s death, to be taught the taste by which The Prelude was to

be enjoyed Despite these explorations and several fine Victorian essaysfrom Pater, Leslie Stephen and Matthew Arnold, the twentieth andtwenty-first centuries – with their great tide of interpreters, editors,historians of ideas – still reach forward, still find Wordsworth ahead

12

—— (1969), The Friend, ed Barbara E Rooke, 2 vols, Princeton.

—— (1983), Biographia Literaria, eds James Engell and W J Bate, 2 vols,

Princeton.

Gill, Stephen (1989), William Wordsworth: A Life, Oxford.

—— (1998), Wordsworth and the Victorians, Oxford.

Moorman, Mary (1965), William Wordsworth: A Biography, 2 vols, Oxford.

Owen, W J B (1957), ‘Costs, Sales, and Profits of Longman’s Editions of

Wordsworth’, Library, 5th ser 12, 93–107.

Peacock, Markham L (1950), The Critical Opinions of William Wordsworth,

Reiman, Donald, ed (1972), The Romantics Reviewed Part A: The Lake Poets, 2

vols, New York.

Smith, Elsie (1932), An Estimate of William Wordsworth by His Contemporaries 1793–1822, Oxford.

Woof, Robert (1962a), ‘Coleridge and Thomasina Dennis’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 32, 37–54.

—— (1962b), ‘Wordsworth’s Poetry and Stuart’s Newspapers: 1797–1803’,

and B Darlington, Ithaca, NY, 76–91.

—— (1984), ‘John and Sarah Stoddart: Friends of the Lambs’, The Charles Lamb Bulletin, January, 93–109.

—— (1986), ‘The Matter-of-Fact Paradise’, The Lake District: A Sort of National Property, ed John Murdoch, London, 9–28.

—— (1995), ‘The Presentation of the Self in the Composition of The Prelude’,

in Presenting Poetry, eds Howard Erskine-Hill and Richard A McCabe,

Cambridge.

Wordsworth, Dorothy, (1941), Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed Ernest de

Selincourt, 2 vols, London.

—— (1971), Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth: The Alfoxden Journal, 1798; The

13

Grasmere Journals, 1800–1803, with an introduction by Helen Darbishire, ed.

Mary Moorman, 2nd edn, Oxford.

—— (1991), The Grasmere Journals, ed Pamela Woof, Oxford.

Wordsworth, William, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed Thomas

Hutchinson, Oxford and London: 1895.

—— The Prose of William Wordsworth, ed Alexander B Grosart, 3 vols, London,

1876.

—— The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed Ernest de Selincourt, 6

vols, Oxford, 1935–9, rev Alan G Hill, 8 vols., Oxford, 1967–93.

—— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed Ernest de Selincourt and

Helen Darbishire, 5 vols, Oxford 1941–9; rev edn 1952–9.

—— Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 1798, ed W J B Owen, 2nd

edn, 1969.

—— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, eds W J B.Owen and Jane

Worthington Smyser, 3 vols, Oxford, 1974.

—— The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed Jared Curtis, London, 1993.

14

Early notices and opinions, 1793–1801

descriptive sketches and an evening walk

1 Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855)From a letter to Jane Pollard (1771–1847), 16 February 1793

By this Time, you have doubtless seen my Brother William’s Poems, andthey have already suffered the Lash of your Criticisms I should be veryglad if you would give me your opinion of them with the same Franknesswith which I am going to give you mine The Scenes which he describeshave been viewed with a Poet’s eye and are pourtrayed with a Poet’spencil; and the Poems contain many passages exquisitely beautiful, butthey also contain many Faults, the chief of which are Obscurity, and atoo frequent use of some particular expressions and uncommon words,

for instance moveless, which he applies in a sense if not new, at least

different from its ordinary one; by moveless when applied to the Swan hemeans that sort of motion which is smooth without agitation; it is a verybeautiful epithet but ought to have been cautiously used, he ought at anyrate only to have hazarded it once, instead of which it occurs three orfour times.1 The word viewless, also, is introduced far too often, this,

though not so uncommon a word as the former ought not to have beenmade use of more than once or twice – I regret exceedingly that he didnot submit the works to the inspection of some Friend before theirPublication, and he also joins with me in this Regret Their Faults aresuch as a young Poet was most likely to fall into and least likely todiscover, and what the Suggestions of a Friend would easily have madehim see and at once correct It is however an error he will never fall intoagain, as he is well aware that he would have gained considerably morecredit if the Blemishes of which I speak had been corrected My BrotherKitt and I, while he was at Forncett, amused ourselves by analysing everyline and prepared a very bulky Criticism, which he was to transmit toWilliam as soon as he should have [ad]ded to it the [remarks] of hisCambridge Friends At the conclusion of the [E]vening Walk, I thinkyou would be pleased with those lines, ‘Thus hope first pouring from herblessed Horn’ &c.&c.2 You would espy the little gilded Cottage in theHorizon, but perhaps your less gloomy Imagination and your anxiety

to see your Friend placed in that happy Habitation might make you

17

overlook the dark and broad Gulph between If you have not yet seen thePoems pray do not make known my opinion of them – let them pass thefiery ordeal.

(EY, 88–9)

EDITOR’S NOTES

1 The word, ‘moveless’, occurs in Evening Walk (1793) ll 104 and 206 where it

is ‘applied to the Swan’, and in Descriptive Sketches l 206; ‘viewless’ occurs in Evening Walk (1793) l 148, and in Descriptive Sketches (1793) ll 36, 92, 227,

548, 648; in l 36 it was changed to ‘sightless’ in 1794 These words were all removed in later editions, as were ‘breathless’, ‘shadeless’, ‘harmless’, ‘roofless’,

‘cloudless’, ‘bottomless’, ‘hopeless’, ‘weedless’, ‘pulseless’.

2 Evening Walk (1793), l 407 The longed-for cottage retreat is seen in the

distance, though ‘dark and broad the gulph of time between’ (l 414).

2.

Unsigned review, Analytical Review, March 1793, XV, 294–7

Joseph Johnson published this periodical as well as Descriptive Sketches and Evening Walk (both 1793) and there is inevitably a touch of advertisement

about the reviews This early review was rendered doubly effective for

Wordsworth since the long extract from Descriptive Sketches was reprinted

in a major provincial newspaper, the weekly supplement to the Sherborne Advertiser The extract appeared in the Weekly Entertainer 22 (30 Septem-

ber 1793), 334–5 under the heading, ‘From Descriptive Sketches of the

Alps, by V Wordsworth [sic]’, with the misprint of ‘shed’ for ‘shade’ The Analytical Review notices of the two poems are usefully placed as far as

Wordsworth is concerned: they come immediately after a long review of

Erasmus Darwin’s much-heralded Botanic Garden (1791), and this

juxta-position might account for the fact that Wordsworth’s poems were known

at this early date at Derby, the home of Darwin, and at Exeter (see Christopher Wordsworth’s diary).

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a Descriptive Sketches

Certainly nothing can be conceived better adapted to inspire sublimeconceptions, and to enrich the fancy with poetical imagery, than a tour tothe Alps The present poem, as we learn from the dedication, is the result

of such a tour, made by the author with a single companion on foot: andour traveller has not been an indolent spectator of the magnificent andvaried scenes through which he has passed The diversified pictures ofnature which are sketched in this poem, could only have been produced

by a lively imagination, furnished by actual and attentive observationwith an abundant store of materials The majestic grandeur of moun-tains, the rich and varied scenery of lakes and vallies, the solemn gloom ofruined monasteries and abbeys, and the different aspect of Alpine scenes

in the morning and evening, during a storm, and in other atmosphericalchanges, are described with studied variety of imagery; the piece isoccasionally enlivened with human figures, and the whole is renderedinstructive by the frequent introduction of moral reflections At the sametime we must own, that this poem is on the whole less interesting thanthe subject led us to expect; owing in part, we believe, to the want of ageneral thread of narrative to connect the several descriptions, or of someepisodical tale, to vary the impression; and in part also to a certainlaboured and artificial cast of expression, which often involves the poet’smeaning in obscurity But our readers will be best able to judge of thenature of this performance, and the degree of entertainment it is likely toafford them, from a specimen We shall select the description of the lake

of Uri, and a stormy sunset

[Quotes Descriptive Sketches (1793), ll 284–347:

Lo! Fear looks silent down on Uri’s lake

The mountains, glowing hot, like coals of fire.]

We fancy there are few readers, whose imagination will be sufficientlyglowing, to bear this last image, without pronouncing it extravagant.Perhaps too, some others may be disposed to censure, as degrading thesubject to which it is applied, the image of the sun ‘shaking his flashingshield from behind the clouds.’ But it will not be denied, that the scenery

of the hermit’s hut is well conceived and described, and that Freedom ispoetically exhibited as an allegorical person The subject of freedom thepoet afterwards resumes, in the following pleasing lines:

[Quotes Descriptive Sketches (1793), ll, 719–39:

In the wide range of many a weary round

And whiter is the hospital bed.]

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