acquainted with Mr. Wordsworth's first publication, entitled Descriptive
Sketchesand seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic genius
above the literary horizon more evidently announced. In the form, style, and
manner of the whole poem, and in the structure of the particular lines and
periods, there is a harshness and acerbity connected and combined with words
and images all a-glow which might recall those products of the vegetable world,
where gorgeous blossoms rise out of the hard and thorny rind and shell within
which the rich fruit was elaborating. The language was not only peculiar and
strong, but at times knotty and contorted, as by its own impatient strength;
while the novelty and struggling crowd of images, acting in conjunction with
the difficulties of the style, demanded always a greater closeness of attention
than poetry (at all events than descriptive poetry) has a right to claim. It not
seldom therefore justified the complaint of obscurity. In the following extract
1. Published 1793, the year before Coleridge left tour in the Alps in 1790. Wordsworth describes the Cambridge; a long descriptive-meditative poem in same tour in The Prelude, book 6.
closed couplets, recounting Wordsworth's walking
.
BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA / 47 5
I have sometimes fancied that I saw an emblem of the poem itself and of the
author's genius as it was then displayed:
'Tis storm; and hid in mist from hour to hour,
All day the floods a deepening murmur pour;
The sky is veiled, and every cheerful sight:
Dark is the region as with coming night;
And yet what frequent bursts of overpowering light!
Triumphant on the bosom of the storm,
Glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form;
Eastward, in long perspective glittering, shine
The wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline;
Wide o'er the Alps a hundred streams unfold,
At once to pillars turned that flame with gold;
Behind his sail the peasant strives to shun
The West, that burns like one dilated sun,
Where in a mighty crucible expire
The mountains, glowing hot, like coals of fire.2 The poetic Psyche, in its process to full development, undergoes as many
changes as its Greek namesake, the butterfly.3 And it is remarkable how soon
genius clears and purifies itself from the faults and errors of its earliest prod
ucts; faults which, in its earliest compositions, are the more obtrusive and
confluent because, as heterogeneous elements which had only a temporary
use, they constitute the very-ferment by which themselves are carried off. Or
we may compare them to some diseases, which must work on the humors and
be thrown out on the surface in order to secure the patient from their future
recurrence. I was in my twenty-fourth year when I had the happiness of know
ing Mr. Wordsworth personally;4 and, while memory lasts, I shall hardly forget
the sudden effect produced on my mind by his recitation of a manuscript poem
which still remains unpublished, but of which the stanza and tone of style
were the same as those of The Female Vagrant as originally printed in the first
volume of the Lyrical Ballads,5 There was here no mark of strained thought or
forced diction, no crowd or turbulence of imagery, and, as the poet hath him
self well described in his lines on revisiting the Wye,6 manly reflection and
