There
is no one who has ever felt uneasy under the blasphemies of the enemy
but must entertain deep gratitude for so complete a discharge as
Coleridge has procured him from the task of defending such lines as
"And I have travelled far as Hull to see
What clothes he might have left or other property."
Defend them indeed the ordinary reader probably would not, preferring
even the abandonment of his theory to a task so humiliating. But the
theory has so much of truth and value in it that the critic who has
redeemed it from the discredit of Wordsworth's misapplications of it is
entitled to the thanks of every friend of simplicity, who is at the
same time an enemy of bathos. There is no longer any reason to treat
the deadly commonplaces, amid which we toil through so many pages of
the _Excursion_, as having any true theoretic affinity with its
but too occasional majestic interludes. The smooth square-cut blocks of
prose which insult the natural beauty of poetic rock and boulder even
in such a scene of naked moorland grandeur as that of _Resolution and
Independence_ are seen and shown to be the mere intruders which we
have all felt them to be. To the Wordsworthian, anxious for a full
justification of the faith that is in him, the whole body of
Coleridge's criticism on his friend's poetry in the _Biographia
Literaria_ may be confidently recommended.
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