III.  He asserts that the language of poetry is in no way different, except in respect to metre, from that of good prose.  Poetry can boast of no celestial ichor that distinguishes her vital juices from those of prose:  the same human blood circulates through the veins of them both.  In works of imagination and sentiment, in proportion as ideas and feelings are valuable, whether the composition be in prose or verse, they require and exact one and the same language.

Such are the principal changes proposed by Wordsworth; and we find Herder, the German poet and metaphysician, agreeing with him in his estimate of poetic language.  Having thus propounded his tenets, he wrote his earlier poems as illustrations of his views, affecting a simplicity in subject and diction that was sometimes simply ludicrous.  It was an affected simplicity:  he was simple with a purpose; he wrote his poems to suit his canons, and in that way his simplicity became artifice.

Jeffrey and other critics rose furiously against the poems which inculcated such doctrines.  “This will never do” were the opening words of an article in the Edinburgh Review.  One of the Rejected Addresses, called The Baby’s Debut, by W. W., (spoken in the character of Nancy Lake, eight years old, who is drawn upon the stage in a go-cart,) parodies the ballads thus: 

    What a large floor! ’tis like a town;
    The carpet, when they lay it down,
      Won’t hide it, I’ll be bound: 
    And there’s a row of lamps, my eye! 
    How they do blaze:  I wonder why
      They keep them on the ground?

And this, Jeffrey declares, is a flattering imitation of Wordsworth’s style.

The day for depreciating Wordsworth has gone by; but calmer critics must still object to his poetical views in their entireness.  In binding all poetry to his dicta, he ignores that mythus in every human mind, that longing after the heroic, which will not be satisfied with the simple and commonplace.  One realm in which Poetry rules with an enchanted sceptre is the land of reverie and day-dream,—­a land of fancy, in which genius builds for itself castles at once radiant and, for the time, real; in which the beggar is a king, the poor man a Croesus, the timid man a hero:  this is the fairy-land of the imagination.  Among Wordsworth’s poems are a number called Poems of the Imagination.  He wrote learnedly about the imagination and fancy; but the truth is, that of all the great poets,—­and, in spite of his faults, he is a great poet,—­there is none so entirely devoid of imagination.  What has been said of the heroic may be applied to wit, so important an element in many kinds of poetry; he ignores it because he was without it totally.  If only humble life and commonplace incidents and unfigured rhetoric and bald language are the proper materials for the poetry, what shall be said of all literature, ancient and modern, until Wordsworth’s day?