least understand; but likewise by following the order, in
which the words of such men are wont to succeed each
other. Now this order, in the intercourse of uneducated
men, is distinguished from the diction of their superiors in
knowledge and power, by the greater disjunction and separa- 5
tion in the component parts of that, whatever it be, which
they wish to communicate. There is a want of that prospec-
tiveness of mind, that surview, which enables a man to fore-
see the whole of what he is to convey, appertaining to any
one point; and by this means so to subordinate and arrange 10
the different parts according to their relative importance, as
to convey it at once, and as an organized wholę.

Now I will take the first stanza, on which I have chanced to open, in the Lyrical Ballads. It is one the most simple and the least peculiar in its language.

"In distant countries have I been,
And yet I have not often seen
A healthy man, a man full grown,
Weep in the public roads alone.
But such a one, on English ground,
And in the broad highway, I met;
Along the broad highway he came,
His cheeks with tears were wet:
Sturdy he seem'd, though he was sad;
And in his arms a lamb he had."

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The words here are doubtless such as are current in all ranks of life; and of course not less so in the hamlet and cottage than in the shop, manufactory, college, or palace. But is this the order, in which the rustic would have placed the words? I am grievously deceived, if the following less 30 compact mode of commencing the same tale be not a far more faithful copy. 'I have been in a many parts, far and near, and I don't know that I ever saw before a man crying by himself in the public road; a grown man I mean, that was neither sick nor hurt," &c., &c. But when I turn to 35 the following stanza in "The Thorn":

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'At all times of the day and night
This wretched woman thither goes,
And she is known to every star,
And every wind that blows:

And there, beside the thorn, she sits,
When the blue day-light 's in the skies;
And when the whirlwind's on the hill,
Or frosty air is keen and still;
And to herself she cries,

Oh misery! Oh misery!

Oh woe is me! Oh misery!

and compare this with the language of ordinary men; or with that which I can conceive at all likely to proceed, in real life, from such a narrator, as is supposed in the note to the poem; compare it either in the succession of the images or of the sentences; I am reminded of the sublime prayer and hymn of praise, which MILTON, in opposition to an established liturgy, presents as a fair specimen of common extemporary devotion, and such as we might expect to hear 20 from every self-inspired minister of a conventicle! And I reflect with delight, how little a mere theory, though of his own workmanship, interferes with the processes of genuine imagination in a man of true poetic genius, who possesses, as Mr. Wordsworth, if ever man did, most assuredly does 25 possess,

"THE VISION AND THE FACULTY DIVINE."

One point then alone remains, but that the most important; its examination having been, indeed, my chief inducement for the preceding inquisition. "There neither ishor can 30 be any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition." Such is Mr. Wordsworth's assertion. Now prose itself, at least in all argumentative and consecutive works, differs, and ought to differ, from the language of conversation; even as * reading ought to differ from talking.

* It is no less an error in teachers, than a torment to the poor children, to inforce the necessity of reading as they would talk.

Unless therefore the difference denied be that of the mere
words, as materials common to all styles of writing, and not
of the style itself in the universally admitted sense of the
term, it might be naturally presumed that there must exist
a still greater between the ordonnance of poetic composition 5
and that of prose, than is expected to distinguish prose from
ordinary conversation.

There are not, indeed, examples wanting in the history of literature, of apparent paradoxes that have summoned the public wonder as new and startling truths, but which on 10 examination have shrunk into tame and harmless truisms; as the eyes of a cat, seen in the dark, have been mistaken for flames of fire. But Mr. Wordsworth is among the last men, to whom a delusion of this kind would be attributed by

In order to cure them of singing as it is called, that is, of too
great a difference, the child is made to repeat the words with
his eyes from off the book; and then, indeed, his tones resemble
talking, as far as his fears, tears and trembling will permit.
But as soon as his eye is again directed to the printed page, the
spell begins anew; for an instinctive sense tells the child's feel-
ings, that to utter its own momentary thoughts, and to recite
the written thoughts of another, as of another, and a far wiser
than himself, are two widely different things; and as the two
acts are accompanied with widely different feelings, so must
they justify different modes of enunciation. Joseph Lancaster,
among his other sophistications of the excellent Dr. Bell's in-
valuable system, cures this fault of singing, by hanging fetters
and chains on the child, to the music of which one of his school-
fellows, who walks before, dolefully chaunts out the child's last
speech and confession, birth, parentage, and education.
this soul-benumbing ignominy, this unholy and heart-hardening
burlesque on the last fearful infliction of outraged law, in pro-
nouncing the sentence to which the stern and familiarized judge
not seldom bursts into tears, has been extolled as a happy and
ingenious method of remedying—what? and how ?-why, one
extreme in order to introduce another, scarce less distant from
good sense, and certainly likely to have worse moral effects, by
enforcing a semblance of petulant ease and self-sufficiency, in
repression, and possible after-perversion of the natural feelings.
I have to beg Dr. Bell's pardon for this connection of the two
names, but he knows that contrast is no less powerful a cause of
association than likeness.

And

anyone, who had enjoyed the slightest opportunity of understanding his mind and character. Where an objection has been anticipated by such an author as natural, his answer to it must needs be interpreted in some sense which either is, 5 or has been, or is capable of being controverted. My object then must be to discover some other meaning for the term "essential difference" in this place, exclusive of the indistinction and community of the words themselves. For whether there ought to exist a class of words in the English, 10 in any degree resembling the poetic dialect of the Greek and Italian, is a question of very subordinate importance. The number of such words would be small indeed, in our language; and even in the Italian and Greek, they consist not so much of different words, as of slight differences in the 15 forms of declining and conjugating the same words; forms, doubtless, which having been, at some period more or less remote, the common grammatic flexions of some tribe or province, had been accidentally appropriated to poetry by the general admiration of certain master intellects, the first 20 established lights of inspiration, to whom that dialect happened to be native.

Essence, in its primary signification, means the principle of individuation, the inmost principle of the possibility of any thing, as that particular thing. It is equivalent to the 25 idea of a thing, when ever we use the word, idea, with philosophic precision. Existence, on the other hand, is distinguished from essence, by the superinduction of reality. Thus we speak of the essence, and essential properties of a circle; but we do not therefore assert, that any thing, which 30 really exists, is mathematically circular. Thus too, without any tautology we contend for the existence of the Supreme Being; that is, for a reality correspondent to the idea. There is, next, a secondary use of the word essence, in which it signifies the point or ground of contra-distinction between 35 two modifications of the same substance or subject. Thus

we should be allowed to say, that the style of architecture
of Westminster Abbey is essentially different from that of
St. Paul's, even though both had been built with blocks
cut into the same form, and from the same quarry. Only
in this latter sense of the term must it have been denied 5
by Mr. Wordsworth (for in this sense alone is it affirmed by
the general opinion) that the language of poetry (i.e. the
formal construction, or architecture, of the words and
phrases) is essentially different from that of prose. Now the
burthen of the proof lies with the oppugner, not with the 10
supporters of the common belief. Mr. Wordsworth, in con-
sequence, assigns as the proof of his position," that not only
the language of a large portion of every good poem, even of
the most elevated character, must necessarily, except with
reference to the metre, in no respect differ from that of good 15
prose, but likewise that some of the most interesting parts
of the best poems will be found to be strictly the language
of prose, when prose is well written. The truth of this
assertion might be demonstrated by innumerable passages
from almost all the poetical writings even of Milton himself." 20
He then quotes Gray's sonnet-

"In vain to me the smiling mornings shine,
And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire;
The birds in vain their amorous descant join,
Or chearful fields resume their green attire.
These ears, alas! for other notes repine;
A different object do these eyes require;
My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;
And in my breast the imperfect joys expire.
Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer,
And newborn pleasure brings to happier men :
The fields to all their wonted tribute bear,
To warm their little loves the birds complain.
I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear,
And weep the more because I weep in vain,"

and adds the following remark:-"It will easily be per

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