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were Cowper, Crabbe, and Burns. All the greater poets, though 

 in part the product of their age, are more conspicuously its 

 formative and inspiring spirits. In them, the intellectual and 

 aesthetic energy of a period finds one of its most characteristic 

 expressions. And in the group of illustrious men, who created the 

 poetical literature of England, towards the close of last century, and 

 during the first quarter of this, — Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, 

 Byron, Shelley, Keats, with many others of lesser note, — we find a 

 sudden outcome of energy long repressed : as, in this district of 

 yours, after a tardy spring, one week of genial weather will some- 

 times liberate the imprisoned life of Nature, and cause it to burst 

 suddenly into leaf and bloom. 



Of this brotherhood of poets (which in originality and genius 

 far excelled the earlier constellation of the Elizabethan era) 

 Wordsworth was, beyond all question, the leader. In him, the 

 creative impulse, and the new attitude towards nature and man, 

 assumed features altogether unique ; and he may therefore be taken 

 as their most prominent literary representative in England. 



Accurately to measure his genius, however, either as to its 

 positive amount or special quality, Wordsworth must be compared 

 both with his predecessors and his contemporaries. Few things 

 are more interesting than to contrast his work in detail with that 

 of those earlier writers from whom the whole new movement was 

 a reaction, and with that of those who were borne for\vard along 

 with him on the rising tide of the renaissance, bringing out 

 succinctly the precise points of difference. Take only two. 



Comparing him with Pope, you find in Wordsworth a 

 frankness and directness, the absence of all roundabout or artificial 

 ways of dealing with and describing things. He spoke and he 

 wrote, because he felt, and as he felt ; therefore clearly, freshly, 

 adequately. He did not describe what all men saw, but what the 

 majority failed to see only because their 'inward eye' had not 

 been trained to see it. Their mind had never awakened to 

 perceive, nor their heart to feel, the significance of the simplest 

 things ; and so, in reading Wordsworth, many became aware for 

 the first time that they 



