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 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 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, 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, 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 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 established lights of inspiration,
to whom that dialect happened to be native.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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