When Wordsworth published his Lyrical Ballads, a storm of ridicule fell upon them. In that age, when the old and the new were clashing with each other on every hand, so stark a symbol of the new as these ballads presented could not fail to furnish an objective point for criticism which was born of the old. Wordsworth, in his defensive Preface, declares, “The principal object proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting, by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature; chiefly as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement. Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings, and, from the necessary character of rural occupations, are more easily comprehended, and are more durable; and, lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.” Every one of these reasons, unless the last, which I do not understand, be excepted, applies with additional force to the use of forms and images and incidents drawn from childhood; and though Wordsworth takes no account of this in his Preface, it is more to the point that he does freely and fully recognize the fact in his poetry. The Preface, with its dry formality, was like much of Wordsworth’s poetry,—Pegasus on a walk, his wings impeding free action. It is one of the anomalies of nature that a poet with such insight as Wordsworth should never apparently have discovered his own pragmatical dullness. It seems to me that Wordsworth’s finer moods were just those of which he never attempted to give a philosophic account, and that he did not refer to childhood in his Preface is an evidence of his inspiration when dealing with it.