This fact can be chronologically proved. In the “Lines on Revisiting Tintern Abbey,” written as far back as 1798, and in which we have the key-note of Wordsworth’s whole system of viewing nature and man, we perceive not only a new element of thought added to English poetry, but an element which appears afterward in Shelley and Byron—modified, of course, by their individuality—and still appears, with decreasing force, in Tennyson and Browning. Plato and Lord Bacon are not more decidedly originators of new scientific methods than Wordsworth is the originator of a new poetical method. Even if we dislike him, and neglect his poetry, we cannot emancipate ourselves from his influence, as long as we are thrilled by the most magnificent and etherial passages in Shelley and Byron. We may be offended at the man, but we cannot escape from his method, unless our reading of the poets stops with Goldsmith and Cowper. The vital poems of Wordsworth—those which are really inspired with his spirit and life, and not mere accretions attached to his works—form a complete whole, pervaded by one living soul, and, amid all their variety of subject, related to one leading idea—the marriage of the soul of man to the external universe, whose “spousal hymn” the poet chants. They constitute together the spiritual body of his mind, exhibiting it as it grew into beautiful and melodious form through thirty years of intense contemplation. To a person who has studied his works with sufficient care to obtain a conception of the author’s personality, every little lyric is alive with his spirit, and is organically connected with the long narrative and didactive poems. This body of verse is, we think, a new creation in literature, differing from others not only in degree but in kind—an organism, having its own interior laws, growing from one central principle, and differing from Spenser and Milton as a swan does from an eagle, or a rose from a lily.