While the critical storm awakened by the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads was still raging, he composed his Peter Bell and his Waggoner, which were not, however, published till many years later. They are full of fine and deep-felt poetry. Their language is genuine racy English, and their versification unsurpassed for sweetness. It cannot, however, be denied that they are marked by a self-willed, exaggerated adherence to the theory of poetry he had promulgated, the effect of something that is very like a spirit of contradiction. In a playful adaptation of Milton’s sonnet, Tetrachordon, Wordsworth defends his choice of subjects by the admiration felt or professed for Tam o’ Shanter. He overlooks the utter difference between the mode in which Burns conceived and executed that poem, and himself his Benjamin the Waggoner. Burns was for the time the hero himself. In Tam o’ Shanter, and still more in the Jolly Beggars, he expresses the very passions of the characters he presents to us. Wordsworth, constitutionally incapable of the emotions of a boon companion, merely describes and moralises on the waywardness of his Benjamin. We sympathise with the common humanity of Burns’s genial reprobates; we feel the cold shadow of Wordsworth’s Benjamin to be a hideous intruder among the fine poetical imagery and thought with which he is mixed up. In 1807, Wordsworth published two volumes, containing his own contributions to the Lyrical Ballads, with many additional poems. Minute detached criticism is not the object of this sketch. Suffice it to say that many pieces in these volumes are unsurpassed in English poetry, or in the poetry of any language. The Song at the feast of Brougham Castle has a rich lyrical exuberance of feeling; the Laodamia is as severely beautiful as a Greek statue; Hartleap Well is full of mellow humanity; Rob Roy’s Grave, the Highland Girl, ‘She was a phantom of delight,’—every piece, in short, is replete with delightful sentiment and graphic pictures of rural nature. The objects of some of these poems obviously originate in a mistaken apprehension of the scope and purpose of poetry. Wordsworth was a curious observer of the workings of the human mind, and he sometimes confounded the pleasure derived from such metaphysical scrutiny with the pleasure derived from the presentation of poetical imaginings. Hence, what is questionable in his Idiot Boy, his Harry Gill, and some others.