Wordsworth’s poetry had long to contend against the conventional prepossessions of the literary world. From the beginning, however, his genius was felt by superior minds, and by a few young unprejudiced enthusiasts. His first admirers were literally a sect, and their admiration was, like the devotion of all sectarians, ardent and indiscriminating. They have, however, served as interpreters between him and the reading public, and thus his merits have come to be generally acknowledged. His writings lent a tone to the works of some who, like Shelley, dissented from his theory; and some who, like Byron, systematically scoffed at them. The public taste was thus insensibly approximated to them. Even yet, however, Wordsworth is probably more praised than liked. But the process will go on, and in time what is really valuable in his poems will take the place that is due to it in the land’s literature. Of the first writings of Wordsworth little need be said. Though they contain valuable thoughts, they are lumbering and sufficiently unreadable. The once furious controversy about his literary creed as heresy, need not be resuscitated; there were great errors on both sides. If his merits were individually depreciated, there was much in his seemingly supercilious re-assertion, rather than defence and explanation of his views, to extenuate the petulance with which he was often treated. As for his wanderings in the fields of politics and polemics, he is no exception to the general truth, that the warmest admirers of poets must regret their deviations into such uncongenial by-ways. The man was like his poetry; simple and therefore conservative in his tastes: self-reliant and sometimes repulsive from his austerity, yet with a rich fund of benevolence beneath the hard exterior. His frame was strong and sinewy from his habits of exercise; his look heavy, and, at first sight, unimpressive; but there was an inexpressible charm in his smile. He was the antithesis of the materialist and practical activity of the time. He did not understand, and therefore could not appreciate, the ennobling tendencies of the social and scientific career on which this age has entered—an age into which he had lingered, rather than to which he belonged. He looked out upon the world from his egotistic isolation rather as a critical spectator, than as a sympathiser. His views of it were rusted over with the conservative prejudices of the past. Railways he hated, and against them waged a sonneteering war. Although they were rapidly increasing the commerce, comforts, intercourse, affluence, and happiness of the whole community, they invaded the selfish solitude of the one man; and single-handed he did battle against the armies of invading tourists, who came to share with him the heathful pleasures of the mountain and the lake, in which he would have almost preserved a patent right for the few.