(L.P., Canto I, 315-6) or Retiring Lichen climbs the topmost stone And drinks the aerial solitude alone. (_Ibid._, 347-8) The whole poem is thus one long series of mechanical personifications which baffle and bewilder and finally wear out the reader. It is strange now to think that “The Botanic Garden” was at the height of its vogue when the “Lyrical Ballads” were being planned and written, but the easy-flowing couplets of Darwin, and the “tinsel and glitter” of his diction, together with most of the “science” he was at such pains to expound (though he was a shrewd and even prophetic inquirer in certain branches, such as medicine and biology), have now little more than a faint historical interest. Yet his theory and practice of poetry—the “painted mists that occasionally rise from the marshes at the foot of Parnassus,” Coleridge called them—so dominated the literature of the last decade of the eighteenth century as to be capable of captivating the mind of the poet who was about to sound their death-knell. While Wordsworth inveighed against “personification” in the great manifesto, his earliest poetry shows clearly, as has been noted, that in this as in other respects he had fallen under the spell and influence of “The Botanic Garden.” The “Evening Walk” and the “Descriptive Sketches” swarm with instances of personifications of the type that had flourished apace for a hundred years, “Impatience,” “Pain,” “Independence,” “Hope,” “Oppression,” and dozens similar.[245] There is thus a certain comic irony in the fact that the poet, who was the first to sound the revolt against “personifications” and similar “heightenings” of style, should have embarked on his literary career with the theft of a good deal of the thunder of the enemy. Later, when Wordsworth’s true ideal of style had evolved itself, this feature of the two poems was in great measure discarded. The first (1793) draft of the “Descriptive Sketches” contains over seventy examples of more or less frigid abstractions; in the final draft of the poem these have dwindled down to about a score.[246] In our detailed examination of personification in eighteenth century poetry we have seen that in general it includes three main types. There is first the mere abstraction, whose distinctive sign is the presence of a capital letter; it may be, and often is, qualified by epithets suggestive of human attributes, but there is little or no attempt to give a definite picture or evoke a distinctive image. This is the prevalent type, and it is against these invertebrates that the criticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge was really directed.