Coleridge has told the
world, of poems chiefly on supernatural subjects, taken from common
life, but looked at, as much as might be, through an imaginative
medium."
The volume of _Lyrical Ballads_, whose first beginnings have here
been traced, was published in the autumn of 1798, by Mr. Cottle, at
Bristol. This volume contained several poems--which have been justly
blamed for triviality,--as _The Thorn, Goody Blake, The Idiot Boy_;
several in which, as in _Simon Lee_, triviality is mingled with much
real pathos; and some, as _Expostulation and Reply_ and _The Tables
Turned_, which are of the very essence of Wordsworth's nature. It is
hardly too much to say, that if these two last-named poems--to the
careless eye so slight and trifling--were all that had remained from
Wordsworth's hand, they would have "spoken to the comprehending" of
a new individuality, as distinct and unmistakeable in its way as
that which Sappho has left engraven on the world for ever in words
even fewer than these. And the volume ended with a poem, which
Wordsworth composed in 1798, in one day, during a tour with his
sister to Tintern and Chepstow. The _Lines written above Tintern
Abbey_ have become, as it were, the _locus classicus_ or consecrated
formulary of the Wordsworthian faith.
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