is remarkable how soon genius clears and purifies itself from the
faults and errors of its earliest products; faults which, in its earli-
est compositions, are the more obtrusive and confluent; because,
as heterogeneous elements which had only a temporary use, they
constitute the very ferment by which themselves are carried off. Or
we may compare them to some diseases, which must work on the
humours, and be thrown out on the surface, in order to secure the
patient from their future recurrence. I was in my twenty-fourth
year when I had the happiness of knowing Mr. Wordsworth person-
ally, and while memory lasts, I shall hardly forget the sudden effect
produced on my mind, by his recitation of a manuscript poem, which
still remains unpublished, but of which the stanza, and tone of style,
were the same as those of the "Female Vagrant," as originally
printed in the first volume of the "Lyrical Ballads." There was
here no mark of strained thought or forced diction, no crowd or tur-
bulence of imagery; and as the poet hath himself well described
in his lines" on revisiting the Wye," manly reflection, and human
associations, had given both variety and an additional interest to
natural objects, which, in the passion and appetite of the first love,
they had seemed to him neither to need or permit. The occasional
obscurities which had risen from an imperfect controul over the re-
sources of his native language, had almost wholly disappeared, to-
gether with that worse defect of arbitrary and illogical phrases, at
once hackneyed and fantastic, which holds so distinguished a place
in the technique of ordinary poetry, and will, more or less, alloy the
earlier
poems of the truest genius, unless the attention has been
specifically directed to their worthlessness and incongruity.* I

"The butterfly the ancient Grecians made
The soul's fair emblem, and its only name-
But of the soul, escaped the slavish trade
Of mortal life! For in this earthly frame

Our's is the reptile's lot, much toil, much blame,

Manifold motions making little speed,

And to deform and kill the things whereon we feed." S. T. C.

*Mr. Wordsworth, even in his two earliest, "the Evening Walk," and "the Descriptive Sketches," is more free from this latter defect than most of the young poets, his contemporaries. It may, however, be exemplified-together with the harsh and obscure construction, in which he more often offended-in the following lines:

"'Mid stormy vapours ever driving by,

Where ospreys, cormorants, and herons cry;

did not perceive any thing particular in the mere style of the poem alluded to during its recitation, except, indeed, such difference as was not separable from the thought and manner; and the Spencerian stanza, which always, more or less, recalls to the reader's mind Spencer's own style, would doubtless have authorized, in my then opinion, a more frequent descent to the phrases of ordinary life than could, without an ill effect, have been hazarded in the heroic couplet. It was not, however, the freedom from false taste, whether as to common defects, or to those more properly his own, which made so unusual an impression on my feelings immediately, and subsequently on my judgment. It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying the objects observed; and, above all, the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and, with it, the depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew drops. "To find no contradiction in the union of old and new; to contemplate the ANCIENT of days and all his works with feelings as fresh as if all had then sprang forth at the first creative fiat; characterizes the mind that feels the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it. To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day, for, perhaps, forty years, had rendered familiar;

"With sun and moon and stars throughout the year,
And man and woman;"

this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talents. And therefore, it is the prime merit of genius, and its most unequivocal mode of manifestation,

Where hardly given the hopeless waste to cheer,
Denied the bread of life the foodful ear,
Dwindles the pear on autumn's latest spray,
And apple sickens pale in summer's ray;

E'en here content has fixed her smiling reign
With independence, child of high disdain.”

I hope I need not say, that I have quoted these lines for no other purpose than to make my meaning fully understood. It is to be regretted that Mr. Wordsworth has not re-published these two poems entire.

so to represent familiar objects as to awaken in the minds of others a kindred feeling concerning them, and that freshness of sensation which is the constant accompaniment of mental, no less than of bodily convalescence. Who has not a thousand times seen snow fall on water? Who has not watched it with a new feeling from the time that he has read Burns' comparison of sensual pleasure,

"To snow that falls upon a river,

A moment white-then gone forever!"

"In poems, equally as in philosophic disquisitions, genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty, while it rescues the most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission. Truths, of all others the most awful and mysterious, yet being, at the same time, of universal interest, are too often considered as so true, that they lose all the life and efficiency of truth, and lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors." THE FRIEND,* page 76. No. 5.

This excellence, which, in all Mr. Wordsworth's writings, is more or less predominant, and which constitutes the character of his mind, I no sooner felt than I sought to understand. Repeated meditations led me first to suspect, (and a more intimate analysis of the human faculties, their appropriate marks, functions and effects, matured my conjecture into full conviction,) that fancy and imagination were two distinct and widely different faculties, instead of being, according to the general belief, either two names with one meaning, or, at furthest, the lower and higher degree of one and the same power. It is not, I own, easy to conceive a more opposite translation of the Greek phantasia than the Latin imaginatio: but it is equally true, that in all societies there exists an instinct of growth, a certain collective, unconscious good sense, working progressively to desynonymise† those words, originally of the same meaning, which the

*As "The Friend" was printed on stampt sheets, and sent only by the post, to a very limited number of subscribers, the author has felt less objection to quote from it, though a work of his own. To the public at large, indeed, it is the same as a volume in manuscript.

†This is effected either by giving to the one word a general, and to the other an exclusive use; as, "to put on the back," and "to endorse;" or, by an actual distinction of meanings, as "naturalist," and "physician;" or, by difference of relation, as "I," and "me;" (each of which the rustics of our different provinces still use in all the cases singular of the first personal pronoun.) Even the mere difference, or corruption, in the pronunciation of the same word, if it have become

conflux of dialects had supplied to the more homogeneous languages, as the Greek and German and which the same cause, joined with accidents of translation from original works of different countries, occasion in mixed languages like our own. The first and most important point to be proved, is, that two conceptions perfectly distinct are confused under one and the same word, and, (this done,) to appropriate that word exclusively to one meaning, and the synonyme, (should there be one,) to the other, But if (as will be of ten the case in the arts and sciences,) no synonyme exists, we must either invent or borrow a word. In the present instance, the appropriation had already begun, and been legitimated in the derivative adjective: Milton had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind. If, therefore, I should succeed in establishing the actual existences of two faculties generally different, the nomenclature would be at once determined. To the faculty by which I had characterized Milton, we should confine the term imagination; while the other would be contra-distinguished as fancy. Now, were it once fully ascertained, that this division is no less grounded in nature than that of delirium from mania, or Otway's

"Lutes, lobsters, seas of milk, and ships of amber,"

from Shakspeare's

"What, have his daughters brought him to this pass?

or from the preceding apostrophe to the elements; the theory of the fine arts, and of poetry in particular, could not, I thought, but derive some additional and important light. It would, in its immediate effects, furnish a torch of guidance to the philosophical critic; and, ultimately, to the poet himself. In energetic minds, truth soon

general, will produce a new word with a distinct signification; thus, "property," and "propriety," the latter of which, even to the time of Charles II. was the written word for all the senses of both. Thus, too, "mister," and "master," both hasty pronunciations of the same word; "magister," "mistress," and "miss," "if," and "give," &c. &c. There is a sort of minim immortal among the animalcula infusoria, which has not, naturally, either birth or death, absolute beginning or absolute end; for, at a certain period, a small point appears on its back, which deepens and lengthens till the creature divides into two, and the same process recommences in each of the halves now become integral. This may be a fanciful, but it is by no means a bad emblem of the formation of words, and may facilitate the conception, how immense a nomenclature may be organized from a few simple sounds by rational beings in a social state. For each new application or excitement of the same sound will call forth a different sensation, which cannot but affect the pronunciation. The after recollection of the sound, without the same vivid sensation, will modify it still further; till, at length, all trace of the origina! likeness is worn away.

changes, by domestication, into power; and from directing in thre discrimination and appraisal of the product, becomes influencive in the production. To admire on principle, is the only way to imitate without loss of originality.

It has been already hinted, that metaphysics and psychology have long been my hobby-horse. But to have a hobby-horse, and be vain of it, are so commonly found together, that they pass almost for the same. I trust, therefore, that there will be more good humour than contempt, in the smile with which the reader chastises my self-complacency, if I confess myself uncertain, whether the satisfaction from the perception of a truth new to myself, may not have been rendered more poignant, by the conceit that it would be equally so to the public. There was a time, certainly, in which I took some little credit to myself, in the belief that I had been the first of my countrymen who had pointed out the diverse meaning of which the two terms were capable, and analyzed the faculties to which they should be appropriated. Mr. W. Taylor's recent volumes of synonymes, I have not yet seen; but his specification of the terms in question, has been clearly shown to be both insufficient and erroneous by Mr. Wordsworth, in the preface added to

*I ought to have added, with the exception of a single sheet which I accidentally met with at the printer's. Even from this scanty specimen, I found it impossible to doubt the talent, or not to admire the ingenuity of the author. That his distinctions were, for the greater part, unsatisfactory to my mind, proves nothing against their accuracy; but it may possibly be serviceable to him in case of a second edition, if I take this opportunity of suggesting the query, whether he may not have been occasionally misled, by having assumed, as to me he appeared to have done, the non-existence of any absolute synonymes in our language? Now, I cannot but think, that there are many which remain for our posterity to distinguish and appropriate, and which I regard as so much reversionary wealth in our mother tongue. When two distinct meanings are confounded under one or more words, (and such must be the case, as sure as our knowledge is progressive, and, of course, imperfect) erroneous consequences will be drawn, and what is true in one sense of the word, will be aflirmed as true in toto. Men of research, startled by the consequences, seek in the things themselves (whether in or out of the mind) for a knowledge of the fact, and having discovered the difference, remove the equivocation either by the substitution of a new word, or by the appropriation of one of the two or more words, that had before been used promiscuously. When this distinction has been so naturalized and of such general currency that the language itself does, as it were, think for us, (like the sliding rule which is the mechanic's safe substitute for arithmetical knowledge,) we then say, that it is evident to common sense. Common sense, therefore, differs in different ages. What was born and christened in the schools, passess by degrees into the world at large, and becomes the property of the market and the tea-table. At least, I can discover no other meaning of the term common sense, if it is to convey any specific difference from sense and jugment in genere, and where it is not used scholastically for the universal reason. Thus, in the reign of Charles II., the philosophic world was called to arms by the moral sophisms of Hobbs, and the ablest writers exerted themselves in the detection of an error which a school-boy would now be able to confute by the mere recollection, that compulsion and obligation conveyed two ideas perfectly disparate, and that what appertained to the one had been falsely transferred to the other, by a mere confusion of terins.