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Various

"English literary criticism"

From this sweeping condemnation four
poems--_Brougham Castle_, and the sonnets on Venice, Milton, and
Bonaparte--are generously excepted. But, as though astonished at his
own moderation, the reviewer quickly proceeds to deal slaughter among
the rest. Of the closing lines of _Resolution and Independence_ he
writes: "We defy Mr. Wordsworth's bitterest enemy to produce anything
at all parallel to this from any collection of English poetry, or even
from the specimens of his friend, Mr. Southey". Of the stanzas to the
sons of Burns, "never was anything more miserable". _Alice Fell_ is
"trash"; _Yarrow Unvisited_, "tedious and affected". The lines from
the _Ode to Duty_.
"Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong,"
are "utterly without meaning". The poem on the _Cuckoo_ is "absurd".
The _Ode on Immortality_ is "the most illegible and unintelligible
part of the whole publication". "We venture to hope that there is now
an end of this folly." [Footnote: _Edinburgh Review_, xi.


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