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 the language of poetry should be indistinguishable from that of ordinary life. That is merely the literary translation of his social doctrine. He and Coleridge have both told us how they agreed to divide labour, and, while Coleridge was to give human interest to the romantic, Wordsworth was to show the romance which is incorporated in commonplace things. Wordsworth proceeded to write the poems which appeared in the Lyrical Ballads; and, if his theory tripped him up sometimes, wrote some of those exquisite and pathetic passages which amply redeem intervening tracts of quaintly prosaic narrative and commonplace moralising—some of the passages, in short, which make one love Wordsworth, and feel his unequalled power of soothing and humanising sorrow. Simon Lee—to mention only one—was the portrait of an old man at Alfoxden. If you are apt to yawn in the middle, you recognise the true Wordsworth at the conclusion:

I must not, however, speak of Wordsworth's