He once for all forsook the styles, and
standards, and modes of thinking of London and Paris, and the books
read there, and the aims pursued, and wrote Helvellyn and
Winandermere, and the dim spirits which these haunts harbored. There
was not the least attempt to reconcile these with the spirit of
fashion and selfishness, nor to show with great deference to the
superior judgment of dukes and earls, that although London was the
home for men of great parts, yet Westmoreland had these consolations
for such as fate had condemned to the country life; but with a
complete satisfaction, he pitied and rebuked their false lives, and
celebrated his own with the religion of a true priest. Hence the
antagonism which was immediately felt between his poetry and the
spirit of the age, that here not only criticism but conscience and
will were parties; the spirit of literature, and the modes of living,
and the conventional theories of the conduct of life were called in
question on wholly new grounds, not from Platonism, nor from
Christianity, but from the lessons which the country muse taught a
stout pedestrian climbing a mountain, and in following a river from
its parent rill down to the sea.
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