Notes from books In four essays Author:Henry Taylor General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1849 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: ME. WORDSWORTH'S SONNETS. In a previous essay we have ventured upon the task of considering Mr. Wordsworth's poetry at large; but such a subject cannot be treated as it ought to be within the limits to which we confined ourselves, and we will now take the ' Sonnets' into separate consideration, and endeavour to do more justice to a part than we have found it possible to do to the whole. Not that justice can be done to a part of Mr. Wordsworth's or of any great writer's works without having reference to the whole. Every portion of such a writer's works has a value beyond its intrinsic worth, as being part and lot of a great mind, and having correlations with every other part; and whether it be from the unity of spirit which is commonly found to pervade the works of a greatwriter whatever may be his variety of manner, or whether it be that there is nothing he has written but must tell us something of his mind (for even his commonplace remarks will tell us that upon occasion he was willing to be commonplace), it is certainly the attribute of such writers to give the coherency of one interest to everything that proceeds from them; and far be it from us to treat Mr. Wordsworth's Sonnets otherwise than as parcel of that great body of doctrine and moral sentiment which constitutes Mr. Wordsworth's mind extant in his works. But by considering the Sonnets principally and the other poems only in relation to them, we shall be enabled to keep our remarks within compass. A Critical Essay, reprinted from No. 137 of the Quarterly Review, being that for the Month of December, 1841. Of the many styles in which this...« less