It is probable that even in this long survey of the great poetical production of the first third of this century some gaps may be detected by specialists. But it seemed to me impossible to give more than the barest mention here to the "single speech" accident of Charles Wolfe, the author of the "Burial of Sir John Moore," which everybody knows, and of absolutely nothing else that is worth a single person's knowing; to the gigantic and impossible labours of Edwin Atherstone; to the industrious translation of Rose and Sotheby; to the decent worth of Caroline Bowles, and the Hood-and-water of Laman Blanchard. And there are others perhaps who cannot be even mentioned; for there must be an end.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Lyrical Ballads, 1798, and with additions 1800; Poems, 1807 (in these four volumes even adorers have allowed all his greatest work to be included); The Excursion, 1814; The White Doe of Rylston, 1815; Sonnets on the River Duddon, and others, 1819-20. In 1836 he brought out a collected edition of his poems in six volumes. The Prelude was posthumous.
[4] It must be remembered that Wordsworth was a prose writer of considerable excellence and of no small volume. Many people no doubt were surprised when Dr. Grosart, by collecting his pamphlets, his essays, his notes, and his letters, managed to fill three large octavo volumes. But his poetry so far outweighs his prose (though, like most poets, he could write admirably in his pedestrian style when he chose) that his utterances in "the other harmony" need not be specially considered. The two most considerable examples of this prose are the pamphlet on The Convention of Cintra and the five and twenty years later Guide to the Lakes. But minor essays, letters of a more or less formal character, and prefaces and notes to the poems, make up a goodly total; and always display a genius germane to that of the poems.
[5] This word, as well as "Aspheterism," which has had a less general currency, was a characteristic coinage of Coleridge's to designate a kind of Communism, partly based on the speculations of Godwin, and intended to be carried into practice in America.
[6] Yet this praise can only be assigned to Coleridge with large allowance. He was always unjust to his own immediate predecessors, Johnson, Gibbon, etc.; and he was not too sensible of the real merits of Pope or even of Dryden. In this respect Leigh Hunt, an immeasurably weaker thinker, had a much more catholic taste. And it is not certain that, as a mere prose writer, Coleridge was a very good prose writer.
[7] Curiously enough, there was another and slightly older Samuel Rogers, a clergyman, who published verse in 1782, just before his namesake, and who dealt with Hope—
Hope springs eternal in the aspiring breast.
His verse, of which specimens are given in Southey's Modern English Poets, is purely eighteenth century. He died in 1790.