Wordsworth is a poet, a most original poet. He no more resembles Milton than Milton resembles Shakespeare--no more resembles Shakespeare than Shakespeare resembles Milton. He is himself and, I dare affirm that, he will hereafter be admitted as the first and greatest philosophical poet, the only man who has effected a complete and constant synthesis of thought and feeling and combined them with poetic forms, with the music of pleasurable passion, and with Imagination or the _modifying_ power in that highest sense of the word, in which I have ventured to oppose it to Fancy, or the _aggregating_ power--in that sense in which it is a dim analogue of creation--not all that we can _believe_, but all that we can _conceive_ of creation.--Wordsworth is a poet, and I feel myself a better poet, in knowing how to honour _him_ than in all my own poetic compositions, all I have done or hope to do; and I prophesy immortality to his "Recluse," as the first and finest philosophical poem, if only it be (as it undoubtedly will be) a faithful transcript of his own most august and innocent life, of his own habitual feelings and modes of seeing and hearing.--My dear sir! I began a letter with a heart, Heaven knows! how full of gratitude toward you--and I have flown off into a whole letter-full respecting Wedgwood and Wordsworth. Was it that my heart demanded an outlet for grateful feelings--for a long stream of them--and that I felt it would be oppressive to you if I wrote to you of yourself half of what I wished to write? Or was it that I knew I should be in sympathy with you, and that few subjects are more pleasing to you than a detail of the merits of two men, whom, I am sure, you esteem equally with myself--though accidents have thrown me, or rather Providence has placed me, in a closer connection with them, both as confidential friends and the one as my benefactor, and to whom I owe that my bed of sickness has not been in a house of want, unless I had bought the contrary at the price of my conscience by becoming a priest.
I leave this place this afternoon, having walked from Grasmere yesterday. I walked the nineteen miles through mud and drizzle, fog and stifling air, in four hours and thirty-five minutes, and was not in the least fatigued, so that you may see that my sickness has not much weakened me. Indeed, the suddenness and seeming perfectness of my recovery is really astonishing. In a single hour I have changed from a state that seemed next to death, swollen limbs, racking teeth, etc., to a state of elastic health, so that I have said, "If I have been dreaming, yet you, Wordsworth, have been awake." And Wordsworth has answered, "I could not expect any one to believe it who had not seen it." These changes have always been produced by sudden changes of the weather. Dry hot weather or dry frosty weather seem alike friendly to me, and my persuasion is strong as the life within me, that a year's residence in Madeira would renovate me. I shall spend two days in Liverpool, and hope to be in London, coach and coachman permitting, on Friday afternoon or Saturday at the furthest. And on this day week I look forward to the pleasure of thanking you personally, for I still hope to avail myself of your kind introductions. I mean to wait in London till a good vessel sails for Madeira; but of this when I see you.