# Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron/Conversations/Section 33

I said to him, “You are accused of owing a great deal to Wordsworth. Certainly there are some stanzas in the Third Canto of ‘Childe Harold’ that smell strongly of the Lakes: for instance—
‘I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me;—and to me High mountains are a feeling!’”
“Very possibly,” replied he. “Shelley, when I was in Switzerland, used to dose me with Wordsworth physic even to nausea: and I do remember then reading some things of his with pleasure. He had once a feeling of Nature, which he carried almost to a deification of it:—that’s why Shelley liked his poetry.
“It is satisfactory to reflect, that where a man becomes a hireling and loses his mental independence, he loses also ​the faculty of writing well. The lyrical ballads, jacobinical and puling with affectation of simplicity as they were, had undoubtedly a certain merit: and Wordsworth, though occasionally a writer for the nursery-masters and misses,
‘Who took their little porringer, And ate their porridge there,’
now and then expressed ideas worth imitating; but, like brother Southey, he had his price; and since he is turned tax-gatherer, is only fit to rhyme about lasses and waggoners. Shelley repeated to me the other day a stanza from ‘Peter Bell’ that I thought inimitably good. It is the rumination of Peter’s ass, who gets into a brook, and sees reflected there a family-circle, or tea-party. But you shall have it in his own words:
‘Is it a party in a parlour, Cramm’d just as you on earth are cramm’d? ​Some sipping punch, some sipping tea, And every one, as you may see, All silent and all d——d!’
“There was a time when he would have written better; but perhaps Peter thinks feelingly.
“The republican trio, when they began to publish in common, were to have had a community of all things, like the ancient Britons; to have lived in a state of nature, like savages, and peopled some ‘island of the blest’ with children in common, like ——. A very pretty Arcadian notion! It amuses me much to compare the Botany Bay Eclogue, the Panegyric of Martin the Regicide, and ‘Wat Tyler,’ with the Laureate Odes, and Peter’s Eulogium on the Field of Waterloo. There is something more than rhyme in that noted stanza containing
‘Yea, slaughter Is God’s daughter!’—
“I offended the par nobile mortally,—past all hope of forgiveness—many years ago. I met, at the Cumberland ​Lakes, Hogg the Ettrick Shepherd, who had just been writing ‘The Poetic Mirror,’ a work that contains imitations of all the living poets’ styles, after the manner of ‘Rejected Addresses.’ The burlesque is well done, particularly that of me, but not equal to Horace Smith’s. I was pleased with Hogg; and he wrote me a very witty letter, to which I sent him, I suspect, a very dull reply. Certain it is that I did not spare the Lakists in it; and he told me he could not resist the temptation, and had shewn it to the fraternity. It was too tempting; and as I could never keep a secret of my own, as you know, much less that of other people, I could not blame him. I remember saying, among other things, that the Lake poets were such fools as not to fish in their own waters; but this was the least offensive part of the epistle.”
* ↑ “Or Wordsworth unexcised, unhired, who then “Season’d his pedlar poems with democracy.” Don Juan, Canto III. Stanza 93.
* ↑ Wordsworth’s Thanksgiving Ode.