"...To sum up a general opinion of the second volume, I do not feel any one poem in it so forcibly as the 'Ancient Marinere, the Mad Mother, and the LInes at Tintern Abbey in the first. I could, too, have wished the Critical Preface had appeared in a separate treatise. All its dogmas are true and just, and most of them new, as criticism. But they associate a 'diminishing' idea with the poems which follow, as having been written for 'experiment' on the public taste, more than having sprung (as they must have done) from living and daily circumstances." Lamb's letter to William Wordsworth, Jan. 30, 1801.