Here is what happened when Crabb Robinson read Wordsworth’s great Ode beginning ‘There was a time’ (generally known after 1815 as the ‘Immortality Ode’) to William Blake in 1825.

The narrative tells us a good deal about early reception of Wordsworth. Robinson is worried about appearing ridiculous. Why? Not because he doubts whether every part of Wordsworth’s Ode is admirable, but because he knows that he cannot explain his admiration for every part of it. Perhaps Robinson had already had the experience of becoming ridiculous in this way. Yet, on this occasion, he knows not to worry. Blake, madder than even Wordsworth could ever be, experiences a near-‘hysterical rapture’. ‘Hysterical’, of course, intimates to us Robinson’s own partial scepticism about Blake and his raptures, and, in doing so, intimates that some of the ambivalence about this passage of Wordsworth’s poem, that ambivalence which Robinson attributes to his auditors, may after all be Robinson’s own.