It is no exaggeration to say that sympathy is the founding principle of the poems collected in both the first and second editions of the Lyrical Ballads. Together with the associated and overlapping affective impulses of compassion, pity, identification, and what we tend now to call ‘empathy’, sympathy, or its absence, is a central organising impulse of almost every poem in the collection. Sympathy – a feeling for or feeling with – is expressed and explored in various ways and with, or towards, different kinds of individuals or objects (including animals and inanimate objects), but is consistently the focus of poem after poem. As Wordsworth comments in the final poem in the 1800, two-volume edition of Lyrical Ballads, the ‘power / Of Nature’ has led him to ‘feel / For passions that were not my own’ and thereby to think ‘On man, the heart of man, and human life’ (LB ‘Michael’, 28–31).