The Borderers does not, and cannot, rank high among Wordsworth's poems. It is curiously lacking in the glamor, the color, the atmosphere of a remote and picturesque past by which the romantic poets are wont to impart a persuasive verisimilitude to their pictures of the Middle Ages. The characters of the play have slight individuality, and in spite of the calamities that befall them, they evoke no sympathy. Although the poem exhibits intellectual power in the handling of a philosophical problem and a finely whittled precision in the statement of ideas, yet these robust merits are unhappily wedded to the mawkish ineptitude of contemporary literature. The hero, Marmaduke, is the humanitarian freebooter of Schiller's Robbers; however, to do him justice, he does not, like Karl Moor, support young men at college with his tainted money. Herbert and Idonea present a lachrymose picture of virtue in distress; the blind old man is a sentimentalized Oedipus, and his daughter is a Greuze maiden, a girl with a broken pitcher, who has stepped out of her frame to go a-wandering; her angelic perfection only exasperates. Even the “little dog, tied by a woollen cord,” that guides the wandering Herbert, has a sentimental pedigree; he is the faithful animal of current novels—the descendant, for example, of virtuous, old Trusty, the “shag house-dog” of The Man of Feeling.