It may be that this chapter will appear to make too much of the word ‘things’. After all, in common usage ‘things’ and ‘objects’ are more or less synonymous, and with that understanding the chapter might as well have been called ‘The Power of Objects in Lyrical Ballads’. What follows is written in the belief not only that there is a distinction between things and objects but that Wordsworth attends carefully to the distinction, and that it is helpful to think of Lyrical Ballads as an exploration, at certain moments, of the imagination’s way of seeing objects primordially – of seeing them, that is, as things. Much of the time, to be sure, things and objects are as interchangeable in Wordsworth’s vocabulary as they are for most of us. But sometimes there is a difference, an important difference that helps to explain the frequent vagueness of his language in his more ecstatic moments (in contrast, for example, with the precise niceties of Coleridge even in such moments), a vagueness disagreeable to his detractors, yet perhaps the very quality his admirers relish most when they find him most affecting. There will be no need here to pause over his vagueness, let alone subject it to stylistic analysis; rather, it will be taken for granted as his way of expressing the power of things, all things in their unity, including the senses in which humans too are things.