The two poems composed / finished by Wordsworth in France during 1792, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, were published by Joseph Johnson on 29 January 1793.
Wordsworth supplied copies of the poems to his sister, Dorothy who comments in a letter to Jane Pollard (from Forncett, 16 February 1793):
The scenes which he describes have been viewed with a poet's eye and pourtrayed with a poet's pencil; and the Poems contain many passages exquisitely beautiful, but they also contain many faults, the chief of which are Obscurity, and a too frequent use of some particular expressions and uncommon words, for instance 'moveless', which he applies in a sense if not new, at least different from its ordinary one; by 'moveless' when applied to the Swan he means that sort of motion which is smooth without agitation... I regret exceedingly that he did not submit the works to the inspection of some Friend before Publication, and he also joins with me in this regret.
Joseph Johnson was also the publisher of the Analytical Review, and the poems were reviewed in the March 1793 issue of this publication, attracting short but generally favourable comment from the reviewer. This was, of course, only to be expected as the Analytical had a vested interest in promoting the sale of the poems.
The reviewer notes:
The diversified pictures of nature which are sketched in this poem, could only have been produced by a lively imagination, furnished by actual and attentive observation with an abundant store of materials. The majestic grandeur of mountains, the rich and varied scenery of lakes and vallies, the solemn gloom of ruined monasteries and abbeys, and the different aspect of Alpine scenes in the morning and evening, during a storm, and in other atmospherical changes, are described with studied variety of imagery; the piece is occasionally enlivened with human figures, and the whole is rendered instructive by the frequent introduction of moral reflections.
but he also laments the want of a general thread of narrative and remarks on a certain laboured and artificial cast of expression, which often involves the poet's meaning in obscurity.
With regard to An Evening Walk, he comments that the poet has the eye of a diligent observer and the hand of an able copyist of nature.
Critical Review Second Series, VIII, August 1793, 472-474
The Critical was Tory and Church Establishment leaning.
Mr. Wordsworth's ... versification is harsh and prosaic; his images ill-chosen, and his descriptions feeble and insipid.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge later comments: In the form, style, and manner of the whole poem [Descriptive Sketches], and in the structure of the particular lines and periods, there is an harshness and acerbity connected and combined with words and images all a-glow, which might recall those products of the vegetable world, where gorgeous blossoms rise out of the hard and thorny rind and shell, within which the rich fruit was elaborating. (Biographica Literaria, p56)