"To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."
And again:
"Long have I loved what I behold,
The night that calms, the day that cheers;
The common growth of mother earth
Suffices me—her tears, her mirth,
Her humblest mirth and tears."
Wordsworth's life was outwardly uneventful. The companionship of the mountains and of his {230} own thoughts; the sympathy of his household; the lives of the dalesmen and cottagers about him furnished him with all the stimulus that he required.
"Love had he found in huts where poor men lie:
His only teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills."
He read little, but reflected much, and made poetry daily, composing, by preference, out of doors, and dictating his verses to some member of his family. His favorite amanuensis was his sister Dorothy, a woman of fine gifts, to whom Wordsworth was indebted for some of his happiest inspirations. She was the subject of the poem beginning "Her eyes are wild," and her charming Memorials of a Tour in the Scottish Highlands records the origin of many of her brother's best poems. Throughout life Wordsworth was remarkably self-centered. The ridicule of the reviewers, against which he gradually made his way to public recognition, never disturbed his serene belief in himself, or in the divine message which he felt himself commissioned to deliver. He was a slow and serious person, a preacher as well as a poet, with a certain rigidity, not to say narrowness, of character. That plastic temperament which we associate with poetic genius Wordsworth either did not possess, or it hardened early. Whole sides of life were beyond the range of his sympathies. He {231} touched life at fewer points than Byron and Scott, but touched it more profoundly. It is to him that we owe the phrase "plain living and high thinking," as also a most noble illustration of it in his own practice. His was the wisest and deepest spirit among the English poets of his generation, though hardly the most poetic. He wrote too much, and, attempting to make every petty incident or reflection the occasion of a poem, he finally reached the point of composing verses On Seeing a Harp in the shape of a Needle Case, and on other themes more worthy of Mrs. Sigourney. In parts of his long blank-verse poems, The Excursion, 1814, and The Prelude—which was printed after his death in 1850, though finished as early as 1806—the poetry wears very thin and its place is taken by prosaic, tedious didacticism. These two poems were designed as portions of a still more extended work, The Recluse, which was never completed. The Excursion consists mainly of philosophical discussions on nature and human life between a school-master, a solitary, and an itinerant peddler. The Prelude describes the development of Wordsworth's own genius. In parts of The Excursion the diction is fairly Shaksperian.
"The good die first,
And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust
Burn to the socket."
A passage not only beautiful in itself, but dramatically true, in the mouth of the bereaved mother {232} who utters it, to that human instinct which generalizes a private sorrow into a universal law. Much of The Prelude can hardly be called poetry at all, yet some of Wordsworth's loftiest poetry is buried among its dreary wastes, and now and then, in the midst of commonplaces, comes a flash of Miltonic splendor—like
"Golden cities ten months' journey deep
Among Tartarian wilds."
Wordsworth is, above all things, the poet of Nature. In this province he was not without forerunners. To say nothing of Burns and Cowper, there was George Crabbe, who had published his Village in 1783—fifteen years before the Lyrical Ballads—and whose last poem, Tales of the Hall, came out in 1819, five years after The Excursion. Byron called Crabbe "Nature's sternest painter, and her best." He was a minutely accurate delineator of the harsher aspects of rural life. He photographs a Gypsy camp; a common, with its geese and donkey; a salt marsh, a shabby village street, or tumble-down manse. But neither Crabbe nor Cowper has the imaginative lift of Wordsworth,