“As homeward through the lane I went with lazy feet,
This song to myself did I oftentimes repeat;
And it seemed, as I retraced the ballad line by line,
That but half of it was hers, and one half of it was mine.
Again and once again did I repeat the song;
Nay, said I, more than half to the damsel must belong,
For she looked with such a look and she spake with such a tone
That I almost received her heart into my own.”
His second thought was best: more than half did belong to the child, for he himself was but the wise interpreter.
Wordsworth’s incidents of childhood are sometimes given a purely objective character, as in Rural Architecture, The Anecdote for Fathers, The Idle Shepherd Boys; but more often childhood is to him the occasion and suggestion of the deeper thought of life. A kitten, playing with falling leaves before the poet and his child Dora, leads him on by exquisite movement to the thought of his own decay of life. But what impresses us most is the twofold conception of childhood as a part of nature, and as containing within itself not only the germ of human life, but the echo of the divine. There are poems of surpassing beauty which so blend the child and nature that we might almost fancy, as we look upon the poetical landscape, that we are mistaking children for bushes, or bushes for children. Such is that one beginning