This solution it is Wordsworth's chief aim to supply. In the familiar verses which stand as a motto to his poems—
The child is father to the man,
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety—
the great problem of life, that is, as he conceives it, is to secure a continuity between the period at which we are guided by half-conscious instincts, and that in which a man is able to supply the place of these primitive impulses by reasoned convictions. This is the thought which comes over and over again in his deepest poems, and round which all his teaching centred. It supplies the great moral, for example, of the 'Leech-gatherer:'
My whole life I have lived in pleasant thought,
As if life's business were a summer mood:
As if all needful things would come unsought
To genial faith still rich in genial good.
When his faith is tried by harsh experience, the leech-gatherer comes,
Like a man from some far region sent
To give me human strength by apt admonishment;
for he shows how the 'genial faith' may be converted into permanent strength by resolution and independence. The verses most commonly quoted, such as—
We poets in our youth begin in gladness,
But thereof come in the end despondency and sadness,
give the ordinary view of the sickly school. Wordsworth's aim is to supply an answer worthy not only of a poet, but a man. The same sentiment again is expressed in the grand 'Ode to Duty,' where the
Stern daughter of the voice of God