side by side with this revelation of nature, and interwoven with it so closely as to be inseparable, wordsworth was receiving a revelation of humanity, no less marvellous, no less significant for his recovery of joy. indeed he himself seems to have thought it the more important of the two, for he speaks of the mind of man as

“my haunt and the main region of my song”;

and again he says that he will set out, like an adventurer,

“and through the human heart explore the way;

and look and listen—gathering whence i may,

triumph, and thoughts no bondage can restrain.”

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the discovery of humble life, of peasant character, of lowly, trivial scenes and incidents, as a field for poetry, was not original with wordsworth. but he was the first english poet to explore this field thoroughly, sympathetically, with steady and deepening joy. burns had been there before him; but the song of burns though clear and passionate, was fitful. cowper had been there before him; but cowper was like a visitor from the polite world, never an inhabitant, never quite able to pierce gently, powerfully down to the realities of lowly life and abide in them. crabbe had been there before him; but crabbe was something of a pessimist; he felt the rough shell of the nut, but did not taste the sweet kernel.

wordsworth, if i may draw a comparison from another art, was the millet of english poetry. in his verse we find the same quality of perfect comprehension, of tender pathos, of absolute truth interfused with delicate beauty that makes millet’s angelus, and the gleaners and the sower and the sheepfold, immortal visions of the lowly life. place beside these pictures, if you will, wordsworth’s solitary reaper, the old cumberland beggar, margaret

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waiting in her ruined cottage for the husband who would never return, michael, the old shepherd who stood, many and many a day, beside the unfinished sheepfold which he had begun to build with his lost boy,

“and never lifted up a single stone,”—

place these beside millet’s pictures, and the poems will bear the comparison.

coleridge called wordsworth “a miner of the human heart.” but there is a striking peculiarity in his mining: he searched the most familiar places, by the most simple methods, to bring out the rarest and least suspected treasures. his discovery was that there is an element of poetry, like some metal of great value, diffused through the common clay of every-day life.

it is true that he did not always succeed in separating the precious metal from the surrounding dross. there were certain limitations in his mind which prevented him from distinguishing that which was familiar and precious, from that which was merely familiar.

one of these limitations was his lack of a sense

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of humour. at a dinner-party he announced that he was never witty but once in his life. when asked to narrate the instance, after some hesitation he said: “well, i will tell you. i was standing some time ago at the entrance of my cottage at rydal mount. a man accosted me with the question, ‘pray, sir, have you seen my wife pass by?’ whereupon i said, ‘why, my good friend, i didn’t know till this moment that you had a wife!’” the humour of this story is unintentional and lies otherwhere than wordsworth thought. the fact that he was capable of telling it as a merry jest accounts for the presence of many queer things in his poetry. for example; the lines in simon lee,

“few months of life has he in store

as he to you will tell,

for still the more he works, the more

do his weak ankles swell:”

the stanza in peter bell, which shelley was accused of having maliciously invented, but which was actually printed in the first edition of the poem,

“is it a party in a parlour

cramming just as they on earth were crammed,

some sipping punch—some sipping tea

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but, as you by their faces see,

all silent and all—damned?”

the couplet in the original version of the blind highland boy which describes him as embarking on his voyage in

“a household tub, like one of those

which women use to wash their clothes.”

it is quite certain, i think, that wordsworth’s insensibility to the humourous side of things made him incapable of perceiving one considerable source of comfort and solace in lowly life. plain and poor people get a great deal of consolation, in their hard journey, out of the rude but keen fun that they take by the way. the sense of humour is a means of grace.

i doubt whether wordsworth’s peasant-poetry has ever been widely popular among peasants themselves. there was an old farmer in the lake country who had often seen the poet and talked with him, and who remembered him well. canon rawnsley has made an interesting record of some of the old man’s reminiscences. when he was asked whether he had ever read any of wordsworth’s

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poetry, or seen any of his books about in the farmhouses, he answered:

“ay, ay, time or two. but ya’re weel aware there’s potry and potry. there’s potry wi’ a li’le bit pleasant in it, and potry sic as a man can laugh at or the childer understand, and some as takes a deal of mastery to make out what’s said, and a deal of wordsworth’s was this sort, ye kna. you could tell fra the man’s faace his potry would niver have no laugh in it.”

but when we have admitted these limitations, it remains true that no other english poet has penetrated so deeply into the springs of poetry which rise by every cottage door, or sung so nobly of the treasures which are hidden in the humblest human heart, as wordsworth has. this is his merit, his incomparable merit, that he has done so much, amid the hard conditions, the broken dreams, and the cruel necessities of life, to remind us how rich we are in being simply human.

like clifford, in the song at the feast of brougham castle,

“love had he found in huts where poor men lie,”

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and thenceforth his chosen task was to explore the beauty and to show the power of that common love.

“there is a comfort in the strength of love;

’twill make a thing endurable, which else

would overset the brain or break the heart.”

he found the best portion of a good man’s life in

“his little, nameless, unremembered acts

of kindness and of love.”

in the old cumberland beggar he declared

“’tis nature’s law

that none, the meanest of created things,

of forms created the most vile and brute,

the dullest or most noxious, should exist

divorced from good—a spirit and pulse of good,

a life and soul, to every mode of being

inseparably linked.”

and then he went on to trace, not always with full poetic inspiration, but still with many touches of beautiful insight, the good that the old beggar did and received in the world, by wakening among the peasants to whose doors he came from year to year, the memory of past deeds of charity, by giving them a sense of kinship with the world of want and sorrow, and by bestowing on them in their poverty

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the opportunity of showing mercy to one whose needs were even greater than their own; for,—the poet adds—with one of those penetrating flashes which are the surest mark of his genius,—

“man is dear to man; the poorest poor

long for some moments in a weary life

when they can know and feel that they have been,

themselves, the fathers and the dealers out

of some small blessings; have been kind to such

as needed kindness, for this single cause

that we have all of us one human heart.”

nor did wordsworth forget, in his estimate of the value of the simplest life, those pleasures which are shared by all men.

“nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room;

and hermits are contented with their cells;

and students with their pensive citadels;

maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,

sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom

high as the highest peak of furniss-fells,

will murmur by the hour in fox-glove bells;

in truth the prison, unto which we doom

ourselves, no prison is.”

he sees a miller dancing with two girls on the platform of a boat moored in the river thames, and

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breaks out into a song on the “stray pleasures” that are spread through the earth to be claimed by whoever shall find them. a little crowd of poor people gather around a wandering musician in a city street, and the poet cries,

“now, coaches and chariots! roar on like a stream;

here are twenty souls happy as souls in a dream;

they are deaf to your murmurs—they care not for you,

nor what ye are flying, nor what ye pursue!”

he describes coleridge and himself as lying together on the greensward in the orchard by the cottage at grasmere, and says

“if but a bird, to keep them company,

or butterfly sate down, they were, i ween,

as pleased as if the same had been a maiden queen.”

it was of such simple and unchartered blessings that he loved to sing. he did not think that the vain or the worldly would care to listen to his voice. indeed he said in a memorable passage of gentle scorn that he did not expect his poetry to be fashionable. “it is an awful truth,” wrote he to lady beaumont, “that there neither is nor can be any genuine enjoyment of poetry among nineteen out of twenty

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of those persons who either live or wish to live in the broad light of the world,—among those who either are, or are striving to make themselves, people of consideration in society. this is a truth, and an awful one, because to be incapable of a feeling of poetry, in my sense of the word, is to be without love of human nature and reverence for god.” he did not expect that his poetry would be popular in that world where men and women devote themselves to the business of pleasure, and where they care only for the things that minister to vanity or selfishness,—and it never was.

but there was another world where he expected to be welcome and of service. he wished his poetry to cheer the solitary, to uplift the downcast, to bid the despairing hope again, to teach the impoverished how much treasure was left to them. in short, he intended by the quiet ministry of his art to be one of those

“poets who keep the world in heart,”

—and so he was.

it is impossible to exaggerate the value of such a service. measured by any true and vital standard

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wordsworth’s contribution to the welfare of mankind was greater, more enduring than that of the amazing corsican, bonaparte, who was born but a few months before him and blazed his way to glory. wordsworth’s service was to life at its fountain-head. his remedy for the despair and paralysis of the soul was not the prescription of a definite philosophy as an antidote. it was a hygienic method, a simple, healthful, loving life in fellowship with man and nature, by which the native tranquillity and vigour of the soul would be restored. the tendency of his poetry is to enhance our interest in humanity, to promote the cultivation of the small but useful virtues, to brighten our joy in common things, and to deepen our trust in a wise, kind, over-ruling god. wordsworth gives us not so much a new scheme of life as a new sense of its interior and inalienable wealth. his calm, noble, lofty poetry is needed to-day to counteract the belittling and distracting influence of great cities; to save us from that most modern form of insanity, publicomania, which sacrifices all the sanctities of life to the craze for advertising; and to make a little quiet space in

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the heart, where those who are still capable of thought, in this age of clattering machinery, shall be able to hear themselves think.