A violet by a mossy stone,
      Half hidden from the eye;
    Fair as a star, when only one
      Is shining in the sky.

Wordsworth set himself to the task of freeing poetry from all its “conceits,” of speaking the language of simple truth, and of portraying man and nature as they are; and in this good work we are apt to miss the beauty, the passion, the intensity, that hide themselves under his simplest lines.  The second difficulty is in the poet, not in the reader.  It must be confessed that Wordsworth is not always melodious; that he is seldom graceful, and only occasionally inspired.  When he is inspired, few poets can be compared with him; at other times the bulk of his verse is so wooden and prosy that we wonder how a poet could have written it.  Moreover he is absolutely without humor, and so he often fails to see the small step that separates the sublime from the ridiculous.  In no other way can we explain “The Idiot Boy,” or pardon the serious absurdity of “Peter Bell” and his grieving jackass.

On account of these difficulties it is well to avoid at first the longer works and begin with a good book of selections.[223] When we read these exquisite shorter poems, with their noble lines that live forever in our memory, we realize that Wordsworth is the greatest poet of nature that our literature has produced.  If we go further, and study the poems that impress us, we shall find four remarkable characteristics:  (1) Wordsworth is sensitive as a barometer to every subtle change in the world about him.  In The Prelude he compares himself to an aeolian harp, which answers with harmony to every touch of the wind; and the figure is strikingly accurate, as well as interesting, for there is hardly a sight or a sound, from a violet to a mountain and from a bird note to the thunder of the cataract, that is not reflected in some beautiful way in Wordsworth’s poetry.

(2) Of all the poets who have written of nature there is none that compares with him in the truthfulness of his representation.  Burns, like Gray, is apt to read his own emotions into natural objects, so that there is more of the poet than of nature even in his mouse and mountain daisy; but Wordsworth gives you the bird and the flower, the wind and the tree and the river, just as they are, and is content to let them speak their own message.

(3) No other poet ever found such abundant beauty in the common world.  He had not only sight, but insight, that is, he not only sees clearly and describes accurately, but penetrates to the heart of things and always finds some exquisite meaning that is not written on the surface.  It is idle to specify or to quote lines on flowers or stars, on snow or vapor.  Nothing is ugly or commonplace in his world; on the contrary, there is hardly one natural phenomenon which he has not glorified by pointing out some beauty that was hidden from our eyes.