(2) The natural instincts and pleasures of childhood are the true standards of a man’s happiness in this life.  All artificial pleasures soon grow tiresome.  The natural pleasures, which a man so easily neglects in his work, are the chief means by which we may expect permanent and increasing joy.  In “Tintern Abbey,” “The Rainbow,” “Ode to Duty,” and “Intimations of Immortality” we see this plain teaching; but we can hardly read one of Wordsworth’s pages without finding it slipped in unobtrusively, like the fragrance of a wild flower.

(3) The truth of humanity, that is, the common life which labors and loves and shares the general heritage of smiles and tears, is the only subject of permanent literary interest.  Burns and the early poets of the Revival began the good work of showing the romantic interest of common life; and Wordsworth continued it in “Michael,” “The Solitary Reaper,” “To a Highland Girl,” “Stepping Westward,” The Excursion, and a score of lesser poems.  Joy and sorrow, not of princes or heroes, but “in widest commonalty spread,” are his themes; and the hidden purpose of many of his poems is to show that the keynote of all life is happiness,—­not an occasional thing, the result of chance or circumstance, but a heroic thing, to be won, as one would win any other success, by work and patience.

(4) To this natural philosophy of man Wordsworth adds a mystic element, the result of his own belief that in every natural object there is a reflection of the living God.  Nature is everywhere transfused and illumined by Spirit; man also is a reflection of the divine Spirit; and we shall never understand the emotions roused by a flower or a sunset until we learn that nature appeals through the eye of man to his inner spirit.  In a word, nature must be “spiritually discerned.”  In “Tintern Abbey” the spiritual appeal of nature is expressed in almost every line; but the mystic conception of man is seen more clearly in “Intimations of Immortality,” which Emerson calls “the high-water mark of poetry in the nineteenth century.”  In this last splendid ode Wordsworth adds to his spiritual interpretation of nature and man the alluring doctrine of preexistence, which has appealed so powerfully to Hindoo and Greek in turn, and which makes of human life a continuous, immortal thing, without end or beginning.

Wordsworth’s longer poems, since they contain much that is prosy and uninteresting, may well be left till after we have read the odes, sonnets, and short descriptive poems that have made him famous.  As showing a certain heroic cast of Wordsworth’s mind, it is interesting to learn that the greater part of his work, including The Prelude and The Excursion, was intended for a place in a single great poem, to be called The Recluse, which should treat of nature, man, and society. The Prelude, treating of the growth of a poet’s mind, was to introduce the work.  The Home at