[Illustration:  GRASMERE LAKE.]

Michael, one of the very greatest of his productions, displays a tender and living sympathy with the humble shepherd.  The simple dignity of Michael’s character, his frugal and honorable life, his affection for his son, for his sheep, and for his forefather’s old home, appealed to the heart of the poet.  He loved his subject and wrote the poem with that indescribable simplicity which makes the tale, the verse, and the tone of thought and feeling form together one perfect and indissoluble whole. The Leech-Gatherer and the story of “Margaret” in The Excursion also deal with lowly characters and exhibit Wordsworth’s power of pathos and simple earnestness.  He could not present complex personalities; but these characters, which belonged to the landscapes of the Lake District and partook of its calm and its simplicity, he drew with a sure hand.

His longest narrative poem is The Excursion (1814), which is in nine books.  It contains fine passages of verse and some of his sanest and maturest philosophy; but the work is not the masterpiece that he hoped to make.  It is tedious, prosy, and without action of any kind.  The style, which is for the most part heavy, becomes pure and easy only in some description of a mountain peak or in the recital of a tale, like that of “Margaret.”

An Interpreter of Child Life.—­Perhaps the French Revolution and the unforgettable incident of the pitiable peasant child were not without influence in causing him to become a great poetic interpreter of childhood.  No poem has surpassed his Alice Fell, or Poverty in presenting the psychology of childish grief, or his We Are Seven in voicing the faith of—­

  “...A simple child,
  That lightly draws its breath,
  And feels its life in every limb,”

or the loneliness of “the solitary child” in Lucy Gray:—­

  “The sweetest thing that ever grew
  Beside a human door.”

In the poem, Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower, Nature seems to have chosen Wordsworth as her spokesman to describe the part that she would play in educating a child.  Nature says:—­

  “This child I to myself will take;
  She shall be mine, and I will make
  A lady of my own.
       * * * * *
  ...She shall lean her ear
    In many a secret place
  Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
  And beauty born of murmuring sound
    Shall pass into her face.”

One of the finest similes in all the poetry of nature may be found in the stanza which likens the charms of a little girl to those of:—­

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

Finally, in his Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, he glorifies universal childhood, that “eye among the blind,” capable of seeing this common earth—­