His faith in the world was shaken.  First his own country had taken up arms against what he believed to be the cause of liberty.  Then faction had destroyed his friends whom he believed to be its standard bearers.  What was in the world, in religion, in morality that such things could be?  In the face of this tremendous problem, Wordsworth, unlike Hamlet, was resolute and determined.  It was, perhaps, characteristic of him that in his desire to get his feet on firm rock again he fled for a time to the exactest of sciences—­to mathematics.  But though he got certainties there, they must have been, one judges, certainties too arid for his thirsting mind.  Then he made his great discovery—­helped to it, perhaps, by his sister Dorothy and his friend Coleridge—­he found nature, and in nature, peace.

Not a very wonderful discovery, you will say, but though the cleansing and healing force of natural surroundings on the mind is a familiar enough idea in our own day, that is only because Wordsworth found it.  When he gave his message to the world it was a new message.  It is worth while remembering that it is still an unaccepted one.  Most of his critics still consider it only Wordsworth’s fun when he wrote: 

“One impulse from the vernal wood
   Can teach us more of man,
 Of moral evil and of good,
   Than all the sages can.”

Yet Wordsworth really believed that moral lessons and ideas were to be gathered from trees and stones.  It was the main part of his teaching.  He claimed that his own morality had been so furnished him, and he wrote his poetry to convince other people that what had been true for him could be true for them too.

For him life was a series of impressions, and the poet’s duty was to recapture those impressions, to isolate them and brood over them, till gradually as a result of his contemplation emotion stirred again—­an emotion akin to the authentic thrill that had excited him when the impression was first born in experience.  Then poetry is made; this emotion “recollected” as Wordsworth said (we may add, recreated) “in tranquillity” passes into enduring verse.  He treasured numberless experiences of this kind in his own life.  Some of them are set forth in the Prelude, that for instance on which the poem The Thorn in the Lyrical Ballads is based; they were one or other of them the occasion of most of his poems; the best of them produced his finest work—­such a poem for instance as Resolution and Independence or Gipsies, where some chance sight met with in one of the poet’s walks is brooded over till it becomes charged with a tremendous significance for him and for all the world.  If we ask how he differentiated his experiences, which had most value for him, we shall find something deficient.  That is to say, things which were unique and precious to him do not always appear so to his readers.  He counted as gold much that we regard as dross.  But though we may differ from