the conscious doings of that portion of nature which is the human race, and excluding also nature’s own share in the making of poor Man, did not abound in raking cruelties and horrors of her own. “Edel sei der Mensch,” sang Goethe in a noble psalm, “Hulfreich und gut, Denn das allein unterscheidet ihn, Von allen Wesen die wir kennen.” “Let man be noble, helpful, and good, for that alone distinguishes him from all beings that we know.  No feeling has nature:  to good and bad gives the sun his light, and for the evildoer as for the best shine moon and stars.”  That the laws which nature has fixed for our lives are mighty and eternal, Wordsworth comprehended as fully as Goethe, but not that they are laws pitiless as iron.  Wordsworth had not rooted in him the sense of Fate—­of the inexorable sequences of things, of the terrible chain that so often binds an awful end to some slight and trivial beginning.

This optimism or complacency in Wordsworth will be understood if we compare his spirit and treatment with that of the illustrious French painter whose subjects and whose life were in some ways akin to his own.  Millet, like Wordsworth, went to the realities of humble life for his inspiration.  The peasant of the great French plains and the forest was to him what the Cumbrian dalesman was to Wordsworth.  But he saw the peasant differently.  “You watch figures in the fields,” said Millet, “digging and delving with spade or pick.  You see one of them from time to time straightening his loins, and wiping his face with the back of his hand.  Thou shalt eat thy bread in the sweat of thy brow.  Is that the gay lively labour in which some people would have you believe?  Yet it is there that for me you must seek true humanity and great poetry.  They say that I deny the charm of the country; I find in it far more than charms, I find infinite splendours.  I see in it, just as they do, the little flowers of which Christ said that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of them.  I see clearly enough the sun as he spreads his splendour amid the clouds.  None the less do I see on the plain, all smoking, the horses at the plough.  I see in some stony corner a man all worn out, whose han han have been heard ever since daybreak—­trying to straighten himself a moment to get breath.”  The hardness, the weariness, the sadness, the ugliness, out of which Millet’s consummate skill made pictures that affect us like strange music, were to Wordsworth not the real part of the thing.  They were all absorbed in the thought of nature as a whole, wonderful, mighty, harmonious, and benign.