duties of a biographer, now relates the story, though in a rather vague and mysterious way.  One wishes that, having told us so much, he had told us a little more.  Even with all we know about the early life of Wordsworth, we are still left guessing at his portrait rather than with a clear idea of it.  He was a figure in his youth, a character in his old age.  The character we know down to the roots of his hair.  But the figure remains something of a secret.

As a poet, Wordsworth may almost be called the first of the democrats.  He brought into literature a fresh vision—­a vision bathing the world and its inhabitants in a strange and revolutionary light.  He was the first great poet of equality and fraternity in the sense that he portrayed the lives of common country, people in their daily surroundings as faithfully as though they had been kings.  It would be absurd to suggest that there are no anticipations of this democratic spirit in English literature from Chaucer down to Burns, but Wordsworth, more than any other English writer, deserves the credit of having emancipated the poor man into being a fit subject for noble poetry.  How revolutionary a change this was it is difficult to realize at the present day, but Jeffrey’s protest against it in the Edinburgh Review in 1802 enables one to realize to what a degree the poor man was regarded as an outcast from literature when Wordsworth was young.  In the course of an attack on Lyrical Ballads Jeffrey wrote:—­

The love, or grief, or indignation, of an enlightened and refined character is not only expressed in a different language, but is in itself a different emotion from the love, or grief, or anger, of a clown, a tradesman, or a market-wench.  The things themselves are radically and obviously distinct....  The poor and vulgar may interest us, in poetry, by their situation; but never, we apprehend, by any sentiments that are peculiar to their condition, and still less by any language that is peculiar to it.

When one takes sides with Wordsworth against Jeffrey on this matter it is not because one regards Wordsworth as a portrait-painter without faults.  His portraits are marred in several cases by the intrusion of his own personality with its “My good man” and “My little man” air.  His human beings have a way of becoming either lifeless or absurd when they talk. The Leech-Gatherer and The Idiot Boy are not the only poems of Wordsworth that are injured by the insertion of banal dialogue.  It is as though there were, despite his passion for liberty, equality, and fraternity, a certain gaucherie in his relations with other human beings, and he were at his happiest as a solitary.  His nature, we may grant, was of mixed aspects, but, even as early as the 1807 Poems in Two Volumes had he not expressed his impatience of human society in a sonnet?—­