I am not one who much or oft delight
    To season my fireside with personal talk—­
    Of friends, who live within an easy walk,
    Or neighbours, daily, weekly, in my sight: 
    And, for my chance-acquaintance, ladies bright,
    Sons, mothers, maidens withering on the stalk,
    These all wear out of me, like forms, with chalk
    Painted on rich men’s floors, for one feast-night.

    Better than such discourse doth silence long,
    Long, barren silence, square with my desire;
    To sit without emotion, hope, or aim,
    In the loved presence of my cottage fire,
    And listen to the flapping of the flame,
    Or kettle whispering its faint undersong.

With Wordsworth, indeed, the light of revelation did not fall upon human beings so unbrokenly as upon the face of the earth.  He knew the birds of the countryside better than the old men, and the flowers far better than the children.  He noticed how light plays like a spirit upon all living things.  He heard every field and valley echoing with new songs.  He saw the daffodils dancing by the lake, the green linnet dancing among the hazel leaves, and the young lambs bounding, as he says in an unexpected line, “as to the tabor’s sound,” and his heart danced to the same music, like the heart of a mystic caught up in holy rapture.  Here rather than in men did he discover the divine speech.  His vision of men was always troubled by his consciousness of duties.  Nature came to him as a liberator into spiritual existence.  Not that he ceased to be a philosopher in his reveries.  He was never the half-sensual kind of mystic.  He was never a sensualist in anything, indeed.  It is significant that he had little sense of smell—­the most sensual of the senses.  It is, perhaps, because of this that he is comparatively so roseless a poet.

But what an ear he had, what a harvesting eye!  One cannot read The Prelude or The Ode or Tintern Abbey without feeling that seldom can there have been a poet with a more exquisite capacity for the enjoyment of joyous things.  In his profounder moments he reaches the very sources of joy as few poets have done.  He attracts many readers like a prospect of cleansing and healing streams.

And he succeeds in being a great poet in two manners.  He is a great poet in the grand tradition of English literature, and he is a great poet in his revolutionary simplicity. The Idiot Boy, for all its banalities, is as immortal as The Ode, and The Solitary Reaper will live side by side with the great sonnets while the love of literature endures.  While we read these poems we tell ourselves that it is almost irrelevant to mourn the fact that the man who wrote them gave up his faith in humanity for faith in Church and State.  His genius survives in literature:  it was only his courage as a politician that perished.  At the same time, he wished to impress himself upon