“It must have been otherwise of old, else how could Homer have created the lovely, wholesome, tender picture of Nausikaa?  Nausikaa loves Ulysses at the first glance.  She says at once to her female friends:  ’Oh, that I could call such a man my spouse, and that it were his destiny to remain here.’  She was even too modest to appear in public at the same time with him, and she says, in his presence, that if she should bring such a handsome and majestic stranger home, the people would say, she may have taken him for a husband.  How simple and natural all this is!  But when she heard that he was going home to his wife and children, no murmur escaped her.  She disappears from our sight, and we feel that she carried the picture of the handsome and majestic stranger a long time afterward in her breast, with silent and joyful admiration.  Why do not our poets know this love—­this joyful acknowledgment, this calm abnegation?  A later poet would have made a womanish Werter out of Nausikaa, for the reason that love with us is nothing more than the prelude to the comedy, or the tragedy, of marriage.  Is it true there is no longer any other love?  Has the fountain of this pure happiness wholly dried up?  Are men only acquainted with the intoxicating draught, and no longer with the invigorating well-spring of love?”

At these words the English poet occurred to me, who also thus complains: 

  From heaven if this belief be sent,
    If such be nature’s holy plan,
  Have I not reason to lament
    What man has made of man.

“Yet, how happy the poets are,” said she.  “Their words call the deepest feelings into existence in thousands of mute souls, and how often their songs have become a confession of the sweetest secrets!  Their heart beats in the breasts of the poor and the rich.  The happy sing with them, and the sad weep with them.  But I cannot feel any poet so completely my own as Wordsworth.  I know many of my friends do not like him.  They say he is not a poet.  But that is exactly why I like him; he avoids all the hackneyed poetical catch-words, all exaggeration, and everything comprehended in Pegasus-flights.  He is true—­and does not everything lie in this one word?  He opens our eyes to the beauty which lies under our feet like the daisy in the meadow.  He calls everything by its true name.  He never intends to startle, deceive, or dazzle any one.  He seeks no admiration for himself.  He only shows mankind how beautiful everything is which man’s hand has not yet spoiled or broken.  Is not a dew-drop on a blade of grass more beautiful than a pearl set in gold?  Is not a living spring, which gushes up before us, we know not whence, more beautiful than all the fountains of Versailles?  Is not his Highland Girl a lovelier and truer expression of real beauty than Goethe’s Helena, or Byron’s Haidee?  And then the plainness of his language, and the purity of his thoughts!  Is it not a pity that we have never had such a poet?