When we are very young we cannot walk alone, and are glad of a kindly helping hand to guide our footsteps.  In learning to read, as in learning to walk, it is at first well to trust to a guiding hand.  And in learning to read poetry it is at first well to use selections chosen for us by those wiser than ourselves.  Later, when we can go alone, we take a man’s whole work, and choose for ourselves what we will most love in it.  And it is only by making use of this power of choice that we can really enjoy what is best.  But of all our great writers Wordsworth is perhaps the last in the reading of whose works we willingly go alone.  He is perhaps the writer who gains most by being read in selections.  Indeed, for some of us there never comes a time when we care to read his whole works.

For if we take his whole works, at times we plow through pages of dry-as-dust argument where there is never a glimmer of that beauty which makes poetry a joy, till we grow weary of it.  Then suddenly there springs to our eye a line of truest beauty which sets our senses atingle with delight, and all our labor is more than paid.  And if our great poets were to be judged by single lines or single stanzas we may safely say that Wordsworth would be placed high among them.  He is so placed, but it is rather by the love of the few than by the voice of the many.

I am not trying to make you afraid of reading Wordsworth, I am only warning you that you must not go to him expecting to gather flowers.  You must go expecting to and willing to dig for gold.  Yet although Wordsworth gives us broad deserts of prose in his poetry, he himself knew the joy of words in lovely sequence.

He tells us that when he was ten years old, or less, already his mind—­

    “With conscious pleasure opened to the charm
    Of words in tuneful order, found them sweet
    For their own sakes, a passion, and a power;
    And phrases pleased me chosen for delight,
    For pomp, or love."*

    Prelude, book v.

When Wordsworth first published his poems they were received with scorn, and he was treated with neglect greater even than most great poets have had to endure.  But in time the tide turned and people came at last to acknowledge that Wordsworth was not only a poet, but a great one.  He showed men a new way of poetry; he proved to them that nightingale was as poetical a word as Philomel, that it was possible to speak of the sun and the moon as the sun and the moon, and not as Phoebus and Diana.  Phoebus, Diana, and Philomel are, with the thoughts they convey, beautiful in their right places, but so are the sun, moon, and nightingale.

Wordsworth tried to make men see with new eyes the little everyday things that they had looked upon week by week and year by year until they had grown common.  He tried to make them see these things again with “the glory and the freshness of a dream."*