Wordsworth approached them, by daily contact with the lives and habit
of men and the forces and magical apparitions of external nature. But
it is a narrow view to suppose that the men of the eighteenth century
did not look through the literary conventions of the day to the truths
of life and nature behind them. The conventions have gone, or are
changed, and we are all glad of it. Wordsworth effected a
wholesome deliverance when he attacked the artificial diction, the
personifications, the allegories, the antitheses, the barren rhymes
and monotonous metres, which the reigning taste had approved. But
while welcoming the new freshness, sincerity, and direct and fertile
return on nature, that is a very bad reason why we should disparage
poetry so genial, so simple, so humane, and so perpetually pleasing,
as the best verse of the rationalistic century.

What Wordsworth did was to deal with themes that had been partially
handled by precursors and contemporaries, in a larger and more
devoted spirit, with wider amplitude of illustration, and with the
steadfastness and persistency of a religious teacher. "Every great
poet is a teacher," he said; "I wish to be considered as a teacher or
as nothing." It may be doubted whether his general proposition is at
all true, and whether it is any more the essential business of a poet
to be a teacher than it was the business of Handel, Beethoven, or
Mozart. They attune the soul to high states of feeling; the direct
lesson is often as nought. But of himself no view could be more sound.
He is a teacher, or he is nothing. "To console the afflicted; to add
sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier; to teach the
young and the gracious of every age to see, to think, and feel, and
therefore to become more actively and sincerely virtuous"--that was
his vocation; to show that the mutual adaptation of the external
world and the inner mind is able to shape a paradise from the "simple