Wordsworth comprehended as fully as Goethe, but not that they are
laws pitiless as iron. Wordsworth had not rooted in him the sense of
Fate--of the inexorable sequences of things, of the terrible chain
that so often binds an awful end to some slight and trivial beginning.

This optimism or complacency in Wordsworth will be understood if we
compare his spirit and treatment with that of the illustrious French
painter whose subjects and whose life were in some ways akin to his
own. Millet, like Wordsworth, went to the realities of humble life for
his inspiration. The peasant of the great French plains and the forest
was to him what the Cumbrian dalesman was to Wordsworth. But he saw
the peasant differently. "You watch figures in the fields," said
Millet, "digging and delving with spade or pick. You see one of them
from time to time straightening his loins, and wiping his face with
the back of his hand. Thou shalt eat thy bread in the sweat of thy
brow. Is that the gay lively labour in which some people would have
you believe? Yet it is there that for me you must seek true humanity
and great poetry. They say that I deny the charm of the country; I
find in it far more than charms, I find infinite splendours. I see
in it, just as they do, the little flowers of which Christ said that
Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of them. I see
clearly enough the sun as he spreads his splendour amid the clouds.
None the less do I see on the plain, all smoking, the horses at the
plough. I see in some stony corner a man all worn out, whose _han han_
have been heard ever since daybreak--trying to straighten himself a
moment to get breath." The hardness, the weariness, the sadness, the
ugliness, out of which Millet's consummate skill made pictures that
affect us like strange music, were to Wordsworth not the real part of
the thing. They were all absorbed in the thought of nature as a whole,
wonderful, mighty, harmonious, and benign.