biographer, now relates the story, though in a rather vague and
mysterious way. One wishes that, having told us so much, he had told us
a little more. Even with all we know about the early life of Wordsworth,
we are still left guessing at his portrait rather than with a clear idea
of it. He was a figure in his youth, a character in his old age. The
character we know down to the roots of his hair. But the figure remains
something of a secret.

As a poet, Wordsworth may almost be called the first of the democrats.
He brought into literature a fresh vision--a vision bathing the world
and its inhabitants in a strange and revolutionary light. He was the
first great poet of equality and fraternity in the sense that he
portrayed the lives of common country, people in their daily
surroundings as faithfully as though they had been kings. It would be
absurd to suggest that there are no anticipations of this democratic
spirit in English literature from Chaucer down to Burns, but Wordsworth,
more than any other English writer, deserves the credit of having
emancipated the poor man into being a fit subject for noble poetry. How
revolutionary a change this was it is difficult to realize at the
present day, but Jeffrey's protest against it in the _Edinburgh Review_
in 1802 enables one to realize to what a degree the poor man was
regarded as an outcast from literature when Wordsworth was young. In the
course of an attack on _Lyrical Ballads_ Jeffrey wrote:--

The love, or grief, or indignation, of an enlightened and refined
character is not only expressed in a different language, but is in
itself a different emotion from the love, or grief, or anger, of a
clown, a tradesman, or a market-wench. The things themselves are
radically and obviously distinct.... The poor and vulgar may
interest us, in poetry, by their _situation_; but never, we