strong affections, his simple tastes, and his quiet and beautiful home;
and this dalesman, built up by communion with nature and by meditation
into the poet-philosopher, with his serious faith and his never-failing
spring of enjoyment, is himself.' Types of character wholly alien to his
own have little attraction for him. He is content to look into the
depths of his own heart and to represent what he sees there. His field
of vision, therefore, is a very limited one: it takes in only a few
types. It is _man_, in fact, rather than men, that interests him."

The poem _Michael_ is well adapted to show Wordsworth's powers of
realism. He describes the poem as "a pastoral," which at once induces a
comparison, greatly to Wordsworth's advantage, with the pseudo-pastorals
of the age of Pope. There the shepherds and shepherdesses were scarcely
the pale shadows of reality, while Wordsworth's poem never swerves from
the line of truth. "The poet," as Sir Henry Taylor says with reference
to _Michael_, "writes in his confidence to impart interest to the
realities of life, deriving both the confidence and the power from the
deep interest which he feels in them. It is an attribute of unusual
susceptibility of imagination to need no extraordinary provocatives; and
when this is combined with intensity of observation and peculiarity of
language, it is the high privilege of the poet so endowed to rest upon
the common realities of life and to dispense with its anomalies." The
student should therefore be careful to observe (1) the truth of
description, and the appropriateness of the description to the
characters; (2) the strong and accurate delineation of the characters
themselves. Not only is this to be noted in the passages where the poet
has taken pains openly to portray their various characteristics, but
there are many passages, or single lines perhaps, which serve more subtly
to delineate them. What proud reserve, what sorrow painfully restrained,
the following line, for example, contains: "Two evenings after he had