that of an old man like this, the survivor of a wife and ten children,
travelling alone among the mountains and all lonely places, carrying
with him his own fortitude, and the necessities which an unjust
state of society has laid upon him. You speak of his speech as
tedious. Everything is tedious when one does not read with the
feelings of the author. _The Thorn_ is tedious to hundreds; and so
is _The Idiot Boy_ to hundreds. It is in the character of the old
man to tell his story, which an impatient reader must feel tedious.
But, good heavens! Such a figure, in such a place; a pious,
self-respecting, miserably infirm and pleased old man, telling such
a tale!"

The naive earnestness of this passage suggests to us how constantly
recurrent in Wordsworth's mind were the two trains of ideas which
form the substance of the poem; the interaction, namely, (if so it
may be termed,) of the moods of Nature with the moods of the human
mind; and the dignity and interest of man as man, depicted with no
complex background of social or political life, but set amid the
primary affections and sorrows, and the wild aspects of the external
world.

Among the pictures which Wordsworth has left us of the influence of
Nature on human character, _Peter Bell_ may be taken as marking one
end, and the poems on _Lucy_ the other end of the scale. Peter Bell
lives in the face of Nature untouched alike by her terror and her
charm; Lucy's whole being is moulded by Nature's self; she is
responsive to sun and shadow, to silence and to sound, and melts
almost into an impersonation of a Cumbrian valley's peace. Between
these two extremes how many are the possible shades of feeling! In
_Ruth_, for instance, the point impressed upon us is that Nature's