the exclamation with which the poet dismisses his visitors and their
gossip:

Better than such discourse doth silence long,
Long barren silence, square with my desire;
To sit without emotion, hope, or aim,
In the loved presence of my cottage fire,
And listen to the flapping of the flame,
Or kettle whispering its faint undersong.

Many will look with envy on a life which has thus decisively cut
itself loose from the world; which is secure from the influx of
those preoccupations, at once distracting and nugatory, which deaden
the mind to all other stimulus, and split the river of life into
channels so minute that it loses itself in the sand.

Hence have I genial seasons; hence have I
Smooth passions, smooth discourse, and joyous thought.

Left to herself, the mind can expatiate in those kingdoms of the
spirit bequeathed to us by past generations and distant men, which
to the idle are but a garden of idleness, but to those who choose it
become a true possession and an ever widening home. Among those
"nobler loves and nobler cares" there is excitement without reaction,
there is an unwearied and impersonal joy--a joy which can only be
held cheap because it is so abundant, and can only disappoint us
through our own incapacity to contain it. These delights of study
and of solitude Wordsworth enjoyed to the full. In no other poet,
perhaps, have the poet's heightened sensibilities been productive of
a pleasure so unmixed with pain. The wind of his emotions blew right