andard of proportion outside himself by which to test the
comparative value of his thoughts, and by rendering him more and more
incapable of that urbanity of mind which could be gained only by
commerce with men more nearly on his own level, and which gives tone
without lessening individuality. Wordsworth never quite saw the
distinction between the eccentric and the original. For what we call
originality seems not so much anything peculiar, much less anything
odd, but that quality in a man which touches human nature at most
points of its circumference, which reinvigorates the consciousness of
our own powers by recalling and confirming our own unvalued sensations
and perceptions, gives classic shape to our own amorphous imaginings,
and adequate utterance to our own stammering conceptions or emotions.
The poet's office is to be a Voice, not of one crying in the
wilderness to a knot of already magnetized acolytes, but singing amid
the throng of men, and lifting their common aspirations and
sympathies (so first clearly revealed to themselves) on the wings of
his song to a purer ether and a wider reach of view. We cannot, if we
would, read the poetry of Wordsworth as mere poetry; at every other
page we find ourselves entangled in a problem of aesthetics. The
world-old question of matter and form, of whether nectar _is_ of
precisely the same flavour when served to us from a Grecian chalice or
from any jug of ruder pottery, comes up for decision anew. The
Teutonic nature has always shown a sturdy preference of the solid bone
with a marrow of nutritious moral to any shadow of the same on the
flowing mirror of sense. Wordsworth never lets us long forget the
deeply rooted stock from which he sprang,--_vien ben da lui_.

[41] In the _Prelude_ he attributes this consecration to a
sunrise seen (during a college vacation) as he walked
homeward from some village festival where he had danced all
night:

My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
Was given that I should be, else sinning greatly.
A dedicated Spirit.--Book IV.

* * * * *

William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth in Cumberland on the 7th of
April, 1770, the second of five children. His father was John
Wordsworth, an attorney-at-law, and agent of Sir James Lowther,
afterwards first Earl of Lonsdale. His mother was Anne Cookson, the
daughter of a m