f "the solitary child" in _Lucy Gray_:--

"The sweetest thing that ever grew
Beside a human door."

In the poem, _Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower_, Nature seems to
have chosen Wordsworth as her spokesman to describe the part that she
would play in educating a child. Nature says:--

"This child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
A lady of my own.
* * * * *
...She shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face."

One of the finest similes in all the poetry of nature may be found in
the stanza which likens the charms of a little girl to those of:--

"A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
Fair as a star when only one
Is shining in the sky."

Finally, in his _Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of
Early Childhood_, he glorifies universal childhood, that "eye among
the blind," capable of seeing this common earth--

"Appareled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream."

General Characteristics.--Four of Wordsworth's characteristics go
hand in hand,--sincerity, feeling, depth of thought, and simplicity of
style. The union of these four qualities causes his great poems to
continue to yield pleasure after an indefinite number of readings. In
his garden of poetry, the daffodil blossoms all the year for the
"inward eye," and the "wandering voice of the cuckoo" never ceases to
awaken springtime in the heart.

His own age greeted with so much ridicule the excessive simplicity of
the presentation of ordinary childish grief in _Alice Fell_, that he
excluded it from many editions of his poems. We now recognize the
special charm of his simplicity in expressing those feelings and
thoughts that "do often lie too deep for tears."

Wordsworth was most truly great when he seemed to write as naturally
as he breathed, when he appeared unconscious of the power that he
wielded. When he attempted to command it at will, he failed, as in the
dull, lifeless lines of _The Excursion_. Sometimes even his labored
simplicity is no better than prose; but such simple and natural poems
as _Michael, The Solitary Reaper, To My Sister, Three Years She Grew
in Sun and Shower_, and the majority of the poems showing the new
attitude toward childhood, are priceless treasures of English
literature. Of most of th