lay in his poetic appreciation of the beauties of nature and of
the essential traits of human character. As he sang in the famous preface
to "The Excursion":

Beauty--a living presence of the earth,
Surpassing the most fair ideal forms
Which craft of delicate spirits hath composed
From earth's materials--waits upon my steps;
Pitches her tents before me as I move,
An hourly neighbor. Paradise, and groves
Elysian, Fortunate Fields--like those of old
Sought in the Atlantic main--why should they be
A history only of departed things,
Or a mere fiction of what never was?
For the discerning intellect of man,
When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion, shall find these
A simple produce of the common day.

[Sidenote: Ode on immortality]

The annunciation of this doctrine was greeted by the critic of the
"Edinburgh Review" with the insolent: "This will never do." In truth,
Wordsworth's fondness for the inner beauty of common things sometimes led
his verse into the commonplace. Wordsworth reached the height of his poetic
fervor in his "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality," containing the
famous lines:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.

[Sidenote: Shelley's sonnet to Wordsworth]

It is at the end of this ode that Wordsworth summed up his veneration for
nature in the lines:

To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

After the death of his friend Southey, the mantle of the Poet Laureate fell
upon him. His acceptance of this honor, and of the humble office of stamp
distributer in the counties of Westmoreland and Cumberland, was decried by
some of his fellow poets as a sordid compromise. Robert Browning then wrote
his stirring invective, "The Lost Leader," while Shelley wrote the famous
sonnet addressed to Wordsworth:

Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know
That things depart which never may return:
Childhood and youth, friendship and love's first glow,
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.
These common woes I feel. One loss is mine
Which thou too feel'st, yet I alone deplore.
Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine
On some frail bark in winter's midnight roar,
Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude:
In