s aspect,
with stately speech, and something of that natural dignity of manners,
which underlies the highest courtesy.

And, seeing man thus as a part of nature, elevated and solemnised in
proportion as his daily life and occupations brought him into
companionship with permanent natural objects, his very religion forming
new links for him with the narrow limits of the valley, the low vaults
of his church, the rough stones of his [51] home, made intense for him
now with profound sentiment, Wordsworth was able to appreciate passion
in the lowly. He chooses to depict people from humble life, because,
being nearer to nature than others, they are on the whole more
impassioned, certainly more direct in their expression of passion, than
other men: it is for this direct expression of passion, that he values
their humble words. In much that he said in exaltation of rural life,
he was but pleading indirectly for that sincerity, that perfect
fidelity to one's own inward presentations, to the precise features of
the picture within, without which any profound poetry is impossible.
It was not for their tameness, but for this passionate sincerity, that
he chose incidents and situations from common life, "related in a
selection of language really used by men." He constantly endeavours to
bring his language near to the real language of men: to the real
language of men, however, not on the dead level of their ordinary
intercourse, but in select moments of vivid sensation, when this
language is winnowed and ennobled by excitement. There are poets who
have chosen rural life as their subject, for the sake of its
passionless repose, and times when Wordsworth himself extols the mere
calm and dispassionate survey of things as the highest aim of poetical
culture. But it was not for such passionless calm that he preferred
the scenes of pastoral life; and the meditative poet, sheltering [52]
himself, as it might seem, from the agitations of the outward world, is
in reality only clearing the scene for the great exhibitions of
emotion, and what he values most is the almost elementary expression of
elementary feelings.

And so he has much for those who value highly the concentrated
presentment of passion, who appraise men and women by their
susceptibility to it, and art and poetry as they afford the spectacle
of it. Breaking from time to time into the pensive spectacle of their
daily toil, their occupations near to nature, come those great
e