lementary feelings, lifting and solemnising their language and giving
it a natural music. The great, distinguishing passion came to Michael
by the sheepfold, to Ruth by the wayside, adding these humble children
of the furrow to the true aristocracy of passionate souls. In this
respect, Wordsworth's work resembles most that of George Sand, in those
of her novels which depict country life. With a penetrative pathos,
which puts him in the same rank with the masters of the sentiment of
pity in literature, with Meinhold and Victor Hugo, he collects all the
traces of vivid excitement which were to be found in that pastoral
world--the girl who rung her father's knell; the unborn infant feeling
about its mother's heart; the instinctive touches of children; the
sorrows of the wild creatures, even--their home-sickness, their strange
yearnings; the tales of passionate regret that hang [53] by a ruined
farm-building, a heap of stones, a deserted sheepfold; that gay, false,
adventurous, outer world, which breaks in from time to time to bewilder
and deflower these quiet homes; not "passionate sorrow" only, for the
overthrow of the soul's beauty, but the loss of, or carelessness for
personal beauty even, in those whom men have wronged--their pathetic
wanness; the sailor "who, in his heart, was half a shepherd on the
stormy seas"; the wild woman teaching her child to pray for her
betrayer; incidents like the making of the shepherd's staff, or that of
the young boy laying the first stone of the sheepfold;--all the
pathetic episodes of their humble existence, their longing, their
wonder at fortune, their poor pathetic pleasures, like the pleasures of
children, won so hardly in the struggle for bare existence; their
yearning towards each other, in their darkened houses, or at their
early toil. A sort of biblical depth and solemnity hangs over this
strange, new, passionate, pastoral world, of which he first raised the
image, and the reflection of which some of our best modern fiction has
caught from him.

He pondered much over the philosophy of his poetry, and reading deeply
in the history of his own mind, seems at times to have passed the
borders of a world of strange speculations, inconsistent enough, had he
cared to note such inconsistencies, with those traditional beliefs,
which [54] were otherwise the object of his devout acceptance.
Thinking of the high value he set upon customariness, upon all that is
habitual, local, rooted in t