o lived about
Wordsworth were all great lovers of the older English literature, and
oftentimes there came out in him a noticeable likeness to our earlier
poets. He quotes unconsciously, but with new power of meaning, a
clause from one of Shakespeare's sonnets; and, as with some other men's
most famous work, the Ode on the Recollections of Childhood had its
anticipator.* He drew something too from the unconscious mysticism of
the old English language itself, drawing out the inward significance of
its racy idiom, and the not wholly unconscious poetry of the language
used by the simplest people under strong excitement--language,
therefore, at its origin.

The office of the poet is not that of the moralist, and the first aim
of Wordsworth's poetry is to give the reader a peculiar kind of
pleasure. But through his poetry, and through this pleasure in it, he
does actually convey to the reader an extraordinary wisdom in the
things of practice. One lesson, if men must have lessons, he conveys
more clearly than all, the supreme importance of contemplation in the
conduct of life.

[60] Contemplation--impassioned contemplation--that, is with Wordsworth
the end-in-itself, the perfect end. We see the majority of mankind
going most often to definite ends, lower or higher ends, as their own
instincts may determine; but the end may never be attained, and the
means not be quite the right means, great ends and little ones alike
being, for the most part, distant, and the ways to them, in this dim
world, somewhat vague. Meantime, to higher or lower ends, they move
too often with something of a sad countenance, with hurried and ignoble
gait, becoming, unconsciously, something like thorns, in their anxiety
to bear grapes; it being possible for people, in the pursuit of even
great ends, to become themselves thin and impoverished in spirit and
temper, thus diminishing the sum of perfection in the world, at its
very sources. We understand this when it is a question of mean, or of
intensely selfish ends--of Grandet, or Javert. We think it bad
morality to say that the end justifies the means, and we know how false
to all higher conceptions of the religious life is the type of one who
is ready to do evil that good may come. We contrast with such dark,
mistaken eagerness, a type like that of Saint Catherine of Siena, who
made the means to her ends so attractive, that she has won for herself
an undying place in the House Beautiful, not by