kept watch o'er
man's mortality,' and by virtue of the tender sympathies of 'the human
heart by which we live,' that to us

The meanest flower which blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

The solitude which implies severance from natural sympathies and
affections is poisonous. The happiness of the heart which lives alone,

Housed in a dream, an outcast from the kind,

* * * * *

Is to be pitied, for 'tis surely blind.

Wordsworth's meditations upon flowers or animal life are impressive
because they have been touched by this constant sympathy. The sermon is
always in his mind, and therefore every stone may serve for a text. His
contemplation enables him to see the pathetic side of the small pains
and pleasures which we are generally in too great a hurry to notice.
There are times, of course, when this moralising tendency leads him to
the regions of the namby-pamby or sheer prosaic platitude. On the other
hand, no one approaches him in the power of touching some rich chord of
feeling by help of the pettiest incident. The old man going to the
fox-hunt with a tear on his cheek, and saying to himself,

The key I must take, for my Helen is dead;

or the mother carrying home her dead sailor's bird; the village
schoolmaster, in whom a rift in the clouds revives the memory of his
little daughter; the old huntsman unable to cut through the stump of
rotten wood--touch our hearts at once and for ever. The secret is given
in the rather prosaic apology for not relating a tale about poor Simon
Lee:

O reader! had you in your mind
Such stores as silent thought can bring,
O gentle reader! you would find
A tale in everything.

The value of silent thought is so to cultivate the primitive emotions
that they may flow spontaneously upon every common incident, and that
every familiar object becomes symbolic of them. It is a familiar remark
that a philosopher or man of science who has devoted himself to
meditation upon some principle or law of nature, is always finding new
illustrations in the most unexpected quarters. He cannot take up a novel
or walk across the street without hitting upon appropriate instances.
Wordsworth would apply the principle to the building up of our 'moral
being.' Admiration, hope, and love should be so constantly in our
thoughts, that innumerable sights and sounds which are meaningless to
the world should