graph from an
essay on Wordsworth by Walter Pater.

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
elementary feelings, lifting and solemnizing 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 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.

Here is the clue to Wordsworth's meaning; and the special quality