comprehended in the language of a man whose thoughts had never moved in the same directions, but the kind of language will be the right thing, and I have heard such amongst the common people myself--language which they did not know to be poetic, but which fell upon my ear and heart as profoundly poetic both in its feeling and its form. In attempting to carry out this theory, I am not prepared to say that Wordsworth never transgressed his own self-imposed laws. But he adhered to his theory to the last. A friend of the poet’s told me that Wordsworth had to him expressed his belief that he would be remembered longest, not by his sonnets, as his friend thought, but by his lyrical ballads, those for which he had been reviled and laughed at; the most by critics who could not understand him, and who were unworthy to read what he had written. As a proof of this let me read to you three verses, composing a poem that was especially marked for derision:-- She dwelt among the untrodden ways, Beside the springs of Dove; A maid whom there were none to praise, And very few to love. A violet by a mossy stone. Half hidden from the eye; Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky. She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and Oh! The difference to me. The last line was especially chosen as the object of ridicule; but I think with most of us the feeling will be, that its very simplicity of expression is overflowing in suggestion, it throws us back upon our own experience; for, instead of trying to utter what he felt, he says in those simple and common words, “You who have known anything of the kind, will know what the difference to me is, and only you can know.” “My intention and desire,” he says in one of his essays, “are that the interest of the poem shall owe nothing to the circumstances; but that the circumstances shall be made interesting by the thing itself.” In most novels, for instance, the attempt is made to interest us in worthless, commonplace people, whom, if we had our choice, we would far rather not meet at all, by surrounding them with peculiar and extraordinary circumstances; but this is a low source of interest. Wordsworth was determined to owe nothing to such an adventitious cause. For illustration allow me to read that well-known little ballad, “The Reverie of Poor Susan,” and you will see how entirely it bears out what he lays down as his theory. The scene is in London:-- At the corner of Wood-street, when daylight appears, Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years; Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard, In the silence of morning, the song of the Bird. ‘Tis a note of enchantment: what ails her? She sees A mountain ascending, a vision of trees; Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide, And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.