Both in respect of this and of the former excellence, Mr. Wordsworth strikingly resembles Samuel Daniel, one of the golden writers of our golden Elizabethan age, now most causelessly neglected: Samuel Daniel, whose diction bears no mark of time, no distinction of age which has been, and as long as our language shall last, will be so far the language of the to-day and for ever, as that it is more intelligible to us, than the transitory fashions of our own particular age. A similar praise is due to his sentiments. No frequency of perusal can deprive them of their freshness. For though they are brought into the full day-light of every reader’s comprehension; yet are they drawn up from depths which few in any age are privileged to visit, into which few in any age have courage or inclination to descend. If Mr. Wordsworth is not equally with Daniel alike intelligible to all readers of average understanding in all passages of his works, the comparative difficulty does not arise from the greater impurity of the ore, but from the nature and uses of the metal. A poem is not necessarily obscure, because it does not aim to be popular. It is enough, if a work be perspicuous to those for whom it is written, and “Fit audience find, though few.” To the “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of early Childhood” the poet might have prefixed the lines which Dante addresses to one of his own Canzoni-- “Canzone, i’ credo, che saranno radi Color, che tua ragione intendan bene, Tanto lor sei faticoso ed alto.” “O lyric song, there will be few, I think, Who may thy import understand aright: Thou art for them so arduous and so high!” But the ode was intended for such readers only as had been accustomed to watch the flux and reflux of their inmost nature, to venture at times into the twilight realms of consciousness, and to feel a deep interest in modes of inmost being, to which they know that the attributes of time and space are inapplicable and alien, but which yet can not be conveyed, save in symbols of time and space. For such readers the sense is sufficiently plain, and they will be as little disposed to charge Mr. Wordsworth with believing the Platonic pre-existence in the ordinary interpretation of the words, as I am to believe, that Plato himself ever meant or taught it. Polla oi ut’ ankonos okea belae endon enti pharetras phonanta synetoisin; es de to pan hermaeneon chatizei; sophos o polla eidos phua; mathontes de labroi panglossia, korakes os, akranta garueton Dios pros ornicha theion.