Be this as it may, his treatment of childhood accords with his manifesto to the British public. Could anything be more trivial, as judged by the standards of the day, than his ballad of Alice Fell, or Poverty?—of which he has himself said, “The humbleness, meanness if you like, of the subject, together with the homely mode of treating it, brought upon me a world of ridicule by the small critics, so that in policy I excluded it from many editions of my Poems, till it was restored at the request of some of my friends, in particular my son-in-law, Edward Quillinan.” What is the motive of a poem which excited such derision that the poet in a moment of alarm withdrew it from publication, and when he restored it held his son-in-law responsible? Simply the grief of a poor child, who had stolen a ride behind the poet’s post-chaise, upon finding that her tattered cloak had become caught in the wheel and irretrievably ruined. The poet makes no attempt to dignify this grief; the incident is related in poetic form, but without any poetic discovery beyond the simple worth of the grief. It is, perhaps, the most audaciously matter of fact of all Wordsworth’s poems; and yet, such is the difference in the audience to-day from what it was in Wordsworth’s time that Alice Fell appears as a matter of course in all the anthologies for children, and is read by men and women with positive sympathy, with a tenderness for the forlorn little girl, and without a question as to the poem’s right of existence. The misery, the grief of childhood, is conceived of as a real thing, measured by the child’s mind into which we enter, and not by our own standards of pain and loss. Again, recall the poem of Lucy Gray, or Solitude. The story is far more pathetic, and has an appeal to more catholic sensibility: a child, sent with a lantern to town from the moor on which she lives, that she may light her mother back through the snow, is lost among the hills, and her footsteps are traced at last to the fatal bridge through which she has fallen. The incident was one from real life; Wordsworth seized upon it, reproducing each detail, and with a touch or two of genius made a wraith. He discovered, as no one before had done, the element of solitude in childhood, and invested it with a fine spiritual, ethereal quality, quite devoid of any ethical property,—a subtle community with nature. How completely Wordsworth entered the mind of a child and identified himself with its movements is consciously betrayed in his pastoral, The Pet Lamb. He puts into the mouth of Barbara Lewthwaite the imaginary song to her lamb, and then says for himself,—