Shortly after reading Professor Legouis’ book, I met by chance a gentleman in Baltimore and was convinced by what he told me, (in a conversation which I do not feel at liberty to repeat in detail,) that Wordsworth had a grand “affair of the heart” while he lived in France, with a young French lady of excellent family and character. But they were parted. A daughter was born, (whom he legitimated according to French law,) and descendants of that daughter were living. There was therefore solid ground for my feeling that the poet was not a man who had been always and easily decorous. He had passed through a time of storm and stress. He had lost not only his political dreams and his hopes of a career, but also his first love and his joy. The knowledge of this gave his poetry a new meaning for me, brought it nearer, made it seem more deeply human. It was under the influence of this feeling that this essay was written in a farmhouse in Tyringham Valley, where I was staying in the winter of 1897, with Richard Watson Gilder and his wife. Since then Professor George McLean Harper has completed and published, (1916,) his classic book on _William Wordsworth, His Life, Works, and Influence_. This is undoubtedly the very best biography of the poet, and it contains much new material, particularly with reference to his life and connections in France. But there is nothing in it to shake, and on the contrary there is much to confirm, the opinion which was first put forth in this essay: namely, that the central theme, the great significance, of Wordsworth’s poetry is _the recovery of joy_. I William Wordsworth was born in 1770 in the town of Cockermouth in Cumberland; educated in the village school of Hawkshead among the mountains, and at St. John’s College, Cambridge. A dreamy, moody youth; always ambitious, but not always industrious; passionate in disposition, with high spirits, simple tastes, and independent virtues; he did not win, and seems not to have desired, university honours. His principal property when he came of age consisted of two manuscript poems,—_An Evening Walk_ and _Descriptive Sketches_,—composed in the manner of Cowper’s _Task_. With these in his pocket he wandered over to France; partly to study the language; partly to indulge his inborn love of travel by a second journey on the Continent; and partly to look on at the vivid scenes of the French Revolution. But the vast dæmonic movement of which he proposed to be a spectator caught his mind in its current and swept him out of his former self.