The kitten playing with the fallen leaves charms him with pure merriment. The skylark’s song lifts him up into the clouds. “There is madness about thee, and _joy divine_ In that song of thine.” He turns from the nightingale, that creature of a “fiery heart,” to the Stock-dove: “He sang of love, with quiet blending, Slow to begin and never ending; Of serious faith, _and inward glee_; That was the song—the song for me.” He thinks of love which grows to use “_Joy as her holiest language._” He speaks of life’s disenchantments and wearinesses as “_All that is at enmity with joy._” When autumn closes around him, and the season makes him conscious that his leaf is sere and yellow on the bough, he exclaims “_Yet will I temperately rejoice_; Wide is the range and free the choice Of undiscordant themes; Which haply kindred souls may prize Not less than vernal ecstacies, And passion’s feverish dreams.” _Temperate rejoicing_,—that is the clearest note of Wordsworth’s poetry. Not an unrestrained gladness, for he can never escape from that deep, strange experience of his youth. Often, in thought, he “Must hear Humanity in fields and groves Pipe solitary anguish; or must hang Brooding above the fierce confederate storm Of sorrow, barricadoed evermore Within the walls of cities.” But even while he hears these sounds he will not be “downcast or forlorn.” He will find a deeper music to conquer these clashing discords. He will learn, and teach, a hidden joy, strong to survive amid the sorrows of a world like this. He will not look for it in some far-off unrealized Utopia, “But in the very world which is the world Of all of us,—_the place where in the end_ _We find our happiness, or not at all_!” To this quest of joy, to this proclamation of joy, he dedicates his life. “By words Which speak of nothing more than what we are Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain _To noble raptures_.” And herein he becomes a prophet to his age,—a prophet of the secret of joy, simple, universal, enduring,—the open secret. The burden of Wordsworth’s prophecy of joy, as found in his poetry, is threefold. First, he declares with exultation that he has seen in Nature the evidence of a living spirit in vital correspondence with the spirit of man. Second, he expresses the deepest, tenderest feeling of the inestimable value of the humblest human life,—a feeling which through all its steadiness is yet strangely illumined by sudden gushes of penetration and pathos. Third, he proclaims a lofty ideal of the liberty and greatness of man, consisting in obedience to law and fidelity to duty.