“Few months of life has he in store As he to you will tell, For still the more he works, the more Do his weak ankles swell:” the stanza in _Peter Bell_, which Shelley was accused of having maliciously invented, but which was actually printed in the first edition of the poem, “Is it a party in a parlour Cramming just as they on earth were crammed, Some sipping punch—some sipping tea But, as you by their faces see, All silent and all—damned?” the couplet in the original version of _The Blind Highland Boy_ which describes him as embarking on his voyage in “A household tub, like one of those Which women use to wash their clothes.” It is quite certain, I think, that Wordsworth’s insensibility to the humourous side of things made him incapable of perceiving one considerable source of comfort and solace in lowly life. Plain and poor people get a great deal of consolation, in their hard journey, out of the rude but keen fun that they take by the way. The sense of humour is a means of grace. I doubt whether Wordsworth’s peasant-poetry has ever been widely popular among peasants themselves. There was an old farmer in the Lake Country who had often seen the poet and talked with him, and who remembered him well. Canon Rawnsley has made an interesting record of some of the old man’s reminiscences. When he was asked whether he had ever read any of Wordsworth’s poetry, or seen any of his books about in the farmhouses, he answered: “Ay, ay, time or two. But ya’re weel aware there’s potry and potry. There’s potry wi’ a li’le bit pleasant in it, and potry sic as a man can laugh at or the childer understand, and some as takes a deal of mastery to make out what’s said, and a deal of Wordsworth’s was this sort, ye kna. You could tell fra the man’s faace his potry would niver have no laugh in it.” But when we have admitted these limitations, it remains true that no other English poet has penetrated so deeply into the springs of poetry which rise by every cottage door, or sung so nobly of the treasures which are hidden in the humblest human heart, as Wordsworth has. This is his merit, his incomparable merit, that he has done so much, amid the hard conditions, the broken dreams, and the cruel necessities of life, to remind us how rich we are in being simply human. Like Clifford, in the _Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle_, “Love had he found in huts where poor men lie,” and thenceforth his chosen task was to explore the beauty and to show the power of that common love. “There is a comfort in the strength of love; ’Twill make a thing endurable, which else Would overset the brain or break the heart.” He found the best portion of a good man’s life in “His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love.” In _The Old Cumberland Beggar_ he declared