“’Tis Nature’s law That none, the meanest of created things, Of forms created the most vile and brute, The dullest or most noxious, should exist Divorced from good—a spirit and pulse of good, A life and soul, to every mode of being Inseparably linked.” And then he went on to trace, not always with full poetic inspiration, but still with many touches of beautiful insight, the good that the old beggar did and received in the world, by wakening among the peasants to whose doors he came from year to year, the memory of past deeds of charity, by giving them a sense of kinship with the world of want and sorrow, and by bestowing on them in their poverty the opportunity of showing mercy to one whose needs were even greater than their own; for,—the poet adds—with one of those penetrating flashes which are the surest mark of his genius,— “Man is dear to man; the poorest poor Long for some moments in a weary life When they can know and feel that they have been, Themselves, the fathers and the dealers out Of some small blessings; have been kind to such As needed kindness, for this single cause That we have all of us one human heart.” Nor did Wordsworth forget, in his estimate of the value of the simplest life, those pleasures which are shared by all men. “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room; And hermits are contented with their cells; And students with their pensive citadels; Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom, Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom High as the highest Peak of Furniss-fells, Will murmur by the hour in fox-glove bells; In truth the prison, unto which we doom Ourselves, no prison is.” He sees a Miller dancing with two girls on the platform of a boat moored in the river Thames, and breaks out into a song on the “stray pleasures” that are spread through the earth to be claimed by whoever shall find them. A little crowd of poor people gather around a wandering musician in a city street, and the poet cries, “Now, coaches and chariots! roar on like a stream; Here are twenty souls happy as souls in a dream; They are deaf to your murmurs—they care not for you, Nor what ye are flying, nor what ye pursue!” He describes Coleridge and himself as lying together on the greensward in the orchard by the cottage at Grasmere, and says “If but a bird, to keep them company, Or butterfly sate down, they were, I ween, As pleased as if the same had been a maiden Queen.”