An Interpreter of Child Life.--Perhaps the French Revolution and the unforgettable incident of the pitiable peasant child were not without influence in causing him to become a great poetic interpreter of childhood. No poem has surpassed his _Alice Fell, or Poverty_ in presenting the psychology of childish grief, or his _We Are Seven_ in voicing the faith of-- "...A simple child, That lightly draws its breath, And feels its life in every limb," or the loneliness of "the solitary child" in _Lucy Gray_:-- "The sweetest thing that ever grew Beside a human door." In the poem, _Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower_, Nature seems to have chosen Wordsworth as her spokesman to describe the part that she would play in educating a child. Nature says:-- "This child I to myself will take; She shall be mine, and I will make A lady of my own. * * * * * ...She shall lean her ear In many a secret place Where rivulets dance their wayward round, And beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pass into her face." One of the finest similes in all the poetry of nature may be found in the stanza which likens the charms of a little girl to those of:-- "A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye! Fair as a star when only one Is shining in the sky." Finally, in his _Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood_, he glorifies universal childhood, that "eye among the blind," capable of seeing this common earth-- "Appareled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream." General Characteristics.--Four of Wordsworth's characteristics go hand in hand,--sincerity, feeling, depth of thought, and simplicity of style. The union of these four qualities causes his great poems to continue to yield pleasure after an indefinite number of readings. In his garden of poetry, the daffodil blossoms all the year for the "inward eye," and the "wandering voice of the cuckoo" never ceases to awaken springtime in the heart. His own age greeted with so much ridicule the excessive simplicity of the presentation of ordinary childish grief in _Alice Fell_, that he excluded it from many editions of his poems. We now recognize the special charm of his simplicity in expressing those feelings and thoughts that "do often lie too deep for tears."