“Long-wished-for sight, the Western World appeared; And when the ship was moored, I leaped ashore Indignantly,--resolved to be a man, Who, having o’er the past no power, would live No longer in subjection to the past, With abject mind--from a tyrannic lord Inviting penance, fruitlessly endured. So, like a fugitive whose feet have cleared Some boundary which his followers may not cross In prosecution of their deadly chase, Respiring, I looked round. How bright the sun, The breeze how soft! Can anything produced In the Old World compare, thought I, for power And majesty, with this tremendous stream Sprung from the desert? And behold a city Fresh, youthful, and aspiring!... Sooth to say, On nearer view, a motley spectacle Appeared, of high pretensions--unreproved But by the obstreperous voice of higher still; Big passions strutting on a petty stage, Which a detached spectator may regard Not unamused. But ridicule demands Quick change of objects; and to laugh alone, ... in the very centre of the crowd To keep the secret of a poignant scorn, ... is least fit For the gross spirit of mankind.” Thus Wordsworth, although then at his prime, indulging in what sounded like a boast that he alone had felt the sense sublime of something interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean, and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man,--even he, to whose moods the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world was lightened by his deeper sympathies with nature and the soul, could do no better, when he stood in the face of American democracy, than “keep the secret of a poignant scorn.”