Of no other poet, except Shakspeare, have so many phrases become household words as of Wordsworth. If Pope has made current more epigrams of worldly wisdom, to Wordsworth belongs the nobler praise of having defined for us, and given us for a daily possession, those faint and vague suggestions of other-worldliness of whose gentler ministry with our baser nature the hurry and bustle of life scarcely ever allowed us to be conscious. He has won for himself a secure immortality by a depth of intuition which makes only the best minds at their best hours worthy, or indeed capable, of his companionship, and by a homely sincerity of human sympathy which reaches the humblest heart. Our language owes him gratitude for the purity and abstinence of his style, and we who speak it, for having emboldened us to trust ourselves to take delight in simple things, and to trust ourselves to our own instincts. And he hath his reward. It needs not to Bid Beaumont lie A little farther off to make him room, for there is no fear of crowding in that little society with whom he is now enrolled as the fifth in the succession of the great English poets. LECTURE XII THE FUNCTION OF THE POET (_Friday Evening, February 16, 1855_) XII Whether, as some philosophers here assume, we possess only the fragments of a great cycle of knowledge, in whose center stood the primeval man in friendly relation with the powers of the universe, and build our hovels out of the ruins of our ancestral palace; or whether, according to the developing theory of others, we are rising gradually and have come up from an atom instead of descending from an Adam, so that the proudest pedigree might run up to a barnacle or a zoöphyte at last, are questions which will keep for a good many centuries yet. Confining myself to what little we can learn from History, we find tribes rising slowly out of barbarism to a higher or lower point of culture and civility, and everywhere the poet also is found under one name or another, changing in certain outward respects, but essentially the same. But however far we go back, we shall find this also--that the poet and the priest were united originally in the same person: which means that the poet was he who was conscious of the world of spirit as well as that of sense, and was the ambassador of the gods to men. This was his highest function, and hence his name of seer.