And this view of Nature he carries into the presence of man. It is not kings and the mighty ones in the dream-play of Life whom he thinks to be the only worthy subjects for poetry. If these people come in his way, he is Catholic enough to admit them through his imagination, into the immortality which awaits his books. But he does not _seek_ them. He thinks they have already had their full share of poetic honour, and perhaps more than their due share; that so much dwelling upon such people, with their unrealities and false glares of splendour, has diseased the holy faculty of the poet, and turned his visions into morbid night-mares. It seems in short to be his opinion, that the higher we advance in the social scale, the further we are off from the sanities and truths of human life. He consequently looks for these in ruder and humbler ranks: in the dwellings of the poor, in the hearts of the peasantry, and the intuitions of uncorrupted childhood. He delights to sing of the commonest things, and is ever happy in his delineations of the hopes and fears, the loves, inquietudes, and disappointments of rustic existence. He has the minute anatomical power of Crabbe, combined with a still higher physiological and creative faculty, by which he not only lays bare the hidden meaning and laws of natural objects, but transforms the objects themselves into new beauty and significance. The grey light of morning breaking over the hill tops of his chosen retreat--the hot sunshine burning in white molten silver upon the bosom of his enchanted lakes--the lonely fisherman upon their shores--look truer and more affecting objects, as we gaze upon them, through the medium of his musical sorcery of words. His picture of the poor wandering leech gatherer, over the deep black pools of the wild moor, with the profound moral which he has attached to it, is an instance of his skill as a painter, and of his divine insight as a man of genius. “The Idiot Boy,” is another specimen of his consummate ability to render the most inert and painful nature alive and glorious by the spiritual appliances of his art. This boy, detached from the poet’s mind, is a gloomy and sorrowful spectacle; but when _he_ enters the shattered temple in which the Idiot dwells, and unites him, by the magic of his presence, to the great universal temple of Nature, he is no longer a gloomy insanity, but a poetically created existence. We see that this Idiot also has a soul; a subject soul certainly, and bound to what we might call hard conditions of capability and action, but a soul nevertheless: vital with its own vagarious life, and rejoicing in it. Wordsworth’s revelations of the inner workings of this Idiot’s mind--of the dark moon glimmerings which break impulsively through the ruins of his intellect, and make him wild with joy or ghastly with terror--are unsurpassable achievements.