Stern Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear The Godhead's most benignant grace; Nor know we anything so fair As is the smile upon thy face: Flowers laugh before thee on their beds, And fragrance in thy footing treads; Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong. To follow such a comparison is to understand Wordsworth by sympathy; it is to understand also the difference between poetry and formal verse. THE POEMS OF WORDSWORTH. As the reading of literature is the main thing, the only word of criticism which remains is to direct the beginner; and direction is especially necessary in dealing with Wordsworth, who wrote voluminously, and who lacked both the critical judgment and the sense of humor to tell him what parts of his work were inferior or ridiculous: There's something in a flying horse, There's something in a huge balloon! To be sure; springs in the one, gas in the other; but if there were anything more poetic in horse or balloon, Wordsworth did not discover it. There is something also in a cuckoo clock, or even in A household tub, one such as those Which women use to wash their clothes. Such banalities are to be found in the work of a poet who could produce the exquisite sonnet "On Westminster Bridge," the finely simple "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," the stirring "Ode to Duty," the tenderly reflective "Tintern Abbey," and the magnificent "Intimations of Immortality," which Emerson (who was not a very safe judge) called "the high water mark of poetry in the nineteenth century." These five poems may serve as the first measure of Wordsworth's genius. [Sidenote: POEMS OF NATURE] A few of Wordsworth's best nature poems are: "Early Spring," "Three Years She Grew," "The Fountain," "My Heart Leaps Up," "The Tables Turned," "To a Cuckoo," "To a Skylark" (the second poem, beginning, "Ethereal minstrel") and "Yarrow Revisited." The spirit of all his nature poems is reflected in "Tintern Abbey," which gives us two complementary views of nature, corresponding to Wordsworth's earlier and later experience. The first is that of the boy, roaming foot-loose over the face of nature, finding, as Coleridge said, "Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere." The second is that of the man who returns to the scenes of his boyhood, finds them as beautiful as ever, but pervaded now by a spiritual quality,--"something which defies analysis, undefined and ineffable, which must be felt and perceived by the soul." It was this spiritual view of nature, as a reflection of the Divine, which profoundly influenced Bryant, Emerson and other American writers. The essence of Wordsworth's teaching, in his nature poems, appears in the last two lines of his "Skylark," a bird that soars the more gladly to heaven because he must soon return with joy to his own nest: Type of the wise, who soar but never roam: True to the kindred points of heaven and home.