Let not Ambition mock their useful toil, Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile The short and simple annals of the poor. Wordsworth, then, enlarged the scope of poetry to include any human experience, however humble. There was another side to Wordsworth's revolt. He revolted not only against the limitations of subject imposed on the poets by eighteenth-century ideals, but also against the limitations of form. Pope and his followers had been poets of practically a single metre, the heroic couplet. Their tricks, mannerisms, and phraseology had been exalted into a _poetic diction_, or, rather, jargon, by countless imitators, and poems written in any other style were not allowed admission to the best company. A field, for example, had to be either a _verdant mead_ or a _grassy sward_, or it could not decently make its appearance in poetry. As late as the beginning of the nineteenth century a rainbow is to Campbell _Heaven's ethereal bow_, and a musket becomes, in poetical dress, _a glittering tube_. Wordsworth claimed for the poet the right of using the language of everyday life, plain, simple, and unadorned. Such is a very brief and insufficient outline of the two main points in Wordsworth's _poetic theory_, which were developed at great length by Wordsworth himself in his prefaces and by Coleridge in the _Biographia Literaria_. It is to just one small part of Wordsworth's _poetic practice_ that I wish to draw your attention. I mean certain studiously simple and realistic poems written in deliberate illustration of his theories. The first of them were published in the famous _Lyrical Ballads_ of 1798, a work which burst like a bombshell upon an astonished literary world, and aroused more scorn, indignation, and controversy than perhaps any other volume of poetry ever published. The _Lyrical Ballads_ was in the nature of a challenge. It contained an announcement of Wordsworth's new theories, together with illustrations of them by himself and Coleridge. Many of the poems were admirable, but in many others Wordsworth is at his worst. A generation brought up in the principles of Pope and nourished on such verse as _The Pleasures of Hope_ could not away with poems like _The Idiot Boy_, or _Alice Fell_, or even _We Are Seven_.