"One impulse, from a vernal wood, Could teach him more of Man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can." And he, we may be sure, who could draw, "Even from the meanest flower that blows, Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,"-- to whom the mere daisy, the pansy, the primrose, could furnish pleasures--not the puerile ones which his most puerile and worldly insulters imagined, but pleasures drawn from depths of reverie and meditative tenderness far beyond all power of _their_ hearts to conceive: that man would hardly need any large variety of books. In fact, there were only two provinces of literature in which Wordsworth could be looked upon as decently well read--Poetry and Ancient History. Nor do I believe that he would much have lamented, on his own account, if all books had perished, excepting the entire body of English Poetry, and, perhaps, "Plutarch's Lives."[119] [119] I do not mean to insinuate that Wordsworth was at all in the dark about the inaccuracy and want of authentic weight attaching to Plutarch as a historian; but his business with Plutarch was not for purposes of research: he was satisfied with his fine moral effects. With these simple or rather austere tastes, Wordsworth (it might seem) had little reason to fear poverty, supposing him in possession of any moderate income; but meantime he had none. About the time when he left college, I have good grounds for believing that his whole regular income was precisely = 0. Some fragments must have survived from the funds devoted to his education; and with these, no doubt, he supported the expenses of his Continental tours, and his year's residence in France. But, at length, "cold, pain, and hunger, and all fleshly ills," must have stared him in the face pretty earnestly. And hope of longer evading an unpleasant destiny of daily toil, in some form or other, there seemed absolutely none. "For," as he himself expostulates with himself-- "For how can _he_ expect that others should Sow for him, build for _him_, and, at his call, Love him, who for himself will take no thought at all?"