Perhaps it is the influence of Wordsworth that still spreads this confusion in our writing. The effect of many of his best known poems has never been wholly satisfactory, not even to his admirers; he drew moral lessons from objects humble or mean, and since his own interest was in the moral lesson, he sometimes was careless of the emotional appeal which the object, left standing as it were in the poem, might make on the reader. In one sense he was not a nature-lover, though he had recourse to nature for ethical wisdom; it was only the wisdom he cared about, and we have an unpleasant impression, which perhaps does him injustice, that when he had got a moral idea out of the primrose by the river’s brim, he was through with the primrose for the day. The same impression, unfortunately, is made by his portrayal of humble or mean characters. He obviously does not identify his better fortunes with their misery, nor does he enter dramatically or imaginatively into their lives; he is content to draw a moral from them, and the reader, in his day and still in ours, is surprised that misery in the picture, having produced a moral, is promptly dropped as though of no further concern. The old leech-gatherer serves a purpose when his courage against frightful odds cheers up a moodish poet; the old beggar at the door moves us to gratitude that another man’s poverty keeps fresh in us our springs of charity. Much good this does the leech-gatherer or the beggar! And if there is to be no help for them, their presence is a bit disturbing in the background of so much complacence. We wish there were more tenderness in these poems that talk so much of feeling. And when Wordsworth deliberately sets out to enlist our admiration for the heroic, we may find ourselves facing such dumb human misery as we have in _Michael_, the heroism of a wrecked family and an abandoned farm. With relief we turn to the passages in the _Prelude_ where the poet no longer looks down benignly on the wretched, but gives expression to the ideal life which he himself desires to attain; there, where he shows life better than it is, we can go with him and lose ourselves in the vision.