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had faculties 

 Which they had never used ; that thought with them 

 Was in its infancy. 



They felt as if a new sense had been given to them, or a power, 

 higher than sense, had suddenly arisen from obscure and shadowy 

 recesses. As Keats wrote, when he first looked into Chapman's 

 Homer — 



Then felt I as some watcher of the skies 

 When a new planet swims into his ken. 



Comparing him again with Byron, you find in Wordsworth a 

 healthful radiance, the supreme note of naturalness. His serenity 

 was due to a clear-eyed freshness of perception, and — what is often 

 denied to him — his objectivity of mind. He is never morbid, or 

 hollow, or cynical ; while to those who craved excitement he had 

 nothing to offer. As he wrote in the poem of Hart-leap Well: — 



The moving accident is not my trade, 

 To freeze the blood I have no ready arts ; 

 'Tis my delight alone, in summer shade, 

 To pipe a simple song for thinking hearts. 



He could not have wailed out his own sorrows to the world 

 in a misanthropic manner, even supposing him to have felt that 

 ' vanity of vanities ' was the last word of the wise, in reference to 

 earthly good. To carry, like Byron, through Europe, 

 The pageant of a bleeding heart, 



was impossible to Wordsworth ; both, because his heart never bled 

 like Byron's — 



the holy forms 

 Of young imagination keep it pure ; — 



and also, because he would have scorned to parade his misery. 

 One element in his greatness was, that with open soul he felt the 

 spirit of the age, which took him out of himself, in the first 

 instance, to Nature. He saw that Nature had a revelation to im- 

 part which man ought, in ' a wise passiveness ' to receive. This 

 he perceived very early, and may be said to have absorbed the idea 

 within a spirit singularly pliant, and open to such influence. It 

 gradually consolidated and matured — the form changing, but the 



