Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/442

428 but admit that it was free alike from those good and bad impulses and actions, which make the lives of Byron and Shelley more fascinating than the most eloquent romance.

Wordsworth, in quietness and confidence, devoted himself to the task of becoming an original contemplative didactic poet; and, to achieve this, he walked alone with Nature. In the unruffled lake, he saw his own calm soul mirrored, and there read its inmost workings. If he ascended the mountain tops—it was to make those heights scenes for contemplation. Here, with the Latin poet, he may have sometimes felt a sweet satisfaction in watching the pain and perturbations of the errant crowds below; but though he was moved by these lofty sentiments, and reasoned, in stately verse, of the vain labours and empty pleasures of the world—he rejoiced in the joys, and sympathized with the sorrows of all, and loved from his heart every creature of God. This was at once the strength and depth of his character, that his writings are both sublime and simple. To address him in language spoken by him of another, but perhaps more applicable to himself—