l and permanent forms of nature."
Wordsworth discarded, in theory, the poetic diction of his predecessors,
{228} and professed to use "a selection of the real language of men in a
state of vivid sensation." He adopted, he said, the language of men in
rustic life, "because such men hourly communicate with the best objects
from which the best part of language is originally derived."

In the matter of poetic diction Wordsworth did not, in his practice,
adhere to the doctrine of this preface. Many of his most admired poems,
such as the _Lines written near Tintern Abbey_, the great _Ode on the
Intimations of Immortality_, the _Sonnets_, and many parts of his longest
poems, _The Excursion_ and _The Prelude_, deal with philosophic thought
and highly intellectualized emotions. In all of these and in many others
the language is rich, stately, involved, and as remote from the "real
language" of Westmoreland shepherds, as is the epic blank verse of
Milton. On the other hand, in those of his poems which were consciously
written in illustration of his theory, the affectation of simplicity,
coupled with a defective sense of humor, sometimes led him to the
selection of vulgar and trivial themes, and the use of language which is
bald, childish, or even ludicrous. His simplicity is too often the
simplicity of Mother Goose rather than of Chaucer. Instances of this
occur in such poems as _Peter Bell_, the _Idiot Boy_, _Goody Blake and
Harry Gill_, _Simon Lee_, and the _Wagoner_. But there are multitudes of
Wordsworth's ballads and lyrics which are simple without being silly, and
which, in their homeliness and clear {229} profundity, in their
production of the strongest effects by the fewest strokes, are among the
choicest modern examples of _pure_, as distinguished from decorated, art.
Such are (out of many) _Ruth_, _Lucy_, _A Portrait, To a Highland Girl_,
_The Reverie of Poor Susan_, _To the Cuckoo_, _The Reaper_, _We Are
Seven_, _The Pet Lamb_, _The Fountain_, _The Two April Mornings_, _The
Leech Gatherer_, _The Thorn_, and _Yarrow Revisited_.

Wordsworth was something of a Quaker in poetry, and loved the sober drabs
and grays of life. Quietism was his literary religion, and the
sensational was to him not merely vulgar, but almost wicked. "The human
mind," he wrote, "is capable of being excited without the application of
gross and violent stimulants." He disliked the far-fetched themes and
high-colored style of Scott and Byro