n. He once told Landor that all of
Scott's poetry together was not worth sixpence. From action and passion
he turned away to sing the inward life of the soul and the outward life
of Nature. He said:

"To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

And again:

"Long have I loved what I behold,
The night that calms, the day that cheers;
The common growth of mother earth
Suffices me--her tears, her mirth,
Her humblest mirth and tears."

Wordsworth's life was outwardly uneventful. The companionship of the
mountains and of his {230} own thoughts; the sympathy of his household;
the lives of the dalesmen and cottagers about him furnished him with all
the stimulus that he required.

"Love had he found in huts where poor men lie:
His only teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills."

He read little, but reflected much, and made poetry daily, composing, by
preference, out of doors, and dictating his verses to some member of his
family. His favorite amanuensis was his sister Dorothy, a woman of fine
gifts, to whom Wordsworth was indebted for some of his happiest
inspirations. She was the subject of the poem beginning "Her eyes are
wild," and her charming _Memorials of a Tour in the Scottish Highlands_
records the origin of many of her brother's best poems. Throughout life
Wordsworth was remarkably self-centered. The ridicule of the reviewers,
against which he gradually made his way to public recognition, never
disturbed his serene belief in himself, or in the divine message which he
felt himself commissioned to deliver. He was a slow and serious person,
a preacher as well as a poet, with a certain rigidity, not to say
narrowness, of character. That plastic temperament which we associate
with poetic genius Wordsworth either did not possess, or it hardened
early. Whole sides of life were beyond the range of his sympathies. He
{231} touched life at fewer points than Byron and Scott, but touched it
more profoundly. It is to him that we owe the phrase "plain living and
high thinking," as also a most noble illustration of it in his own
practice. His was the wisest and deepest spirit among the English poets
of his generation, though hardly the most poetic. He wrote too much,
and, attempting to make every petty incident or reflection the occasion
of a poem, he finally r