_proprietors_ of land, here called 'statesmen' [i.e., estates-men], men
of respectable education, who daily labor on their little properties. . .
Their little tract of land serves as a kind of rallying point for their
domestic feelings, as a tablet upon which they are written, which makes
them objects of memory in a thousand instances, when they would otherwise
be forgotten. The two poems that I have mentioned were written to show
that men who do not wear fine clothes can feel deeply."

Edward Fulton in a _A Selection of the Shorter Poems of Wordsworth_
(Macmillan) says: "The reason Wordsworth succeeds best in describing the
type of character portrayed in _Michael_ and _The Brothers_ is, of
course, chiefly because he knew that type best; but the fact that it was
the type for which he himself might have stood as the representative was
not without its effect upon him. His ideal man is but a variation of
himself. As Dean Church puts it: 'The ideal man with Wordsworth is the
hard-headed, frugal, unambitious dalesman of his own hills, with his
strong affections, his simple tastes, and his quiet and beautiful home;
and this dalesman, built up by communion with nature and by meditation
into the poet-philosopher, with his serious faith and his never-failing
spring of enjoyment, is himself.' Types of character wholly alien to his
own have little attraction for him. He is content to look into the
depths of his own heart and to represent what he sees there. His field
of vision, therefore, is a very limited one: it takes in only a few
types. It is _man_, in fact, rather than men, that interests him."

The poem _Michael_ is well adapted to show Wordsworth's powers of
realism. He describes the poem as "a pastoral," which at once induces a
comparison, greatly to Wordsworth's advantage, with the pseudo-pastorals
of the age of Pope. There the shepherds and shepherdesses were scarcely
the pale shadows of reality, while Wordsworth's poem never swerves from
the line of truth. "The poet," as Sir Henry Taylor says with reference
to _Michael_, "writes in his confidence to impart interest to the
realities of life, deriving both the confidence and the power from the
deep interest which he feels in them. It is an attribute of unusual
susceptibility of imagination to need no extraordinary provocatives; and
when this is combined with intensity of observation and peculiarity of
language, it is the high privilege of the poet so endowed to