avy weight of years has chained and bowed
One too like thee; tameless and swift and proud.

Neither Byron nor Shelley can see any satisfactory solution, and
therefore neither can reach a perfect harmony of feeling. The world
seems to them to be out of joint, because they have not known how to
accept the inevitable, nor to conform to the discipline of facts. And,
therefore, however intense the emotion, and however exquisite its
expression, we are left in a state of intellectual and emotional
discontent. Such utterances may suit us in youth, when we can afford to
play with sorrow. As we grow older we feel a certain emptiness in them.
A true man ought not to sit down and weep with an exhausted debauchee.
He cannot afford to confess himself beaten with the idealist who has
discovered that Rome was not built in a day, nor revolutions made with
rose-water. He has to work as long as he has strength; to work in spite
of, even by strength of, sorrow, disappointment, wounded vanity, and
blunted sensibilities; and therefore he must search for some profounder
solution for the dark riddle of life.

This solution it is Wordsworth's chief aim to supply. In the familiar
verses which stand as a motto to his poems--

The child is father to the man,
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety--

the great problem of life, that is, as he conceives it, is to secure a
continuity between the period at which we are guided by half-conscious
instincts, and that in which a man is able to supply the place of these
primitive impulses by reasoned convictions. This is the thought which
comes over and over again in his deepest poems, and round which all his
teaching centred. It supplies the great moral, for example, of the
'Leech-gatherer:'

My whole life I have lived in pleasant thought,
As if life's business were a summer mood:
As if all needful things would come unsought
To genial faith still rich in genial good.

When his faith is tried by harsh experience, the leech-gatherer comes,

Like a man from some far region sent
To give me human strength by apt admonishment;

for he shows how the 'genial faith' may be converted into permanent
strength by resolution and independence. The verses most commonly
quoted, such as--

We poets in our youth begin in gladness,
But thereof come in the end despondency and sadness,

give the ordinary view of the sickly school. Words