ic whom I have just quoted boldly
pronounces him "the keenest eyed of all modern poets for what is deep
and essential in nature." When he describes the daisy, casting the
beauty of its star-shaped shadow on the smooth stone, or the boundless
depth of the abysses of the sky, or the clouds made vivid as fire by
the rays of light, every touch is true, not the copying of a literary
phrase, but the result of direct observation.

It is true that Nature has sides to which Wordsworth was not
energetically alive--Nature "red in tooth and claw." He was not
energetically alive to the blind and remorseless cruelties of life
and the world. When in early spring he heard the blended notes of the
birds, and saw the budding twigs and primrose tufts, it grieved him,
amid such fair works of nature, to think "what man has made of man."
As if nature itself, excluding the conscious doings of that portion of
nature which is the human race, and excluding also nature's own share
in the making of poor Man, did not abound in raking cruelties and
horrors of her own. "_Edel sei der Mensch_," sang Goethe in a noble
psalm, "_Hulfreich und gut, Denn das allein unterscheidet ihn, Von
allen Wesen die wir kennen._" "_Let man be noble, helpful, and good,
for that alone distinguishes him from all beings that we know. No
feeling has nature: to good and bad gives the sun his light, and for
the evildoer as for the best shine moon and stars_." That the
laws which nature has fixed for our lives are mighty and eternal,
Wordsworth comprehended as fully as Goethe, but not that they are
laws pitiless as iron. Wordsworth had not rooted in him the sense of
Fate--of the inexorable sequences of things, of the terrible chain
that so often binds an awful end to some slight and trivial beginning.

This optimism or complacency in Wordsworth will be understood if we
compare his spirit and treatment with that of the illustrious French
painter whose subjects and whose life were in some ways akin to his
own. Millet, like Wordsworth, went to the realities of humble life for
his inspiration. The peasant of the great French plains and the forest
was to him what the Cumbrian dalesman was to Wordsworth. But he saw
the peasant differently. "You watch figures in the fields," said
Millet, "digging and delving with spade or pick. You see one of them
from time to time straightening his loins, and wiping his face with
the back of his hand. Thou shalt eat thy bread in the sweat of thy
b