Side by side with this revelation of Nature, and interwoven with it so closely as to be inseparable, Wordsworth was receiving a revelation of humanity, no less marvellous, no less significant for his recovery of joy. Indeed he himself seems to have thought it the more important of the two, for he speaks of the mind of man as
“My haunt and the main region of my song”;
And again he says that he will set out, like an adventurer,
“And through the human heart explore the way;
And look and listen—gathering whence I may,
Triumph, and thoughts no bondage can restrain.”
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The discovery of humble life, of peasant character, of lowly, trivial scenes and incidents, as a field for poetry, was not original with Wordsworth. But he was the first English poet to explore this field thoroughly, sympathetically, with steady and deepening joy. Burns had been there before him; but the song of Burns though clear and passionate, was fitful. Cowper had been there before him; but Cowper was like a visitor from the polite world, never an inhabitant, never quite able to pierce gently, powerfully down to the realities of lowly life and abide in them. Crabbe had been there before him; but Crabbe was something of a pessimist; he felt the rough shell of the nut, but did not taste the sweet kernel.
Wordsworth, if I may draw a comparison from another art, was the Millet of English poetry. In his verse we find the same quality of perfect comprehension, of tender pathos, of absolute truth interfused with delicate beauty that makes Millet’s Angelus, and The Gleaners and The Sower and The Sheepfold, immortal visions of the lowly life. Place beside these pictures, if you will, Wordsworth’s Solitary Reaper, The Old Cumberland Beggar, Margaret
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 waiting in her ruined cottage for the husband who would never return, Michael, the old shepherd who stood, many and many a day, beside the unfinished sheepfold which he had begun to build with his lost boy,
“And never lifted up a single stone,”—
place these beside Millet’s pictures, and the poems will bear the comparison.
Coleridge called Wordsworth “a miner of the human heart.” But there is a striking peculiarity in his mining: he searched the most familiar places, by the most simple methods, to bring out the rarest and least suspected treasures. His discovery was that there is an element of poetry, like some metal of great value, diffused through the common clay of every-day life.
It is true that he did not always succeed in separating the precious metal from the surrounding dross. There were certain limitations in his mind which prevented him from distinguishing that which was familiar and precious, from that which was merely familiar.
One of these limitations was his lack of a sense
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 of humour. At a dinner-party he announced that he was never witty but once in his life. When asked to narrate the instance, after some hesitation he said: “Well, I will tell you. I was standing some time ago at the entrance of my cottage at Rydal Mount. A man accosted me with the question, ‘Pray, sir, have you seen my wife pass by?’ Whereupon I said, ‘Why, my good friend, I didn’t know till this moment that you had a wife!’” The humour of this story is unintentional and lies otherwhere than Wordsworth thought. The fact that he was capable of telling it as a merry jest accounts for the presence of many queer things in his poetry. For example; the lines in Simon Lee,
“Few months of life has he in store
As he to you will tell,
For still the more he works, the more
Do his weak ankles swell:”
the stanza in Peter Bell, which Shelley was accused of having maliciously invented, but which was actually printed in the first edition of the poem,
“Is it a party in a parlour
Cramming just as they on earth were crammed,
Some sipping punch—some sipping tea
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But, as you by their faces see,
All silent and all—damned?”
the couplet in the original version of The Blind Highland Boy which describes him as embarking on his voyage in
“A household tub, like one of those
Which women use to wash their clothes.”
It is quite certain, I think, that Wordsworth’s insensibility to the humourous side of things made him incapable of perceiving one considerable source of comfort and solace in lowly life. Plain and poor people get a great deal of consolation, in their hard journey, out of the rude but keen fun that they take by the way. The sense of humour is a means of grace.
I doubt whether Wordsworth’s peasant-poetry has ever been widely popular among peasants themselves. There was an old farmer in the Lake Country who had often seen the poet and talked with him, and who remembered him well. Canon Rawnsley has made an interesting record of some of the old man’s reminiscences. When he was asked whether he had ever read any of Wordsworth’s
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 poetry, or seen any of his books about in the farmhouses, he answered:
“Ay, ay, time or two. But ya’re weel aware there’s potry and potry. There’s potry wi’ a li’le bit pleasant in it, and potry sic as a man can laugh at or the childer understand, and some as takes a deal of mastery to make out what’s said, and a deal of Wordsworth’s was this sort, ye kna. You could tell fra the man’s faace his potry would niver have no laugh in it.”
But when we have admitted these limitations, it remains true that no other English poet has penetrated so deeply into the springs of poetry which rise by every cottage door, or sung so nobly of the treasures which are hidden in the humblest human heart, as Wordsworth has. This is his merit, his incomparable merit, that he has done so much, amid the hard conditions, the broken dreams, and the cruel necessities of life, to remind us how rich we are in being simply human.
Like Clifford, in the Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle,
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