Wordsworth was something of a Quaker in poetry, and loved the sober drabs and grays of life. Quietism was his literary religion, and the sensational was to him not merely vulgar, but almost wicked. "The human mind," he wrote, "is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants." He disliked the far-fetched themes and high-colored style of Scott and Byron. 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.
Long have I loved what I behold. The night that charms, 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 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. 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 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 reached the point of composing verses _On Seeing a Harp in the shape of a Needle Case_, and on other themes more worthy of Mrs. Sigourney. In parts of his long blank-verse poems, _The Excursion_, 1814, and _The Prelude_--which was printed after his death in 1850, though finished as early as 1806--the poetry wears very thin and its place is taken by prosaic, tedious didacticism. These two poems were designed as portions of a still more extended work, _The Recluse_, which was never completed. _The Excursion_ consists mainly of philosophical discussions on nature and human life between a school-master, a solitary, and an itinerant peddler. _The Prelude_ describes the development of Wordsworth's own genius. In parts of _The Excursion_ the diction is fairly Shaksperian: