"a selection of language really used by men." The reasons for the tenets were, in part, quite wrong, but the tenets themselves represent a sound and healthy revolt against an affected and citified diction, in which the sun never rose across open fields, but "Sol thro' white curtains shot a tim'rous ray.". In his recoil from the stilted, however, Wordsworth pitched headlong into the trivial, and in its rebellion against the artificially poetic, his diction became the apotheosis of the prosaic.

"Now, little Edward, say why so:
My little Edward, tell me why."
"I cannot tell, I do not know."
"Why, this is strange," said I...

At this, my boy hung down his head,
He blushed with shame, nor made reply;
And three times to the child I said,
"Why, Edward, tell me why?"

His head he raised

there was in sight,

It caught his eye, he saw it plain

Upon the house-top, glittering bright,
A broad and gilded vane.

All the words in these famous stanzas from the "Anecdote for Fathers" are susceptible of poetic quality, but there is nothing present to infuse them with it. And having the form of poetry

without the power thereof, they sink below the level of prose itself to the prosaic.

Why bustle thus about your door,
What means this bustle, Betty Foy?
Why are you in this mighty fret?
And why on horseback have you set
Him whom you love, your Idiot Boy?

Wordsworth wrote to one of the critics of "The Idiot Boy" a letter which occupies eight full pages of the "Memoir." Two sentences are of special interest: "It is probable that the principal cause of your dislike to this particular poem lies in the word Idiot. If there had been any such word in our language, to which we had attached passion, as lack-wit, half-wit, witless, etc., I should certainly have employed it in preference; but there is no such word." The difficulty, however, lies in no single word-certainly not in "idiot." As Sir Walter Raleigh has said, poets "redeem words from degradation by a single noble employment," and Shakespeare had saved "idiot," if it required salvation:

... It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

The head and front of Wordsworth's offending, in this and in the other poems of its kind, hath

this extent, no more: his employment of his words is not noble. The indictment lies, not against his diction, but against its use. And that use is not infrequently due to a defective sense of humora perilous lack, when one is dealing with the potential incongruities that lurk, malignly expectant, in the associations of words. "I never wrote anything with so much glee," said Wordsworth of "The Idiot Boy." It is precisely when Wordsworth is most gleeful that he is most afflicting, for then his touch on words is never sure. And that means Peter Bell, and Betty Foy, and Goody Blake, and Harry Gill, and little Edward, and the Blind Highland Boy who went to sea, not in a bowl, but in

A household tub, like one of those

Which women use to wash their clothes.

And Wordsworth's sense of values remained defective, when, flying from Scylla to Charybdis, he changed the tub to a turtle-shell —

A shell of ample size, and light

As the pearly car of Amphitrite,
That sportive dolphins drew.

And yet Wordsworth's theory, stripped of the limitations which he imposed upon it, was absolutely sound. The diction of poetry was to be "a selection of language really used by men."

Rightly understood, that means a selection of the language really used by William Wordsworth, and not of that employed by Betty Foy. The poet is more than the mouth-piece of an idiot and his mother. He is the translator of their halting speech, not a mere emulator of their inarticulateness. Wordsworth says of Michael: "His mind was keen, Intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs." That is a selection of the language really used by men. But it has behind it the copious stores of Wordsworth's own vocabulary, from which are culled the apt, and fitting, and exact words to express a man who could not possibly thus express himself. And a phrase like "keen, intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs," refutes once for all the absurdities of "Now, little Edward, say why so." There is a simplicity of diction which reflects a meagre and barren stock; there is also a simplicity which results from the winnowing of a rich abundance. The one is the simplicity of the "Anecdote for Fathers"; the other of "Michael." And in the Tintern Abbey lines, and the "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality," and the great sonnets, and in such lines as:

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.

The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep.

And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and strong.

... to send

Its own deep quiet to restore our hearts.

For old, unhappy, far-off things,

And battles long ago

in all these, Wordsworth transcends, without contravening, his theory. He employs the language really used by men, but his employment is now noble with a nobility attained only by the greatest.

The pendulum, however, is always swinging, and the Romanticists opened up new and vast regions for poetry. And since they all had, to a greater or less degree, that Hang zum Unbegrenzten that penchant for the infinitewhich Goethe ascribed to Byron in particular, the vocabulary of poetry increased enormously its store of words of heightened emotional associations, of vague splendors, of richly sensuous suggestion. The diction of poetry became, with notable exceptions, opulent, sumptuous, lavish, rather than pointed, terse, concrete. And this very opulence of the Romantic diction - at its best, one of the glories of English poetry – tended to confuse the issue for the Romanticists'