satisfaction in reading the poems of Wordsworth. But Wordsworth's
poems are useful in the fact that they supply a refreshing contrast
to the normal thought of the world, and nothing but the fact that
many took a different view of life was potent enough to produce
them.

So, for the present at all events, we must be content to feel that
our imagination provides us with a motive rather than with a goal;
and though it is very important that we should strive with all our
might to eliminate the baser elements of life, yet we must be brave
and wise enough to confess how much of our best happiness is born
of the fact that we have these elements to contend with.

Edward FitzGerald once said that a fault of modern writing was that
it tried to compress too many good things into a page, and aimed
too much at omitting the homelier interspaces. We must not try to
make our lives into a perpetual feast; at least we must try to do
so, but it must be by conquest rather than by inglorious flight; we
must face the fact that the stuff of life is both homely and indeed
amiss, and realise, if we can, that our happiness is bound up with
energetically trying to escape from conditions which we cannot
avoid. When we are young and fiery-hearted, we think that a tame
counsel; but, like all great truths, it dawns on us slowly. Not
until we begin to ascend the hill do we grasp how huge, how
complicated, how intricate the plain, with all its fields, woods,
hamlets, and streams is; we are happy men and women if in middle
age we even faintly grasp that the actual truth about life is
vastly larger and finer than any impatient youthful fancies about
it are, though it is good to have indulged our splendid fancies in
youth, if only for the delight of learning how much more