At the present time, when the world is too much with us, many reasons might be urged for a wider and deeper attention to the study of Wordsworth. We must content ourselves here with a single, obvious reason, easily grasped. The two accredited leaders of English criticism in the nineteenth century, Coleridge and Matthew Arnold, ranked Wordsworth among the five greatest English poets, his compeers being, in their opinion, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. A third critic, no mean one, namely Wordsworth himself, held substantially the same belief, viewing the grounds of his belief as objectively as he could. It is well for everybody, now and then, to regard some matters in a broad perspective.