Adam Kirsch in his Dec 5, 2005, review in the New Yorker of Juliet Barker’s new biography Wordsworth: A Life writes that Woodsworth believed that the soul, uncontaminated by wealth and unperverted by extreme poverty, is essentially good; more, that it is part of a universal frame of goodndess, which can also also be glimpseed in mountains and rivers, animals and plants. Sin and death have no dominion over this goodness, which lies just underneath the surface of things, always ready to receive us. To support this interpretation, he provides these lines by the poet:

‘Tis Nature’s law

That none, the meanest of created things,

Of forms created the most vile and brute,

The dullest or most noxious, should exist

Divorced from good—a spirit and pulse

of good,

A life and soul, to every mode of being

Inseparably linked.