Ruskin was profoundly influenced by Wordsworth, in particular sharing a conviction of man's potential nobility, a love and reverence for nature and a belief that a sense of its sublimity is lost with advancing years (for a moving account of this 'loss,' (see Works, 36.80). Ruskin only saw Wordsworth on two occasions, the first occurring during a family party to the Lake District on Sunday, 4 July 1830. Ruskin, his parents and his cousin Mary Richardson attended the service at Rydal Chapel, where he was disappointed by the poet's appearance, noting in his cousin's Journal entry for that day:
He appeared asleep the greatest part of the time. This gentleman possesses a long face and a large nose. ( Works, 2.xxvii)
Southey also happened to be in the chapel that day and managed to conform in his appearance more nearly to Ruskin's ideal of a poet (See Ruskin and Southey).
The second occasion was on 12 June 1839 when Wordsworth became an honourary Doctor of Civil Law in the University of Oxford and, robed in his new honour, awarded the twenty-year-old undergraduate Ruskin the Newdigate Prize, hearing him recite his award-winning poem and subsequently taking 'kindly notice of him' ( Works, 2.xxvii).
Ruskin 's description of Wordsworth in Praeterita reflects an analytical fastidiousness which may have prevented him from becoming a poet himself:
A snowdrop was to me, as to Wordsworth, part of the Sermon on the Mount; but I never should have written sonnets to the celandine, because it is of a coarse yellow, and imperfect form. ( Works, 35.220)
As poets, Ruskin preferred Byron and Scott in his belief that their descriptions of nature were more precise, but his opinion of Wordsworth was sufficiently high in 1843 for him to include a spirited defence of him in a letter to a college tutor who had compared Wordsworth unfavourably to Coleridge, with Ruskin describing the latter as a mere 'intellectual opium-eater' while the former manifested a 'grand, consistent, perfectly disciplined, all grasping intellect' ( Works, 4.392).
Ruskin ranked Wordsworth in a second order of poets who employ the pathetic fallacy, whose imagination is of a reflective and perceptive bent, below the first order, comprised of such original creative geniuses as Shakespeare, Homer, and Dante ( Works, 5.205n.). However, his deep admiration for the poet is evident throughout his works, with Ruskin including a motto from The Excursion in which Wordsworth affirms his devotion to 'Truth and Nature' on the title page of Modern Painters in 1843, repeating the motto on each subsequent volume. Wordsworth's opinion of Ruskin was also generally positive.