of the temper as well as of the intellect. | with those pantheistic theories which He meets us with the promise that he have largely exercised men's minds in has much, and something very peculiar, some modern systems of philosophy; it to give us, if we will follow a certain dif- is traceable even in the graver writings ficult way, and seems to have the secret of historians; it makes as much differof a special and privileged state of mind. ence between ancient and modern landAnd those who have undergone his influ- scape as there is between the rough ence, and followed this difficult way, are masks of an early mosaic and a portrait like people who have passed through some by Reynolds or Gainsborough. Of this initiation, a disciplina arcani, by submit- new sense the writings of Wordsworth ting to which they became able constantly are the central and elementary expresto distinguish in art, speech, feeling, man- sion; he is more simply and entirely ocners, that which is organic, animated, ex-cupied with it than any other. There pressive, from that which is only conven- was in his own character a certain contional, derivative, inexpressive. tentment, a sort of religious placidity, seldom found united with a sensibility like his, which was favourable to the quiet, habitual observation of inanimate, or imperfectly animate, existence. His life of eighty years is not divided by profoundly felt incidents; its changes are almost wholly inward, and it falls into broad, untroubled spaces. What it most resembles is the life of one of those early Italian or Flemish painters, who just because their minds were full of heavenly visions, passed, some of them, the better part of sixty years in quiet, systematic industry. This placid life matured in him But although the necessity of selecting these precious morsels for oneself is an opportunity for the exercise of Wordsworth's peculiar influence, and induces a kind of just criticism and true estimate of them, yet the purely literary product would have been more excellent had the writer himself purged away that alien element. How perfect would have been the little treasury shut between the covers of how thin a book! Let us suppose the desired separation made, the electric thread untwined, the golden pieces, great and small, lying apart together. What are the peculiarities of this residue? an unusual, innate sensibility to natural What special sense does Wordsworth sights and sounds, the flower and its exercise, and what instincts does he sat- shadow on the stone, the cuckoo and its isfy? What are the subjects and the echo. The poem of Resolution and Indemotives which in him excite the imagina-pendence is a storehouse of such images; tive faculty? What are the qualities in for its fulness of imagery it may be comthings and persons which he values, the pared to Keats's Saint Agnes' Eve. To impression and sense of which he can read one of his longer pastoral poems convey to others in an extraordinary way? for the first time is like a day spent in a An intimate consciousness of the ex-new country; the memory is crowded for pression of natural things, which a time with precise and vivid images : weighs, listens, penetrates, where the earlier mind passed roughly by, is a large element in the complexion of modern poetry. It has been remarked again and again; it reveals itself in many forms, but is strongest and most attractive in what is strongest and most attractive in modern literature; it is exemplified almost equally by writers as unlike each other as Senancour and Théophile Gautier; as a singular chapter in the history of the human mind, its growth might be traced from Rousseau to Chateaubriand, from Chateaubriand to Victor Hugo; it has doubtless some latent connection On some grey rock; — The single sheep and the one blasted tree In the meadows and the lower ground ears. Subtle and sharp as he is in the outlining of visible imagery, he is most subtle and delicate of all in the noting of sounds; so that he conceives of noble sound as even moulding the human countenance to this power of seeing life, this perception nobler types, and as something actually of a soul, in inanimate things, came of an "profaned by visible form or image." exceptional susceptibility to the impresHe has a power likewise of realizing and sions of eye and ear, and was at bottom conveying to the consciousness of the a kind of sensuousness. At least it is reader abstract and elementary impres- only in a temperament exceptionally sussions, silence, darkness, absolute motion- ceptible on the sensuous side that this lessness; or, again, the whole complex sense of the expressiveness of outward sentiment of a particular place, the ab- things comes to be so large a part of stract expression of desolation in the life. That he awakened "a sort of long white road, of peacefulness in a par- thought in sense" is Shelley's just crititicular folding of the hills. In the airy cism of this element in Wordsworth's building of the brain, a special day or poetry. hour even, comes to have for him a sort of personal identity, a spirit or angel given to it, by which, for its exceptional insight, or the happy light upon it, it has a presence in one's history, and acts there as a separate power or accomplishment; and he has celebrated in many of his poems the "efficacious spirit" which, as he says, resides in these "particular spots" of time. and feelings with a particular spot of earth, has sometimes seemed to degrade those who are subject to its influence, as if it did but reinforce that physical connection of our nature with the actual lime and clay of the soil, which is always drawing us nearer to our end. But for And it was through nature thus ennobled by a semblance of passion and thought that he approached the spectacle of human life. Human life indeed is, at first, but an additional, accidental grace on this expressive landscape. When he thought of man, it was of man as in the presence and under the influence of these effective natural objects, and linked to them by many associations. The close That sense of a life in natural objects, connection of man with natural objects, which in most poetry is only a rhetorical the habitual association of his thoughts artifice, is in Wordsworth the assertion of what for him is almost literal fact. To him every natural object seemed to possess more or less of a moral or spiritual life, to be capable of a companionship with man full of finesse and expression, of inexplicable affinities and subtle secrets of intercourse. An emanation, a Wordsworth these influences tended to particular spirit, belonged not to the moving leaves or water only, but to the distant peak arising suddenly by some change or perspective above the nearer horizon, to the passing space of light across the plain, to the lichened Druid stone even, for a certain weird fellowship in it with the moods of men. It was like a" survival" in him of that primitive condition, which some philosophers have traced in the history of human culture, in which all outward objects alike, even Religious sentiment, consecrating the the works of men's hands, were believed affections and regrets of the human heart, to be endowed with life and animation, above all that pitiful care and awe for the and the world was full of souls; that perishing human clay, of which relic-wormood in which the old Greek gods were ship is but the corruption, has always had first begotten, and which had many much to do with localities, with the strange aftergrowths. In the early ages thoughts which attach themselves to acthis belief, delightful as its effects in tual scenes and places. What is true of poetry often are, was but the result of a it everywhere, is truest of it in those secrude intelligence. But in Wordsworth cluded valleys where one generation the dignity of human nature, because they tended to tranquillize it. He raises nature to the level of human thought to give it power and expression; he subdues man to the level of nature, and gives him thereby a certain breadth and coolness and solemnity. The leechgatherer on the moor, the woman stepping westward, are for him natural objects, almost in the same sense as the aged thorn, or the lichened rock on the heath. himself from the agitations of the outward world, is in reality only clearing the scene for the exhibition of emotion, and what he values most is the almost ele after another maintains the same abid-culture; but it was not for its passionless ing-place; and it was on this side that calm that he chose the scenes of pastoral Wordsworth seized religion most strong-life; and the meditative poet, sheltering ly. Consisting, as it did so much, in the recognition of local sanctities, in the habit of connecting the stones and trees of a particular spot of earth with the great events of life, till the low walls, the mentary expression of elementary feelgreen mounds, the half-obliterated epi-ings. taphs seemed full of voices and a sort And so he has much for those who of natural oracles, the very religion of value highly the concentrated expression these people of the dales seemed but an- of passion, who appraise men and women other link between them and the earth, by their susceptibility to it, and art and and was literally a religion of nature. poetry as they afford the spectacle of it. It tranquillized them by bringing them Breaking from time to time into the penunder the placid rule of traditional and sive spectacle of their daily toil, their ocnarrowly localized observances. "Grave cupations near to Nature, come the great livers," they seemed to him under this elementary feelings, lifting and solemnizaspect, with stately speech, and some-ing their language and giving it a natural thing of that natural dignity of manners music. The great, distinguishing passion which underlies the highest courtesy. came to Michael by the sheepfold, to And seeing man thus as a part of na- Ruth by the wayside, adding these humture, elevated and solemnized in propor-ble children of the furrow to the true aristion as his daily life and occupations tocracy of passionate souls. In this rebrought him into companionship with spect Wordsworth's work resembles most permanent natural objects, his very reli- that of George Sand in those novels which gion forming new links for him with depict country life. With a penetrative the narrow limits of the valley, the low pathos, which puts him in the same rank vaults of his church, the rough stones with the masters of the sentiment of pity of his home, made intense for him now in literature, with Meinhold and Victor with profound sentiment, he was able to Hugo, he collects all the traces of vivid appreciate passion in the lowly. He excitement which were to be found in chooses to depict people from humble that pastoral world; the girl who rung life, because, being nearer to nature than her father's knell; the unborn infant feelothers, they are on the whole more im- ing about its mother's heart; the instincpassioned, certainly more direct in their tive touches of children; the sorrows of expression of passion, than other men; the wild creatures even, their home-sickit is for this direct expression of passion ness, their strange yearnings; the tales that he values their humble words. In of passionate regret that hang by a ruined much that he said in exaltation of rural farm-building, a heap of stones, a desertlife he was but pleading indirectly for ed sheepfold; that wild, gay, false, adthat sincerity, that perfect fidelity to venturous outer world, which breaks in one's own inward presentations, to the from time to time to bewilder and deflower precise features of the picture within, these quiet homes; not "passionate sorwithout which any profound poetry is im- row" only for the overthrow of the soul's possible. It was not for their tameness, beauty, but the loss of or carelessness but for this passionate sincerity, that he for personal beauty itself, in those whom chose incidents and situations from com- men have wronged, their pathetic wanmon life, related in a selection of lan-ness; the sailor “who, in his heart, was guage really used by men. He constant-half a shepherd on the stormy seas; " the ly endeavours to bring his language near wild woman teaching her child to pray to the real language of men; but it is to for her betrayer; incidents like the makthe real language of men, not on the dead ing of the shepherd's staff, or that of the level of their ordinary intercourse, but in young boy laying the first stone of the select moments of vivid sensation, when sheepfold; — all the pathetic episodes of this language is winnowed and ennobled their humble existence, their longing, by excitement. There are poets who their wonder at fortune, their poor pahave chosen rural life for their subject for thetic pleasures, like the pleasures of the sake of its passionless repose, and children, won so hardly in the struggle there are times when Wordsworth extols for bare existence, their yearning towards the mere calm and dispassionate survey each other in their darkened houses, or of things as the highest aim of poetical at their early toil. A sort of biblical depth and solemnity hangs over this strange, new, passionate, pastoral world of which he first raised the image, and the reflection of which some of our best modern fiction has caught from him. mous Ode on the Recollections of Childhood, and some other poems which may be grouped around it, like the lines on Tintern Abbey; and something like what he describes was actually truer of him than he seems to have understood; for his own most delightful poems were really the instinctive productions of earlier life; and most surely for him "the first diviner influence of this world" passed away more and more completely in his contact with experience. He pondered much over the philosophy of his poetry, and reading deeply in the history of his own mind, seems at times to have passed the borders of a world of strange speculations, inconsistent enough, had he cared to note such inconsistencies, with those traditional beliefs, which were otherwise the object of Sometimes, as he dwelt upon those his devout acceptance. Thinking of the moments of intense imaginative power, high value he set upon customariness, in which the outward object seems to upon all that is habitual, local, rooted in take colour and expression, a new nature the ground, in matters of religious senti-almost, from the prompting of the ob- . ment, you might sometimes regard him serving mind, the actual world seemed to as one tethered down to a world, refined dissolve and detach itself, flake by flake, and peaceful indeed, but with no broad and he himself seemed to be the creator, outlook, a life protected, but somewhat and when he would the destroyer, of the narrowed, by the influence of received world in which he lived; that old isoideas. But he is at times also something lating thought of many a brainsick mystic very different from this, and something of ancient and modern times. much bolder. A chance expression is overheard and placed in a new connection, the sudden memory of a thing long past occurs to him, a distant object is relieved for a moment by a random gleam of light accidents turning up for a moment what lies below the surface of our immediate experience and he passes from the humble graves and lowly arches of "the little rock-like pile" of a Westmoreland church on bold trains of speculative thought, and comes from point to point into strange contact with thoughts which have visited from time to time far bolder and more wandering spirits. At other times, again, in those mo ments of intense susceptibility, in which he seemed to himself but the passive recipient of external influences, he was attracted by the thought of a spirit of life in outward things, a single all-pervading mind in them, of which man, and even the poet's imaginative energy, are but moments,- that old dream of the anima mundi, the mother of all things and their grave, in which some had desired to lose themselves and others had become indifferent to the distinctions of good and evil. It would come sometimes like the sign of the macrocosm to Faust in his cell; the network of man and nature was pervaded by a common universal life; a new, bold thought lifted him above the furrow, above the green turf of the Westmoreland churchyard, to a world altogether different in its vagueness and vastness, and the narrow glen was full of the brooding power of a universal life. He had pondered deeply, for instance, on those strange reminiscences and forebodings which seem to make our lives stretch before and behind us, beyond where we can see or touch anything, or trace the lines of connection. Following the soul backwards and forwards on these endless ways, his sense of man's dim, potential powers became a pledge And so he has something also for to him, indeed, of a future life; but car- those who feel the fascination of bold ried him back also to that mysterious speculative ideas, who are really capable notion of an earlier state of existence, of rising upon them to conditions of pothe fancy of the Platonists, the old heresy etical thought. He uses them, indeed, of Origen. It was in this mood that he always with a very subtle feeling for conceived the oft-reiterated regrets for a those limits within which alone philosophhalf-ideal childhood, when the relics of ical imaginings have any place in true Paradise still clung about the soul-a poetry, and using them only for poetical childhood, as it seemed, full of the fruits purposes, is not too careful even to make of old age, lost for all in a degree in the them consistent with each other. To passing away of the youth of the world, him, theories which for other men bring lost for each over again in the passing a world of technical diction, brought peraway of actual youth. It is this ideal fect form and expression, as in those two childhood which he celebrates in his fa- lofty books of the Prelude, which de scribe the decay and the restoration of independent of their metrical combinaImagination and Taste. Skirting the bor- tion. Yet some of his pieces, pieces ders of this world of bewildering heights prompted by a sort of half-playful mystiand depths, he got but the first exciting cism, like the Daffodils and The Two influence of it, that joyful enthusiasm April Mornings, are noticeable for a cerwhich great imaginative theories prompt, tain quaint gaiety of metre, and rival by when the mind first comes to have an un- their perfect execution in this respect derstanding of them; and it is not under similar pieces among our own Elizthe influence of these thoughts that his abethan or contemporary French poetry. poetry becomes tedious or loses its Those who take up these poems after an blitheness. He keeps them, too, always interval of months, or years perhaps, may within certain bounds, so that no word be surprised at finding how well old faof his could offend the simplest of those vourites wear, how their strange invensimple souls which are always the largest tive turns of diction or thought still send portion of mankind. But it is, neverthe- through them the old feeling of surprise. less, the contact of these thoughts, the Those about Wordsworth were all great speculative boldness in them, that con- lovers of the older English literature, and stitutes, at least for some minds, the se- oftentimes there came out in him a nocret attraction of much of his best poetry ticeable likeness to our earlier poets; - the sudden passage from lowly he quotes unconsciously, but with new thoughts and places to the majestic forms power of meaning, a clause from one of of philosophical imagination, the play of Shakespeare's sonnets; and, as with some these thoughts over a world so different, other men's most famous work, the Ode enlarging so strangely the bounds of its on the Recollections of Childhood has its humble churchyards, and breaking such antitype. He drew something too from a wild light on the graves of christened the unconscious mysticism of the old children. English language itself, drawing out the inward significance of its racy idiom, and the not wholly unconscious poetry of the language used by the simplest people under strong excitement, language therefore at its source. And these moods always brought with them faultless expression. In regard to expression, as of feeling and thought, the duality of the higher and lower moods was absolute. It belonged to the higher, the imaginative mood, and was the pledge of its reality, to bring the appropriate language with it. In him, when the really poetical motive worked at all, it united with absolute justice the word and the idea, each in the imaginative flame becoming inseparably one with the other, by that fusion of matter and form which is the characteristic of the highest poetical expression. His words are themselves thought and feeling; not eloquent or musical words merely, but that sort of creative language which carries the reality of what it depicts directly to the consciousness. The office of the poet is not that of the moralist, and the first aim of Wordsworth's poetry is to give the reader a peculiar kind of pleasure. But through his poetry, and through this pleasure in it, he does actually convey to the reader an extraordinary wisdom in the things of practice. One lesson, if men must have lessons, he conveys more clearly than all, the supreme importance of contemplation in the conduct of life. Contemplation, impassioned contemplation, that is with Wordsworth the end in itself, the perfect end. We see the majority of mankind going most often The music of mere metre plays but a to definite ends, lower or higher ends as limited, yet a very peculiar and subtly their own instincts may determine; but ascertained function in Wordsworth's the end may never come, and the means poetry. With him metre is but an addi- not be quite the right means, great ends tional, accessory grace on that deeper and little ones alike being for the most music of words and sounds, that moving part distant, and the ways to them in this power, which they exercise in the nobler dim world somewhat vague. Meantime, prose no less than in formal poetry. It to higher or lower ends, they move too is a sedative to that excitement, an ex- often with something of a sad countecitement sometimes almost painful, under nance, with hurried and ignoble gait, bewhich the language of poetry and prose coming unconsciously something like alike attains a rhythmical power, depend- thorns, in their anxiety to bear grapes; ent on some subtle adjustment of the it being possible for individuals in the elementary sounds of words themselves to the image or feeling they convey, and • Henry Vaughan's Retreat. |