Oxford Lectures on Poetry

Wordsworth1

‘Never forget what, I believe, was observed to you by Coleridge, that every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished; he must teach the art by which he is to be seen.... My ears are stone-dead to this idle buzz, and my flesh as insensible as iron to these petty stings.’ These sentences, from a letter written by Wordsworth to Lady Beaumont in 1807, may remind us of the common attitude of his reviewers in the dozen years when most of his best poetry was produced. A century has gone by, and there is now no English poet, either of that period or of any other, who has been the subject of criticism more just, more appreciative, we may even say more reverential. Some of this later criticism might have satisfied even that sense of wonder, awe, and solemn responsibility with which the poet himself regarded the operation of the spirit of poetry within him; and if we desire an interpretation of that spirit, we shall find a really astonishing number of excellent guides. Coleridge, Hazlitt, Arnold, Swinburne, Brooke, Myers, Pater, Lowell, Legouis,—how easy to add to this list of them! Only the other day there came another, Mr. Walter Raleigh. And that the best book on an English poet that has appeared for some years should be a study of Wordsworth is just what might have been expected. The whirligig of time has brought him a full revenge.

I have no idea of attempting in these two lectures another study, or even an estimate, of Wordsworth. My purpose is much more limited. I think that in a good deal of current criticism, and also in the notions of his poetry prevalent among general readers, a disproportionate emphasis is often laid on certain aspects of his mind and writings. And I should like to offer some words of warning as to this tendency, and also some advice as to the spirit in which he should be approached. I will begin with the advice, though I am tempted at the last moment to omit it, and simply to refer you to Mr. Raleigh, who throughout his book has practised what I am about to preach.

1.

There have been greater poets than Wordsworth, but none more original. He saw new things, or he saw things in a new way. Naturally, this would have availed us little if his new things had been private fancies, or if his new perception had been superficial. But that was not so. If it had been, Wordsworth might have won acceptance more quickly, but he would not have gained his lasting hold on poetic minds. As it is, those in whom he creates the taste by which he is relished, those who learn to love him (and in each generation they are not a few), never let him go. Their love for him is of the kind that he himself celebrated, a settled passion, perhaps ‘slow to begin,’ but ‘never ending,’ and twined around the roots of their being. And the reason is that they find his way of seeing the world, his poetic experience, what Arnold meant by his ‘criticism of life,’ to be something deep, and therefore something that will hold. It continues to bring them joy, peace, strength, exaltation. It does not thin out or break beneath them as they grow older and wiser; nor does it fail them, much less repel them, in sadness or even in their sorest need. And yet—to return to our starting-point—it continues to strike them as original, and something more. It is not like Shakespeare’s myriad-mindedness; it is, for good or evil or both, peculiar. They can remember, perhaps, the day when first they saw a cloud somewhat as Wordsworth saw it, or first really understood what made him write this poem or that; his unique way of seeing and feeling, though now familiar and beloved, still brings them not only peace, strength, exaltation, but a ‘shock of mild surprise’; and his paradoxes, long known by heart and found full of truth, still remain paradoxes.

If this is so, the road into Wordsworth’s mind must be through his strangeness and his paradoxes, and not round them. I do not mean that they are everywhere in his poetry. Much of it, not to speak of occasional platitudes, is beautiful without being peculiar or difficult; and some of this may be as valuable as that which is audacious or strange. But unless we get hold of that, we remain outside Wordsworth’s centre; and, if we have not a most unusual affinity to him, we cannot get hold of that unless we realise its strangeness, and refuse to blunt the sharpness of its edge. Consider, for example, two or three of his statements; the statements of a poet, no doubt, and not of a philosopher, but still evidently statements expressing, intimating, or symbolising, what for him was the most vital truth. He said that the meanest flower that blows could give him thoughts that often lie too deep for tears. He said, in a poem not less solemn, that Nature was the soul of all his moral being; and also that she can so influence us that nothing will be able to disturb our faith that all that we behold is full of blessings. After making his Wanderer tell the heart-rending tale of Margaret, he makes him say that the beauty and tranquillity of her ruined cottage had once so affected him

That what we feel of sorrow and despair
From ruin and from change, and all the grief
The passing shows of Being leave behind,
Appeared an idle dream, that could not live
Where meditation was.

He said that this same Wanderer could read in the silent faces of the clouds unutterable love, and that among the mountains all things for him breathed immortality. He said to ‘Almighty God,’

But thy most dreaded instrument
For working out a pure intent
Is Man arrayed for mutual slaughter;
Yea, Carnage is thy daughter.

This last, it will be agreed, is a startling statement; but is it a whit more extraordinary than the others? It is so only if we assume that we are familiar with thoughts that lie too deep for tears, or if we translate ‘the soul of all my moral being’ into ‘somehow concordant with my moral feelings,’ or convert ‘all that we behold’ into ‘a good deal that we behold,’ or transform the Wanderer’s reading of the silent faces of the clouds into an argument from ‘design.’ But this is the road round Wordsworth’s mind, not into it.2

Again, with all Wordsworth’s best poems, it is essential not to miss the unique tone of his experience. This doubtless holds good of any true poet, but not in the same way. With many poems there is little risk of our failing either to feel what is distinctive of the writer, or to appropriate what he says. What is characteristic, for example, in Byron’s lines, On this day I complete my thirty-sixth year, or in Shelley’s Stanzas written in dejection near Naples, cannot escape discovery, nor is there any difficulty in understanding the mood expressed. But with Wordsworth, for most readers, this risk is constantly present in some degree. Take, for instance, one of the most popular of his lyrics, the poem about the daffodils by the lake. It is popular partly because it remains a pretty thing even to those who convert it into something quite undistinctive of Wordsworth. And it is comparatively easy, too, to perceive and to reproduce in imagination a good deal that is distinctive; for instance, the feeling of the sympathy of the waves and the flowers and the breeze in their glee, and the Wordsworthian ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ expressed in the lines (written by his wife),

They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude.

But there remains something still more intimately Wordsworthian:

I wandered lonely as a Cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills.

It is thrust into the reader’s face, for these are the opening lines. But with many readers it passes unheeded, because it is strange and outside their own experience. And yet it is absolutely essential to the effect of the poem.

This poem, however, even when thoroughly conventionalised, would remain, as I said, a pretty thing; and it could scarcely excite derision. Our point is best illustrated from the pieces by which Wordsworth most earned ridicule, the ballad poems. They arose almost always from some incident which, for him, had a novel and arresting character and came on his mind with a certain shock; and if we do not get back to this through the poem, we remain outside it. We may, of course, get back to this and yet consider the poem to be more or less a failure. There is here therefore room for legitimate differences of opinion. Mr. Swinburne sees, no doubt, as clearly as Coleridge did, the intention of The Idiot Boy and The Thorn, yet he calls them ‘doleful examples of eccentricity in dullness,’ while Coleridge’s judgment, though he criticised both poems, was very different. I believe (if I may venture into the company of such critics) that I see why Wordsworth wrote Goody Blake and Harry Gill and the Anecdote for Fathers, and yet I doubt if he has succeeded in either; but a great man, Charles James Fox, selected the former for special praise, and Matthew Arnold included the latter in a selection from which he excluded The Sailor’s Mother.3 Indeed, of all the poems at first most ridiculed there is probably not one that has not been praised by some excellent judge. But they were ridiculed by men who judged them without attempting first to get inside them. And this is fatal.

I may bring out the point by referring more fully to one of them. Alice Fell was beloved by the best critic of the nineteenth century, Charles Lamb; but the general distaste for it was such that it was excluded ‘in policy’ from edition after edition of Wordsworth’s Poems; many still who admire Lucy Gray see nothing to admire in Alice Fell; and you may still hear the question asked, What could be made of a child crying for the loss of her cloak? And what, I answer, could be made of a man poking his stick into a pond to find leeches? What sense is there in asking questions about the subject of a poem, if you first deprive this subject of all the individuality it possesses in the poem? Let me illustrate this individuality methodically. A child crying for the loss of her cloak is one thing, quite another is a child who has an imagination, and who sees the tattered remnants of her cloak whirling in the wheel-spokes of a post-chaise fiercely driven by strangers on lonesome roads through a night of storm in which the moon is drowned. She was alone, and, having to reach the town she belonged to, she got up behind the chaise, and her cloak was caught in the wheel. And she is fatherless and motherless, and her poverty (the poem is called Alice Fell, or Poverty) is so extreme that for the loss of her weather-beaten rag she does not ‘cry’; she weeps loud and bitterly; weeps as if her innocent heart would break; sits by the stranger who has placed her by his side and is trying to console her, insensible to all relief; sends forth sob after sob as if her grief could never, never have an end; checks herself for a moment to answer a question, and then weeps on as if she had lost her only friend, and the thought would choke her very heart. It was this poverty and this grief that Wordsworth described with his reiterated hammering blows. Is it not pathetic? And to Wordsworth it was more. To him grief like this is sublime. It is the agony of a soul from which something is torn away that was made one with its very being. What does it matter whether the thing is a woman, or a kingdom, or a tattered cloak? It is the passion that counts. Othello must not agonise for a cloak, but ‘the little orphan Alice Fell’ has nothing else to agonise for. Is all this insignificant? And then—for this poem about a child is right to the last line—next day the storm and the tragedy have vanished, and the new cloak is bought, of duffil grey, as warm a cloak as man can sell; and the child is as pleased as Punch.4

2.

I pass on from this subject to another, allied to it, but wider. In spite of all the excellent criticism of Wordsworth, there has gradually been formed, I think, in the mind of the general reader a partial and misleading idea of the poet and his work. This partiality is due to several causes: for instance, to the fact that personal recollections of Wordsworth have inevitably been, for the most part, recollections of his later years; to forgetfulness of his position in the history of literature, and of the restricted purpose of his first important poems; and to the insistence of some of his most influential critics, notably Arnold, on one particular source of his power—an insistence perfectly just, but accompanied now and then by a lack of sympathy with other aspects of his poetry. The result is an idea of him which is mainly true and really characteristic, but yet incomplete, and so, in a sense, untrue; a picture, I might say, somewhat like Millais’ first portrait of Gladstone, which renders the inspiration, the beauty, the light, but not the sternness or imperiousness, and not all of the power and fire. Let me try to express this idea, which, it is needless to say, I do not attribute, in the shape here given to it, to anyone in particular.

It was not Wordsworth’s function to sing, like most great poets, of war, or love, or tragic passions, or the actions of supernatural beings. His peculiar function was ‘to open out the soul of little and familiar things,’ alike in nature and in human life. His ‘poetry is great because of the extraordinary power with which he feels the joy offered to us in nature, the joy offered to us in the simple primary affections and duties.’ His field was therefore narrow; and, besides, he was deficient in romance, his moral sympathies were somewhat limited, and he tended also to ignore the darker aspects of the world. But in this very optimism lay his strength. The gulf which for Byron and Shelley yawned between the real and the ideal, had no existence for him. For him the ideal was realised, and Utopia a country which he saw every day, and which, he thought, every man might see who did not strive, nor cry, nor rebel, but opened his heart in love and thankfulness to sweet influences as universal and perpetual as the air. The spirit of his poetry was also that of his life—a life full of strong but peaceful affections; of a communion with nature in keen but calm and meditative joy; of perfect devotion to the mission with which he held himself charged; and of a natural piety gradually assuming a more distinctively religious tone. Some verses of his own best describe him, and some verses of Matthew Arnold his influence on his readers. These are his own words (from A Poet’s Epitaph):

But who is he, with modest looks,
And clad in homely russet brown?
He murmurs near the running brooks
A music sweeter than their own.
He is retired as noontide dew,
Or fountain in a noon-day grove;
And you must love him, ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love.
The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
And impulses of deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude.
In common things that round us lie
Some random truths he can impart,
—The harvest of a quiet eye
That broods and sleeps on his own heart.
But he is weak; both man and boy,
Hath been an idler in the land:
Contented if he might enjoy
The things which others understand.

And these are the words from Arnold’s Memorial Verses:

He too upon a wintry clime
Had fallen—on this iron time
Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears
He found us when the age had bound
Our souls in its benumbing round—
He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears.
He laid us as we lay at birth
On the cool flowery lap of earth;
Smiles broke from us and we had ease.
The hills were round us, and the breeze
Went o’er the sunlit fields again;
Our foreheads felt the wind and rain.
Our youth returned: for there was shed
On spirits that had long been dead,
Spirits dried up and closely furled,
The freshness of the early world.
Ah, since dark days still bring to light
Man’s prudence and man’s fiery might,
Time may restore us in his course
Goethe’s sage mind and Byron’s force;
But where will Europe’s latter hour
Again find Wordsworth’s healing power?
Others will teach us how to dare,
And against fear our breast to steel;
Others will strengthen us to bear—
But who, ah who, will make us feel?
The cloud of mortal destiny,
Others will front it fearlessly—
But who, like him, will put it by?
Keep fresh the grass upon his grave,
O Rotha! with thy living wave.
Sing him thy best! for few or none
Hears thy voice right, now he is gone.

Those last words are enough to disarm dissent. No, that voice will never again be heard quite right now Wordsworth is gone. Nor is it, for the most part, dissent that I wish to express. The picture we have been looking at, though we may question the accuracy of this line or that, seems to me, I repeat, substantially true. But is there nothing missing? Consider this picture, and refuse to go beyond it, and then ask if it accounts for all that is most characteristic in Wordsworth. How did the man in the picture ever come to write the Immortality Ode, or Yew-trees, or why should he say,

For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink
Deep—and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil?

How, again, could he say that Carnage is God’s daughter, or write the Sonnets dedicated to National Liberty and Independence, or the tract on the Convention of Cintra? Can it be true of him that many of his best-known poems of human life—perhaps the majority—deal with painful subjects, and not a few with extreme suffering? Should we expect him to make an ‘idol’ of Milton, or to show a ‘strong predilection for such geniuses as Dante and Michael Angelo’? He might easily be ‘reserved,’ but is it not surprising to find him described as haughty, prouder than Lucifer, inhumanly arrogant? Why should his forehead have been marked by the ‘severe worn pressure of thought,’ or his eyes have looked so ‘supernatural... like fires, half burning, half smouldering, with a sort of acrid fixture of regard, and seated at the further end of two caverns’? In all this there need be nothing inconsistent with the picture we have been looking at; but that picture fails to suggest it. In that way the likeness it presents is only partial, and I propose to emphasise some of the traits which it omits or marks too faintly.5

And first as to the restriction of Wordsworth’s field. Certainly his field, as compared with that of some poets, is narrow; but to describe it as confined to external nature and peasant life, or to little and familiar things, would be absurdly untrue, as a mere glance at his Table of Contents suffices to show. And its actual restriction was not due to any false theory, nor mainly to any narrowness of outlook. It was due, apart from limitation of endowment, on the one hand to that diminution of poetic energy which in Wordsworth began comparatively soon, and on the other, especially in his best days, to deliberate choice; and we must not assume without question that he was inherently incapable of doing either what he would not do, or what, in his last five and thirty years, he could no longer do.

There is no reason to suppose that Wordsworth undervalued or objected to the subjects of such poets as Homer and Virgil, Chaucer and Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. And when, after writing his part of the Lyrical Ballads, he returned from Germany and settled in the Lake Country, the subjects he himself revolved for a great poem were not concerned with rural life or humble persons. Some old ‘romantic’ British theme, left unsung by Milton; some tale of Chivalry, dire enchantments, war-like feats; vanquished Mithridates passing north and becoming Odin; the fortunes of the followers of Sertorius; de Gourgues’ journey of vengeance to Florida; Gustavus; Wallace and his exploits in the war for his country’s independence,—these are the subjects he names first. And, though his ‘last and favourite aspiration’ was towards

    Some philosophic song
Of Truth that cherishes our daily life,

—that song which was never completed—yet, some ten years later, he still hoped, when it should be finished, to write an epic. Whether at any time he was fitted for the task or no, he wished to undertake it; and his addiction, by no means entire even in his earlier days, to little and familiar things was due, not at all to an opinion that they are the only right subjects or the best, nor merely to a natural predilection for them, but to the belief that a particular kind of poetry was wanted at that time to counteract its special evils. There prevailed, he thought, a ‘degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation.’ The violent excitement of public events, and ‘the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies,’ had induced a torpor of mind which only yielded to gross and sensational effects—such effects as were produced by ‘frantic novels,’ of the Radcliffe or Monk Lewis type, full of mysterious criminals, gloomy castles and terrifying spectres. He wanted to oppose to this tendency one as far removed from it as possible; to write a poetry even more alien to it than Shakespeare’s tragedies or Spenser’s stories of knights and dragons; to show men that wonder and beauty can be felt, and the heart be moved, even when the rate of the pulse is perfectly normal. In the same way, he grieved Coleridge by refusing to interest himself in the Somersetshire fairies, and declared that he desired for his scene no planet but the earth, and no region of the earth stranger than England and the lowliest ways in England. And, being by no means merely a gentle shepherd, but a born fighter who was easily provoked and could swing his crook with uncommon force, he asserted his convictions defiantly and carried them out to extremes. And so in later days, after he had somewhat narrowed, when in the Seventh Book of the Excursion he made the Pastor protest that poetry was not wanted to multiply and aggravate the din of war, or to propagate the pangs and turbulence of passionate love, he did this perhaps because the world which would not listen to him6 was enraptured by Marmion and the earlier poems of Byron.

How great Wordsworth’s success might have been in fields which he deliberately avoided, it is perhaps idle to conjecture. I do not suppose it would have been very great, but I see no reason to believe that he would have failed. With regard, for instance, to love, one cannot read without a smile his reported statement that, had he been a writer of love-poetry, it would have been natural to him to write it with a degree of warmth which could hardly have been approved by his principles, and which might have been undesirable for the reader. But one may smile at his naïveté without disbelieving his statement. And, in fact, Wordsworth neither wholly avoided the subject nor failed when he touched it. The poems about Lucy are not poems of passion, in the usual sense, but they surely are love-poems. The verses ’Tis said that some have died for love, excluded from Arnold’s selection but praised by Ruskin, are poignant enough. And the following lines from Vaudracour and Julia make one wonder how this could be to Arnold the only poem of Wordsworth’s that he could not read with pleasure:

Arabian fiction never filled the world
With half the wonders that were wrought for him.
Earth breathed in one great presence of the spring;
Life turned the meanest of her implements,
Before his eyes, to price above all gold;
The house she dwelt in was a sainted shrine;
Her chamber-window did surpass in glory
The portals of the dawn; all paradise
Could, by the simple opening of a door,
Let itself in upon him:—pathways, walks,
Swarmed with enchantment, till his spirit sank,
Surcharged, within him, overblest to move
Beneath a sun that wakes a weary world
To its dull round of ordinary cares;
A man too happy for mortality!

As a whole, Vaudracour and Julia is a failure, but these lines haunt my memory, and I cannot think them a poor description of that which they profess to describe. This is not precisely ‘passion,’ and, I admit, they do not prove Wordsworth’s capacity to deal with passion. The main reason for doubting whether, if he had made the attempt, he would have reached his highest level, is that, so far as we can see, he did not strongly feel—perhaps hardly felt at all—that the passion of love is a way into the Infinite; and a thing must be no less than this to Wordsworth if it is to rouse all his power. Byron, it seemed to him, had

          dared to take
Life’s rule from passion craved for passion’s sake;7

and he utterly repudiated that. ‘The immortal mind craves objects that endure.’

Then there is that ‘romance’ which Wordsworth abjured. In using the word I am employing the familiar distinction between two tendencies of the Romantic Revival, one called naturalistic and one called, in a more special sense, romantic, and signalised, among other ways, by a love of the marvellous, the supernatural, the exotic, the worlds of mythology. It is a just and necessary distinction: the Ancient Mariner and Michael are very dissimilar. But, like most distinctions of the kind, it becomes misleading when it is roughly handled or pushed into an antithesis; and it would be easy to show that these two tendencies exclude one another only in their inferior examples, and that the better the example of either, the more it shows its community with the other. There is not a great deal of truth to nature in Lalla Rookh, but there is plenty in the Ancient Mariner: in certain poems of Crabbe there is little romance, but there is no want of it in Sir Eustace Grey or in Peter Grimes. Taking the distinction, however, as we find it, and assuming, as I do, that it lay beyond Wordsworth’s power to write an Ancient Mariner, or to tell us of

   magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,

we are not therefore to conclude that he was by nature deficient in romance and incapable of writing well what he refused to write. The indications are quite contrary. Not to speak here of his own peculiar dealings with the supernatural, his vehement defence (in the Prelude) of fairy-tales as food for the young is only one of many passages which show that in his youth he lived in a world not haunted only by the supernatural powers of nature. He delighted in ‘Arabian fiction.’ The ‘Arabian sands’ (Solitary Reaper) had the same glamour for him as for others. His dream of the Arab and the two books (Prelude, v.) has a very curious romantic effect, though it is not romance in excelsis, like Kubla Khan. His love of Spenser; his very description of him,

Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven
With the moon’s beauty and the moon’s soft pace;

the very lines, so characteristic of his habitual attitude, in which he praises the Osmunda fern as

    lovelier, in its own retired abode
On Grasmere’s beach, than Naiad by the side
Of Grecian brook, or Lady of the Mere
Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance,8

—these, and a score of other passages, all point the same way. He would not carry his readers to the East, like Southey and Moore and Byron, nor, like Coleridge, towards the South Pole; but when it suited his purpose, as in Ruth, he could write well enough of un-English scenery:

He told of the magnolia, spread
High as a cloud, high overhead,
The cypress and her spire;
Of flowers that with one scarlet gleam
Cover a hundred leagues, and seem
To set the hills on fire.

He would not choose Endymion or Hyperion for a subject, for he was determined to speak of what Englishmen may see every day; but what he wrote of Greek religion in the Excursion is full of imagination and brought inspiration to Keats, and the most famous expression in English of that longing for the perished glory of Greek myth which appears in much Romantic poetry came from Wordsworth’s pen:

     Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

As for war, Wordsworth neither strongly felt, nor at all approved, that elementary love of fighting which, together with much nobler things, is gratified by some great poetry. And assuredly he could not, even if he would, have rivalled the last canto of Marmion, nor even the best passages in the Siege of Corinth. But he is not to be judged by his intentional failures. The martial parts of the White Doe of Rylstone are, with few exceptions, uninteresting, if not painfully tame. The former at least they were meant to be. The Lay of the Last Minstrel was on every tongue. The modest poet was as stiff-necked a person as ever walked the earth; and he was determined that no reader of his poem who missed its spiritual interest should be interested in anything else. Probably he overshot his mark. For readers who could understand him the effect he aimed at would not have been weakened by contrast with an outward action narrated with more spirit and sympathy. But, however that may be, he did what he meant to do. In the Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle, again, the war-like close of the Song was not written for its own sake. It was designed with a view to the transition to the longer metre, the thought of peace in communion with nature, and the wonderful stanza ‘Love had he found in huts where poor men lie.’ But, for the effect of this transition, it was necessary for Wordsworth to put his heart into the martial close of the Song; and surely it has plenty of animation and glory. Its author need not have shrunk from the subject of war if he had wished to handle it con amore.

The poet whose portrait we drew when we began might have been the author of the White Doe, and perhaps of Brougham Castle, and possibly of the Happy Warrior. He could no more have composed the Poems dedicated to National Independence and Liberty than the political sonnets of Milton. And yet Wordsworth wrote nothing more characteristic than these Poems, which I am not going to praise, since Mr. Swinburne’s praise of them is, to my mind, not less just than eloquent. They are characteristic in many ways. The later are, on the whole, decidedly inferior to the earlier. Even in this little series, which occupies the first fifteen years of the century, the decline of Wordsworth’s poetic power and the increasing use of theological ideas are clearly visible. The Odes, again, are much inferior to the majority of the Sonnets. And this too is characteristic. The entire success of the Ode to Duty is exceptional, and it is connected with the fact that the poem is written in regular stanzas of a simple metrical scheme. The irregular Odes are never thus successful. Wordsworth could not command the tone of sustained rapture, and where his metrical form is irregular his ear is uncertain. The Immortality Ode, like King Lear, is its author’s greatest product, but not his best piece of work. The Odes among the Poems which we are now considering are declamatory, even violent, and yet they stir comparatively little emotion, and they do not sing. The sense of massive passion, concentrated, and repressing the utterance it permits itself, is that which most moves us in his political verse. And the Sonnet suited this.

The patriotism of these Poems is equally characteristic. It illustrates Wordsworth’s total rejection of the Godwinian ideas in which he had once in vain sought refuge, and his belief in the necessity and sanctity of forms of association arising from natural kinship. It is composed, we may say, of two elements. The first is the simple love of country raised to a high pitch, the love of ‘a lover or a child’; the love that makes it for some men a miserable doom to be forced to live in a foreign land, and that makes them feel their country’s virtues and faults, and joys and sorrows, like those of the persons dearest to them. We talk as if this love were common. It is very far from common; but Wordsworth felt it.9 The other element in his patriotism I must call by the dreaded name of ‘moral,’ a name which Wordsworth did not dread, because it meant for him nothing stereotyped or narrow. His country is to him the representative of freedom, left, as he writes in 1803,

        the only light
Of Liberty that yet remains on earth.

This Liberty is, first, national independence; and that requires military power, the maintenance of which is a primary moral duty.10 But neither military power nor even national independence is of value in itself; and neither could be long maintained without that which gives value to both. This is the freedom of the soul, plain living and high thinking, indifference to the externals of mere rank or wealth or power, domestic affections not crippled (as they may be) by poverty. Wordsworth fears for his country only when he doubts whether this inward freedom is not failing;11 but he seldom fears for long. England, in the war against Napoleon, is to him almost what the England of the Long Parliament and the Commonwealth was to Milton,—an elect people, the chosen agent of God’s purpose on the earth. His ideal of life, unlike Milton’s in the stress he lays on the domestic affections and the influence of nature, is otherwise of the same Stoical cast. His country is to him, as to Milton,

An old and haughty nation, proud in arms.12

And his own pride in it is, like Milton’s, in the highest degree haughty. It would be calumnious to say that it recalls the description of the English given by the Irishman Goldsmith,

Pride in their port, defiance in their eye,
I see the lords of human kind pass by;

for Wordsworth had not the faintest wish to see his countrymen the lords of human kind, nor is there anything vulgar in his patriotism; but there is pride in his port and defiance in his eye. And, lastly, the character of his ideal and of this national pride, with him as with Milton, is connected with personal traits,—impatience of constraint, severity, a certain austere passion, an inclination of imagination to the sublime.

3.

These personal traits, though quite compatible with the portrait on which I am commenting, are not visible in it. Nor are others, which belong especially, but not exclusively, to the younger Wordsworth. He had a spirit so vehement and affections so violent (it is his sister’s word) as to inspire alarm for him. If he had been acquainted with that excuse for impotent idleness and selfishness, ‘the artistic temperament,’ he might have made out a good claim to it. He was from the beginning self-willed, and for a long time he appeared aimless. He would not work at the studies of his university: he preferred to imagine a university in which he would work. He had a passion for wandering which was restrained only by want of means, and which opened his heart to every pedlar or tramp whom he met. After leaving Cambridge he would not fix on a profession. He remained, to the displeasure of his relatives, an idler in the land or out of it; and as soon as he had £900 of capital left to him he determined not to have a profession. Sometimes he worked hard at his poetry, even heroically hard; but he did not work methodically, and often he wrote nothing for weeks, but loafed and walked and enjoyed himself. He was not blind like Milton, but the act of writing was physically disagreeable to him, and he made his woman-kind write to his dictation. He would not conform to rules, or attend to the dinner-bell, or go to church (he made up for this neglect later). ‘He wrote his Ode to Duty,’ said one of his friends, ‘and then he had done with that matter.’ He never ‘tired’ of his ‘unchartered freedom.’ In age, if he wanted to go out, whatever the hour and whatever the weather, he must have his way. ‘In vain one reminded him that a letter needed an answer or that the storm would soon be over. It was very necessary for him to do what he liked.’ If the poetic fit was on him he could attend to nothing else. He was passionately fond of his children, but, when the serious illness of one of them coincided with an onset of inspiration, it was impossible to rouse him to a sense of danger. At such times he was as completely possessed as any wild poet who ruins the happiness of everyone dependent on him. But he has himself described the tyranny of inspiration, and the reaction after it, in his Stanzas written in Thomson’s Castle of Indolence. It is almost beyond doubt, I think, that the first portrait there is that of himself; and though it is idealised it is probably quite as accurate as the portrait in A Poet’s Epitaph. In the Prelude he tells us that, though he rarely at Cambridge betrayed by gestures or looks his feelings about nature, yet, when he did so, some of his companions said he was mad. Hazlitt, describing his manner of reading his own poetry in much later years, says, ‘It is clear that he is either mad or inspired.’

Wordsworth’s lawlessness was of the innocuous kind, but it is a superstition to suppose that he was a disgustingly well-regulated person. It is scarcely less unjust to describe his poetic sympathies as narrow and his poetic morality as puritanical. The former, of course, had nothing like the range of minds like Chaucer, or Shakespeare, or Browning, or the great novelists. Wordsworth’s want of humour would by itself have made that impossible; and, in addition, though by no means wanting in psychological curiosity, he was not much interested in complex natures. Simple souls, and especially simple souls that are also deep, were the natures that attracted him: and in the same way the passions he loved to depict are not those that storm themselves out or rush to a catastrophe, but those that hold the soul in a vice for long years. But, these limitations admitted, it will not be found by anyone who reviews the characters in the smaller poems and the Excursion (especially Book vii.), that Wordsworth’s poetic sympathies are narrow. They are wider than those of any imaginative writer of his time and country except Scott and perhaps Crabbe.

Nor is his morality narrow. It is serious, but it is human and kindly and not in the least ascetic. ‘It is the privilege of poetic genius,’ he says in his defence of Burns, ‘to catch a spirit of pleasure wherever it can be found—in the walks of nature and in the business of men. The poet, trusting to primary instincts, luxuriates among the felicities of love and wine, and is enraptured while he describes the fairer aspects of war: nor does he shrink from the company of the passion of love though immoderate—from convivial pleasure though intemperate—nor from the presence of war though savage and recognised as the handmaid of desolation. Who but some impenetrable dunce or narrow-minded puritan in works of art ever read without delight the picture which Burns has drawn of the convivial exaltation of the rustic adventurer Tam o’ Shanter?’ There is no want of sympathy in Wordsworth’s own picture of the ‘convivial exaltation’ of his Waggoner. It is true that he himself never describes a scene in which, to quote his astonishing phrase, ‘conjugal fidelity archly bends to the service of general benevolence,’ and that his treatment of sexual passion is always grave and, in a true sense, moral; but it is plain and manly and perfectly free from timidity or monkishness. It would really be easier to make out against Wordsworth a charge of excessive tolerance than a charge of excessive rigidity. A beggar is the sort of person he likes. It is all very well for him to say that he likes the Old Cumberland Beggar because, by making people give, he keeps love alive in their hearts. It may be so—he says so, and I always believe him. But that was not his only reason; and it is clear to me that, when he met the tall gipsy-beggar, he gave her money because she was beautiful and queenly, and that he delighted in her two lying boys because of their gaiety and joy in life. Neither has he the least objection to a thief. The grandfather and grandson who go pilfering together, two infants separated by ninety years, meet with nothing but smiles from him. The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale, after thirty years of careless hospitality, found himself ruined. He borrowed money, spent some of it in paying a few of his other debts, and absconded to London.

But this he did all in the ease of his heart.

And for this reason, and because in London he keeps the ease of his heart and continues to love the country, Wordsworth dismisses him with a blessing. What he cannot bear is torpor. He passes a knot of gipsies in the morning; and, passing them again after his twelve hours of joyful rambling, he finds them just as they were, sunk in sloth; and he breaks out,

    Oh, better wrong and strife,
Better vain deeds and evil than such life.

He changed this shocking exclamation later, but it represents his original feeling, and he might have trusted that only an ‘impenetrable dunce or narrow-minded puritan’ would misunderstand him.13

Wordsworth’s morality is of one piece with his optimism and with his determination to seize and exhibit in everything the element of good. But this is a subject far too large for treatment here, and I can refer to it only in the most summary way. What Arnold precisely meant when he said that Wordsworth ‘put by’ the cloud of human destiny I am not sure. That Wordsworth saw this cloud and looked at it steadily is beyond all question. I am not building on such famous lines as

The still sad music of humanity, or

   the fierce confederate storm
Of Sorrow, barricadoed evermore
Within the walls of cities;

or

Amid the groves, under the shadowy hills,
The generations are prepared; the pangs,
The internal pangs, are ready; the dread strife
Of poor humanity’s afflicted will
Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny;

for, although such quotations could be multiplied, isolated expressions, even when not dramatic,14 would prove little. But I repeat the remark already made, that if we review the subjects of many of Wordsworth’s famous poems on human life,—the subjects, for example, of The Thorn, The Sailor’s Mother, Ruth, The Brothers, Michael, The Affliction of Margaret, The White Doe of Rylstone, the story of Margaret in Excursion, i., half the stories told in Excursion, vi. and vii.—we find ourselves in the presence of poverty, crime, insanity, ruined innocence, torturing hopes doomed to extinction, solitary anguish, even despair. Ignore the manner in which Wordsworth treated his subjects, and you will have to say that his world, so far as humanity is concerned, is a dark world,—at least as dark as that of Byron. Unquestionably then he saw the cloud of human destiny, and he did not avert his eyes from it. Nor did he pretend to understand its darkness. The world was to him in the end ‘this unintelligible world,’ and the only ‘adequate support for the calamities of mortal life’ was faith.15 But he was profoundly impressed, through the experience of his own years of crisis, alike by the dangers of despondency, and by the superficiality of the views which it engenders. It was for him (and here, as in other points, he shows his natural affinity to Spinoza) a condition in which the soul, concentrated on its own suffering, for that very reason loses hold both of its own being and of the reality of which it forms a part. His experience also made it impossible for him to doubt that what he grasped

At times when most existence with herself
Is satisfied,

—and these are the times when existence is most united in love with other existence—was, in a special sense or degree, the truth, and therefore that the evils which we suffer, deplore, or condemn, cannot really be what they seem to us when we merely suffer, deplore, or condemn them. He set himself to see this, as far as he could, and to show it. He sang of pleasure, joy, glee, blitheness, love, wherever in nature or humanity they assert their indisputable power; and turning to pain and wrong, and gazing at them steadfastly, and setting himself to present the facts with a quiet but unsparing truthfulness, he yet endeavoured to show what he had seen, that sometimes pain and wrong are the conditions of a happiness and good which without them could not have been, that no limit can be set to the power of the soul to transmute them into its own substance, and that, in suffering and even in misery, there may still be such a strength as fills us with awe or with glory. He did not pretend, I repeat, that what he saw sufficed to solve the riddle of the painful earth. ‘Our being rests’ on ‘dark foundations,’ and ‘our haughty life is crowned with darkness.’ But still what he showed was what he saw, and he saw it in the cloud of human destiny. We are not here concerned with his faith in the sun behind that cloud; my purpose is only to insist that he ‘fronted’ it ‘fearlessly.’

4.

After quoting the lines from A Poet’s Epitaph, and Arnold’s lines on Wordsworth, I asked how the man described in them ever came to write the Ode on Immortality, or Yew-trees, or why he should say,

For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink
Deep—and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil.

The aspect of Wordsworth’s poetry which answers this question forms my last subject.

We may recall this aspect in more than one way. First, not a little of Wordsworth’s poetry either approaches or actually enters the province of the sublime. His strongest natural inclination tended there. He himself speaks of his temperament as ‘stern,’ and tells us that

to the very going out of youth
[He] too exclusively esteemed that love,
And sought that beauty, which, as Milton says,
Hath terror in it.

This disposition is easily traced in the imaginative impressions of his childhood as he describes them in the Prelude. His fixed habit of looking

    with feelings of fraternal love
Upon the unassuming things that hold
A silent station in this beauteous world,

was only formed, it would seem, under his sister’s influence, after his recovery from the crisis that followed the ruin of his towering hopes in the French Revolution. It was a part of his endeavour to find something of the distant ideal in life’s familiar face. And though this attitude of sympathy and humility did become habitual, the first bent towards grandeur, austerity, sublimity, retained its force. It is evident in the political poems, and in all those pictures of life which depict the unconquerable power of affection, passion, resolution, patience, or faith. It inspires much of his greatest poetry of Nature. It emerges occasionally with a strange and thrilling effect in the serene, gracious, but sometimes stagnant atmosphere of the later poems,—for the last time, perhaps, in that magnificent stanza of the Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg (1835),

Like clouds that rake the mountain-summits,
 Or waves that own no curbing hand,
How fast has brother followed brother
 From sunshine to the sunless land!

Wordsworth is indisputably the most sublime of our poets since Milton.

We may put the matter, secondly, thus. However much Wordsworth was the poet of small and humble things, and the poet who saw his ideal realised, not in Utopia, but here and now before his eyes, he was, quite as much, what some would call a mystic. He saw everything in the light of ‘the visionary power.’ He was, for himself,

The transitory being that beheld
This Vision.

He apprehended all things, natural or human, as the expression of something which, while manifested in them, immeasurably transcends them. And nothing can be more intensely Wordsworthian than the poems and passages most marked by this visionary power and most directly issuing from this apprehension. The bearing of these statements on Wordsworth’s inclination to sublimity will be obvious at a glance.

Now we may prefer the Wordsworth of the daffodils to the Wordsworth of the yew-trees, and we may even believe the poet’s mysticism to be moonshine; but it is certain that to neglect or throw into the shade this aspect of his poetry is neither to take Wordsworth as he really was nor to judge his poetry truly, since this aspect appears in much of it that we cannot deny to be first-rate. Yet there is, I think, and has been for some time, a tendency to this mistake. It is exemplified in Arnold’s Introduction and has been increased by it, and it is visible in some degree even in Pater’s essay. Arnold wished to make Wordsworth more popular; and so he was tempted to represent Wordsworth’s poetry as much more simple and unambitious than it really was, and as much more easily apprehended than it ever can be. He was also annoyed by attempts to formulate a systematic Wordsworthian philosophy; partly, doubtless, because he knew that, however great the philosophical value of a poet’s ideas may be, it cannot by itself determine the value of his poetry; but partly also because, having himself but little turn for philosophy, he was disposed to regard it as illusory; and further because, even in the poetic sphere, he was somewhat deficient in that kind of imagination which is allied to metaphysical thought. This is one reason of his curious failure to appreciate Shelley, and of the evident irritation which Shelley produced in him. And it is also one reason why, both in his Memorial Verses and in the introduction to his selection from Wordsworth, he either ignores or depreciates that aspect of the poetry with which we are just now concerned. It is not true, we must bluntly say, that the cause of the greatness of this poetry ‘is simple and may be told quite simply.’ It is true, and it is admirably said, that this poetry ‘is great because of the extraordinary power with which Wordsworth feels the joy offered to us in nature, the joy offered to us in the simple primary affections and duties.’ But this is only half the truth.

Pater’s essay is not thus one-sided. It is, to my mind, an extremely fine piece of criticism. Yet the tendency to which I am objecting does appear in it. Pater says, for example, that Wordsworth is the poet of nature, ‘and of nature, after all, in her modesty. The English Lake country has, of course, its grandeurs. But the peculiar function of Wordsworth’s genius, as carrying in it a power to open out the soul of apparently little and familiar things, would have found its true test had he become the poet of Surrey, say! and the prophet of its life.’ This last sentence is, in one sense, doubtless true. The ‘function’ referred to could have been exercised in Surrey, and was exercised in Dorset and Somerset, as well as in the Lake country. And this function was a ‘peculiar function of Wordsworth’s genius.’ But that it was the peculiar function of his genius, or more peculiar than that other function which forms our present subject, I venture to deny; and for the full exercise of this latter function, it is hardly hazardous to assert, Wordsworth’s childhood in a mountain district, and his subsequent residence there, were indispensable. This will be doubted for a moment, I believe, only by those readers (and they are not a few) who ignore the Prelude and the Excursion. But the Prelude and the Excursion, though there are dull pages in both, contain much of Wordsworth’s best and most characteristic poetry. And even in a selection like Arnold’s, which, perhaps wisely, makes hardly any use of them, many famous poems will be found which deal with nature but not with nature ‘in her modesty.’

My main object was to insist that the ‘mystic,’ ‘visionary,’ ‘sublime,’ aspect of Wordsworth’s poetry must not be slighted. I wish to add a few remarks on it, but to consider it fully would carry us far beyond our bounds; and, even if I attempted the task, I should not formulate its results in a body of doctrines. Such a formulation is useful, and I see no objection to it in principle, as one method of exploring Wordsworth’s mind with a view to the better apprehension of his poetry. But the method has its dangers, and it is another matter to put forward the results as philosophically adequate, or to take the position that ‘Wordsworth was first and foremost a philosophical thinker, a man whose intention and purpose it was to think out for himself, faithfully and seriously, the questions concerning man and nature and human life’ (Dean Church). If this were true, he should have given himself to philosophy and not to poetry; and there is no reason to think that he would have been eminently successful. Nobody ever was so who was not forced by a special natural power and an imperious impulsion into the business of ‘thinking out,’ and who did not develope this power by years of arduous discipline. Wordsworth does not show it in any marked degree; and, though he reflected deeply and acutely, he was without philosophical training. His poetry is immensely interesting as an imaginative expression of the same mind which, in his day, produced in Germany great philosophies. His poetic experience, his intuitions, his single thoughts, even his large views, correspond in a striking way, sometimes in a startling way, with ideas methodically developed by Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer. They remain admirable material for philosophy; and a philosophy which found itself driven to treat them as moonshine would probably be a very poor affair. But they are like the experience and the utterances of men of religious genius: great truths are enshrined in them, but generally the shrine would have to be broken to liberate these truths in a form which would satisfy the desire to understand. To claim for them the power to satisfy that desire is an error, and it tempts those in whom that desire is predominant to treat them as mere beautiful illusions.

Setting aside, then, any questions as to the ultimate import of the ‘mystic’ strain in Wordsworth’s poetry, I intend only to call attention to certain traits in the kind of poetic experience which exhibits it most plainly. And we may observe at once that in this there is always traceable a certain hostility to ‘sense.’ I do not mean that hostility which is present in all poetic experience, and of which Wordsworth was very distinctly aware. The regular action of the senses on their customary material produces, in his view, a ‘tyranny’ over the soul. It helps to construct that every-day picture of the world, of sensible objects and events ‘in disconnection dead and spiritless,’ which we take for reality. In relation to this reality we become passive slaves;16 it lies on us with a weight ‘heavy as frost and deep almost as life.’ It is the origin alike of our torpor and our superficiality. All poetic experience frees us from it to some extent, or breaks into it, and so may be called hostile to sense. But this experience is, broadly speaking, of two different kinds. The perception of the daffodils as dancing in glee, and in sympathy with other gleeful beings, shows us a living, joyous, loving world, and so a ‘spiritual’ world, not a merely ‘sensible’ one. But the hostility to sense is here no more than a hostility to mere sense: this ‘spiritual’ world is itself the sensible world more fully apprehended: the daffodils do not change or lose their colour in disclosing their glee. On the other hand, in the kind of experience which forms our present subject, there is always some feeling of definite contrast with the limited sensible world. The arresting feature or object is felt in some way against this background, or even as in some way a denial of it. Sometimes it is a visionary unearthly light resting on a scene or on some strange figure. Sometimes it is the feeling that the scene or figure belongs to the world of dream. Sometimes it is an intimation of boundlessness, contradicting or abolishing the fixed limits of our habitual view. Sometimes it is the obscure sense of ‘unknown modes of being,’ unlike the familiar modes. This kind of experience, further, comes often with a distinct shock, which may bewilder, confuse or trouble the mind. And, lastly, it is especially, though not invariably, associated with mountains, and again with solitude. Some of these bald statements I will go on to illustrate, only remarking that the boundary between these modes of imagination is, naturally, less marked and more wavering in Wordsworth’s poetry than in my brief analysis.

We may begin with a poem standing near this boundary, the famous verses To the Cuckoo, ‘O blithe new-comer.’ It stands near the boundary because, like the poem on the Daffodils, it is entirely happy. But it stands unmistakably on the further side of the boundary, and is, in truth, more nearly allied to the Ode on Immortality than to the poem on the Daffodils. The sense of sight is baffled, and its tyranny broken. Only a cry is heard, which makes the listener look a thousand ways, so shifting is the direction from which it reaches him. It seems to come from a mere ‘voice,’ ‘an invisible thing,’ ‘a mystery.’ It brings him ‘a tale of visionary hours,’—hours of childhood, when he sought this invisible thing in vain, and the earth appeared to his bewildered but liberated fancy ‘an unsubstantial fairy place.’ And still, when he hears it, the great globe itself, we may say, fades like an unsubstantial pageant; or, to quote from the Immortality Ode, the ‘shades of the prison house’ melt into air. These words are much more solemn than the Cuckoo poem; but the experience is of the same type, and ‘the visionary gleam’ of the ode, like the ‘wandering voice’ of the poem, is the expression through sense of something beyond sense.

Take another passage referring to childhood. It is from the Prelude, ii. Here there is something more than perplexity. There is apprehension, and we are approaching the sublime:

 One summer evening (led by her17) I found
A little boat tied to a willow tree
Within a rocky cave, its usual home.
Straight I unloosed her chain, and stepping in
Pushed from the shore. It was an act of stealth
And troubled pleasure, nor without the voice
Of mountain-echoes did my boat move on;
Leaving behind her still, on either side,
Small circles glittering idly in the moon,
Until they melted all into one track
Of sparkling light. But now, like one who rows,
Proud of his skill, to reach a chosen point
With an unswerving line, I fixed my view
Upon the summit of a craggy ridge,
The horizon’s utmost boundary; far above
Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky.
She was an elfin pinnace; lustily
I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the water like a swan;
When, from behind that craggy steep till then
The horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,
And through the silent water stole my way
Back to the covert of the willow tree;
There in her mooring-place I left my bark,—
And through the meadows homeward went, in grave
And serious mood; but after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

The best commentary on a poem is generally to be found in the poet’s other works. And those last dozen lines furnish the best commentary on that famous passage in the Ode, where the poet, looking back to his childhood, gives thanks for it,—not however for its careless delight and liberty,

  But for those obstinate questionings
  Of sense and outward things,
  Fallings from us, vanishings;
  Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.

Whether, or how, these experiences afford ‘intimations of immortality’ is not in question here; but it will never do to dismiss them so airily as Arnold did. Without them Wordsworth is not Wordsworth.

The most striking recollections of his childhood have not in all cases this manifest affinity to the Ode, but wherever the visionary feeling appears in them (and it appears in many), this affinity is still traceable. There is, for instance, in Prelude, xii., the description of the crag, from which, on a wild dark day, the boy watched eagerly the two highways below for the ponies that were coming to take him home for the holidays. It is too long to quote, but every reader of it will remember

    the wind and sleety rain,
And all the business of the elements,
The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,
And the bleak music from that old stone wall,
The noise of wood and water, and the mist
That on the line of each of those two roads
Advanced in such indisputable shapes.

Everything here is natural, but everything is apocalyptic. And we happen to know why. Wordsworth is describing the scene in the light of memory. In that eagerly expected holiday his father died; and the scene, as he recalled it, was charged with the sense of contrast between the narrow world of common pleasures and blind and easy hopes, and the vast unseen world which encloses it in beneficent yet dark and inexorable arms. The visionary feeling has here a peculiar tone; but always, openly or covertly, it is the intimation of something illimitable, over-arching or breaking into the customary ‘reality.’ Its character varies; and so sometimes at its touch the soul, suddenly conscious of its own infinity, melts in rapture into that infinite being; while at other times the ‘mortal nature’ stands dumb, incapable of thought, or shrinking from some presence

Not un-informed with Phantasy, and looks
That threaten the profane.

This feeling is so essential to many of Wordsworth’s most characteristic poems that it may almost be called their soul; and failure to understand them frequently arises from obtuseness to it. It appears in a mild and tender form, but quite openly, in the lines To a Highland Girl, where the child, and the rocks and trees and lake and road by her home, seem to the poet

Like something fashioned in a dream.

It gives to The Solitary Reaper its note of remoteness and wonder; and even the slight shock of bewilderment due to it is felt in the opening line of the most famous stanza:

Will no one tell me what she sings?

Its etherial music accompanies every vision of the White Doe, and sounds faintly to us from far away through all the tale of failure and anguish. Without it such shorter narratives as Hartleap Well and Resolution and Independence would lose the imaginative atmosphere which adds mystery and grandeur to the apparently simple ‘moral.’

In Hartleap Well it is conveyed at first by slight touches of contrast. Sir Walter, in his long pursuit of the Hart, has mounted his third horse.

Joy sparkled in the prancing courser’s eyes;
The horse and horseman are a happy pair;
But, though Sir Walter like a falcon flies,
There is a doleful silence in the air.
A rout this morning left Sir Walter’s hall,
That as they galloped made the echoes roar;
But horse and man are vanished, one and all;
Such race, I think, was never seen before.

At last even the dogs are left behind, stretched one by one among the mountain fern.

Where is the throng, the tumult of the race?
The bugles that so joyfully were blown?
—This chase it looks not like an earthly chase;
Sir Walter and the Hart are left alone.

Thus the poem begins. At the end we have the old shepherd’s description of the utter desolation of the spot where the waters of the little spring had trembled with the last deep groan of the dying stag, and where the Knight, to commemorate his exploit, had built a basin for the spring, three pillars to mark the last three leaps of his victim, and a pleasure-house, surrounded by trees and trailing plants, for the summer joy of himself and his paramour. But now ‘the pleasure-house is dust,’ and the trees are grey, ‘with neither arms nor head’:

Now, here is neither grass nor pleasant shade;
The sun on drearier hollow never shone;
So will it be, as I have often said,
Till trees, and stones, and fountain all are gone.

It is only this feeling of the presence of mysterious inviolable Powers, behind the momentary powers of hard pleasure and empty pride, that justifies the solemnity of the stanza:

The Being, that is in the clouds and air,
That is in the green leaves among the groves,
Maintains a deep and reverential care
For the unoffending creatures whom he loves.

Hartleap Well is a beautiful poem, but whether it is entirely successful is, perhaps, doubtful. There can be no sort of doubt as to Resolution and Independence, probably, if we must choose, the most Wordsworthian of Wordsworth’s poems, and the best test of ability to understand him. The story, if given in a brief argument, would sound far from promising. We should expect for it, too, a ballad form somewhat like that of Simon Lee. When we read it, we find instead lines of extraordinary grandeur, but, mingled with them, lines more pedestrian than could be found in an impressive poem from any other hand,—for instance,

And, drawing to his side, to him did say,
‘This morning gives us promise of a glorious day.’

or,

‘How is it that you live, and what is it you do?’

We meet also with that perplexed persistence, and that helpless reiteration of a question (in this case one already clearly answered), which in other poems threatens to become ludicrous, and on which a writer with a keener sense of the ludicrous would hardly have ventured. Yet with all this, and by dint of all this, we read with bated breath, almost as if we were in the presence of that ‘majestical’ Spirit in Hamlet, come to ‘admonish’ from another world, though not this time by terror. And one source of this effect is the confusion, the almost hypnotic obliteration of the habitual reasoning mind, that falls on the poet as he gazes at the leech-gatherer, and hears, without understanding, his plain reply to the enquiry about himself and the prosaic ‘occupation’ he ‘pursues’:

The old man still stood talking by my side;
But now his voice to me was like a stream
Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide;
And the whole body of the man did seem
Like one whom I had met with in a dream;
Or like a man from some far region sent,
To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.

The same question was asked again, and the answer was repeated. But

While he was talking thus, the lonely place,
The old man’s shape, and speech, all troubled me.

‘Trouble’ is a word not seldom employed by the poet to denote the confusion caused by some visionary experience. Here are, again, the fallings from us, vanishings, blank misgivings, dim fore-feelings of the soul’s infinity.

Out of many illustrations I will choose three more. There is in the Prelude, iv., the passage (so strongly resembling Resolution and Independence that I merely refer to it) where Wordsworth describes an old soldier suddenly seen, leaning against a milestone on the moon-lit road, all alone:

No living thing appeared in earth or air;
And, save the flowing water’s peaceful voice,
Sound there was none...
          ... still his form
Kept the same awful steadiness—at his feet
His shadow lay, and moved not.

His shadow proves he was no ghost; but a ghost was never ghostlier than he. And by him we may place the London beggar of Prelude, vii.:

How oft, amid those overflowing streets,
Have I gone forward with the crowd, and said
Unto myself, ‘The face of every one
That passes by me is a mystery!’
Thus have I looked, nor ceased to look, oppressed
By thoughts of what and whither, when and how,
Until the shapes before my eyes became
A second-sight procession, such as glides
Over still mountains, or appears in dreams;
And once, far-travelled in such mood, beyond
The reach of common indication, lost
Amid the moving pageant, I was smitten
Abruptly, with the view (a sight not rare)
Of a blind Beggar, who, with upright face,
Stood, propped against a wall, upon his chest
Wearing a written paper, to explain
His story, whence he came, and who he was.
Caught by the spectacle my mind turned round
As with the might of waters; an apt type
This label seemed of the utmost we can know,
Both of ourselves and of the universe;
And, on the shape of that unmoving man,
His steadfast face and sightless eyes, I gazed,
As if admonished from another world.

Still more curious psychologically is the passage, in the preceding book of the Prelude, which tells us of a similar shock and leads to the description of its effects. The more prosaically I introduce the passage, the better. Wordsworth and Jones (‘Jones, as from Calais southward you and I’) set out to walk over the Simplon, then traversed only by a rough mule-track. They wandered out of the way, and, meeting a peasant, discovered from his answers to their questions that, without knowing it, they ‘had crossed the Alps.’ This may not sound important, and the italics are Wordsworth’s, not mine. But the next words are these:

 Imagination—here the Power so called
Through sad incompetence of human speech,
That awful Power rose from the mind’s abyss
Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;
Halted without an effort to break through;
But to my conscious soul I now can say—
‘I recognise thy glory’: in such strength
Of usurpation, when the light of sense
Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
The invisible world, doth greatness make abode,
There harbours; whether we be young or old,
Our destiny, our being’s heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.

And what was the result of this shock? The poet may answer for himself in some of the greatest lines in English poetry. The travellers proceeded on their way down the Defile of Gondo.

       Downwards we hurried fast,
And, with the half-shaped road which we had missed,
Entered a narrow chasm. The brook and road
Were fellow-travellers in this gloomy strait,
And with them did we journey several hours
At a slow pace. The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
And in the narrow rent at every turn
Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light—
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.18

I hardly think that ‘the poet of Surrey, say, and the prophet of its life’ could have written thus. And of all the poems to which I have lately referred, and all the passages I have quoted, there are but two or three which do not cry aloud that their birth-place was the moor or the mountain, and that severed from their birth-place they would perish. The more sublime they are, or the nearer they approach sublimity, the more is this true. The cry of the cuckoo in O blithe new-comer, though visionary, is not sublime; but, echoed by the mountain, it is Like—but oh, how different!19

It was among the mountains that Wordsworth, as he says of his Wanderer, felt his faith. It was there that all things

Breathed immortality, revolving life,
And greatness still revolving; infinite.
There littleness was not; the least of things
Seemed infinite; and there his spirit shaped
Her prospects, nor did he believe,—he saw.

And even if we count his vision a mere dream, still he put into words, as no other poet has, the spirit of the mountains.

Two voices are there; one is of the sea,
One of the mountains; each a mighty voice.

And of the second of these we may say that ‘few or none hears it right’ now he is gone.

Partly because he is the poet of mountains he is, even more pre-eminently, the poet of solitude. For there are tones in the mountain voice scarcely audible except in solitude, and the reader whom Wordsworth’s greatest poetry baffles could have no better advice offered him than to do what he has probably never done in his life—to be on a mountain alone. But for Wordsworth not this solitude only, but all solitude and all things solitary had an extraordinary fascination.

The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
And impulses of deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude.

The sense of solitude, it will readily be found, is essential to nearly all the poems and passages we have been considering, and to some of quite a different character, such as the Daffodil stanzas. And it is not merely that the poet is alone; what he sees is so too. If the leech-gatherer and the soldier on the moon-lit road had not been solitary figures, they would not have awaked ‘the visionary power’; and it is scarcely fanciful to add that if the boy who was watching for his father’s ponies had had beside him any more than

The single sheep and the one blasted tree, the mist would not have advanced along the roads ‘in such indisputable shapes.’ With Wordsworth that power seems to have sprung into life at once on the perception of loneliness. What is lonely is a spirit. To call a thing lonely or solitary is, with him, to say that it opens a bright or solemn vista into infinity. He himself ‘wanders lonely as a cloud’: he seeks the ‘souls of lonely places’: he listens in awe to

One voice, the solitary raven...
An iron knell, with echoes from afar:

against the distant sky he descries the shepherd,

A solitary object and sublime,
Above all height! like an aerial cross
Stationed alone upon a spiry rock
Of the Chartreuse, for worship.

But this theme might be pursued for hours, and I will refer only to two poems more. The editor of the Golden Treasury, a book never to be thought of without gratitude, changed the title The Solitary Reaper into The Highland Reaper. He may have had his reasons. Perhaps he had met some one who thought that the Reaper belonged to Surrey. Still the change was a mistake: the ‘solitary’ in Wordsworth’s title gave the keynote. The other poem is Lucy Gray. ‘When I was little,’ a lover of Wordsworth once said, ‘I could hardly bear to read Lucy Gray, it made me feel so lonely.’ Wordsworth called it Lucy Gray, or Solitude, and this young reader understood him. But there is too much, reason to fear that for half his readers his ‘solitary child’ is generalised into a mere ‘little girl,’ and that they never receive the main impression he wished to produce. Yet his intention is announced in the opening lines, and as clearly shown in the lovely final stanzas, which give even to this ballad the visionary touch which distinguishes it from Alice Fell:

Yet some maintain that to this day
She is a living child;
That you may see sweet Lucy Gray
Upon the lonesome wild.
O’er rough and smooth she trips along,
And never looks behind;
And sings a solitary song
That whistles in the wind.

The solitariness which exerted so potent a spell on Wordsworth had in it nothing ‘Byronic.’ He preached in the Excursion against the solitude of ‘self-indulging spleen.’ He was even aware that he himself, though free from that weakness, had felt

       perhaps too much
The self-sufficing power of Solitude.20

No poet is more emphatically the poet of community. A great part of his verse—a part as characteristic and as precious as the part on which I have been dwelling—is dedicated to the affections of home and neighbourhood and country, and to that soul of joy and love which links together all Nature’s children, and ‘steals from earth to man, from man to earth.’ And this soul is for him as truly the presence of ‘the Being that is in the clouds and air’ and in the mind of man as are the power, the darkness, the silence, the strange gleams and mysterious visitations which startle and confuse with intimations of infinity. But solitude and solitariness were to him, in the main, one of these intimations. They had not for him merely the ‘eeriness’ which they have at times for everyone, though that was essential to some of the poems we have reviewed. They were the symbol of power to stand alone, to be ‘self-sufficing,’ to dispense with custom and surroundings and aid and sympathy—a self-dependence at once the image and the communication of ‘the soul of all the worlds.’ Even when they were full of ‘sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not,’ the solitude of the Reaper or of Lucy, they so appealed to him. But they appealed also to that austerer strain which led him to love ‘bare trees and mountains bare,’ and lonely places, and the bleak music of the old stone wall, and to dwell with awe, and yet with exultation, on the majesty of that ‘unconquerable mind’ which through long years holds its solitary purpose, sustains its solitary passion, feeds upon its solitary anguish. For this mind, as for the blind beggar or the leech-gatherer, the ‘light of sense’ and the sweetness of life have faded or ‘gone out’; but in it ‘greatness makes abode,’ and it ‘retains its station proud,’ ‘by form or image unprofaned.’ Thus, in whatever guise it might present itself, solitariness ‘carried far into his heart’ the haunting sense of an ‘invisible world’; of some Life beyond this ‘transitory being’ and ‘unapproachable by death’;

Of Life continuous, Being unimpaired;
That hath been, is, and where it was and is
There shall endure,—existence unexposed
To the blind walk of mortal accident;
From diminution safe and weakening age;
While man grows old, and dwindles, and decays;
And countless generations of mankind
Depart; and leave no vestige where they trod.

For me, I confess, all this is far from being ‘mere poetry’—partly because I do not believe that any such thing as ‘mere poetry’ exists. But whatever kind or degree of truth we may find in all this, everything in Wordsworth that is sublime or approaches sublimity has, directly or more remotely, to do with it. And without this part of his poetry Wordsworth would be ‘shorn of his strength,’ and would no longer stand, as he does stand, nearer than any other poet of the Nineteenth Century to Milton.

Note

I take this opportunity of airing a heresy about We are Seven. Wordsworth’s friend, James Tobin, who saw the Lyrical Ballads while they were going through the press, told him that this poem would make him everlastingly ridiculous, and entreated him in vain to cancel it. I have forgotten how it was received in 1798, but it has long been one of the most popular of the ballad poems, and I do not think I have ever heard it ridiculed. I wonder, however, what its readers take to be the ‘moral’ of it, for I have never been able to convince myself that the ‘moral’ given in the poem itself truly represents the imaginative impression from which the poem arose.

The ‘moral’ is in this instance put at the beginning, in the mutilated opening stanza:

————A simple child,
 That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
 What should it know of death?

Wordsworth, in composing, began his poem with the end; and when it was all but finished he recited it to Dorothy and Coleridge, and observed that a prefatory stanza was wanted, and that he should enjoy his tea better if he could add it first. Coleridge at once threw off the stanza as we have it, except that the first line ran, ‘A simple child, dear brother Jim,’—this Jim, who rhymes with ‘limb,’ being the James Tobin who protested afterwards against the poem. The stanza was printed in the Lyrical Ballads as Coleridge made it, Wordsworth objecting to the words ‘dear brother Jim’ as ludicrous, but (apparently) giving way for the sake of the joke of introducing Tobin.

Now the poem gains in one way by this stanza, which has a felicity of style such as Wordsworth perhaps would not have achieved in expressing the idea. And the idea was not only accepted by Wordsworth, but, according to his own account, he had mentioned in substance what he wished to be expressed. It must seem, therefore, outrageous to hint a doubt whether the stanza truly represents the imaginative experience from which the poem arose; and I can only say, in excuse, that this doubt does not spring from reflection, or from knowledge of Coleridge’s authorship of the stanza, for I do not remember ever having read We are Seven without feeling it or without saying to myself at the end, ‘This means more than the first stanza says.’ And, however improbable, it cannot be called impossible that even so introspective a poet as Wordsworth might misconstrue the impression that stirred him to write. I will take courage, therefore, to confess the belief that what stirred him was the coincidence of the child’s feelings with some of those feelings of his own childhood which he described in the Immortality Ode, and once or twice in conversation, and which, in a less individual and peculiar form, he attributes, in the Essay on Epitaphs, to children in general. But, rather than argue the point, I will refer to one or two passages. ‘At that time I could not believe that I should lie down quietly in the grave, and that my body would moulder into dust’ (remark recorded by Bishop Wordsworth, Prose Works, ed. Grosart, iii. 464). Is not this the condition of the child in We are Seven? ‘Nothing,’ he says to Miss Fenwick, ‘was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being’ (ib. iii. 194). He then quotes the first stanza of We are Seven. It is true that thereupon he expressly distinguishes his own case from the child’s, attributing the difficulty in her case to ‘animal vivacity.’ But I have already fully admitted that Wordsworth’s direct testimony goes against me; and I have now only to call attention to a passage in the Essay on Epitaphs. In that essay Wordsworth begins by saying that the custom of raising monuments to the dead ‘proceeded obviously from a two-fold desire; first, to guard the remains of the deceased from irreverent approach or from savage violation, and, secondly, to preserve their memory.’ But these desires, in his opinion, resolve themselves into one, and both proceed from the consciousness or fore-feeling of immortality, also described as ‘an intimation or assurance within us, that some part of our nature is imperishable.’ And he goes on thus: ‘If we look back upon the days of childhood, we shall find that the time is not in remembrance when, with respect to our own individual Being, the mind was without this assurance.... Forlorn, and cut off from communication with the best part of his nature, must that man be, who should derive the sense of immortality, as it exists in the mind of a child, from the same unthinking gaiety or liveliness of animal spirits with which the lamb in the meadow or any other irrational creature is endowed; to an inability arising from the imperfect state of his faculties to come, in any point of his being, into contact with a notion of death; or to an unreflecting acquiescence in what had been instilled into him!’ Now Coleridge’s stanza, and Wordsworth’s own distinction between the child and himself, do come at least very near to attributing the child’s inability to realise the fact of death to that very liveliness of animal spirits which, as a sufficient cause of it, is here indignantly repudiated. According to the present passage, this inability ought to have been traced to that ‘sense’ or ‘consciousness’ of immortality which is inherent in human nature. And (whether or no Wordsworth rightly describes this sense) it was this, I suggest, that, unknown to himself, arrested him in the child’s persistent ignoring of the fact of death. The poem is thus allied to the Immortality Ode. The child is in possession of one of those ‘truths that wake to perish never,’ though the tyranny of the senses and the deadening influence of custom obscure them as childhood passes away. When the conversation took place (in 1793), and even when the poem was written (1798), Wordsworth had not yet come to regard the experiences of his own childhood as he saw them later (Tintern Abbey, 1798, shows this), and so he gave to the poem a moral which is not adequate to it. Or perhaps he accepted from Coleridge a formulation of his moral which was not quite true even to his own thoughts at that time. It is just worth observing as possibly significant that the child in We are Seven is not described as showing any particular ‘animal vivacity’: she strikes one as rather a quiet, though determined, little person.

These remarks, of course, can have no interest for those readers who feel no misgivings, such as I have always felt, in reading the poem. But many, I think, must feel them.

---

1 The following pages reproduce the two concluding lectures of a short course on the Age of Wordsworth, given at Oxford in April, 1903, and intended specially for undergraduates in the School of English Language and Literature. A few passages from the other lectures appear elsewhere in this volume. On the subject of the course may I advise any reader who may need the advice to consult Professor Herford’s The Age of Wordsworth, a little book which is familiar to students of the history of English Literature, and the more admired the more they use it?

2 These statements, with the exception of the last, were chosen partly because they all say, with the most manifest seriousness, much the same thing that is said, with a touch of playful exaggeration, in The Tables Turned, where occurs that outrageous stanza about ‘one impulse from a vernal wood’ which Mr. Raleigh has well defended. When all fitting allowance has been made for the fact that these statements, and many like them, are ‘poetic,’ they ought to remain startling. Two of them—that from the story of Margaret (Excursion, I.), and that from the Ode, 1815—were made less so, to the injury of the passages, by the Wordsworth of later days, who had forgotten what he felt, or yielded to the objections of others.

3 Goody Blake, to my mind, tries vainly to make the kind of impression overwhelmingly made by Coleridge’s Three Graves. The question as to the Anecdote for Fathers is not precisely whether it makes you laugh, but whether it makes you laugh at the poet, and in such a way that the end fails to restore your sobriety. The danger is in the lines,
And five times to the child I said,
Why, Edward, tell me why?

The reiteration, with the struggle between the poet and his victim, is thoroughly Wordsworthian, and there are cases where it is managed with perfect success, as we shall see; but to me it has here the effect so delightfully reproduced in Through the Looking-glass (‘I’ll tell thee everything I can’).

4 Some remarks on We are seven are added in a note at the end of the lecture.

5 The phrases quoted in this paragraph are taken chiefly from Hazlitt and De Quincey.

6 The publication of the Excursion seems to have been postponed for financial reasons. One edition of a thousand copies sufficed the world for thirteen years.

7 Evening Voluntaries, iv. We know that he refers to Byron.

8 Poems on the Naming of Places, iv. Keats need not have been ashamed to write the last line.

9 ‘’Tis past, that melancholy dream,’—so he describes his sojourn in Germany.

10 Wordsworth’s Letter to Major-General Pasley (Prose Works, i.) contains an excellent statement both of his views on this duty and of his hostility to mere militarism.

11 I am writing of the years of the Napoleonic War. Later, he lost courage, as he himself said. But it is not true that he ever ceased to sympathise with the cause of national independence in Europe.

12 [This great line, as I am reminded, refers to the Welsh (Comus, 33); but it does not seem necessary to change the quotation.]

13 In saying that what Wordsworth could not bear was torpor, of course I do not mean that he could bear faithlessness, ingratitude, cruelty, and the like. He had no tolerance for such things, either in his poetry or in his life. ‘I could kick such a man across England with my naked foot,’ the old poet burst forth when he heard of a base action. This reminds one of Browning, whose antinomian morality was not so very unlike Wordsworth’s. And neither poet would have found it difficult to include the worst vices under the head of torpor or ‘the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin.’

14 The third quotation is from a speech by the Solitary (Excursion, vi.).

15 The second half of this sentence, true of the Wordsworth of the Excursion, is perhaps not quite true of his earlier mind.

16 This is just the opposite of the ‘wise passiveness’ of imaginative but unreflective feeling.

17 Nature.

18 I add here some notes which would have disturbed the lecture, but may be of use to the student of Wordsworth’s mind who cares to return to them.

The collocation of the last two quotations shows how, for Wordsworth, ‘the visionary power’ arises from, and testifies to, the mind’s infinity, and how the feeling of this is, or involves, or is united with, a feeling or idea of the infinite or ‘one mind,’ and of union with it. This connection of ideas (as to which I purposely use vague alternative terms, because I do not want to theorise the poet’s experience), is frequent or constant in Wordsworth, and it ought always to be borne in mind in regard to his language about ‘immortality’ or ‘eternity.’ His sense or consciousness of ‘immortality,’ that is to say, is at once a consciousness that he (in some sense of that word) is potentially infinite, and a consciousness that ‘he’ belongs to, is part of, is the home of, or is, an ‘active principle’ which is eternal, indivisible, and the ‘soul of all the worlds’ (cf. opening of Excursion, ix.). Whatever we may make of this connection of ideas, unless we realise it we shall remain entirely outside Wordsworth’s mind in passages like that just referred to, and in passages where he talks of ‘acts of immortality in Nature’s course,’ or says that to the Wanderer ‘all things among the mountains breathed immortality,’ or says that he has been unfolding ‘far-stretching views of immortality,’ though he may not appear to us to have touched in any way on the subject. Nature and Man (in one sense) are for Wordsworth ‘transitory,’ but Nature always and everywhere reveals ‘immortality,’ and Man (in another sense) is ‘immortal.’ Unquestionably for Wordsworth he is so. In what precise sense he is so for Wordsworth may not be discoverable, but the only chance of discovering it is to forget what we or anybody else, except Wordsworth, may mean by ‘man’ and ‘immortal,’ and to try to get into his mind.

There is an illuminating passage on ‘the visionary power’ and the mind’s infinity or immortality, in Prelude, ii.:

    and hence, from the same source,
Sublimer joy; for I would walk alone,
Under the quiet stars, and at that time
Have felt whate’er there is of power in sound
To breathe an elevated mood, by form
Or image unprofaned; and I would stand,
If the night blackened with a coming storm,
Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are
The ghostly language of the ancient earth,
Or make their dim abode in distant winds.
Thence did I drink the visionary power;
And deem not profitless those fleeting moods
Of shadowy exultation: not for this,
That they are kindred to our purer mind
And intellectual life; but that the soul,
Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
Remembering not, retains an obscure sense
Of possible sublimity, whereto
With growing faculties she doth aspire,
With faculties still growing, feeling still
That whatsoever point they gain, they yet
Have something to pursue.

An interesting point, worth fuller treatment, is the connection of this feeling of infinity and the endless passing of limits with Wordsworth’s love of wandering, wanderers, and high roads. See, for instance, Prelude, xiii., ‘Who doth not love to follow with his eye The windings of a public way?’ And compare the enchantment of the question, What, are you stepping westward?

         ’twas a sound
Of something without place or bound.

19 Yes, it was the mountain echo, placed in Arnold’s selection, with his usual taste, next to the earlier poem To the Cuckoo.

20 This was Coleridge’s opinion.