reluctance to admit any personal existence of the Supreme Being, or the possibility of personality except in a finite Intellect, and while they were sitting at table, a shower of rain came on unexpectedly. Gleim expressed his regret at the circumstance, because they had meant to drink their wine in the garden: upon which Lessing, in one of his halfearnest, half-joking moods, nodded to Jacobi, and said, "It is I, perhaps, that am doing that," i.e., raining!-and Jacobi answered, "or perhaps I;" Gleim contented himself with staring at them both, without asking for any explanation. So with regard to this passage. In what 15 sense can the magnificent attributes, above quoted, be appropriated to a child, which would not make them equally suitable to a bee, or a dog, or a field of corn; or even to a ship, or to the wind and waves that propel it? The omnipresent Spirit works equally in them, as in the child; and the child is equally unconscious of it as they. It cannot surely be that the four lines immediately following are to contain the explanation? To whom the grave Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight Of day or the warm light, A place of thought where we in waiting lie.1 Surely, it cannot be that this wonderrousing apostrophe is but a comment on the little poem We are Seven? that the whole meaning of the passage is reducible to the assertion that a child, who, by the bye, at six years old would have been better instructed in most Christian families, has no other notion of death than that of lying in a dark, cold place? And still, I hope, not as in a place of thought! not the frightful notion of lying awake in his grave! The analogy between death and sleep is too simple, too natural, to render so horrid a belief possible for children; even had they not been in the habit, as all Christian children are, of hearing the latter term used to express the former. But if the child's belief be only that "he is not dead, but sleepeth,'' wherein does it differ from that of his father and mother, or any other adult and instructed person? To form an idea of a thing's becoming nothing; or of nothing becoming a thing; is impossible to all finite beings alike, of whatever age, and however educated or uneducated. Thus it is with splendid paradoxes in general. If the words are taken in the common sense, they convey an absurd 1 These lines are found only in the editions of 1807 and 1815. Matthew, 9:24. 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 ity; and if, in contempt of dictionaries and custom, they are so interpreted as to avoid the absurdity, the meaning dwindles into some bald truism. Thus you must at once understand the words contrary to their common import, in order to arrive at any sense; and according to their common import, if you are to receive from them any feeling of sublimity or admiration. Though the instances of this defect in Mr. Wordsworth's poems are so few that for themselves it would have been scarcely just to attract the reader's attention toward them, yet I have dwelt on it, and perhaps the more for this very reason. For being so very few, they cannot sensibly detract from the reputation of an author who is even characterized by the number of profound truths in his writings, which will stand the severest analysis; and yet few as they are, they are exactly those passages which his blind admirers would be most likely, and best able, to imitate. But Wordsworth, where he is indeed Wordsworth, may be mimicked by copyists, he may be plundered by plagiarists; but he cannot be imitated, except by those who are not born to be imitators. For without his depth of feeling and his imaginative power his sense would want its vital warmth and peculiarity; and without his strong sense, his mysticism would become sickly-mere fog, and dimness! To these defects which, as appears by the extracts, are only occasional, I may oppose, with far less fear of encountering the dissent of any candid and intelligent reader, the following (for the most part correspondent) excellencies. First, an austere purity of I language both grammatically and logically; in short a perfect appropriateness of the words to the meaning. Of how high value I deem this, and how particularly estimable I hold the example at the present day, has been already stated:1 and in part, too, the reasons on which I ground both the moral and intellectual importance of habituating ourselves to a strict accuracy of expression. It is noticeable how limited an acquaintance with the masterpieces of art will suffice to form a correct and even a sensitive taste, where none but masterpieces have been seen and admired: while, on the other hand, the most correct notions, and the widest acquaintance with the works of excellence of all ages and countries, will not perfectly secure us against the contagious familiarity with the far more numerous offspring of 1 Biographia Literaria, 2. 5 10 15 tastelessness or of a perverted taste. If this be the case, as it notoriously is, with the arts of music and painting, much more difficult will it be to avoid the infection of multiplied and daily examples in the practice of an art which uses words, and words only, as its instruments. In poetry, in which every line, every phrase, may pass the ordeal of deliberation and deliberate choice, it is possible, and barely possible, to attain that ultimatum which I have ventured to propose as the infallible test of a blameless style,namely, its untranslatableness in words of the same language without injury to the meaning. Be it observed, however, that I include in the meaning of a word not only its correspondent object, but likewise all the associations which it recalls. For language is framed to convey not the object alone, but likewise the character, mood, and inten- 20 tions of the person who is representing it. In poetry it is practicable to preserve the diction uncorrupted by the affections and misappropriations which promiscuous authorship, and reading not promiscuous only 25 because it is disproportionately most conversant with the compositions of the day, have rendered general. Yet even to the poet, composing in his own province, it is an arduous work: and as the result and 30 pledge of a watchful good sense, of fine and luminous distinction, and of complete selfpossession, may justly claim all the honor which belongs to an attainment equally difficult and valuable, and the more valuable for being rare. It is at all times the proper food of the understanding; but in an age of corrupt eloquence it is both food and antidote. 40 45 In prose I doubt whether it be even possible to preserve our style wholly unalloyed by the vicious phraseology which meets us everywhere, from the sermon to the newspaper, from the harangue of the legislator to the speech from the convivial chair, announcing a toast or sentiment. Our chains rattle, even while we are complaining of them. The poems of Boetius rise high in our estimation when we compare them with those of his contemporaries, as Sidonius Apol- 50 linarius, &c. They might even be referred to a purer age, but that the prose in which they are set, as jewels in a crown of lead or iron, betrays the true age of the writer. Much, however, may be effected by education. I believe not only from grounds of reason, but from having in great measure assured myself of the fact by actual though limited experience, that, to a youth led from 55 his first boyhood to investigate the meaning of every word and the reason of its choice and position, logic presents itself as an old acquaintance under new names. On some future occasion, more especially demanding such disquisition, I shall attempt to prove the close connection between veracity and habits of mental accuracy; the beneficial after-effects of verbal precision in the preclusion of fanaticism, which masters the feelings more especially by indistinct watchwords; and to display the advantages which language alone, at least which language with incomparably greater ease and certainty than any other means, presents to the instructor of impressing modes of intellectual energy so constantly, so imperceptibly, and, as it were, by such elements and atoms, as to secure in due time the formation of a second nature. When we reflect that the cultivation of the judgment is a positive command of the moral law, since the reason can give the principle alone, and the conscience bears witness only to the motive, while the application and effects must depend on the judgment: when we consider that the greater part of our success and comfort in life depends on distinguishing the similar from the same, that which is peculiar in each thing from that which it has in common with others, so as still to select the most probable, instead of the merely possible or positively unfit, we shall learn to value earnestly and with a practical seriousness a mean, already prepared for us by nature and society, of teaching the young mind to think well and wisely by the same unremembered process and with the same never-forgotten results, as those by which it is taught to speak and converse. Now how much warmer the interest is, how much more genia! the feelings of reality and practicability, and thence how much stronger the impulses to imitation are, which a contemporary writer, and especially a contemporary poet, excites in youth and commencing manhood, has been treated of in the earlier pages of these sketches.1 I have only to add that all the praise which is due to the exertion of such influence for a purpose so important, joined with that which must be claimed for the infrequency of the same excellence in the same perfection, belongs in full right to Mr. Wordsworth. I am far, however, from denying that we have poets whose general style possesses the same excellence, as Mr. Moore, Lord Byron, Mr. Bowles, and, in all his later and more im1 In discussing the influence of Bowles.-Chapter 1. portant works, our laurel-honoring Laureate. But there are none in whose works I do not appear to myself to find more exceptions than in those of Wordsworth. Quotations or specimens would here be wholly out of place, and must be left for the critic who doubts and would invalidate the justice of this eulogy so applied. 5 The second characteristic excellence of Mr. Wordsworth's work is: a correspondent 10 weight and sanity of the thoughts and sentiments, won, not from books, but from the poet's own meditative observation. They are fresh and have the dew upon them. His muse, at least when in her strength of 15 wing, and when she hovers aloft in her proper element, Makes audible a linked lay of truth, Of truth profound a sweet continuous lay, Even throughout his smaller poems there is scarcely one which is not rendered valuable by some just and original reflection. See page 25, vol. II3: or the two following passages in one of his humblest compo sitions.* 20 And many love me; but by none or the sonnet on Buonaparté,1 page 202, To be a prodigal's favorite-then, worse truth, O man! that from thy fair and shining youth Both in respect of this and of the former excellence, Mr. Wordsworth strikingly resembles Samuel Daniel, one of the golden writers of our golden Elizabethan age, now most causelessly neglected: Samuel Daniel, whose diction bears no mark of time, no distinction of age, which has been, and as long as our language shall last, will be so far the language of the today and forever, as that it is more intelligible to us than the transitory fashions of our own particular age. A similar praise is due to his sentiments. No frequency of perusal can deprive them of their freshness. Nor though they are brought into the full daylight of every reader's comprehension, yet are they drawn up from depths which few in any 30 age are privileged to visit, into which few in any age have courage or inclination to descend. If Mr. Wordsworth is not equally with Daniel alike intelligible to all readers of average understanding in all passages of 25 or in a still higher strain the six beautiful 35 his works, the comparative difficulty does quatrains, page 134.5 Thus fares it still in our decay: And yet the wiser mind Mourns less for what age takes away The blackbird in the summer trees, The lark upon the hill, Let loose their carols when they please, With Nature never do they wage A foolish strife; they see A happy youth, and their old age But we are pressed by heavy laws; We wear a face of joy, because We have been glad of yore. If there is one who need bemoan His kindred laid in earth, The household hearts that were his own, My days, my friend, are almost gone, not arise from the greater impurity of the ore, but from the nature and uses of the metal. A poem is not necessarily obscure because it does not aim to be popular. It is 40 enough if a work be perspicuous to those for whom it is written, and Fit audience find, though few. To the Ode on the Intimations of Immor 45 tality from Recollections of Early Child- Canzone, i' credo, che saranno radi O lyric song, there will be few, I think. But the ode was intended for such readers 50 only as had been accustomed to watch the 1I Grieved for Buonaparté (p. 285). 2 The Small Celandine. 3 Paradise Lost, 7, 51. Il Convivio, 2, Canzone Prima. 5 flux and reflux of their inmost nature, to venture at times into the twilight realms of consciousness, and to feel a deep interest in modes of inmost being, to which they know that the attributes of time and space are inapplicable and alien, but which yet can not be conveyed, save in symbols of time and space. For such readers the sense is sufficiently plain, and they will be as little disposed to charge Mr. Wordsworth with be- 10 lieving the Platonic pre-existence, in the ordinary interpretation of the words, as I am to believe that Plato himself ever meant or taught it. Πολλά δι ὑπ' ἀγκῶ νος ὠκέα βέλη ἔνδον ἑντὶ φαρέτρας φωνᾶντα συνετοισιν· ἐς δὲ τὸ πὰν ἔρμηνέων χατίζει. σοφὸς ὁ πολ· λα εἰδὼς φυᾶ μαθόντες δὲλάβροι παγγλωσσια, κόρακες ὣς, ἄκραντα γαρύετον Διὸς πρὸς ὀρνιχα θεῖον.1 Let me refer to the whole description of skating, vol. I, page 42 to 47,1 especially to the lines So through the darkness and the cold we flew, Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars Or to the poem on The Green Linnet, vol. I, page 244. What can be more accurate yet more lovely than the two concluding 15 stanzas? Third (and wherein he soars far above Daniel), the sinewy strength and originality of single lines and paragraphs: the frequent curiosa felicitas2 of his diction, of which I need not here give specimens, having antici- 20 pated them in a preceding page. This beauty, and as eminently characteristic of Wordsworth's poetry, his rudest assailants have felt themselves compelled to acknowledge and admire. Fourth, the perfect truth of nature in his images and descriptions as taken immediately from nature, and proving a long and genial intimacy with the spirit which gives the physiognomic expression to all the works of nature. Like a green field reflected in a calm and perfectly transparent lake, the image is distinguished from the reality only by its greater softness and lustre. Like the moisture or the polish on a pebble, genius neither distorts nor false-colors its objects; but on the contrary brings out many a vein and many a tint, which escape the eye of common observation, thus raising to the rank of gems what had been often kicked away by the hurrying foot of the traveller on the dusty high road of custom. I have many swift missiles within the quiver under my arm that speak to those who under 25 30 35 40 stand; but for the multitude they need inter- 45 preters. Wise is he who knows many things by nature but those who have learned, ravenons in their loquacity, like crows chatter idly against the divine bird of Zeus.-Pindar, Olympian Odes, 2, 91 ff. (Teuberg ed.). painstaking happiness Upon yon tuft of hazel trees, That twinkle to the gusty breeze, Yet seeming still to hover; There where the flutter of his wings Upon his back and body flings Shadows and sunny glimmerings, That cover him all over. While thus before my eyes he gleams, A brother of the leaves he seems; When in a moment forth he teems His little song in gushes: As if it pleased him to disdain Of leaves among the bushes. Or the description of the blue-cap, and of the noontide silence, page 284;2 or the poem to the cuckoo, page 299;3 or, lastly, though I might multiply the references to ten times the number, to the poem, so completely Wordsworth's, commencing Three years she grew in sun and showerFifth, a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with sensibility; a sympathy with man as man; the sympathy indeed of a contemplator, rather than a fellow-sufferer or co-mate (spectator, haud particeps), but of a contemplator, from whose view no difference of rank conceals the sameness of the nature; no injuries of wind or weather, or toil, or even of ignorance, wholly disguise the human face divine. The superscription and the image of the Creator still remain legible to him under the dark lines with which guilt or calamity had cancelled or cross-barred it. Here the man and the poet lose and find themselves in each other, the one as glorified, the latter as substantiated. In this mild and philosophic pathos, Wordsworth appears to me without a compeer. Such as he is: so he 1 Influence of Natural Objects (The Prelude, 1, 401-63. p. 243). 2 The Kitten and Fallen Leaves. writes. See vol. I, pages 134 to 136,1 or that most affecting composition, The Affliction of Margaret of pages 165 to 168, which no mother, and, if I may judge by my own experience, no parent can read without a tear. Or turn to that genuine lyric, in the former edition, entitled The Mad Mother, pages 174 to 178, of which I cannot refrain from quoting two of the stanzas, both of them for their pathos, and 10 the former of the fine transition in the two concluding lines of the stanza, so expressive of that deranged state in which, from the increased sensibility, the sufferer's attention is abruptly drawn off by every trifle, 15 and in the same instant plucked back again by the one despotic thought, bringing home with it, by the blending, fusing power of Imagination and Passion, the alien object to which it had been so abruptly diverted, no longer an alien but an ally and an inmate. Suck, little babe, oh suck again! 20 It cools my blood; it cools my brain; Thy lips, I feel them, baby! they Draw from my heart the pain away. Oh! press me with thy little hand; It loosens something at my chest; About that tight and deadly band I feel thy little fingers prest. The breeze I see is in the tree! It comes to cool my babe and me. Thy father cares not for my breast, "Tis thine, sweet baby, there to rest; "Tis all thine own-and if its hue Be changed, that was so fair to view, 'Tis fair enough for thee, my dove! My beauty, little child, is flown, But thou wilt live with me in love; And what if my poor cheek be brown? 'Tis well for me, thou canst not see How pale and wan it else would be. Last, and pre-eminently, I challenge for 25 this poet the gift of Imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word. In the play of fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is not always graceful, and sometimes recondite. The likeness is occasionally too strange, or demands too peculiar a point of view, or is such as appears the creature of predetermined research, rather than spontaneous presentation. Indeed, his fancy seldom displays itself as mere and unmod- 35 ified fancy. But in imaginative power he stands nearest of all modern writers to Shakespeare and Milton; and yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and his own. To employ his own words, which are at once an 40 instance and an illustration, he does indeed to all thoughts and to all objects 30 I shall select a few examples as most obviously manifesting this faculty; but if I should ever be fortunate enough to render my analysis of Imagination, its origin and characters, thoroughly intelligible to the reader, he will scarcely open on a page of this poet's works without recognizing, more or less, the presence and the influences of this faculty. From the poem on the Yew Trees, vol. I, page 303, 304. But worthier still of note Are those fraternal four of Borrowdale, Of intertwisted fibres serpentine Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved,- Perennially beneath whose sable roof Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked May meet at noontide: Fear and trembling Hope, And Time, the shadow; there to celebrate, As in a natural temple scattered o'er To lie, and listen to the mountain flood The effect of the old man's figure in the poem of Resolution and Independence, vol. II, page 33. While he was talking thus, the lonely place, me: In my mind's eye I seemed to see him pace Or the 8th,1 9th,2 19th, 26th,* 31st, and 33rd, in the collection of miscellaneous sonnets-the sonnet on the subjugation of Switzerland, page 210, or the last ode, from which I especially select the two following stanzas or paragraphs, pages 349 to 350. Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; And cometh from afar. Not in entire forgetfulness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing boy; But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy! 1 Where Lies the Land? 2 Even as a Dragon's Eye. Composed Upon Westminster Bridge (p. 285). Thought of a Briton on the Subjugation of 8 Intimations of Immortality (p. 303). |