Biographia Literaria
The household hearts that were his own,
It is the man of mirth.
My days, my Friend, are almost gone,
My life has been approved,
And many love me; but by none
Am I enough beloved;”
or the sonnet on Buonaparte, page 202, vol. II. or finally (for a volume
would scarce suffice to exhaust the instances,) the last stanza of the
poem on the withered Celandine, vol. II. p. 312.
“To be a Prodigal’s Favorite--then, worse truth,
A Miser’s Pensioner--behold our lot!
O Man! That from thy fair and shining youth
Age might but take the things Youth needed not.”
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 to-day and for ever, 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. For though they are brought into the full
day-light of every reader’s comprehension; yet are they drawn up from
depths which few in any 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 his works, the comparative difficulty
does 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 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 Immortality from Recollections of
early Childhood” the poet might have prefixed the lines which Dante
addresses to one of his own Canzoni--
“Canzone, i’ credo, che saranno radi
Color, che tua ragione intendan bene,
Tanto lor sei faticoso ed alto.”
“O lyric song, there will be few, I think,
Who may thy import understand aright:
Thou art for them so arduous and so high!”
But the ode was intended for such readers only as had been accustomed
to watch the 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 believing the Platonic pre-existence in the ordinary
interpretation of the words, as I am to believe, that Plato himself ever
meant or taught it.
Polla oi ut’ ankonos
okea belae
endon enti pharetras
phonanta synetoisin; es
de to pan hermaeneon
chatizei; sophos o polla
eidos phua;
mathontes de labroi
panglossia, korakes os,
akranta garueton
Dios pros ornicha theion.
Third (and wherein he soars far above Daniel) the sinewy strength
and originality of single lines and paragraphs: the frequent curiosa
felicitas of his diction, of which I need not here give specimens,
having anticipated 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 very 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-colours 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.
Let me refer to the whole description of skating, vol. I. page 42 to 47,
especially to the lines
“So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
And not a voice was idle. with the din
Meanwhile the precipices rang aloud;
The leafless trees and every icy crag
Tinkled like iron; while the distant hills
Into the tumult sent an alien sound
Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars,
Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.”
Or to the poem on THE GREEN LINNET, vol. I. page 244. What can be more
accurate yet more lovely than the two concluding stanzas?
“Upon yon tuft of hazel trees,
That twinkle to the gusty breeze,
Behold him perched in ecstasies,
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
And mock the Form which he did feign
While he was dancing with the train
Of Leaves among the bushes.”
Or the description of the blue-cap, and of the noontide silence, page
284; or the poem to the cuckoo, page 299; 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 shower”--
Fifth: 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 writes. See vol. I. page 134 to 136, or that most
affecting composition, THE AFFLICTION OF MARGARET ---- OF ----, page 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, page 174 to 178, of which I
cannot refrain from quoting two of the stanzas, both of them for their
pathos, and the former for 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, 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!
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 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 unmodified 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 instance and an
illustration, he does indeed to all thoughts and to all objects--
“------add the gleam,
The light that never was, on sea or land,
The consecration, and the Poet’s dream.”
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
recognising, 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,
Joined in one solemn and capacious grove;
Huge trunks!--and each particular trunk a growth
Of intertwisted fibres serpentine
Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved;
Not uninformed with phantasy, and looks
That threaten the profane;--a pillared shade,
Upon whose grassless floor of red-brown hue,
By sheddings from the pinal umbrage tinged
Perennially--beneath whose sable roof
Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked
With unrejoicing berries--ghostly shapes
May meet at noontide; FEAR and trembling HOPE,
SILENCE and FORESIGHT; DEATH, the Skeleton,
And TIME, the Shadow; there to celebrate,
As in a natural temple scattered o’er
With altars undisturbed of mossy stone,
United worship; or in mute repose
To lie, and listen to the mountain flood
Murmuring from Glazamara’s inmost caves.”
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,
The Old Man’s shape, and speech, all troubled me
In my mind’s eye I seemed to see him pace
About the weary moors continually,
Wandering about alone and silently.”
Or the 8th, 9th, 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, page 349 to 350.
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
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!