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 L900
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 her[17]) 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.