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