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.