“Behold!—as with a gushing impulse heaves
That downy prow, and softly cleaves
The mirror of the crystal flood,
Vanish inverted hill and shadowy wood.”
He catches sight of the fluttering green linnet among the hazel-trees:
“My dazzled sight he oft deceives,
A Brother of the dancing leaves.”
He looks on the meadows sleeping in the spring sunshine:
“The cattle are grazing,
Their heads never raising,
There are forty feeding like one!”
He beholds the far-off torrent pouring down Ben Cruachan:
“Yon foaming flood seems motionless as ice;
Its dizzy turbulence eludes the eye,
Frozen by distance.”
Now in such an observation of Nature as this, so keen, so patient, so
loving, so delicate, there is an immediate comfort for the troubled mind,
a direct refuge and repose for the heart. To see and hear such things is
peace and joy. It is a consolation and an education. Wordsworth himself
has said this very distinctly.
“One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man
Of moral evil and of good
Than all the sages can.”
But the most perfect expression of his faith in the educating power of
Nature is given in one of the little group of lyrics which are bound
together by the name of Lucy,—love-songs so pure and simple that they
seem almost mysterious in their ethereal passion.
“Three years she grew in sun and shower,
Then Nature said, ‘A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown;
This Child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
A Lady of my own.
Myself will to my darling be
Both law and impulse; and with me
The Girl, in rock and plain,
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
Shall feel an overseeing power
To kindle or restrain.
...
The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
_And beauty born of murmuring sound_
_Shall pass into her face_.’”
The personification of Nature in this poem is at the farthest removed
from the traditional poetic fiction which peopled the world with Dryads
and Nymphs and Oreads. Nor has it any touch of the “pathetic fallacy”
which imposes the thoughts and feelings of man upon natural objects. It
presents unconsciously, very simply, and yet prophetically, Wordsworth’s
vision of Nature,—a vision whose distinctive marks are vitality and
unity.
It is his faith that “every flower enjoys the air it breathes.” It is
also his faith that underlying and animating all this joy there is the
life of one mighty Spirit. This faith rises to its most magnificent
expression in the famous _Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey_:
“And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thought; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.”
The union of this animating Spirit of Nature, with the beholding,
contemplating, rejoicing spirit of man is like a pure and noble marriage,
in which man attains peace and the spousal consummation of his being.
This is the first remedy which Wordsworth finds for the malady of
despair, the first and simplest burden of his prophecy of joy. And he
utters it with confidence,
“Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.”