There are three lofty and emotional verses in Wordsworth’s “Intimations,”
which should be spoken of. The first of these is a gem, and would have
been without flaw but that it begins in the climacteric, while the
subject and development of it, which should come first, begin at the
sixth line, thus:
“It is not now as it hath been of yore,”
down to the end.
It is almost sad to observe what splendid material Wordsworth sacrifices
through his want of poetic art.
The stanza needs no verbal correction; its fault is in the misplacement
of the lines. It is one of the most important verses in the language, or
I would not trouble the critic about it, but I will ask him to read it
thus by transposing the lines:
(1. THE SUBJECT.)
It is not now as it hath been of yore;
(2. THE DEVELOPMENT.)
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
(3. THE GRAND CLIMAX.)
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream!
The qualifications of one who could be classed with the greatest of poets
are deducible from Shakespeare alone; they are as follows:—
1. Imagination.
2. Philosophic vision.
3. A sense of the ludicrous.
4. An emotional perception of beauty.
5. Harmony.
6. Art.
All of these might be dilated on, but not here.
It is a notable truth that the poetic mind never appears fully to mature.
A man often writes a whole bible of verses, of which but one per cent.,
or from that to ten, is worth preserving. If he produces one or two
favourite poems, a mild people accepts the whole, but only feeds on the
little income of its large capital. A voluminous writer may succeed in
yielding a fine harvest on the whole; the wheats beyond all praise, the
barleys good, the oats plentiful; but the roots indifferent and the
potato crop decidedly bad.
It would be a curious sight if one could inspect the proceedings of Fame
Insurance Companies, in which Shakespeare had a policy for millions all
paid up, and invested in the hearts of generations unborn; in which,
if Coleridge has not a tithe of the amount, he is yet rich with the
well-earned increment ever increasing; and Wordsworth, who teaches moral
as well as poetic divinity, is not very far behind him. There I pause,
accepting contemporary poets as more or less life-annuitants.
There is, perhaps, no example of retrospective imagination (it is at once
so dramatic, so poetic) like the opening words of Gloucester in the play
of _Richard III_.
Before Shakespeare’s day, drama and poetry lived very much apart—one may
say entirely separate in the Greek; no less so than chemical science and
geology may do at the present time: Shakespeare, in much of his work,
made them one.
“Grim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front;”
in this the action is dramatic, the verbal structure metaphoric.