I heard among the solitary hills
Low breathings coming after me, and sounds
Of undistinguishable motion, steps
Almost as silent as the turf they trod.
And there are other passages telling of nature in less awful and
menacing aspects, nature the giver of comfort and strong serenity.
Reading these we are able in some measure to live for ourselves the
emotions that were Wordsworth’s. If we can feel his “shadowy
exaltations,” we have got all that Wordsworth can give us. There is no
need to read the theology of his mysticism, the pantheistic explanation
of his emotions. To Peter Bell a primrose by a river’s brim was only a
yellow primrose. Its beauty stirred in him no feeling. But one can be
moved by the sight of the primrose without necessarily thinking, in the
words of Mr. Cobden-Sanderson’s preface, of “the infinite tenderness of
the infinitely great, of the infinitely great which, from out the
infinite and amid its own stupendous tasks, stoops to strew the path of
man, the infinitely little, with sunshine and with flowers.” This is the
theology of our primrose emotion. But it is the emotion itself which is
important, not the theology. The emotion has its own powerful conduct
value, whereas the philosophy derived from it, suspiciously
anthropocentric, possesses, we should imagine, only the smallest value
as truth.