oV 
 
 ^' ^, 
 
 A^'' "^. 
 
 
 5 0^ 
 ■71 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ,,SX^' ^f 
 
 x\ 
 
 ii;^^;;:^. 
 
 K .#5^1^^ 
 
 5o. 
 
 
 ' •^, 
 
 :i- V 
 
 
 
 ,-J, 
 
 0' s^" '/, -C' 
 
 U * ■' N <^ ■ n"'' 
 
 .V 
 
 •XH^ 
 
 -0^ 
 
 
 
 5 0^ 
 
 oX>' 
 
 
 s' A 
 
 xV .v'8>f 'o 
 
 ■y^ •, 
 
 ^, ' ., ^ 
 
 o 
 
 '"ir^.c^ ;^' 
 
 ^^^"^ 
 
 .0 o 
 
 
 ^ .^^ 
 
 s^ •^, 
 
 
 ^<r> 
 
 5 Oi^ 
 
 O 0' 
 
C^' ■^'.: 
 
 ■>' ^. 
 
 ^ * - 'Kj ■^ 
 
 ■ 0* 
 
 >' ^^'^- 
 
 
 • xK- 
 
 
 \' V- ■- * " 
 
 ^^ ,<^ 
 
 '^. c^"^ 
 
 s'' -^^ 
 
 >:^'^. ^'^ 
 
 
 
 ,^vV ^»^ ■ " * ^ -o- 
 
 .x\ 
 
 ^A v^ 
 
 
 .1-^ s 
 
 o'V-' 
 
 ,0- 
 
 Pi' 
 
 
 fz f." 
 
 
 
 x^^" '^^. 
 
 ^^o. 
 
 
 .^:^-% 
 
 
 
 ■■>. 
 
 
 ^^^ 
 
 > Of- "^vt. 
 '/ O V * ' ■ 
 
 ,0 o . 
 
 CN 
 
 
 
 
 -:> ^^. 
 
 
 .(^^ 
 
 O' 
 
 "^.. .-5^^ 
 
WORDSWORTH 
 
 A STUDY IN MEMORY AND 
 MYSTICISM 
 
 BY 
 SOLOMON F. GINGERIGH, A. M. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN GOSHEN COLLEGE 
 
 •I? 
 
 Slkbart. Slubtana 
 
 MENNONITE PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 1908 
 

 iUBHARY of C0NGBP.3S. 
 Two Copies Htx^ttjC: 
 MAR Piy08 
 Ooiiyi.k'*'' cotry ^ 
 I'M 5 ^-^^^^ 
 
 Ij COHYfl. 
 
 Copyright, 1908. 
 By S. F. Gingerich. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Readers acquainted with the critical writings 
 on Wordsworth will no doubt find much in this 
 volume that is old and familiar, especially in 
 Chapters I and II. It is hoped, however, that the 
 treatment of this old and well-known material is 
 sufficiently novel and original to warrant its 
 appearance in print. Such novelty and originality 
 are claimed for the bit of psychology brought out 
 near the close of Chapter II, for the intermediary 
 stages of mysticism as developed in Chapter V, for 
 the renunciation of the mystical proper and yet the 
 retention of the highest mystical intensity possible 
 for artistic excellence as shown in Chapter VII, 
 and for the attempt in Chapter VIII to answer 
 the question how far and in what sense Words- 
 worth is a philosopher. 
 
 Perhaps more obvious than novelty and orig- 
 inality is the indebtedness these pages show to 
 various men and various writings. The existence 
 of this volume in its present form is due in part 
 to the work in an English Seminary on Words- 
 
wor(th in Indiana University, to the inspiration 
 and personal help of Professor Will D. Howe, to 
 the sympathetic and searching- criticism of Professor 
 C. J. Sembower, to some valuable suggestions of 
 Professor Alfred M. Brooks (members of the 
 Faculty of Indiana University), and to the host 
 of writers of the past century who have written 
 well on William Wordsworth and his poetry. 
 
 S. F. G. 
 
 Goshen, Indiana. 
 February, 1908. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 The Man and His Times. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 Memories of Childhood : Their Development. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Memories of Childhood : Their Ethical Meaning. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 Memories of Childhood : Their Artistic Value. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Mysticism : Its Development. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 Mysticism : Its Ethical Meaning. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 Mysticism : Its Artistic Value. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 Philosophy : Its Limitations. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Conclusion. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 It is the purpose of this study to trace tl>e 
 development, in Wordsworth, of his psychology 1 
 of childhood memories and his theory and practice \ 
 of mysticism, and to show their relation to each ,1 
 other and their relation indirectly to his poetry. 
 This study is to be made mainly, if not wholly, 
 in the light of the original qualities of Words- 
 worth's character and of the times in which he 
 lived — in the light of the action and reaction of 
 the time upon the character. The chief emphasis, 
 however, must be placed upon the development of 
 his character. For whatever argument may be 
 made in favor of the independence of art and 
 morals, it can hardly be denied that the art products 
 of Wordsworth have their sources deep in his 
 moral being; and without a strong sense and 
 appreciation of his moral nature, we cannot arrive 
 at any just conclusion as to the peculiar influence 
 the times exerted on him. Without the key to his 
 character, all study of him is in vain. 
 
 The excuses for undertaking such a task as here 
 
8 WORDSWORTH 
 
 proposed are two. First, the genius of Wordsworth 
 himself is so towering, and the period in which 
 he spent his first thirty years, and especially the 
 last ten of those years, is so replete with human 
 interest, that, although a great literature has already 
 sprung up dealing with the man and his times, this 
 literature is not all written as yet, but will continue 
 to be written in succeeding generations. Secondly, 
 our progress in civilization depends upon the clear- 
 ness of vision with which we perceive, and the 
 energy with which we seize upon the greatest 
 achievements of the race in the past, and especially 
 the achievements of its geniuses. How well we 
 can appropriate to our use the highest acquire- 
 ments of past civilizations determines our success 
 in the future. Thus, it is the duty of each 
 generation in its own way to re-interpret for 
 itself the vital elements of a past civilization. Per- 
 haps this can be done in no better way than by 
 the simple and time-honored method of observing 
 the action and reaction of a great time upon a 
 great character, with special reference to some 
 phase of that character's thought and experience. 
 And Wordsworth's time and Wordsworth's char- 
 acter and the particular phase of his thought upon 
 which we wish to dwell are all great enough to 
 make unnecessary any further apologies. 
 
INTRODUCTION g. 
 
 Whether we believe with Carlyle that geniuses 
 are not made but are born, and assert themselves 
 in spite of the conditions that birth and society 
 may impose on them, or whether we believe with 
 others that even geniuses are but mouthpieces of 
 their own time-spirit, or whether we take a middle 
 ground and say that somehow both the power of 
 the moment and the power of the man are neces- 
 sary for the most excellent achievement, we can 
 perhaps agree that a great poet, by virtue of his 
 sensitive, responsive, and sympathetic nature, is 
 more indebted to his age than other men, and that 
 by virtue of his imaginative and creative powers 
 he makes the world indebted to himself more than 
 other men do. And notwithstanding the fact that 
 throughout his whole life, Wordsworth drew much 
 of his light and joy from within and became a 
 conservative rather early in life, setting himself in 
 opposition to mechanical and industrial progress, 
 to the Reform Bill of 1832, to the introduction of 
 railways, to formal education, to the Catholic 
 Emancipation, etc., there is still much reason to 
 believe that he is in no sense an outstanding fact 
 of his day and generation, but that he is essentially 
 a part of it, first absorbing its vital elements, and 
 secondly reacting upon those elements and giving 
 them new direction of development. The man who- 
 
10 WORDSWORTH 
 
 could say, as Wordsworth did say, in speaking of 
 an experience as early in youth as when he first 
 remembered the sun and the waters — 
 
 Oh, then, the calm 
 And dead still water lay upon my mind 
 Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky, 
 Never before so beautiful, sank down 
 Into my heart and held me like a dream — 
 
 and who could say of a later experience — an 
 -experience caused by the declaration of war by 
 England against France — 
 
 No shock 
 Given to my moral nature had I known 
 Down to that very moment ; neither lapse 
 Nor turn of sentiment that might be named 
 A revolution, save at this one time : — 
 
 such a man shows that he was at least extremely 
 susceptible to two great objective and environ- 
 mental forces that play upon men's lives and help 
 to mold their characters — the forces of external 
 nature and organized human society. * 
 But Wordsworth held that 
 
 Poets, even as prophets, each with each 
 Connected in a mighty scheme of truth, 
 Have each his own peculiar faculty, 
 Heaven's gift, a sense that fits him to perceive 
 Objects unseen before. 
 
INTRODUCTION ii 
 
 He believed that 
 
 Happy is he who lives to understand 
 Not human nature only, but explores 
 All natures — to the end that he may find 
 The law that governs each — ■ 
 
 and that 
 
 The array 
 Of act and circumstance, and visible form. 
 Is mainly to the pleasure of the mind 
 What passion makes them. — 
 
 And the man who could boldly proclaim that it 
 is the legitimate btisiness of a poet to explore all 
 natures in order to find the law that governs each, 
 that it should be his ideal to perceive objects 
 unseen before and to color the array of act and 
 circumstance and visible form with the passions 
 of the mind itself, must have possessed an original 
 force of mind that retained its identity throughout 
 his whole career, even though he was extremely 
 susceptible to objective and environmental forces. 
 And yet, one is constrained to ask, Whence come 
 these bold assertions of the high and far-reaching- 
 purposes and ideals of the poet? Why especially 
 should Wordsworth believe it to be a peculiar 
 faculty of the poet to perceive objects unseen 
 before? How did he come to feel that the poet 
 should discover the law that governs all natures 
 
12 WORDSWORTH 
 
 and at the same time attempt to color the array 
 of act and circumstance and visible form with the 
 passions of his own mind? It is quite clear that 
 these statements of his are not only an indication 
 of a strong individuality, but are distinctive echoes 
 of a particular time — a time when men, as> 
 DeQuincey says, were forced to think, and par- 
 ticularly to think on the first principles of things 
 and to take sides on almost all the questions of 
 the day, a time when men were encouraged to give- 
 full expression to their individual experiences in- 
 stead of repressing them, a time, in short, more 
 or less revolutionary, which made men earnest 
 exponents and apostles of new faiths and various 
 and oftentimes conflicting theories. Would even 
 a Wordsworth have given expression to just these 
 sentiments had he lived in the time of Pope? 
 And is it fanciful to ask, in passing, whether it 
 is not a significant fact that Wordsworth was about 
 thirty-four years old, in the prime of life, feeling, 
 the full measure of native strength and unusual 
 vigor of soul, when he gave expression to these 
 and other similar sentiments? 
 
 It is always impossible, however, to determine 
 with exactness how much of the product of a poet 
 is due to personal and how much to environmentar 
 forces. The subtle and intangible nature of the 
 
INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 spirit of the times and the inexplicable qualities 
 and powers of the genius preclude the possibility 
 of the scientist ever givang an exact formula for 
 the influence of the environment on the individual 
 and the individual on the environment, respectively. 
 Moreover, historical study is as helpless in this 
 respect as science. There are many events and 
 incidents that play a part in the making of any 
 period of history which are beyond the power of 
 discovery of the historian. Besides there are 
 motives and impulses beneath and behind the facts 
 of history, which themselves give the facts a color- 
 ing of their own, so that the conscientious historian 
 can never be absolutely positive of his results, and 
 he is often driven to call in the imagination to fill 
 in at points where facts escape him. Again, in a 
 time of great political and social disturbances, when 
 the genius of a people or the spirit of the times 
 work deeply and vitally on an individual, much of 
 these workings are unconscious. Accidental afifairs 
 and events that have a temporary influence proclaim 
 their presence with a noise and a flourish that can- 
 not be mistaken. On the other hand, the vital 
 forces of such a time are exactly those that are 
 the most pervasive and the most subtle, and it is 
 the special gift of the genius to divine the difference 
 between the accidental on the one hand and the 
 
14 WORDSWORTH 
 
 vital on the other, and to identify himself whole- 
 heartedly with the latter. Thus in dealing with our 
 problem, which is at bottom the problem of the 
 philosophy of history, the historian, like the scien- 
 tist, can obtain only partial and inadequate results. 
 The literary critic can not come any nearer the 
 solution of the problem than either the scientist 
 or the historian except so far only as he can success- 
 fully combine the method of the scientist and the 
 knowledge of the historian with his own special 
 faculty of sensibility to his work in hand. But 
 this advantage is immediately offset by another 
 difficulty, peculiar to the problem of the literary 
 critic. The history of the development of poetry 
 is harder to trace than is, for example, the history 
 of philosophic thought. Philosophy deals mainly 1 
 with intellectual matters, matters that have to do 1 
 with theories and with systems. And many of 
 these systems are more or less sharply defined and 
 are differentiated from other systems, and, there- 
 fore, their development can be traced with cotfi- 
 parative ease. Poetry, on the other hand, deals 
 more generally with personal experiences, and with 
 the instincts and intuitions and feelings of common 
 humanity. Whatever else a great poetry may deal 
 with, it deals, first of all, with the deep, abiding 
 and universal experiences of tb.e heart, which ex- 
 
INTRODUCTION 15 
 
 periences are much the same in all places and in 
 all ages. It is possible, therefore, for a great 
 poetry to spring up directly from the soil, as it 
 were, and its relation to other great poetry may 
 be hard to find, if, indeed, it have any important 
 relation to it at all. 
 
 Let the proposition be stated from another point 
 of view. A philosopher, like Hume, holds that one [ 
 should not believe in immortality. His philosophic 
 system develops this thoroughly and systematically. 
 But when Hume thinks of his mother he says he 
 cannot believe that her character can ever suffer 
 dissolution. Why is there this difference in attitude 
 in the same man ? Simply that in the former case 
 he speaks from a purely intellectual standpoint and 
 in accord with a developed system and a school 
 to which he belongs, while in the latter case he 
 allows his affections to play a part in his experience. 
 In the first instance he speaks like a philosopher ; 
 in the second, like a man. The first view accords 
 with the views of a certain school of philosophers 
 with a particular skeptical bias, and the origin and 
 development of the view can be traced easily 
 enough. But the second view accords with the 
 common experience of humanity, and, as such, has , 
 no particular history. And it is precisely this 
 second kind of experience that gives the poet the 
 
i6 WORDSWORTH 
 
 matter with which he deals. Poetry is related to 
 the times out of which it comes as a river is related 
 to the country in which it has its source and 
 thr&ugh which it flows — distinctly individual, it 
 yet carries in itself something of the very soil and 
 substance of the regions through which it has 
 traveled. And the poet's relation to his time is 
 like that of a tree to the soil from which it springs 
 — its marrow and strength and volume are drawn 
 from the very elements that surround it and 
 threaten its destruction, but in the process the 
 elements themselves undergo a mysterious change 
 by means of the vital force in the tree itself. 
 Though the relation between a poet and his time 
 is always vital, it is also always extremely pervasive 
 and intangible, consisting for the most part of deep 
 under-current connections. 
 
 And since it is thus, there have always been 
 some literary critics who have given up in despair 
 to carry out such a program as here suggested. 
 They have contented themselves with giving critigal 
 expositions of particular works, or, at most, they 
 have included in their criticism the consideration 
 of the character of the poet in relation to his works. 
 A few have even discouraged this latter and 
 especially any larger problem, because the results 
 obtained are correspondingly less exact and final. 
 
INTRODUCTION 17 
 
 And for these reasons there will perhaps always 
 be a minority of literary critics of this stamp. But 
 should a method be given up because it yields only 
 partial and relative results? Should we not rather 
 distrust as superficial, a method that strictly limits 
 itself to a chosen sphere and then attempts final 
 and absolute answers to all questions that arise 
 within that sphere? And though it be insisted upon 
 that our problem shall be developed in the broadest 
 possible way, it will no doubt be seen by this time 
 that there is no intention here to present the 
 detailed facts of Wordsworth's outward life. It 
 is intended, on the contrary, to trace out the inward 
 evolution of his character. And it will also be 
 seen that it is not the purpose here to set down an 
 array of historical facts pertaining to the times, 
 nor to trace out temporal influences to their origins. 
 Such facts and influences and origins can be found 
 written in the books, and it would be a thankless 
 task to restate them here. But it is intended to 
 seize upon a few of the most essential and funda- 
 mental characteristics of the times and to use those 
 characteristics in conjunction with the enfoldnient 
 of Wordsworth's character, with the hope of giving 
 a more detailed and complete psychological 
 explanation than has hitherto been given of his 
 introspective tendencies that became embodied in 
 
i8 WORDSWORTH 
 
 his doctrine of childhood memories and in his 
 theory and practice of mysticism. It is to be shown 
 that these tendencies were not only peculiar to 
 him, but that they were peculiarly influenced in 
 their development by his environment. 
 
 ^ 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 THE MAX AND HIS TIMES 
 
 What, then, are the chief characteristics of the 
 times and the vital qualities in Wordsworth's 
 character with which we must begin our study? 
 The most general formula for those times is that 
 they were times of revolution with a strong i 
 tendency toward the readjustment of society, and 
 of insistence on personal liberty with the result 
 of giving wide divergence in the expression of 
 personal experience. This formula is not intended 
 to be in any sense a complete expression of those 
 characteristics. One needs but to glance at the 
 literature dealing with this period of time to notice 
 the futile efforts of writers in their attempt to | 
 express in single phrases the forces and tendencies 
 then at work. Some of the phrases include so much [ 
 that they are vague ; others are so specific that 
 they do not include enough. "A time of growing 
 
20 WORDSWORTH 
 
 intolerance of antiquated and artificial forms," a 
 time of "reaction on eighteenth century civiliza- 
 tion," of a "return to nature," of "simplification," 
 a time of the "recreation of medievalism," of the 
 "rediscovery and vindication of the concrete," a 
 time of "a sudden increase of the vital energy of 
 the species," a time of "growth in the notion of the 
 brotherhood of man," a time of the "strengthening 
 of the national consciousness of the different coun- 
 tries of Europe" — all these are partial failures and 
 partial successes ; they fail to give an adequate 
 conception of the times ; they succeed in expressing 
 some important aspects of them. The complexity 
 of forces then at work makes it impossible ever 
 to express those forces in a single phrase. And 
 perhaps our own formula can claim no more than 
 the statement of a few important aspects of the 
 times. They are such aspects, however, as will be 
 shown to have the most important bearing on the 
 development of Wordsworth's experiences regard- 
 ing the memories of childhood and mysticism. 
 
 Moreover, the forces included in our formula 
 are among the most vital and permanent of the 
 times. Though many of the others, such as a 
 "return to nature" and the "rediscovery and vin- 
 dication of the concrete," have done their work, 
 those included in our formula have still not spent 
 
THE MAN AND HIS TIMES 21 
 
 their energy, even though a hundred years span 
 the time between then and now. Our times arc 
 still re\-olutionary, only in a milder sense, but even ) 
 with an increased effort at the readjustment of 
 society ; and, although we may not proclaim per- 
 sonal liberty with the same vehemence as men did 
 a hundred years ago, yet the divergence of the 
 expression of personal experience is greater than/ 
 ever, and is ever widening. The times of Words- 
 worth initiated and gave a tremendous impetus 
 to tw^o forces that characterize the whole of the 
 nineteenth century, the forces, namely, of increased 
 efficiency and adjustment of organized society, and 
 the widened powers and range of personal liberty. 
 The revolutionary forces of those days were by 
 no means confined to the settlement and readjust- 1 
 ment of political problems. They invaded all the 
 departments of human affairs, even the affairs of 
 practical religion. In a preface to a sonnet written 
 in 1827, Wordsworth makes this suggestive state- 
 ment, "Attendance at church on prayer-days, 
 Wednesdays and Fridays and Holidays, received 
 a shock at the Revolution. It is now, however, 
 happily reviving." The spirit of revolution was in 
 the atmosphere, and it found its way into every 
 nook and corner of town and hamlet, and most 
 of all into the hearts of men : 
 
22 WORDSWORTH i 
 
 'Twas in truth an hour 
 Of universal ferment, mildest men 
 Were agitated ; and commotions, strife t 
 
 Of passion and opinion filled the walls 
 Of peaceful houses with unquiet sound. 
 
 Dominant in all the activities of the times was 
 the note of an equilibrium less secure than in the 
 period of time preceding, of an old anchorage 
 breaking up, of maladjustments and instabilities, 
 and, at the same time, of promises and potencies 
 of a slow but ever higher development. By the 
 shock of the Revolution men were compelled to 
 revert to first principles, to explore all natures in 
 order to find the law that governs each. And when, 
 in the presence of danger, a man sinks deeply into 
 himself to discover the grounds upon which to 
 think and act, he not only finds his own opinions 
 to diverge from those of others, but he also gathers 
 courage for his own convictions. Such was the 
 experience of Wordsworth in the time of the 
 Revolution. But while the insecure equilibrium 
 and the maladjustments of the times encouraged 
 and reinforced the expression of personal experience, 
 they also tended to produce the excess of individual- 
 ism, false perspectives of life, wild theories and 
 unattainable ideals. They account in part, it has 
 been alleged and rightly, for the incoherencies of 
 
THE MAN AND HIS TIMES 23 
 
 Shelley and the terrific convulsions of Byron. But S 
 do they not also in part account for .the "amazing 
 inequalities" in Wordsworth that have been the 
 wonder of critics from that day to this? It is the 
 misfortune, or the fortune, of the great and the 
 good to understand the burdens and the sorrows 
 of a people and to bear those burdens and sorrows 
 in their own hearts. (Is it not indeed by virtue of 
 this sympathetic understanding and this burden- 
 bearing that posterity gives them the title of great- 
 ness and goodness?) And when those burdens are 
 exceptionally heavy and those sorrows profoundly 
 deep, do they not leave their scars in the characters 
 of even the greatest? As our theme unfolds, we 
 shall be ^able to watch the dramatic interplay of 
 the spirit of the times and the character of the man 
 until we arrive at the psychological and mystical 
 attitude toward life that is both characteristic of 
 the man and a natural outcome of the troubled 
 times in which he lived. 
 
 Since we have now before us the chief character- 
 istics of the times, let us next consider the qualities 
 of mind that were original with Wordsworth ( 
 and that remained a personal possession with him 
 through life. The powers that were given to him 
 by nature and inheritance were the powers of 
 passion with extreme sensitiveness, and volition 
 
24 WORDSWORTH 
 
 with a moral predisposition. Like our formula for 
 the spirit of the times, this is not intended to be 
 a complete formulation of all of Wordsworth's 
 excellent gifts of mind. Besides these, for example, 
 ( he possessed an imagination that was not only 
 ; "essentially scientific, and quite unlike the fancy 
 that decorates and falsifies fact to gratify an idle 
 mind with a sense of neatness and ingenuity," but 
 an imagination that was penetrating and con- 
 templative and that saw, in a very great measure, 
 the "soul of truth in every part" of the object of 
 its vision. Yet, though it is hard to establish 
 precedences in the order of development, it seems 
 to be peculiarly true of Wordsworth that his 
 imagination is the product of these more elemental 
 powers of our formula. At any rate, it is the com- 
 bination of these elemental powers which furnish 
 the nucleus of his moral and intellectual being and 
 give the key to his character. 
 
 In writing to a friend in 1792, the sister of 
 Wordsworth says, "William has .... a sort of 
 violence of affection, if I may so term it, which 
 demonstrates itself every moment of the day, when 
 the objects of his afifection are present with him, 
 in a thousand almost imperceptible attentions to 
 their wishes, in a sort of restless watchfulness 
 which I know not how to describe, a tenderness 
 
THE MAN AND HIS TIMES 25 
 
 that never sleeps." With keen penetration Miss 
 Wordsworth points out the basic elements in the 
 character of her brother. "Restless watchfulness," 
 "a tenderness that never sleeps," and "violence of 
 affection" are the chief characteristics of it. The 
 key words are watchfulness, tenderness, and vio- 
 lence. And this characterization accords remark- 
 ably with Wordsworth's description of his own 
 childhood character, given to his intended biog- 
 rapher many years later. He says, "I was of a 
 stifif, moody, violent temper." Allowing for some 
 freedom in the use of terms, these characteristics 
 may be respectively dignified (as, indeed, they were 
 dignified in Wordsworth's manhood) into volition, 
 sensitiveness, and passion. The stiffness of temper 
 of his childhood grew into the "restless watchful- 
 ness" of his youth, and matured into that thorough- 
 going volition which directed the events of his 
 whole after-life; the moodiness of his childhood 
 grew, under the forming agency of the will, into 
 the "tenderness that never sleeps" of his youth, and 
 flowered into that exquisite sensitiveness character- 
 istic of his whole subsequent career; while the 
 violent temper of his childhood grew into the 
 "violent affections" of his youth, and, tempered In' 
 the influence of a masterful will, finally bore fruit 
 a hundred fold in the deepest and most thoroughly 
 
26 WORDSWORTH 
 
 subdued passions of any literary man in the world. 
 Passion, sensitiveness, volition — these were the 
 powers that were with him when a child hidden 
 away among the silences of the Westmoreland hills, 
 long before the terrible rumblings of the French 
 Revolution broke upon his ears. Wordsworth 
 attests to the possession of them in his childhood : 
 
 I cannot paint (he says) 
 What then I was. The sounding cataract 
 Haunted me like a passion ; the tall rock, 
 The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, 
 Their colors and their forms, were then to me 
 An appetite ; a feeling and a love, 
 That had no need of a remoter charm, 
 By thought supplied, nor any interest 
 Unborrowed from the eye. 
 
 There were not only "aching joys" and "dizzy 
 raptures" with the child, but he was strangely 
 sensitive to all objects. Before he was ten years 
 old he would range through half the night among 
 the mountain slopes and on the "open heights where 
 woodcocks run along the smooth green turf," and 
 would ply his anxious visitation : 
 
 Sometimes it befell 
 In those night wanderings, that a strong desire 
 O'erpowered my better reasoh, and the bird 
 Which was the captive of another's toil 
 Became my prey; and when the deed was done 
 
THE MAN AND HIS TIMES 27 
 
 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. 
 
 This not only expresses the child's sensitiveness 
 ■of mind, but also contains the germ of a moral 
 disposition. The silent steps, the sounds of un- 
 distinguishable motion and the low breathings 
 ■coming after him were due mainly to the deed he 
 had committed. In speaking of a time before he 
 ■was seventeen, he says : 
 
 But let this 
 
 Be not forgotten, that I still retained 
 
 My first creative sensibility ; 
 
 That by the regular action of the world 
 
 My soul was unsubdued. 
 
 Tie not only retained his creative sensibility 
 throughout, but he very early in youth learned 
 through the strength of his will to keep his soul 
 from being subdued "by the regular action of the 
 world." And in the earliest of those days his strong 
 will, similar to that of other boys with strong wills, 
 manifested itself in the form of wilfulness and 
 even stubbornness. His mother once told an 
 intimate friend of hers that the only one of her 
 five children about whose future life she was 
 anxious was William, and that he would be remark- 
 able either for good or for evil. But the deposit of 
 
28 WORDSWORTH 
 
 moral conviction in his constitution was easily 
 sufficient to save him from his mother's anxious, 
 fears and to give him not only the will to live, but 
 to live morally, to realize the better alternative of 
 his mother's prophecy, and become remarkable only 
 for good. 
 
 These same powers of passion, sensitiveness and 
 volition were with him in his youth. If any further 
 testimony than that of his sister, which is clear 
 and unmistakable, is needed, it can be found in his 
 early attitude toward the French Revolution. It 
 especially illustrates his volitional activity. We 
 all know the difference in effect on us of two 
 characters, one of whom orders the activities of 
 his life toward some definite end and always moves 
 in a straight line when the direction is once chosen, 
 and the other of whom is frequently at variance 
 with himself and is easily turned from any course 
 by accident or circumstance. The first impresses 
 us as having will and volition. The latter as lack- 
 ing will and volition. Now, Wordsworth, whose 
 temperament from childhood was somewhat "stiff," 
 was very slow in choosing a direction of activity, 
 but when it was once chosen he held to it with a 
 tenacity equalled by very few men. As the 
 Prelude shows and as Myers in his book on Words- 
 worth has well demonstrated, Wordsworth for a 
 
THE MAN AND HIS TIMES 29 
 
 time accepted the French Revolution as a matter 
 of course, without being deeply stirred. But even 
 after he was thoroughly aroused and his "inmost 
 soul was agitated," and he could almost 
 
 Have prayed that throughout earth upon all men, 
 ....The gift of tongues might fall, and power arrive 
 
 From the four quarters of the winds to do 
 
 For France, what without help she could not do, 
 
 A work of honor ; — 
 
 •even then he was slow to throw himself into the 
 cause. He checked and interrogated his emotions. 
 It was his wont always to hold his erhotions in 
 restraint. He would not decide blindly, he would 
 wait for light : 
 
 A mind whose rest 
 
 Is where it ought to be, in self-restraint. 
 
 In circumspection and simplicity. 
 
 Falls rarely in entire discomfiture 
 
 Below its aim, or meets with, from without, 
 
 A treachery that fails it or defeats. 
 
 But finally, when he felt sure of the worthiness of 
 the cause, he gave himself, not partly or stingily, 
 iDut whole-heartedly, to it. He was then for France, 
 out and out. And when once this decision had 
 been reached, no one but as strong-willed and 
 resolute a person as Wordsworth himself can 
 realize what a shock his moral and sensitive nature 
 must have sustained when his hopes for France 
 
30 • WORDSWORTH 
 
 were blasted. Wordsworth was a man who 
 accepted great human issues seriously. He believed 
 in what truth he possessed as few men believe in 
 truth. And when once in his life he was compelled 
 to witness the complete and absolute failure of 
 his highest hopes, it was by means of a slow and 
 painful process that he readjusted himself tO' 
 another course. Had his desire to see the truth 
 victorious been less intense, had the issues at stake 
 in France been taken to heart less seriously, had 
 his will in the matter been less strong, he would 
 have passed through the moral crisis with cor- 
 respondingly greater ease. So important is this- 
 crisis that it must be considered more in detail in 
 another connection. It has been cited here merely- 
 as a proof of Wordsworth's tenacity of mind and 
 unexcelled volitional and moral temper in youth. 
 But these same powers of passion with sensitive- 
 ness and volition with a moral predisposition were 
 with him in his mature years and manifest them- 
 selves in his maturest works. Though we cannot 
 pluck the heart out of Wordsworth's mystery, it 
 is quite certain that it lies in the direction of his. 
 wonderful sensitiveness to the simple and elemental 
 forces of life, his insight into them, his firm grasp 
 on them, and his power of compelling the reader 
 to feel them, colored as they always are by his own 
 
THE MAN AND HIS TIMES 31 
 
 moral disposition. The following familiar passage : 
 
 I have felt 
 A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
 Of elevated thoughts ; 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 the mind of man ; 
 A motion and a spirit that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts 
 And rolls through all things — 
 
 does not primarily owe its strength and wonder 
 to any new and original philosophical conception 
 imderlying it. The conception that there is a uni- 
 fied and living spirit back of all things and in and 
 through all things, is as old as the thinking race. 
 But this passage owes its uniqueness and fame 
 almost wholly to the mysterious vitality of volition. 
 The power of it is due to the intimacy of the 
 presence, to the fact that the presence disturbs one's 
 inmost being. One is compelled to feel the motion 
 and the spirit that impels, all things. If there is 
 any new philosophical conception here at all, it is 
 the conception of vital movement — of attributing 
 volition to the goings-on of the universe. It should 
 be remembered that the chief part of Wordsworth's 
 definition of a poet, is, that he is "a man pleased 
 with his own passions and volitions, and who re- 
 
22 WORDSWORTH 
 
 joices more than other men in the spirit of life 
 that is in him ; delighting to contemplate similar 
 volitions and passions as manifested in the 
 goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled 
 to create them where he does not find them." And 
 this passage of poetry is an illustration of his 
 definition. It deepens immeasurably one's sense 
 of the vital and sublime energies of volition — 
 volition in the vast spaces of the universe without 
 and in the heart and mind of man within. It is 
 not dramatic, but it is dynamic ; and, though 
 Wordsworth possessed little of the power of char- 
 acterization and dramatic presentation, there is, 
 nevertheless, an undercurrent of motion in his 
 poetry which is at once an essential source of his 
 power. It seems to be a sublimation of activit}' 
 but expressed with such a strong grasp on reality 
 that its force is extremely effective. 
 
 In the little poem, "She Was a Phantom," there 
 is drawn a woman that is "a spirit, yet a woman too" : 
 
 She was a Phantom of delight 
 
 When first she gleamed upon my sight. 
 
 This character does not impress one with the 
 (|ualities of color, concreteness, flesh and blood, 
 and the like, for she is too phantom-like and 
 sublimated to possess these qualities. But she 
 impresses one with a very different kind of 
 
THE MAN AND HIS TIMES 33 
 
 reality. She "gleams" upon one's sight. There is 
 intense and vital movement inherent in 
 
 Her household motions light and free 
 And steps of virgin liberty — 
 
 and the vitality of her motions is directly felt as 
 a reality by the reader. She is 
 
 A perfect woman, nobly planned 
 To warn, to comfort, and command. 
 
 She is at once the embodiment of spiritual sublima- 
 tion and reality, and her power over us lies in the 
 complete fusion of these two opposite forces in her 
 character by means of the mysterious vitality and 
 intensity of the poet's volition. 
 
 It may be remarked, in passing, that perhaps 
 the most favorite words of Wordsworth, especially 
 during the period of his greatest literary production, 
 are the words "motion" and "gleam" with their 
 \arious adjectival and verbal forms, together with 
 words of kindred meaning — words at once dynamic 
 and volitional. In addition to the examples already 
 given, a few more must suffice: 
 
 To cut across the reflex of a star 
 
 That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed 
 
 Upon the glassy plain. 
 
 Even then I felt 
 
 Gleams like the flashing of a shield. 
 
-34 WORDSWORTH 
 
 And add the gleam, 
 
 The light that never was, on sea or land. 
 
 Lighted by gleams of moonlight from the sea 
 We beat with thundering hoofs the level sand. 
 
 Now is crossed by gleatn 
 V Of his own image, by a sunbeam now 
 
 And wavering motions sent he knows not whence. 
 
 Sounds of undistinguishable motion — 
 
 No motion but the moving tide, a breeze — 
 
 All the shadowy banks on either side 
 
 Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still 
 
 The rapid line of motion. 
 
 Ye motions of delight that haunt the sides 
 Of the green hills. 
 
 From the blessed power that rolls 
 About, below, above. 
 
 No motion has she now, no force. 
 She neither hears nor sees. 
 Rolled round in earth's diurnal course 
 With rocks, and stones, and trees. 
 
 Those hallowed and pure motions of the sense — 
 
 On the first motion of a holy thought — 
 
 And all the tender motions of the soul — 
 
 Thou Soul that art the eternity of thought 
 That gives to forms and images a breath 
 And everlasting motion. 
 
THE MAN AND HIS TIMES 35 
 
 Listen ! the mighty Being is awake, 
 And doth with his eternal motion make 
 A sound like thunder — everlastingly. 
 
 This list might very easily be extended. Too 
 much emphasis, however, should not be placed 
 upon the point that these are favorite words with 
 Wordsworth. And unless the point immediately 
 commends itself to the student familiar with 
 Wordsworth's poetry, it is of little value. It can 
 nevertheless be seen from these passages that 
 W.ordsworth, in a very peculiar sense, attributes 
 vital movement, not only to all the objects of the 
 outer world, but also to the senses, the thoughts, 
 and the soul of man, and even to God. And the 
 mere act of pronouncing repeatedly the words, 
 "gleam" and "motion" and "roll" in the sense 
 Wordsworth uses them, gives a healthy and volun- 
 tary thrill to the soul. 
 
 In the great lyrical poetry of Wordsworth, then, 
 there is not the purely lyrical strain which arises ( 
 simply from a mood or a feeling. Nor in his great 
 narrative poetry is there anything like the purely 
 dramatic power. But alike in both his lyrical and 
 narrative poetry there is a union of feeling and 
 force, of mood and self-control, of emotion and 
 volition. 
 
36 WORDSWORTH 
 
 r 
 / And volition has two functions to fulfil in 
 
 the production of Wordsworth's poetry. He him- 
 self says that "poetry is the spontaneous over- 
 flow of powerful feelings : it takes its origin from 
 emotion recollected in tranquility ; the emotion is 
 contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the 
 tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, 
 kindred to that which was before the subject of 
 contemplation, is gradually produced, and does it- 
 self actually exist in the mind. In this mood 
 successful composition generally begins and in a 
 mood similar to this it is carried on." First, the 
 will, by a species of reaction, whips a recollected 
 emotion into a state of excitement, and secondly, 
 the overflow of the powerful emotion thus excited 
 must be held under restraint as it enters into the 
 making of a poetic composition. Though this theory 
 for the production of poetry is by no means true for 
 the production of all successful composition, it is 
 certainly a careful and exact transcript of what 
 took place in the conscious part of Wordsworth's 
 own mind. And since it is not merely the descrip- 
 tion of an intellectual process, but involves the 
 activities of passion and volition as well as intellect, 
 it offers an excellent insight into Wordsworth's 
 whole nature and character. His was a life of 
 continuous "high endeavors" at "plain living and 
 
THE MAN AND HIS TIMES - 37 
 
 high thinking," conscious and purposive. To every- 
 thing he did he imparted a touch of volition. Even 
 his "wise passiveness'' requires a certain mental 
 alertness that does not belong to a lazy man, since 
 it iM'esupposes more or less conscious effort. In 
 the early days of Wordsworthian criticism Anbrey 
 De \'ere made a noble plea for Wordsworth's 
 possession of passion. He says, "The whole of 
 Wordsworth's nature was impassioned, body and 
 spirit, intellect and imagination." The reason for 
 the necessity for such a plea was that Wordsworth 
 was so completely the master of his passions that 
 unsympathetic critics at once alleged that he did 
 not possess any. In Wordsworth's mature years 
 the will always dominates the feelings. "There is 
 volition and self-government in every line of his 
 poetry," says Hutton, and there is likewise volition 
 and self-government in every act of his life. It is 
 with him as though there were a great underground 
 reservoir of passion. But the reservoir is so deeply 
 and firmly set in adamant that there is no possible 
 chance for an explosion to occur. 
 
 There is something of the wariness of a logician 
 in Wordsworth's statement. "Had I been a writer 
 of love-poetry it would have been natural to me 
 to write with a degree of warmth which could 
 hardly have been approved by my principles, and 
 
38 WORDSWORTH 
 
 which might have been undesirable for the reader." 
 Like the logician who is, more than others, con- 
 scious of the limitations of logic, Wordsworth, the 
 man of volitions and self-government, is constantly 
 aware of the limits of the power of self-control ; 
 and like the logician again who is forever dealing 
 with matter that is refractory to logic, Wordsworth 
 is always dealing with forces that lie just outside 
 of his control, with intuitive impulses, with acts 
 in which "we associate ideas in a state of excite- 
 ment," with half-conscious forces that are defiant 
 to the subordination of the mind, yet do not over- 
 whelm its conscious self-possession. In close juxta- 
 position to a passage in the Fourth Book of the 
 Prelude in which he emphasizes the independent 
 and self-directing power of the soul — 
 
 How life pervades the undecaying mind; 
 How the immortal soul with God-like power 
 Informs, creates, and thaws the deepest sleep 
 That time can lay upon her — 
 
 there is this passage, which tells of half-conscious 
 influences, to the finer influx of which his sensitive 
 "mind lay open to a more exact and close com- 
 munion" : 
 
 Around me from among the hazel leaves, 
 
 Now here, now there, moved by the straggling wind. 
 
THE MAN AND HIS TIMES 39 
 
 Came ever and anon a breath-like sound, 
 Quick as the pantings of a faithful dog, 
 The off-and-on companion of my walk; 
 And such, at times, believing them to be, 
 I turned my head to look if he were there ; 
 Then into solemn thought I passed once more. 
 
 With the soul's subordination of powers like these 
 — pervasive, yet only half-conscious — Wordsworth 
 was constantly dealing, but with the passion of 
 love, which is sufficiently strong and self-conscious 
 to require a degree of warmth in treatment that 
 could hardly be approved by his principles, and 
 which is likely to invade the power of self- 
 control, he refused to deal directly. Though he 
 acknowledged that 
 
 Love, blessed Love is everywhere 
 The spirit of my song — 
 
 yet he preferred to keep so far from the border line 
 of conflict between passionate love and self-control 
 that he would always be absolutely sure of the 
 supremacy of the latter. But he who would aspire 
 to fathom the "depth" of the human soul and at the 
 same time remain human-hearted, must also be 
 willing to sound its "tumult." Wordsworth, how- 
 ever, consistently refused to do the latter, which 
 resulted not only in a distinct loss of human- 
 heartedness, but also in the gain of a certain con- 
 
40 WORDSWORTH 
 
 scious self-mastery which is at once the source of 
 both his weakness and his strength, 
 
 A precaution must be thrown out at this point. 
 It is not intended in these pages to convey the 
 idea that Wordsworth's best and most character- 
 istic poems were the product of self-directed effort 
 and the "conscious conquests of insight." There 
 is at bottom no contradiction in saying that there 
 is volition and self-government in every line of his 
 poetry and that at the same time in his best poetry 
 nature not only gave him the matter of his best 
 poems, but also wrote his poems for him. For, 
 just as psychologists of late years have disproved 
 the old idea that animals have more instincts than 
 man, and have shown that man's richer nature has 
 a much greater variety of instincts than animals 
 and besides possesses higher powers of reason 
 which overlay those instincts and of which animals 
 know very little ; so it may be conceived analo- 
 gously that a nature like Wordsworth's may have 
 a great variety of instinctive and spontaneous qual- 
 ities and still possess a more than usual amount of 
 self-consciousness and self-government, overlaying, 
 as it were, those spontaneous activities. Self- 
 possession and spontaneity are thus not mutually 
 exclusive, but may both be abounding in a genius 
 of a volitional type. This seems to be the truth in 
 
THE MAN AND HIS TIMES ■ 41 
 
 the case of Wordsworth. His strength, frorii this 
 point of view, lies in the happy co-operation, at rare 
 moments, of self-possession and spontaneity. This 
 co-operation is of such a rare and generally 
 unattainable sort that we should not expect 
 Wordsworth to attain to it always, but to fail at 
 times, as indeed he does, on the side of spontaneity. 
 How^ these unconscious and spontaneous elements 
 are wrought into artistic structures we may never 
 know from the very fact that they are unconscious 
 and spontaneous. In his prefaces to his poems 
 Wordsworth does not make enough allowance for 
 the part they actually play in the making of his^ 
 poetry. But in those same prefaces, on the other 
 hand, he gives the most accurate and profound 
 descriptions of what took place consciously in his ( 
 own mind, and, as such, the prefaces are invaluable,./ 
 not only as a criticism of the conscious side of his 
 art, but as giving us excellent insights into his 
 character. 
 
 We have now seen that the powers that were- 
 with Wordsworth in childhood, in youth, and in 
 his luature life, were the powers of passion with 
 extreme sensitiveness, and volition with a moral ( 
 predisposition ; that these powers were the nucleus / 
 of his moral and intellectual being and are the key ' 
 to his character. We have also seen that the spirit 
 
42 WORDSWORTH 
 
 of the times in which Wordsworth Hved was a/ 
 spirit of revolution with serious efforts of men to\ 
 readjust society on a higher level, and a spirit off 
 personal liberty resulting in a wide divergence in 
 the expression of personal experience. How these 
 forces conspired together in developing the theory 
 of childhood memories is to be the theme of the 
 next chapter of this study. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD: THEIR 
 DEVELOPMENT 
 
 When Wordsworth, in his mature years, looked 
 back over the passionate life of his childhood he 
 felt that he had then lived too much the life of 
 the senses. He says in the Prelude : 
 
 I speak in recollection of a time 
 When the bodily eye, in every stage of life 
 The most despotic of our senses, gained 
 Such strength in vie as often held my mind 
 In absolute dominion. 
 
 He very kindly and genially ascribes his mind's 
 redemption from this thralldom to the powers of 
 nature, and suggests that if he cared to enter upon 
 ^'abtruser argument," he could "unfold the means 
 which nature studiously employs to thwart this 
 tyranny." Whatever the agency by which this 
 tyranny was thwarted, it is quite certain that by 
 the time he was writing the Prelude his own mind 
 was a safeguard against any such tyranny, and 
 that, too, without the agency of natural forces. 
 
44 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Just as he resisted the power of passionate love 
 to master his will, so he carefully guarded against 
 the despotism of the senses and even looked with 
 a jealous eye upon their despotism in his childhood. 
 He had now shaken off the domineering habit o£ 
 the senses : 
 
 I had known 
 Too forcibly, too early in my life, 
 Visitings of imaginative power 
 For this to last : I shook the habit off 
 Entirely and forever, and again 
 In Nature's presence stood, as now I stand, 
 A sensitive being, a creative soul. 
 
 And he had now become the example of his own 
 text : 
 
 Man, if he do but live within the light 
 Of high endeavors, daily spreads abroad 
 His being armed with strength that cannot fail. 
 
 With a mind that was sensitive and creative and 
 that constantly lived in the light of high endeavors,. 
 Wordsworth had attained to a large and glorious 
 personal freedom. He was like a man on a high 
 eminence overlooking a broad expanse of country. 
 The slightest change of position presents views of 
 objects remote from each other and varied in kind 
 and nature. He was like the Solitary of his ownr 
 Excursion, who in the wilds of America 
 
MEMORIES Of CHILDHOOD 45 
 
 Having gained the top 
 Of some commanding eminence, which yet 
 Intruder ne'er beheld, he thence surveys 
 Regions of wood and wide savannah, vast 
 Expanse of unappropriated earth. 
 With mind that sheds a light on what he sees ; 
 Free as the sun and lonely as the sun. 
 Pouring above his head its radiance down 
 Upon a living and rejoicing world ! 
 
 And thus, with a mind that shed light on what it 
 •saw and that was as free as the sun and oftentimes 
 as lonely as the sun, Wordsworth had attained a 
 high vantage ground from which to explore nature 
 and human life. But in this unusual self-mastery 
 •of his there was wrapped up the weakness of the 
 man as well as his strength. And among those 
 weaknesses is certainly that of arbitrariness. 
 Arbitrary rule is dangerous even though its do- 
 minion extends only over one's personal being. 
 Having controlled the despotism of the senses in 
 ■childhood and the passions and loves of youth, 
 volition now was "free as the sun" and often acted 
 arbitrarily. 
 
 There is, of course, a certain amount of arbitrari- 
 ness in all human natures, as Wordsworth was well 
 aware. He illustrates the presence of this principle 
 in children in the poem, "Anecdote for Fathers." 
 When the five-year-old child in the poem is pressed 
 
46 WORDSWORTH 
 
 for a reason why he would rather be at Kilve than 
 at Liswynfarm, he suddenly catches sight of a 
 weather-cock, and in order to evade further ques- 
 tioning he arbitrarily answers : 
 
 At Kilve there was no weather-cock; 
 And that's the reason why. 
 
 This principle of arbitrariness is again illustrated 
 in a sonnet the incident of which was drawn from 
 Wordsworth's own experience. He once stood by 
 a harbor that was sprinkled with ships far and nigh. 
 But suddenly, and with no explainable reason, he 
 fixed his eye upon one goodly vessel : 
 
 This Ship was naught to me, nor I to her. 
 Yet I pursued her with a Lover's look ; 
 This Ship to all the rest did I prefer. 
 
 He not only preferred to single out a particular 
 ship with the eye, which in itself were a trivial 
 matter, but in weightier affairs, he showed decided 
 preferences rather arbitrarily. His choice of books, 
 his judgment of contemporary authors, his selection 
 of subject matter for poetry, his preference for 
 certain regions of thought — all bear more or less 
 the marks of arbitrary choice. Though not always, 
 he often followed the line of least resistance. But 
 when once the direction was chosen, he followed it 
 resolutely and persistently to the end. His volition 
 focused his feelings and imagination on single ob- 
 
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 47 
 
 jects of perception and thought until those objects 
 became vivid realities to him and gave up, as he 
 felt, their secret meaning. 
 
 Now, from the extraordinary frequency with 
 which allusions are made to his childhood in 
 Wordsworth's poetry, it may be suspected that he 
 chose somewhat arbitrarily to vivify in his later life 
 the memories of that childhood. We are strength- 
 ened in our suspicion when we consider with what 
 interest, or rather with what lack of interest, he 
 regarded the period of his life between childhood 
 and maturity. To be sure in the Books from the 
 Third to the Sixth, inclusive, of the Prelude, in 
 which poem he deliberately sets out to trace thej 
 growth of a poetic mind from childhood to maturity, 
 •there is considerable said about adolescence and 
 maturing youth. But even here, especially in the 
 Fourth and Fifth Books, he has a tendency often 
 to slip back into the period of "our simple child- 
 hood," which "sits upon a throne that hath more 
 power than all the elements." Again and again 
 he returns to this point of view. Even in the 
 Eighth Book, where according to the natural evolu- 
 tion of the poem he should have passed this period, 
 he not only gives a long retrospective view of that 
 time when nature was "prized for her own sake" 
 and became his joy, but he describes the qualities 
 
48 WORDSWORTH 
 
 of childhood fancies at great length. In the Twelfth 
 and Thirteenth Books, where one wonld think 
 surely he had done with the subject, he turns upon 
 it more strongly than ever in his attempt to explain 
 the mystery of imagination and taste. He exclaims : 
 
 Oh ! mystery of man, from w hat a depth 
 Proceed thy honors ! I am lost, but see 
 In simple childhood something of the base 
 On which thy greatness stands. 
 
 In fact, with the exception of the Seventh Book, 
 which describes his residence in London and which 
 is perhaps the dullest book in the Prelude, and 
 the Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Books, into which 
 political considerations enter, the Prelude con- 
 tinually eddies about the idea of childhood and 
 never really passes beyond it. 
 
 Outside of his inner communings with himself 
 and nature which he had begun in his childhood, 
 Wordsworth has little to say about his college life 
 and vacations that is instructive and inspiring. As 
 if by a preconception that this life can be made up 
 of nothing but superficialities and conventions, he 
 seems resohitely to have set his mind against it. 
 We grant that at Cambridge in Wordsworth's time 
 and at all colleges in his time and in our time, too, 
 there is a vast deal of life that never goes below 
 the surface of things — shallow, mechanical, super- 
 
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 49 
 
 ficial, conventional, well-nigh dead. But we see, too, 
 that beneath this show of things, deep in the heart 
 of many an adolescent and growing youth there is 
 sincerity, freshness, vitality, genius — which qualities 
 this same college, or these same colleges, will help 
 to unfold and develop, if the youth but give them 
 a chance. And what revelations could a Words- 
 worth have made had he given himself to study 
 sympathetically some of these same growing and 
 unfolding youths — youths as interesting, one would 
 think, as Westmoreland dalesmen ! But Worth- 
 worth chose positively not to do this. To state 
 it more charitably, his austere and unbending nature 
 did not permit him to do it. Still more charitably, 
 he actually made efforts to do it ; but as he could 
 not do it sympathetically, his efforts were futile. 
 Of himself in those days he says : 
 
 My mind was at that time 
 A parti-coloured show of grave and gay. 
 Solid and light, shortsighted and profound ; 
 Of inconsiderate habits and sedate,' 
 Consorting in one mansion unreproved. 
 
 Of course, the gay, the light, the shortsightedness, 
 the inconsiderate habits, were the result of his 
 contact with the sort of society that he considered 
 contaminating. Its repellent force on him was 
 sufficiently strong to prevent him from penetrating 
 
 4 
 
50 WORDSWORTH 
 
 through it to the deeper life that lay hidden there. 
 It may be noted incidentally that Wordsworth 
 observed a duality existing in his nature at this 
 ' time ; but the gay and light self was so feeble in 
 him that it soon dwindled away and died a natural 
 death. This death, however, could not have taken 
 place had Wordsworth not been far less interested 
 in his college experiences than in the experiences 
 of his childhood. He says somewhat indifferently: 
 
 Not seeking those who might participate 
 My deeper pleasures, .... easily I passed 
 From the remembrance of better things, 
 And slipped into ordinary works 
 
 Of careless youth, unburthened, and unalarmed 
 
 Companionships, 
 
 Friendships, acquaintances, were welcome all. 
 We sauntered, played, or rioted ; we talked 
 Unprofitable talk at morning hours ; 
 Drifted about along the streets and walks, 
 Read lazily in trivial books, went forth 
 To gallop through the country in blind zeal 
 Of senseless horsemanship, or on the breast 
 Of Cam sailed boisterously, and let the stars 
 Come forth perhaps without one quiet thought. 
 
 It is highly instructive to contrast this allusion to 
 sailing boisterously "on the breast of Cam" and 
 letting the "stars come forth perhaps without one 
 quiet thought," with the description in the First 
 
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 51 
 
 Book of the Prelude of sailing in an "elfin pinnace," 
 which boat moved on, 
 
 Leaving behind her still, on either side, 
 
 Small circles glittering idly in the moon, 
 
 Until they mettled all into one track 
 
 Of sparkling light. 
 
 It was not only the boisterous sailing on the breast 
 of Cam, but the companionships, the unprofitable 
 talk, the reading of trivial books, the senseless- 
 horsemanship — these all were matters of indiffer- 
 ence to him ; and the fact that they were so, 
 produced a sort of a gap in the otherwise con- 
 tinuousness of his life. A link between his child- 
 hood and manhood was lost, which void gave rise 
 to a sense of double consciousness, a consciousness 
 of himself and some other Being: 
 
 So wide appears 
 The vacancy between me and those days 
 Which yet have such self-presence in my mind 
 That, musing on them, often do I seem 
 Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself 
 And of some other Being. 
 
 There is an important psychological observation 
 underlying this passage. The claim for Words- 
 worth that he is a philosopher has often been 
 challenged, but it has never been disputed that 
 he is the keenest of psychologists. One of the 
 professed purposes of his work was to trace "the 
 
52 WORDSWORTH 
 
 primary laws of our nature, chiefly, as far as regards 
 the manner in which we associate ideas in a state 
 of excitement." He was both an experimental and 
 an introspective psychologist. Although antedating 
 modern science and modern scientific methods, he 
 put such a series of questions to children and 
 peasants about their reasons for things that would 
 do justice to a modern psychological questionairee : 
 
 When I began to enquire. 
 
 To watch and question those I met and speak 
 
 Without reserve to them, the lonely roads 
 
 Were open schools in which I daily read, 
 
 With most delight the passions of mankind, 
 
 Whether by words, looks, sighs, or tears, revealed ; 
 
 There saw into the depth of human souls. 
 
 Souls that appeared to have no depth at all 
 
 To careless eyes. 
 
 Wordsworth was introspective also, and when he 
 writes such an introspective passage as the second 
 above, we must look carefully into its psychological 
 import. It is a simple fact of psychology that when 
 any memory images are recalled and brooded over 
 they become more vivid and lifelike than ordinary 
 memory images, and can be made as vivid and life- 
 like as the images of immediate perception. Our 
 theory thus far has been that Wordsworth, 
 following somewhat the line of least resistance, 
 deliberatelv and arbitrarilv vivified the "remem- 
 
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 53 
 
 brance of those long past hours" of childhood at 
 llie expense of the memories of adolescent years; 
 and that, as a consequence, the aggregate memories 
 of childhood stood in his mind somewhat apart; 
 from his ideas and images of immediate perception, 
 so that he simultaneously felt conscious of himself 
 and some other Being. 
 
 There is a curious affirmation of our theory in 
 a passage near the close of the Third Book of the 
 Prelude. After recounting a tournament of blows, 
 "feuds, factions, flatteries, enmity, guile, murmur- 
 ing, submission, bold government," and sundry 
 other uninteresting matters relating to college life, 
 Wordsworth says : 
 
 Of these and other kindred notices 
 
 I cannot say what portion is in truth 
 
 The naked recollection of that time, 
 
 And what may rather have been called to life 
 
 By after meditation. 
 
 This is an affirmation of our theory because one 
 can conceive of Wordsworth admitting the possi- 
 bility of mistake in such a judgment only in case 
 of a profound indifference to the subject in hand ; 
 it is a curious affirmation because there is not a 
 single admission of doubt anywhere in the Prelude 
 with regard to his childhood memories. The 
 intensitv with which Wordsworth brooded over his 
 
54 IVORDSJVORTH 
 
 childhood experience canceled all doubt that per- 
 haps some of the memories of them might have 
 been "called to life by after meditation." 
 
 The fact, however, that Wordsworth arbitrarily 
 vivified the memories of childhood is not a fact of 
 sufficient weight to account fully for this strangely 
 divided consciousness. There is a deeper cause for 
 it. There was another force that wrought in con- 
 junction with his will toward the same end. That 
 force was the great external fact of Wordsworth's 
 late youth and early manhood, the fact, namely, of 
 the French Revolution. During his adolescent 
 years and up to the dawn of his vital interest in 
 the Revolution, he was much given to introspective 
 tendencies. In the parts of the Prelude relating to 
 this period of time, are many passages that speak 
 of the "reasonings of the mind turned inward." 
 It was his wont to separate himself from his 
 companions and allow his "mind to turn into her- 
 self." He early discovered that 
 
 Caverns there are within my mind which sun 
 Could never penetrate. 
 
 But in early days of youth this tendency towards 
 introspection may easily become abnormal, and 
 there is a slight touch of the morbid and the hectic 
 in some of Wordsworth's youthful moodiness. 
 There existed in his mind, he says, at this time, 
 
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 5o 
 
 A treasonable growth 
 
 Of indecisive judgments, that impaired 
 
 And shook the mind's simplicity. 
 
 He slightly overstrained the instrument of intro- 
 spection that was to do such effective work in later 
 years. This excess, however, can easily be over- 
 looked in the light of the fact that he now also 
 perfected this instrument for future use. 
 
 But when, in his twenty-second year, Words- 
 
 / worth became vitally alive to the agitation, the 
 
 sorrow, and the terror of the Revolution, he was 
 
 completely, though slowly, taken out of himself. 
 
 His mind turned from within, outward : 
 
 I gradually withdrew 
 
 Into a noisier world, and thus ere long 
 Became a patriot ; and my heart was all 
 Given to the people, and my love was theirs. 
 
 And when later he was at the point of leaving 
 
 France, he assures us that he would 
 At this time with willing heart 
 Have undertaken for a cause so great 
 Service however dangerous. 
 
 And the only reason why he did not perform this 
 "service however dangerous" was that he was pre- 
 emptorily called home by his guardians. His sum- 
 mons home, however, did not lessen his enthusiasm 
 for the cause of the Revolution but rather 
 heightened it. It is a common experience that a 
 
56 WORDSWORTH 
 
 man's enthusiasm for a cause is heightened when 
 his hands are tied so that he cannot play the part 
 in it he has espoused in his heart. Wordsworth 
 had been at Orleans and had learned the local and 
 national characteristics of the French. He had been 
 at Blois and for three months had associated inti- 
 mately with Beaupuy, who opened his mind to 
 the real issues of the Revolution. He had seen the 
 hunger-bitten girl and the heifer, which incident 
 greatly enforced the arguments of Beaupuy that 
 a benignant spirit was abroad to destroy such 
 poverty; and Wordsworth's deepest chords of sym- 
 pathy were touched. He had accepted the Septem- 
 ber Massacre as a necessary violence during a 
 revolution, for, as he explained a little later, "n 
 time of revolution is not a season of true liberty." 
 He had been in Paris and had "passed the prison 
 where the unhappy Monarch lay," and that night 
 in a high and lonely room he had felt most deeply 
 in what world he was, what ground he trod on, 
 what air he breathed. He thought of the September 
 ]\lassacre and of the Monarch in the prison, and 
 conjured up similar scenes from "tragic fictions or 
 true history." "And in this way," he says. 
 
 I wrought upon myself 
 Until I seemed to hear the voice that cried 
 To the whole city, "Sleep no more." 
 
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD b7 
 
 He had already clearly perceived that the forces 
 at work in the Revolution did not arise in a day 
 and were not the harvest of "popular government 
 and equality," but he clearly saw 
 
 That neither these nor aught 
 Of wild belief engrafted on their names 
 By false philosophy had caused the woe, 
 But a terrific reservoir of guilt 
 And ignorance filled up from age to age 
 That could no longer hold its loathsome charge, 
 But burst and spread in deluge through the land. 
 
 What he did not perceive as clearly at this time 
 was that it would take as many ages for the 
 reservoir of guilt and ignorance to disappear as 
 it had been in filling up from age to age. He had, 
 on the contrary, looked for the immediate appear- 
 ance of a new and glorious era of liberty. 
 
 He had also revolved in his mind "how much 
 the destiny of man had still hung upon single 
 persons," and if perchance he himself were destined 
 by providence to lead the people through the 
 ])resent crisis, he would not thwart the designs of 
 providence, but would be ready for the sacrifice. 
 Reluctantly indeed, then, did he obey the summons 
 that called him back to England. When once at 
 home, he was unable to act, but was given much 
 time to meditate. Then it was that the full power 
 and the spirit of the Revolution reverberated 
 
S8 WORDSWORTH 
 
 through his whole sensitive nature. His senses and 
 feelings and moral being were as alive to the issues 
 of the Revolution as they had ever been to the 
 forces of nature. He was filled with the highest 
 hopes and the most sanguine aspirations ; but these 
 hopes and aspirations were soon doomed to dis- 
 appointment. It was only a few months after this 
 that England declared war against the French 
 Revolutionists, and Wordsworth's moral nature 
 was given its first great shock : 
 
 No shock 
 
 Given to my moral nature had I known 
 Down to that very moment; neither lapse 
 Nor turn of sentiment that might be named 
 A revolution, save at this one time ; 
 All else was progress on the self-same path ' 
 
 , On which with a diversity of pace 
 
 I had been travelling; this a stride at once 
 Into another region. 
 
 But the stride was not as swift as one would 
 surmise from this passage. Wordsworth's affections 
 'for his native country and his native soil were of 
 slow growth and were deeply rooted. And slowly 
 and painfully his alienation wrought itself into his 
 character. 
 
 But a second shock was awaiting him. It came 
 when the French Revolutionists took aggressive 
 steps in subduing the efforts made for liberty in 
 
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 59 
 
 Switzerland. France herself was abandoning the 
 cause of human liberty, and Wordsworth's sym- 
 pathies were alienated : 
 
 Frenchmen had changed a war of self-defence 
 For one of conquest, losing sight of all 
 Which they had struggled for. 
 
 Cut ofT from sympathy with his own coimtry and 
 with the country whose cause he had espoused, he 
 was thrown back into himself more violently and 
 more completely than he had been taken out of 
 himself. For a number of years his depression was 
 as great as his hopes and aspirations had been high. 
 Were all his aspirations for the relief of suffering 
 humanity vain and foolish? Were there no grounds 
 at all for the confidence he placed in human good? 
 Was he, then, utterly wrong in his social and 
 political ideals, and was life after all nothing but 
 an empty mockery? These questions demanded 
 answers. For Wordsworth there was just one 
 method of finding answers to them and of escaping 
 from his depression, the method, namely, of asso- 
 ciating with the simple life and society of his early 
 surroundings. Unfortunately this method was 
 remote from his thoughts at first and he attempted 
 another way of escape. He tried to find solace 
 for his tempest-tossed soul in the speculative 
 philosophies of his day : 
 
6o WORDSWORTH 
 
 This was the time, when, all things tending fast 
 To depravation, speculative schemes — 
 That promised to abstract the hopes of Man 
 Out of his feelings, to be fixed thenceforth 
 Forever in a purer element — 
 Found ready welcome. 
 
 But in that speculative scheming which promised' 
 to abstract the hopes of Man out of his feelings- 
 Wordsworth was wholly outside of his natural 
 sphere. Perhaps none of the world's great geniuses 
 have been more helpless than Wordsworth in mere 
 abstract speculation. Here he was not only "out 
 of the pale of love," his sentiment "soured and 
 corrupted, upwards to the source,"' but he was 
 really doing violence to his nature, his affections 
 and his powers. And the result of this prolonged 
 experience was that he lost 
 
 All feeling of conviction, and, in fine. 
 Sick, wearied out with contrarities. 
 Yielded up moral questions in despair. 
 
 This was the "soul's last and lowest ebb," and 
 he turned for a time to the study of abstract 
 science with the faint hope that his mind might 
 be drawn away from the dark moral questions that 
 had haunted it. 
 
 But now he had come to live with his sister. 
 and her association, together with the surroundings 
 of simple life and nature, began to be a healing 
 
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 6l 
 
 "balm to the wounds of his mind, and gradually, 
 as by inches, he recovered from his depression. 
 As the process went on, memories of his early 
 childhood joys, sweet and strong, came trooping 
 into his mind. Associations with familiar haunts 
 of childhood vividly recalled many memories that 
 had been these years slumbering but half con- 
 sciously in his mind. In the presence of these new 
 joys of childhood memories, the immediate past 
 became almost as a blank to him. His voluntary 
 indifference to his college experiences and the tragic 
 reaction of his interest in the Revolution, that is, 
 the character of the man and the spirit of the times, 
 wrought together to cut his life, as it were, in 
 twain, and the days of his childhood stood out in 
 bold relief from the rest of his life. They were 
 now the only memories of the past that he could 
 associate with all that he held most dear. Separated 
 from him in point of time, they stood in his mind 
 as an aggregate whole distinctly apart from his 
 ideas and images of immediate perception. "So 
 wide appears the vacancy between me and those 
 days," it will be remembered the passage runs, that 
 "often do I seem two consciousnesses, conscious 
 -of myself and of some other Being." What a unique 
 :and interested bit of psychology is this when viewed 
 in the right perspective ! 
 
62 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Since these childhood memories were the most 
 sacred things of the past to him he would cling to 
 them as to life, and with that frugality of mind 
 which loses no opportunities, he would turn them, 
 to the best account. So he cherished them and 
 nurtured them all back to life, and they became 
 to him a living and vital reality. It is not to> 
 be wondered at, then, as he came back into the 
 same surroundings and atmosphere in which he 
 had spent his passionate life of childhood, and heard 
 the same sounds and saw the same sights over 
 again that he had seen and heard in those early 
 days, that he would make one of his characters in 
 a poem say : 
 
 My eyes are dim with childish tears, 
 
 My heart is idly stirred, 
 
 For the same sound is in my ears 
 
 Which in those days I heard ; — 
 
 nor that in many another poem written soon after 
 his recovery from the depression of the Revolution 
 his mind would constantly slip back to the time 
 of childhood, which he now believed held the key 
 to the secret of the profoundest meanings of life : 
 
 Our childhood sits, 
 Our simple childhood, sits upon a throne 
 That hath more power than all the elements, 
 I guess not what this tells of Being past. 
 Nor what it augurs of the life to come ; — 
 
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 6>y 
 
 nor that, finally, in the Twelfth Book of the Prelude^ 
 after having finished the story of his despondency 
 following the Revolution in the Eleventh, he would 
 luxuriate, nay, fairly revel, in the beauties and 
 powers wrapped up in the potencies of childhood 
 with such passages of strength and intensity as the 
 following : 
 
 I roamed from hill to hill, from rock to rock, 
 Still craving combinations of new forms, 
 New pleasure, wider empire for the sight. 
 Proud of her own endowments, and rejoiced 
 To lay the inner faculties asleep. 
 
 Before I was called forth 
 From the retirement of my native hills, 
 I loved whate'er I saw ; nor lightly loved, 
 But most intensely; never dreamt of aught 
 More grand, more fair, more exquisitely framed 
 Than those few nooks to which my happy feet 
 Were limited. I had not at that time 
 Lived long enough, nor in the least survived 
 The first diviner influence of this world. 
 As it appears to unaccustomed eyes. 
 
 I roamed, in daily presence of this scene 
 
 Upon the naked pool and dreary crags. 
 
 And on the melancholy beacon, fell 
 
 A spirit of pleasure and youth's golden gleam ; 
 
 And think ye not with radiance more sublime 
 
 For these remembrances, and for the power 
 
 They have left behind? So feeling comes in aid- 
 
64 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Of feeling, and diversity of strength 
 Attends us, if but once we have been strong. 
 Oh ! mystery of man, from what a depth 
 Proceed thy honors ! I am lost, but see 
 In simple childhood something of the base 
 On which thy greatness stands. 
 
 And although these and like passages are not to 
 be wondered at when viewed in the light of their 
 ■development, they are also not to be accepted un- 
 critically as having universal validity and as giving 
 a normal perspective of the truth of life. They 
 are rather to be regarded as exaggerated and highly 
 individualized experiences, with a certain amount 
 of truth and validity underlying them. 
 
 And now, that we have, in the light of the 
 enfoldment of Wordsworth's character and the 
 Revolutionary times through which he had just 
 passed, traced the development of his interest in 
 childhood memories and have seen how it happened 
 that he came to prize them so highly, it will be 
 our next task to consider what particular meaning 
 and validity they had for Wordsworth, and what 
 imiversal meaning and validity they may have 
 permanently. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD: THEIR 
 ETHICAL MEANING. 
 
 Since Wordsworth's life of childhood was almost 
 wholly a life of passionate love for natural objects, 
 his return to the memories of his childhood was 
 simultaneous with his returning interest in nature. 
 Hence these two experiences of his are inextricably 
 bound up with each other, and we only speak of 
 them separately for the purpose of exposition. In 
 his essay on Wordsworth's Ethics, Leslie Stephen 
 says, "The great problem of life, that is, as he 
 conceives it, is to secure continuity between the 
 period at which we are guided by half-conscious 
 instincts, and that in which man is able to supply 
 the place of those primitive impulses by reasoned 
 conviction. This is the thought which comes over 
 I and over again in his deepest poems and round 
 which all his teachings center," It would perhaps 
 be more accurate to say that a great many poems 
 
 6 
 
66 WORDSWORTH 
 
 written round and about the time of the composition 
 of the Prelude, touch upon this idea ; that in the 
 Hght of the enfoldment of Wordsworth's character 
 and the revolutionary times through which he had 
 just passed, it was peculiarily necessary for him to 
 attempt a unity of the two ends of his life that had 
 been almost broken asunder ; and that, instead of 
 attempting to find a continuity between the instincts 
 of childhood and the reason of man as such, 
 Wordsworth, who had just been thoroughly con- 
 vinced of the absolute hollowness of rationalism 
 and of all abstract speculation, was really attempt- 
 ing either to transcend reason or to level it down 
 to the basis of childhood experiences themselves. 
 Wordsworth was now wholly on the side of the 
 intuitionists, and he would give no quarters to the 
 rationalists. He carried the revolutionary method 
 and spirit with him. Though he may have become 
 a "lost leader" from the political point of view, he 
 had no intentions of giving up revolutionary leader- 
 ship in other fields. He fell back upon his personal 
 experiences as a basis for operation. Since the 
 experiences of his childhood were the only ones 
 that had not played him false, he believed in their 
 validity ; and he would dare to make the most 
 of them. 
 
 And here he comes into harmony with the 
 
MEAf OKIES Of CHILDHOOD 67 
 
 movement in English Literature called the Roman- 
 tic movement. As has often been said, the Romantic 
 movement can be defined only in negative terms. 
 If there was one quality, however, that all the 
 leaders of the movement possessed, it was the 
 insistence on the expression of personal liberty and 
 personal experience. These experiences were as 
 varied as the individuals engaged in the movement, 
 and, therefore, the movement has no other im- 
 portant quality common to all its leaders. But 
 this spirit of insistence on the expression of per- 
 sonal experience gave Wordsworth the courage of 
 his convictions ; and would it not have been so, 
 perhaps those strange and beautiful raptures of his 
 childhood would have never been brought to light. 
 It must not be supposed, however, that he was 
 acting with a conscious gusto in the matter. He 
 was being deeply and vitally moved by the spirit 
 of his times, and his conscious will wrought in 
 harmony with that spirit; and he was in dead 
 earnest. The robe of the prophet had now fallen 
 upon him. He had become a mystic and a seer. 
 He had already come into possession of his poetical 
 powers. He was now formulating his poetic prin- 
 ciples both in prose and in verse. He had said 
 that the poet, like the prophet, has "a sense that 
 fits him to perceive objects unseen before." His 
 
68 WORDSWORTH 
 
 mind ranged down the scale of thought to the 
 instincts and impulses of childhood ; it ranged up 
 the scale through reasoning to a transcendent 
 region of experience. And these two remote ends; 
 of experience, he felt, met in a harmony of truth 
 in one's immediate experience of memory, or recol- 
 lection. And so the memories of childhood, which 
 had been rejected by the builders, became one of 
 the foundation stones in his experiment of life. 
 
 These memories of childhood, then, were for 
 Wordsworth no mere poetic fancies or figments 
 of the imagination, but they stood in his mind as 
 a great reality. And, first of all, they were 
 an ethical reality, since they were for him the 
 source of joy, tranquility, and intimations of im- 
 mortality. In late years once, it is true, in a very 
 scientific and unpoetic frame of mind, Wordsworth 
 declared that in his childhood he was of a "stiff, 
 moody, violent temper." No doubt this is scien- 
 tifically and unpoetically accurate. But according 
 to his theory now, there was beneath this moody 
 and unbending self, another and deeper self in the 
 child, not tainted with original sin, but invested 
 with glorious and heavenly attributes; and the 
 experiences of this deeper self of the child furnished 
 the material for the will and memory to act upon. 
 It cannot be stated too early that one of the 
 
 I 
 
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 69 
 
 characteristics of the mystic is that he insists on 
 the validity of immediate experience. Wordsworth, 
 it will be remembered, said that an early emotion 
 may be contemplated in tranquility, "till, by a species 
 of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears, and 
 an emotion, kindred to that which was before the 
 subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and 
 does itself actually exist in the mind." His will, 
 focusing his feelings upon some past experience, 
 produces an emotion that does actually exist in the 
 mind and has immediate validity. In this sense, 
 a memory image or an imaginative picture is as 
 valuable to the mind as an actual perceptive image. 
 This is characteristic of much of Wordsworth's 
 experience. Witness one of many examples that 
 might l^e given : 
 
 That very day, 
 From a bare ridge we also first beheld 
 Unveiled the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved 
 To have a soulless image on the eye 
 That had usurped upon a living thought 
 That never more could be. 
 
 The "living thought" of imagination is to be valued 
 more than the "soulless image" of perception. The 
 important point to seize is that a mental image is 
 to be valued for its own sake. So, upon the most 
 sacred experiences of his past, Wordsworth long 
 
70 WORDSWORTH 
 
 and earnestly focused his feelings and imaginative 
 thought until, around these experiences as a center, 
 there irradiated a dome of light which he called 
 the golden age, heaven, immortality. These 
 glorified present memory experiences which had 
 their concrete basis in childhood was what Words- 
 worth prized. They brought him joy and tran- 
 quility and intimations of immortality. 
 
 Immortality is at best a vague and shadowy 
 thing for us here below. We can never do more 
 than speculate about it on this side of the grave. 
 We can only have intimations of it. We can see 
 it only, so to speak, through a key hole ; and there 
 are many key holes ; and it mattters little which 
 we choose. Naturally we choose that which appeals 
 most to our experiences. Wordsworth chose the 
 key hole of his childhood experiences. Long and 
 earnestly he peered through it into the shadowy 
 and invisible world. Often he thought "of Eternity, 
 of first, and last, and midst, and without end," and 
 of "life, death, eternity! momentous themes;" and 
 he could not guess what our childhood, our simple 
 childhood "tells of Being past, nor what it augurs 
 of the life to come." Joy, tranquility, intimations 
 of immortality — these are substantial results in the 
 experiment of life. And since our childhood, which 
 "sits upon a throne that hath more power than all 
 
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 71 
 
 the elements," is the substantial basis upon which 
 they rest, the memories of childhood have absolute 
 validity in Wordsworth's scheme of life. 
 
 To the question as to the ultimate ethical 
 meaning and validity of Wordsworth's theory of 
 childhood memories, our answers are various. 
 Because of the very nature of the question, personal 
 experiences and temperamental dififerences enter 
 into the opinions of those who judge. Perhaps the 
 only point upon which there can be a real consensus 
 of opinion is that a number of passages, as, for 
 example, those quoted in the preceding chapter, 
 taken singly cannot be accepted at their face value. 
 The}^ must be considered as polemical and exag- 
 gerated statements of a well enough defined prin- 
 ciple that underlies them. The reason for these 
 exaggerations lies in Wordsworth's revolutionary 
 zeal in opposing abstract speculation and logical 
 reason, in his vigorous defence of a doctrine 
 opposed to cold-hearted science, that "false 
 secondary power by which we multiply distinc- 
 tions." Not that he was opposed to scientific facts 
 as facts. No one was a closer and more careful 
 observer of the habits and conduct of animals, 
 children, and human beings. But the whole energy 
 of his mind was leveled against dry scientific and 
 speculative systems ; and in his fervor to state his 
 
•72 WORDSWORTH 
 
 own positive convictions, he fell into making 
 exaggerated statements. Incident to these exag- 
 gerations, there is sometimes a lack of clearness 
 to distinguish between childhood experiences and 
 the memories of those experiences. When cleared 
 of its exaggerations and its ambiguity, the doctrine 
 is essentially a doctrine of recollection, which 
 resolves itself really into the simplicity of a 
 psychological method rather than the dignity of 
 a philosophical system. The child is not really 
 the philosopher in esse but is the philosopher 
 in posse. He possesses fresh and divine potencies 
 which, if conserved and transmuted, will constitute 
 the solid substance in the experience of the 
 philosopher that is to be. 
 
 Reduced, then, to its normal proportions, what 
 is the ultimate meaning and validity of this 
 doctrine? Here it is that the widest difiference of 
 critical opinion prevails, and perhaps will always 
 continue to prevail, due mainly to personal 
 experience and temperamental preferences. It all 
 depends upon the point of view. To the hard- 
 headed reasoner there is little in this doctrine that 
 commends itself. He will insist that it must be 
 submitted to the arbitrament of scientific fact. It 
 is certain that in childhood there is a great deal 
 
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 73 
 
 of impotence. The perceptive faculties are not 
 trained. The imagination is crude. Thought is 
 embryonic. To be sure, in childhood there is 
 innocency and sweetness. But it is the innocency/ 
 of ignorance and the sweetness of inexperience. 
 Besides, in some types of childhood, at least, there 
 is plenty of anger, spiteful jealousies, wrangling, 
 screaming, and getting red in the face. And it is 
 precisely the memory of these sharp and thorny 
 experiences that rankle in the mind in after years. 
 True indeed is all this, Wordsworth would reply. 
 He himself had visitings of those moodier hours. 
 He had experienced all the manifest weaknesses of 
 childhood. He would not write himself down as a 
 polished and philosophical little scholar. He would 
 not put a false veneer on the facts. They are 
 written large in the Prelude, so that he who runs 
 may read. But deeper and more vital facts than 
 these Wordsworth also found in his childhood. 
 His childhood, at bottom, he discovered was a 
 wonderful compact of instincts and impulses that 
 defied all analysis. There were gleams of light at 
 opportune times. There were occasional flashes 
 of insight into the life of things. His soul, like 
 every other serious soul, had known its god-like 
 hours : 
 
74 WORDSWORTH 
 
 There's not a man 
 That lives who hath not known his god-like hours, 
 And feels not what an empire we inherit, 
 As natural beings in the strength of Nature. 
 
 It does not require the occult wisdom of a 
 philosopher to distinguish broadly between these 
 higher moments of inspiration and the lower moods 
 of sullenness. It lies within the power of every 
 individual's will and memory to recreate the exalted 
 moments of life until they are lived over again in 
 the mind. This, then, may become a universal 
 method of life and a panacea for its ills. 
 
 There is, however, a still more serious objection 
 to be made from the standpoint of scientific fact. 
 Our perspective of childhood naturally tends to 
 become untrue. There is a natural inclination in 
 us to give additional colors to the joys and 
 pleasures of the past. In his zeal to revive his 
 memories of childhood experiences Wordsworth 
 did not guard against the possible deception that 
 some of them might have been "called to life by 
 after meditation." And, therefore, he unconsciouslv 
 drifted into an attitude towards his childhood 
 experiences that is essentially unscientific and 
 seems to be based on prejudice. To a disinterested 
 person this natural inclination of the mind can 
 easily be illustrated from experience. I remember 
 
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 75 
 
 the schoolhonse in which I attended school as a 
 child. It was the largest schoolhouse in the 
 neighborhood. To me it seemed spacious indeed. 
 I always carried an idea of its spaciousness with 
 me. Some years after I had left the schoolhouse 
 I came back to it. Then it appeared to me not 
 spacious, but small, dingy, and stufify. My memory 
 image that I had carried with me these years was 
 shattered. Most of our early memory images, if 
 they could be tested likewise, would be shattered. 
 From the scientific standpoint, then, Wordsworth 
 seems to take a prejudiced position, for he 
 deliberately chose not to have his memory images 
 shattered. But he would not, of course, defend 
 this position from the standpoint of prejudice; he 
 would defend it from the standpoint of subjective 
 experience. He would not have the vision from 
 within invaded and outdone by the outward facts 
 of life: 
 
 We have a vision of our own 
 
 Oh! why should we undo it? 
 
 The immediate psychic entity in the form of a 
 memory image was to him as valuable as the 
 original experience from which that memory image 
 took its rise. Though showing a reverent attitude 
 toward the outward and verifiable facts of science, 
 he showed a greater reverence for the immediate 
 
76 WORDSWORTH 
 
 facts of consciousness. Whether an imaginative 
 picture, or a memory image, or a transfused or 
 interfused presence, the inner fact of consciousness, 
 held priority of validity in his mind. And at this- 
 point, Wordsworth, the mystic, parts company with 
 those who insist on objective standards of scientific 
 accuracy to decide what is true reality. And it is. 
 exactly on these grounds of difference that critics. 
 are divided as to the ultimate value of Words- 
 worth's theory of childhood memories. 
 
 This same divergence, based on two widely 
 different methods of approaching the problems of 
 life, is manifested in the criticism that has been 
 written on the famous "Ode on Intimations of 
 Immortality." The conclusion, it may be argued, 
 that there is a future life is based on the hypotheses 
 of a pre-existent life. The hypothesis of a pre- 
 existent life is based on the hypothesis that heaven 
 lies about us in our infancy, which latter hypothesis,. 
 being the major premise, ought to be an uncontro- 
 vertible fact — a thing which most of us are quite 
 unwilling to admit. Wordsworth reasons in a circle 
 and there is no logical foundation for his thought. 
 So says the man of logical thought and of scientific 
 accuracy. On the other hand, it may be argued 
 that in the immortal life which is a new state of 
 existence, there may be a complete transcendence- 
 
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 77 
 
 of our known order of time. Accordingly, then, 
 in eternity there is no such thing as time. Before 
 and after, past and present, are terms not in the 
 vocabulary of angels and the immortals. This idea 
 is presented more clearly in a passage in the Four- 
 teenth Book of the Prelude. One night after a 
 glorious vision from the top of a mountain in 
 which Wordsworth says — 
 
 The Moon hung naked in a firmament 
 Of azure without cloud, and at my feet 
 Rested a silent sea of hoary mist — 
 
 after this vision had partially dissolved into air, it 
 appeared to him the "type of a majestic intellect": 
 
 There I beheld the emblem of a mind 
 That feeds upon infinity, that broods 
 Over the dark abyss, intent to hear 
 Its voices issuing forth to silent light 
 In one continuous stream. 
 
 And like unto this majestic intellect that feeds upon 
 infinity and that broods over the dark abyss, are 
 the higher minds of human beings when inspired, 
 which minds live in a world of life. 
 
 By sensible impressions not enthralled. 
 
 But by their quickening impulse made more prompt 
 
 To hold fit converse with the spiritual world, 
 
 And with the generations of mankind 
 
 Spread over time, past, present, and to come. 
 
 Age after age till Time shall be no more. 
 
JVORDSIVORTH 
 
 Just as time — past, present, and to come — is nothing 
 to the inspired mind that can hold fit converse 
 with the spiritual world, so our known order of 
 time seems to be transcended in the Ode in which 
 Wordsworth reached his highest point of inspira- 
 tion. We have here, then, practically nothing to 
 do with pre-existence and future life as such — it 
 is simply one ever-present eternal state. And why 
 should not the stray gleams of the pure white light 
 of childhood intimate to us, as strongly as does 
 any other phase of our experience, the life 
 immortal ? 
 
 Or, waiving the point of actual transcendence 
 of time and granting that the poem is of a 
 sufficiently earthly mold to have remained within 
 the regular mundane order of time, we can still 
 maintain from the intuitionist's or mystical stand- 
 point that Wordsworth's grounds are perfectly 
 tenable. The fulcrum, so to speak, upon which the 
 mind turns from pre-existence to the future life, 
 is not the objective experience represented in the 
 child, but the subjective immediate memory ex- 
 perience of the poet. From the standpoints of 
 tone, feeling, motive, and meaning of the poem 
 as a whole, the passage, 
 
 O joy! that in our embers 
 Is something that doth live — 
 
 ng 1! 
 
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 7»> 
 
 is much more nearly at the core of it than the 
 
 passage, 
 
 Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. 
 
 In after years Wordsworth explained to his readers 
 that he had used the theory of pre-existence merely 
 as a device, making the best of it that he could 
 as a poet. Some have said the explanation was 
 due to the weakness of old age ; it would be more 
 fair perhaps to say that it was due to the sanity 
 of old age. Leslie Stephen says Wordsworth took 
 unnecessary pains in making the explanation. It 
 may be so, but judging from the extraordinary 
 proneness of human beings to clutch at something 
 outward and objective, something away from them- 
 selves, as a basis for reasoning and faith, Words- 
 worth's admonition is not at all superfluous. He 
 publicly said of the theory that "it is far too 
 shadowy a notion to be recommended to faith, as 
 more than an element in our instincts of immor- 
 tality." But in spite of his disclaiming all rights 
 to the theory, critics have again and again foisted 
 it upon him as though there were something 
 distinctly Wordsworthian in it. 
 
 In short, Wordsworth's theory of childhood 
 memories has constantly been discussed as though 
 the question of origin were the prime question 
 to decide. Undoubtedly the whole trend of modern 
 
8c WORDSWORTH 
 
 thought on the question of origin is to explain the 
 marvellous illuminations that come to children as 
 the reverberations of past life in its physical and 
 psychical evolution. A modern scientist, Dr. G. 
 Stanley Hall, who of all living men has perhaps col- 
 lected the largest number of facts concerning child- 
 hood and adolescence, speaks like a poet, yet with 
 the authority of science, when he says, "Whatever 
 soul-stufif may or may not be, it is most susceptible 
 and responsive to all present influences, and also, 
 in a yet far deeper sense, most pervaded with 
 reverberations from an innumerable past." And 
 again, "We are influenced in our deeper, more 
 temperamental dispositions by the life-habits and 
 code of conduct of we know not what innumerable 
 hosts of ancestors, which like a cloud of witnesses 
 are present through our lives ; and our souls are 
 echo chambers in which their whispers reverberate." 
 No doubt, the pre-existent theory must gradually 
 give way to the more scientific theory. Nor does 
 this latter theory in any way degrade the value and 
 meaning of childhood memories. For the theory 
 in question is influenced by a second trend of 
 modern thought, the trend, namely, to distinguish 
 sharply between two kinds of judgments — existen- 
 tial and spiritual. The first is a judgment of origin, 
 the second a judgment of value. Since these two 
 
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 8i 
 
 judgments are independent of each other, the vakie 
 of a thing cannot be determined by its origin, 
 whether that origin be lowly or high. Whether the 
 child is a product of a long physical and psychical 
 evolutionary process, or whether its soul comes 
 directly from a state of spiritual pre-existence, its 
 present spiritual experience has precisely the same 
 \alue. "By their fruits ye shall know them, not 
 by their roots." And with this latter conception 
 \\'ordsworth was thoroughly in harmony. What- 
 ever we may believe about the origin of child life, 
 and whatever Wordsworth may have believed about 
 it. it was "from a sense of the indomitableness of 
 the spirit" that was in him as a child, and much 
 more from the sense of the volitional and 
 indomitable spirit in him as a man, which he felt 
 would not and could not die, that gives genumeness 
 and permanent vitality to the Ode. The fame of 
 the Ode cannot rest on any question of origin. 
 
 Although W^ordsworth was intellectually curious 
 enough to wnsh to know the origin of life, yet his 
 chief interest centered in the operations of his will 
 and ir.emory upon his childhood experiences, for 
 the purpose of producing an immediate illumination 
 in his mind. And, in the moment of inspiration, 
 he joined the memories of instinctive and impulsive 
 childhood with an experience that transcended 
 
82 WORDSWORTH 
 
 reason and time. But this new experience defies 
 any sensible and rational explanation, says the man 
 of a scientific temper of mind. Be it so ; and since 
 it must be so, men of this temper of mind will 
 always find in Wordsworth a rock of offense after 
 a certain point has been reached. They will find a 
 permanent satisfaction in Jeffries's and Macaulay's 
 commonsense way of dealing with Wordsworth. 
 On the other hand, men whose temperaments are 
 like that of Wordsworth's, will always rate Words- 
 worth and his doctrine of childhood memories 
 extremely high. The intensity with which he 
 focused his mind upon his childhood experiences, 
 and the still greater intensity with which he pene- 
 trated the mysterious truths of consciousness to 
 which the memories of those experiences were an 
 inlet, will be to these critics but a natural comple- 
 ment to his extraordinary grasp on the essential 
 and fundamental facts of every-day life, and to 
 his power of extracting out of the very pain and 
 sorrow and tumult of that life, deep pleasure, joy, 
 and tranquility. 
 
 Let us now turn from the speculative side of 
 the theory of childhood memories to the practical 
 side. No doubt there is something in this doctrine 
 that has validity for all alike. The two views we 
 have just been discussing are by no means mutually 
 
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 8j 
 
 exclusive. They are not diametrically opposed. It 
 is only a question of emphasis, whether the em- 
 phasis be placed on the objective, verifiable facts 
 of life, or on the inner visions of the mind and the 
 unverifiable facts of consciousness. But there is a 
 large ground between that is common to both. 
 Much of this common ground is in the practical 
 and the ordinarily human. Whether we be of a 
 scientific or of a mystical temper of mind, it is 
 laid upon us all to live largely by some memories 
 of the past, for out of the past we construct the 
 present and very largely determine the future. 
 Childhood memories, purged of all crassness by 
 time, are beautiful and pure. They are as good 
 to live by as any others, far better than the 
 memories, let us say, of some youthful carousal. 
 Every one has some memories of childhood — 
 innocent, sweet, spontaneous childhood, ignorant, 
 inexperienced, and weak though it be — and such 
 memories, glorified and idealized, act as vitalizers 
 of our living present ; they simplify and purify, 
 they bring peace and tranquility, and they produce 
 substantial fruits for life. All men in their old 
 age revive the memories of childhood. Through 
 the influence of strange circumstances and by con- 
 scious effort, Wordsworth merely hastened the 
 process. Any one can hasten the process by 
 
84 WORDSWORTH 
 
 conscious efifort. By way of experiment, I fixed 
 my mind for a half hour upon some particularly 
 pleasing experience of my childhood. The memory 
 of that experience grew more and more vivid. 
 Forgotten details of the incident came to life. Was 
 that little child that figured in the incident really 
 I, I myself? I caught the spirit of childhood 
 innocency and naturalness. Peace and tranquility 
 came. I can fully recommend the experiment to 
 persons too much care-worn with the affairs ofj 
 this world. The practice of recalling childhood 
 experiences can be engaged in by every one. The 
 exercise furnishes not only a source of perennial 
 charm, but produces a moral and tranquillizing 
 effect. 
 
 Another practical phase of the doctrine is that 
 when it is connected, as it was in Wordsworth, 
 with a general theory of optimism, time and nature 
 help to bring about good results with the memories 
 of the past. For, if we conceive the world in which 
 we live as constitutionally. good instead of evil, and 
 that everything tends toward the development of 
 the former, then good memories have a better 
 chance of surviving in the mind than bad memories. 
 And, as time goes on, nature assists the mind in 
 purifying the memories of the past and in giving 
 them a lovely halo in the present. Even to a less 
 
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 85 
 
 optimistic mind than that of Wordsworth, the 
 doctrine is practical, as, for example, to Matthew 
 Arnold's mind, for Arnold says that 
 
 Tasks in hours of insight will'd, 
 
 Can be through hours of gloom fulfill'd. 
 
 Even as to a stoical mind, the very fulfilment of 
 the tasks willed in hours of insight will dispel the 
 gloom and lighten the drudgery of life, much more 
 will this result follow in an optimistic temper of 
 mind. 
 
 There is still another practical observation that 
 may be made on this doctrine. It is that in a much 
 deeper sense than that of which we are conscious 
 our lives have taken their bias from childhood 
 experiences. As we grow older we learn more 
 and more that what we have been all these years 
 has been determined for us largely by the conditional 
 of our childhood ; that the very molds of our minds 
 have been cast into their characteristic shapes at 
 an early and pliable age ; that sometimes the 
 slightest incidents of childhood may give a coloring" 
 to all our subsequent thoughts and actions : that 
 the depth of our insights and sincerity is distinctly 
 foreshadowed by the depth of our childish insights 
 and serious moments ; that, just as to the boy whom 
 the "clififs and islands of Winander" knew so well. 
 
86 WORDSWORTH 
 
 "a gentle shock of mild surprise has carried far 
 into his heart the voice of mountain torrent," so 
 the impact of our first impressions has carried far 
 into each man's heart those "first-born affinities 
 that fit our new existence to existing things." Of 
 these facts Wordsworth was far more deeply con- 
 scious than we. 
 
 He was also aware that he was wrought upon 
 by the experiences of childhood in ways that defied 
 conscious exposition. These unconscious and un- 
 fathomable workings in the child's mind is what 
 gives Wordsworth a profound reverence for child- 
 life. This is most touchingly and powerfully ex- 
 pressed in the last six lines of the following sonnet, 
 which sonnet, it may be said parenthetically, ha 
 as many felicitous lines as any sonnet can have, 
 since they are all felicitous : 
 
 It is a beauteous evening calm and free, 
 
 The holy time is quiet as a Nun 
 
 Breathless with adoration ; the broad sun 
 
 Is sinking down in its tranquility; 
 
 The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the Sea : 
 
 Listen ! the mighty Being is awake, 
 
 And doth with his eternal motion make 
 
 A sound like thunder — everlastingly. 
 
 Dear Child ! dear Girl ! that walkest with me here, 
 
 If thou appear untouched by solemn thought. 
 
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 87 
 
 Thy nature is not therefore less divine : 
 Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year; 
 And worship'st at the Temple's inner shrine, 
 God being with thee when we know it not. 
 
 And since God is with the child "when we know 
 it not," the ttltimatum of Wordsworth's doctrine 
 of childhood memories was left by him, as it must I 
 always be left, shrouded in deep mystery. Yet he ' 
 had learned, a thing that many of us never do learn, 
 that the traditions of our childhood can and ought 
 to be the most sacred traditions of the past — 
 traditions that will give us the buoyancy of youth, 
 that will tend to smooth down the rough places 
 in life, that will help to build up and sustain our 
 moral being. 
 
 We have now seen that the memories of child- 
 hood stood in Wordsworth's mind as a great ethical ] 
 reality ; that, due to his opposition to the rational- 
 ism and the cold-hearted science of his day and 
 to the intensity of his own convictions, he fell into 
 exaggerated and sometimes ambiguous statements 
 of his doctrine ; that the doctrine is at the bottom 
 one of recollection — an immediate memory experi- 
 ence accompanied by such an intensity of feeling 
 as to produce a state of mind that transcends 
 reason ; that men of cool, calculating temperaments 
 will never have much sympathy with this doctrine ; 
 
88 WORDSWORTH 
 
 that men of emotional and mystical temperaments 
 will find in it the highest expression of some of 
 their deepest intuitions and innermost experiences ; 
 that the questions of origin and of time are not 
 important in the consideration of the "Ode on 
 Intimations of Immortality" ; that the subjective, 
 immediate-memory experience, transcending reason 
 and time, together with the volitional and 
 indomitable spirit in the poet, lie at the core of 
 the Ode and give the poem its genuineness and 
 permanent vitality ; that men will differ tempera- 
 mentally in their judgment on the Ode in the same 
 way as on the doctrine of childhood memories ; 
 and that, finally, on the practical and ordinarily 
 human side, the doctrine of childhood memories 
 may have validity for all alike in the following 
 points: i. Since we must all live by some memories 
 of the past, childhood memories are especially com- 
 mendable because they naturally tend to bring 
 peace and tranquility. 2. Granting the basis of 
 an optimistic scheme of life, we may be sure that 
 the best memories will survive and the best 
 moments of life will be recalled and lived over 
 again. 3. Since the experiences of our childhood 
 always deeply mold our subsequent life, it is the 
 part of wisdom to recognize them as the most 
 sacred traditions of our past. 
 
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 89 
 
 The memories of childhood, however, were not 
 only an ethical, but also an aesthetic reality to 
 Wordsworth, ^^'e shall, therefore, now turn to 
 the study of the subject from the standpoint of 
 aesthetics. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD: THEIR 
 ARTISTIC VALUE 
 
 In the preceding chapter a distinction has been 
 made between the doctrine of childhood memories 
 as held by Wordsworth and one that may be of 
 universal practicability. Undoubtedly Wordsworth 
 brooded so intensely on his childhood experiences 
 that his doctrine in its real essence will never be 
 practiced by any considerable number of individ- 
 uals ; for it is this degree of intensity rather than 
 any peculiar view attached to it that gives the 
 doctrine its mark of distinction. It is the degree 
 of intensity that produced an illumination in 
 Wordsworth's mind, which illumination in turn 
 caused him to feel that these memories were an 
 inlet into new truths of consciousness. And it must 
 further be noted that this intensity could not be 
 kept up even in Wordsworth for any great length 
 of time, but that it gradually burnt itself out and 
 
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD gr 
 
 produced a hardened and solidifying effect on his 
 •character. We need not be surprised to find, 
 therefore, that nearly everything that is distinctive 
 ■concerning this doctrine was expressed within a 
 period of about eight years, that is, between the 
 time of the composition of "Tintern Abbey" in 1798 
 and the completion of the "Ode on Intimations of 
 Immortality" in 1806. 
 
 The little poem, "We Are Seven." it is true, 
 Avas written before "Tintern Abbey," but here the 
 point of view of the poet is comparatively more '• 
 objective. The poem is based on a psychological 
 observation made upon the mind of a little child 
 •eight years of age. The child herself is drawn as 
 a simple but an unusual rustic beauty : 
 
 She had a rustic woodland air, 
 And she was wildly clad : 
 Her eyes were fair, and very fair ; 
 — Her beauty made me glad. 
 
 Informed with the spirit of life and vitality, the 
 child, Wordsworth found, could only think of her 
 dead brother and sister laid in the church-yard as 
 really informed with the same life and vitality as 
 herself. Though in the closest proximity to death, 
 the child could form no notion whatever of the 
 meaning of death. In this fact of childhood intuition 
 Wordsworth found a strong confirmation of his 
 
92 WORDSWORTH 
 
 own remembered experience that nothing in child- 
 hood had been more difficuk than to admit the 
 notion of death as a state applicable to his own 
 being. He seems not to have perceived with the 
 same clearness, however, that if a child were to be 
 qnestioned as to its ideas of abstract principles 
 it would be as helpless in this as in forming an 
 idea of death, which is but another form of an 
 abstraction to the mind. But this somewhat naive 
 acceptance of the child's positive notion of life, 
 resulting from the indomitable spirit of activity 
 within, lies at the root of much of Wordsworth's 
 theory and practice of life during the years 
 immediately following the recovery of the re- 
 actionary influence of the Revolution. And although 
 in "We Are Seven" the point of view is somewhat 
 objective, the poem already contains the germ of 
 the idea that almost completely absorbed Words- 
 worth's mind for a time, and that became more 
 and more subjective with him until it finally found 
 full expression in the "Ode on Intimations of 
 Immortality." 
 
 It must be granted also that there are a good 
 many poems after 1806 that have to do with child- 
 hood. But here the point of view of the poet has 
 again become quite objective, and the poems contain 
 only such ideas as would be eocpressed by any poet 
 
MEMORIES OE CHILDHOOD 93 
 
 of power were he to compose poems about children, 
 without claiming to hold any distinctive doctrine 
 about childhood memories. Such, for example, is 
 the poem "Characteristics of a Child Three Years 
 Old," which begins with : 
 
 Loving she is, and tractable, though wild ; 
 And Innocence hath privilege in her 
 To dignify arch looks and laughing eyes. 
 
 This child is a "happy creature," who of herself 
 
 Is all sufficient, solitude to her 
 Is blithe society, who fills the air 
 With gladness and involuntary songs. 
 
 Such is the poem "The Infant," which likewise 
 sets forth the spontaneity of childhood : 
 
 Unquiet Childhood here by special grace 
 Forgets her nature, opening like a flower 
 That neither feeds nor wastes its vital power 
 In painful struggles. 
 
 Such is the poem addressed' to a mother "upon 
 the birth of her first-born child": 
 
 Like a ship-wrecked Sailor tost 
 By rough waves on a perilous coast, 
 Lies the Babe, in helplessness 
 And in tenderest nakedness. 
 Flung by laboring nature forth 
 Upon the mercies of the earth. 
 
94 WORDSWORTH 
 
 And in this case there is no special need of a pre- 
 existent state to give the child power to baffle 
 death, for heavenly guardians are constantly brood- 
 ing near the child and are breathing upon it 
 
 Something like the faintest breath 
 That has power to baffle death — • 
 Beautiful, while very weakness 
 Captivates like passive meekness. 
 
 These extracts illustrate sufficiently the statement 
 that the poems about children after 1806 are sym- 
 pathetic studies of the sweetness, meekness, and 
 spontaneity of children, and express only such ideas 
 as are held in conunon by all lovers of children^ 
 To this statement, however, there must im- 
 mediately be made one important exception. Once 
 only during these years did Wordsworth reproduce 
 vividly the magic inward experience based on the 
 memory of his childhood. Near the close of the 
 poem "composed upon an evening of extraordinary 
 splendor and beauty," written in 1818, the trans- 
 formation occurs : 
 
 Oh, let thy grace remind me of the light 
 Full early lost, and fruitlessly deplored ; 
 Which, at this moment, on my waking sight 
 Appears to shine, by miracle restored ; 
 My soul, though yet confined to earth, 
 Rejoices in a second birth! 
 
 Though no hard and fast lines can be drawn, the- 
 
|V MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 93 
 
 quality of this passage is decidedly different from 
 the quality of those that have just been quoted. 
 Not that this passage is necessarily better poetry 
 than the others. Nor is it intended here to convey 
 the idea that the poem in which this passage occurs 
 is the onh^ great poetry of this period. Professor 
 Dowden undoubtedly is right in his insistence 
 on the statement that a considerable amount of 
 great and original poetry was produced by 
 Worthsworth during this period. But the point 
 to be seized here is, that, with the single 
 exception of the above passage, none of this 
 great and original poetry illustrates the doctrine 
 of childhood memories in its real essence. Here 
 in this passage, however, something is shown to 
 have happened in the immediate memory experience 
 of the poet. The light shines in as of old. A 
 second birth takes place in the mind. The miracle 
 of transcendence has occurred and the poet sud- 
 denly feels that he has a clear insight into a higher 
 kind of truth than the ordinary, or commonplace. 
 This is the essence of the doctrine. This passage, 
 isolated in its production in point of time from 
 those of its own kind, at once possesses the charac- 
 teristic intensity of them and avoids the excess 
 of overstatement that has been pointed out in some 
 of them. 
 
96 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Although this magic transformation happened 
 but once in the productions of later years, the spirit 
 of the doctrine of childhood memories occurs in 
 poem after poem between the years 1798 and 1806, 
 in varying degrees of intensity. At the close of 
 Chapter II illustrative passages have been quoted 
 from "The Fountain" and the Prelude. This same 
 spirit fairly saturates the poems "Influence of 
 Natural Objects" and "There Was a Boy," both 
 written in 1799. and later incorporated in the 
 Prelude, and the poems "My^ Heart Leaps Up" and 
 "To Hartley Coleridge," both written in 1802. The 
 closing lines of the latter poem may be quoted to 
 indicate the temper of these poems : 
 
 Thou art a dewdrop, which the morn brings forth 
 
 111 fitted to sustain unkindly shocks, 
 
 Or to be trailed along the soiling earth ; 
 
 A gem that glitters while it lives, 
 
 And no forewarning gives ; 
 
 But, at the touch of wrong, without a strife 
 
 Slips in a moment out of life — ■ 
 
 asserting that the glittering gem is likely to slip 
 in a moment out of life, but implying, according to 
 the doctrine, that it can be retained, or, at least, 
 reproduced in the memory in after years. The 
 spirit of this doctrine is found in "Tintern Abbey" 
 with its 
 
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD . gy 
 
 Gleams of half extinguished thought, 
 With many recognitions dim and faint, 
 And somewhat of a sad perplexity. 
 The picture of the mind revives again; — 
 
 with its recreation of the feelings and sensations 
 in this passage : 
 
 Sensations sweet 
 Felt in the blood and felt along the heart ; 
 And passing even into my purer mind, ) 
 
 With tranquil restoration — 
 
 and with its passage of address to the poet's 
 sister: 
 
 Thou art with me here upon the banks 
 Of this fair river; thou, my dearest Friend, 
 My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch 
 , The language of my former heart, and read 
 
 My former pleasures in the shooting lights 
 Of thy wild eyes. 
 
 The spirit of this doctrine, with somewhat less 
 intensity, is found in "Expostulation and Reply" 
 with its passage of genuine naivete : 
 
 You look round on your Mother Earth, 
 
 As if she for no purpose bore you ; 
 
 As if you were her first-born birth, ' 
 
 And none had lived before you ; — , 
 
 in the "Lucy" poems, of which the following lines 
 must s^rve as an example : 
 
gS WORDSWORTH 
 
 She died, and left to me 
 This heath, this calm, and quiet scene; 
 The memory of what has been. 
 And never more will be ; — 
 
 in "The Two April Mornings" with its suggestive 
 backward look, in the words of Matthew : 
 
 Yon cloud with that long purple cleft 
 Brings fresh into my mind 
 A day like this which I have left 
 Full thirty years behind — 
 
 and with its accompanying picture of incomparable 
 beauty of the "blooming girl, whose hair was wet 
 with points of morning dew" : 
 
 No fountain from its rocky cave 
 E'er tripped with foot so free; 
 She seemed as happy as a wave 
 That dances on the sea; — 
 
 in the poem "To a Butterfly," which closes with 
 the lines : 
 
 We'll talk of sunshine and of song 
 And summer days, when we were young, 
 Sweet childish days, that were so long 
 As twenty days are now. 
 
 Likewise in "Michael" with its famous passage: 
 
 A child more than all other gifts 
 
 That earth can oflfer to declining man 
 
 Brings hope with it and forward looking thoughts;- 
 
 Ji 
 
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 99 
 
 in the "Brothers,"' in the "Sparrow's Nest," in a 
 second poem "To a Butterfly," in "It is a Beauteous 
 Evening Calm and Free," in "To a Highland Girl," 
 in "She Was a Phantom," in the "Ode to Duty," 
 in "Louisa" and in the opening lines of "The Happy 
 Warrior'" — in all these and still others the spirit 
 of the doctrine of childhood memories is found. 
 These poems, together with the Prelude, were all 
 written during the years following Wordsworth's 
 recovery from the reactionary influence of the 
 Revolution. So that during this time he kept his 
 mind intently concentrated upon the experiences 
 of childhood, and was, as he says in the Prelude, 
 
 Loth to quit 
 Those recollected hours that have the charm 
 Of visionary things, those lovely forms 
 And sweet sensations that throw back our life. 
 And almost make remote infancy 
 A visible scene, on which the sun is shining. 
 
 "Loth" indeed he was "to quit those recollected 
 hours that have the charm of visionary things," 
 until he had penetrated both their outward and 
 inward meaning, had gathered up the power of 
 them, and had, with one supreme effort, given them 
 an ultimate expression in the "Ode on Intimations 
 of Immortality." And immediately after this the 
 reaction came. The fire had burned itself out. The 
 LOFa 
 
100 WORDSWORTH 
 
 intensity of it had spent its force ; and Wordsworth 
 swiftly passed into another stage of his poetic 
 career. 
 
 The chief purpose, however, in citing the above 
 poems and in quoting from them has been to show 
 that Wordsworth found an aesthetic meaning as 
 well as ethical reality in the memories of childhood. 
 In the last analysis it will be found that for Words 
 worth the chief function of those memories was to 
 furnish material for purely artistic purposes. In 
 poetry more than in philosophy the ultimate validity 
 and worth of a thing depends upon the success 
 with which it can be used. And with respect to 
 using the memories of childhood in his poetry, it 
 must at once be granted that Wordsworth was 
 eminently successful. No doubt all poets find the 
 memories of childhood an important source of poetic 
 material. If we could only enter behind the scenes 
 we should most certainly find that Shakespeare 
 -drew from this source poetic material of inestimabl 
 value. Byron and Tennyson, to mention no others, 
 each in his own peculiar way, worked this rich vein 
 with success. But there is something in the nature 
 and character of the man and in the spirit of the 
 times in which he lived that makes Wordsworth, 
 in a special sense, the poet of childhood memories.1 
 
 There were in the first place two strongly 
 
 e 
 
 4 
 
'MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD lor 
 
 divergent tendencies in the character of Words- 
 worth. There was a strong- tendency in him toward 
 reaHsm. He would see things as they are. He 
 would be true to outward facts with scientific 
 accuracy. He would write with his eye on the 
 object. He would find poetic material right before 
 his eyes that would be wrought into a new and 
 original kind of poetry. The opposite tendency in 
 him was toward spiritualization. He would not 
 only see things as they are outwardly, but he would 
 "feel the soul of nature and see things as they are," 
 inwardly. He would penetrate to the spiritual 
 meaning of objects of the slightest outward im- 
 portance, with the hope of finding spiritual essence 
 of value within. Again, there was a third tendency 
 that came to him from the spirit of his times, from 
 the spirit of the Romantic movement of which he 
 was a part and to which he gave a new impetus. 
 This tendency, under the pressure of personal 
 liberty and power of personal conviction, was a 
 tendency in Wordsworth toward the strange and 
 the wonderful. 
 
 Now, the memories of childhood furnish the 
 best material for the fusion of these three opposing 
 tendencies. First, these memories satisfy the 
 requirements of realism, for they have their basis 
 in concrete experience, in the personal experience. 
 
102 WORDSWORTH 
 
 in fact, of the poet himself. Secondly, they are far 
 enough removed in point of time to satisfy the 
 requirements of romantic strangeness. And thirdly, 
 not dominated wholly by the concrete, they are 
 easily detached from time and place and readily 
 lend themselves to spiritualization and mystic 
 interpretation. Wordsworth's scientific sincerity 
 and realism prevented him from going outside of 
 his personal experience for poetic material, from 
 entering a region as remote from the personal as 
 that, say, of the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." 
 But his desire for strangeness and wonder led him, 
 so to speak, to the rim of his personal experience. 
 The remote ends of the real and the strange met 
 together in the memories of his childhood, which 
 could readily be sublimated into a spiritual ex- 
 perience. Wordsworth, it may be said in passing, 
 was in almost every respect the opposite of Scott. 
 But in one respect they were alike, which likeness 
 at the same time involves a contrast. They both 
 lived much in the past. Scott's past was historic 
 feudalism, Wordsworth's past was his own child- 
 hood. Scott saw the beautiful and ideal side of 
 feudalism, Wordsworth saw the beautiful and ideal 
 side of childhood. Each conceived his past in some 
 sort of reality. Scott built a castle on the principles 
 of feudalism, Wordsworth built a castle, too, with 
 
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 103 
 
 his inheritance of the past — a castle not made with 
 hands. 
 
 But the perfect fusion of realism, spiritualization, 
 and mystery into an artistic unity is a feat beyond 
 the strength of ordinary mortals. It requires a 
 strict fidelity to the outward facts of life, a subtle 
 and penetrating insight into their inward and 
 intuitional meaning, and a voluntary intensity of 
 mind which can be sustained alone by deep and 
 genuine feelings. The wonder is, not that Words- 
 worth failed sometimes, but that he succeeded as 
 often as he did. And much of his success must 
 be attributed both to his personal instincts and 
 the circumstances of his times that led him to make 
 use of his childhood memories. The failure in the 
 perilous attempt at such a high and rare union is 
 nearly always due to following to excess one of 
 these three tendencies at the expense of the other 
 two. "Alice Fell," "The Thorn," and "Simon Lee," 
 are examples that instantly come to mind 
 illustrating the domination of . realism, with a 
 corresponding lack of spiritual aiTd mystical inter- 
 penetration. The poem "Gypsies'" is a familiar 
 example of too bold and over-wrought spiritual- 
 ization for the slight outward incident of the poem. 
 And there are passages in the Prelude which, even 
 to a man of a mystical temperament, one can fancy, 
 
104 WORDSWORTH 
 
 the mystery is tantalizingly just beyond the point 
 of any satisfactory understanding. It is more 
 pleasant, however, to dwell on instances which 
 show Wordsworth's success in this respect, and 
 nowhere, as has already been intimated, is he more 
 successful than when the magic of childhood 
 memories blends together the real and the strange 
 into an artistic union of spiritual experience. 
 
 Although exhaustive treatment in the way of 
 illustration can not be entered upon here, yet one 
 illustration, which is at once the most beautiful 
 and the most perfect, must be given. It is the 
 poem "To the Cuckoo," a poem which Wordsworth 
 himself placed first in merit among his shorter 
 productions. The idea of mystery which pervades 
 and underlies the whole poem is slightly suggested 
 in the first stanza : 
 
 blithe Newcomer ! I have heard, 
 
 1 hear thee and rejoice. 
 
 O Cuckoo ! shall I call thee Bird, 
 Or but a wandering Voice ? 
 
 In the next two stanzas the necessary outward 
 facts, the situation, and the immediate sense per- 
 ceptions of the poem are given, but at the close 
 of these stanzas there is again a suggestion of 
 mystery slightly stronger than the first : 
 
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 105 
 
 While I am lying on the grass 
 
 Thy two-fold shout I hear, ' 
 
 From hill to hill it seems to pass, 
 
 At once far off, and near. 
 
 Though babbling only to the Vale, 
 Of sunshine and of flowers, 
 Thou bringest unto me a tale 
 Of visionary hours. 
 
 In the next stanza the mystery is more pronounced,, 
 and the "even yet" suggests that this impression 
 of mystery had been experienced before : 
 
 Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring! 
 
 Even yet thou art to me 
 
 No bird, but an invisible thing, 
 
 A voice, a mystery. 
 
 And then suddenly the whole scene, as by magic, 
 is thrown back to "those recollected hours that 
 have the charm of visionary things," and romantic 
 strangeness is added to mystery : 
 
 The same whom in my school-boy days 
 I listened to ! that Cry 
 Which made me look a thousand ways. 
 In bush, and tree, and sky. 
 
 To seek thee did I often rove 
 Through \\oods and on the green; 
 And thou wert still a hope, a love; 
 Still longed for, never seen. 
 
io6 WORDSWORTH 
 
 And now the scene is suddenly brought back to the 
 immediate present, producing that subjective trans- 
 formation which the spell of childhood memories 
 always wrought upon Wordsworth : 
 
 And I can listen to thee yet; 
 Can lie upon the plain 
 And listen, till I do beget 
 That golden time again. 
 
 And this potent charm of inward delight makes the 
 ordinary outward world of reality fade into "an 
 insubstantial faery place'' : 
 
 O blessed Bird ! this earth we pace 
 Again appears to be 
 An unsubstantial faery place 
 That is fit home for Thee. 
 
 This is perhaps the finest example of the perfect 
 harmony of sense-perceptions, childhood memories, 
 spiritualization. and m)^stery that can be found in 
 the language. And it is chiefly the potency of 
 childhood memories that deepens and vitalizes the 
 meaning of the ordinary cry of an ordinary bird, 
 and creates in the soul an inward light and joy of 
 such intense reality that the outward world seems 
 to fioat in a faery-like and insubstantial substance. 
 The memories of childhood, then, have a real 
 aesthetic meaning and an artistic function of ab- 
 solute worth and validity. When the doctrine of 
 
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD 107 
 
 pre-existence (whether Wordsworth held it or not) 
 shall have failed, and when our perspective of 
 •childhood generally shall have been proved by 
 science to be false, the memories of childhood will 
 still and forever remain a vital source of poetic 
 material to satisfy deeply the artistic impulse in 
 us toward the beautiful and the true. And the 
 world shall have long to wait before another child 
 of genius shall come who shall extract as deep and 
 tmalloyed pleasures from this source as did William 
 Wordsworth, the supreme poet, not of childhood, 
 iDut of childhood memories : 
 
 With heart as calm as lakes that sleep, 
 
 In frosty moonlight glistening ; 
 
 Or mountain rivers, where they creep 
 
 Along a channel smooth and deep, 
 
 To their own far-off murmurs listening. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 MYSTICISM: ITS DEVELOPMENT 
 
 The stuff which a true poet principally makes 
 use of is that which comes to him from first-hand 
 experience, and from such experience that gives 
 genuine pleasure. But the moment of pleasure 
 which the poet wishes to seize and enshrine in his 
 poem, is, when drawn from experience, a thing of 
 the past — always something of yesterday. With 
 the exquisite sense for pleasure values that belongs 
 to a poet, he will attempt to snatch from devouring 
 time the thing of beauty, give it permanent ex- 
 pression, and really make it a joy forever. The 
 point, or points, of his past experience upon which 
 the poet will most habitually fix his'attention will 
 depend upon the character of the poet and the 
 conditions and circumstances of his environment. 
 On account of particular traits in his character and 
 peculiar circumstances into which he was thrown,. 
 AVordsworth, we have seen, fixed his attention, more 
 
MYSTICISM 109 
 
 than other poets, upon the experiences of his child- 
 hood. We have also seen that the experiences of 
 •childhood which had value for him were those that 
 were bound up with his interest in nature. We 
 have had abundant proof that, in his effort of 
 recollection to produce an immediate subjective 
 ■experience in the mind, there was present a deep 
 strain of what is called the mystical. But when the 
 memory of those experiences is connected with 
 •outward sense perceptions there is produced a still 
 deeper strain of the mystical, as in the poem "To 
 a Cuckoo." And when Wordsworth attaches a 
 moral value to this double experience of memory 
 images and sense perceptions, as in "Tintern 
 Abbey," the full tide of the mystical is on. 
 
 The general outline of thought in "Tintern 
 Abbey" is as follows : First, the picture of the 
 mind is revived. The landscape, the plots of cottage- 
 ground, the orchard-tufts, the grove's and copses, 
 the hedge rows, "little lines of sportive wood run 
 wild," the pastoral farms, the wreathes of smoke — 
 all these beauteous forms, through a long absence, 
 had not been to the poet as a landscape to a blind 
 man's eye, but had frequently been partially revived 
 in his mind. But now, as he stood in the very 
 presence of the beauteous forms themselves the 
 memory of them was revived in full measure. 
 
no WORDSWORTH 
 
 Secondly, there is a development of immediate sense 
 
 perceptions — perceptions of 
 
 The meadows and the woods, 
 And mountains ; and of all that we behold 
 From this green earth ; of all the mighty world 
 Of eye and ear — both what they half create, 
 And what perceive. 
 
 And thirdly, a moral value is given to this double 
 experience of memory and sense perceptions. 
 "Therefore am I," he says, 
 
 Well pleased to recognize 
 In nature and the language of the sense. 
 The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, 
 The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 
 Of all my moral being. 
 
 And in the same strain of moral interpretation he 
 
 adds : 
 
 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. 
 
MYSTICISM III 
 
 The genesis of giving such a high moral value 
 to the power of nature working through memory 
 and the senses, is important and instructive in the 
 history of the development of the poet's mind. It 
 will be remicmbered that in the crisis following his 
 over-wrought interest in the Revolution, Words- 
 worth considered that his soul had attained its "last 
 and lowest ebb" when "wearied out with con- 
 trarities" he "yielded up moral questions in 
 despair." But it is a fair question to ask whether 
 Wordsworth actually gave up moral questions com- 
 pletely. It is to be suspected rather that his nature 
 so imperatively demanded moral solace that he 
 could not give up the moral problem at all. No 
 doubt for a time he made conscious efiforts to avoid 
 the contrarities of moral issues ; but even "The 
 Borderers," which was written in his despondency, 
 is much greater as a study in the moral nature of 
 man than as a play. He makes Marmaduke, the 
 young hero of the play, say to Oswald, his tempter : 
 
 Young as I am, I might go forth a teacher. 
 And you should see how deeply I could reason 
 Of love in all its shapes, beginnings, ends; 
 Of moral qualities in their diverse aspects ; 
 Of actions, and their laws and tendencies. 
 
 And so Wordsworth really never ceased reasoning 
 of love in all its shapes, of moral qualities, and of 
 
112 WORDSWORTH 
 
 actions ; and the poems written immediately after 
 his recovery are steeped with moral sentiment. 
 In the poem "To My Sister" he writes : 
 
 Love, now a universal birth, 
 From heart to heart is stealing, 
 From earth to man, from man to earth : 
 — It is the hour of feeling. 
 
 One moment now may give us more 
 Than years of toiling reason : 
 Our minds shall drink at every pore 
 The spirit of the season. 
 
 Some silent laws our hearts will make 
 Which they shall long obey : 
 , We for the year to come may take 
 
 Our temper from today. 
 
 And from the blessed power that rolls 
 About, below, above, 
 We'll frame the measure of our souls : 
 They shall be tuned to love. 
 
 The mind, drinking at every pore the spirit of the 
 season, and the heart, taking its temper from the 
 day, are attuned to the highest law of morals — the 
 law of love. In "Expostulation and Reply" we have 
 this passage : 
 
 The eye — it cannot choose but see ; 
 We cannot bid the ear be still ; 
 Our bodies feel, where'er they be. 
 Against or with our will. 
 
MYSTICISM 113 
 
 Nor less I deem that there are Powers 
 Which of themselves our minds impress ; 
 That we can feed this mind of ours 
 In a wise passiveness. 
 
 This mind of ours is to be fed through the eye and 
 the ear by the powers of nature — "this mighty sum 
 of things forever speaking." And in "The Tables 
 Turned" the poet says : 
 
 And hark! how blithe the throstle sings! 
 He, too, is no mean preacher : 
 Come forth into the light of things, 
 Let Nature be your teacher. 
 
 She has a world of ready wealth, 
 Our hearts and minds to bless — 
 Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health, 
 Truth breathed by cheerfulness. 
 
 One impulse from a vernal wood 
 May teach you more of man, 
 Of moral evil and of good, 
 Than all the sages can. 
 
 These passages all possess an tmmistakable moral 
 temper, and the source of their strength lies in 
 extracting moral nurture from "the blessed power 
 that rolls about, below, above," from drawing upon 
 the "ready wealth" of nature and allowing her to 
 be our teacher. It may be that to some persons 
 impulses from vernal woods cannot teach anything 
 of moral evil or of good, as Morley would have it ; 
 
114 WORDSWORTH 
 
 but they greatly err who maintain that Wordsworth 
 did not find this the prime source of moral strength. 
 What happened to Wordsworth, then, is not that 
 he gave up the consideration of moral questions, 
 which was impossible to a nature like his, but that 
 he ceased to look for moral strength in the social 
 and political philosophies of his day. And, thrown 
 back upon the dignity and strength of his own inner 
 life, he revived the memories of childhood, joined 
 them to outward sense perceptions, and in that 
 double process, he rediscovered himself — his moral 
 nature. From thenceforth those memory and sense 
 impressions became the vehicle of expression for 
 his inner moral life. It was through his reaction, 
 therefore, on the French Revolution that Words- 
 worth's eyes were opened and that his peculiar 
 moral principles were formulated. And, carrying 
 the revolutionary method and spirit with him, he 
 would teach men the new principles. He would 
 explain to them how to build up their moral being. 
 He would readjust society on a new and simple 
 basis, on the basis of the primal affections and 
 moral strength derived through memory and sense 
 from the powers of nature. Thus, with the intensity 
 and wholeheartedness characteristic of Revolution- 
 ary leaders, Wordsworth became the prophet and 
 leader of a new moral and revolutionary movement. 
 
MYSTICISM 115 
 
 But this synthesis of memory images, sense 
 perceptions, and a moral idea by a mind that is 
 voHtional and passionate, is eminently productive 
 of a mystical state of mind. When the most com- 
 mon ideas that are naturally remote from each 
 other, are held in close juxtaposition under the 
 stress of passion, the mystical state of mind always 
 results. There is, therefore, some mystical deposit 
 in every human constitution, but the quantity of it 
 is greater in some individuals than in others. There 
 was in Wordsworth, to start with, an unusually 
 great deposit of the mystical consciousness. The 
 original powers of his mind — the powers of 
 sensitiveness, passion and volition — were well fitted 
 to de^•elop the mystical. In his earliest childhood, 
 he made elaborate preparations to bring on the 
 mystical state, although, of course, he was not then 
 conscious of their meaning. 
 
 Again, in some periods of history more than in 
 others, the spirit of the times favors the develop- 
 ment of the mystical. The age of Pope, for example, 
 with its aversion to passion and to any new and 
 strange combination of ideas, was decidedly un- 
 favorable to the development of it. If, in that age, 
 a young person were possessed by nature with a 
 large deposit of mystical tendencies, the spirit of 
 the times would help him to hush them up, would 
 
ii6 IVORDSWORTIT 
 
 deaden them for him, and finally destroy them. 
 This is why no mystics appeared in the age of 
 Pope. The age of Wordsworth, on the contrary, 
 with its revolutionary tendencies, with its efforts 
 at the readjustment of society in new and strange 
 ways, with its insistence on personal freedom, and 
 with its powerful emphasis on personal convictions, 
 was emphatically favorable to the development of 
 the mystical. What the spirit of the times did for 
 Wordsworth was to encourage him to bring to 
 light and to perfect the elaborate mystical practices 
 of his childhood. In tracing their development, 
 then, we must recur again to the experiences of his 
 childhood. 
 
 One precaution, however, is necessary at this 
 point. It is not profitable to trace this development 
 closely in the sequence of time. For the mystical 
 [proper, that is, the pure mystical state, is not ■ 
 developed gradually in the mind and then 
 permanently possessed. It is rather a state of mind 
 that is arrived at occasionally, and held transitorily, 
 and with irregular recurrence. It is altogether too 
 intense and strained to be permanently possessed. 
 What is more important, therefore, is to note in 
 its development the degree of intensity it has 
 reached, and the different stages of its development 
 marked by that degree of intensity. 
 
MYSTICISM 117 
 
 The simplest rudiment of mystical experience 
 is based upon the most common experiences of 
 humanity, and is developed out of them. It deals 
 with 
 
 Unshaped half-human thoughts 
 
 Which solitary Nature feeds 
 
 'Mid summer storms or winter's ice. 
 
 Strange, unshaped. half-human thoughts come to 
 all of us and out of them the will builds its mystic 
 temple. The heart of the mystic, on the basis of 
 common experience, tends to 
 
 Luxuriate with indifferent things, 
 Wasting its kindliness on stocks and stones 
 And on the vacant air. 
 
 The following characterization of Peter Bell 
 is universally recognizable, yet it expresses such 
 rigidity and fixedness of attention that it un- 
 mistakably possesses the rudiment of the mystical 
 experience : 
 
 There was a hardness in his cheek, 
 There was a hardness in his eye. 
 As if the man had fixed his face, 
 In many a solitary place 
 Against the wind and open sky! 
 
 These passages represent the most common 
 experiences, but they also possess the germ of the 
 
ii8 WORDSWORTH 
 
 mystical consciousness, the suggestion of deeper 
 strains of fixed attention. They represent the very 
 beginnings of the mystical state of mind. 
 
 When, however, the kindliness that is wasted 
 "on stocks and stones, and on the vacant air" 
 becomes more intense, when the face that is fixed 
 "in many a solitary place, against the wind and 
 open sky" becomes more passionately fixed, then 
 a higher and more distinct stage of the mystical 
 presence is recognizable and it becomes more 
 clearly separated from other experiences. Not only 
 did Wordsworth as a lover fix his eye upon the 
 moon that descended to Lucy's cot, but when he 
 came home from school on vacation and lay down 
 in his accustomed bed he tells us with what fixed- 
 ness he aforetimes had gazed upon the moon : 
 
 That lowly bed whence I had heard the wind 
 Roar, and the rain beat hard ; where I so oft 
 Had lain awake on summer nights to watch 
 The moon in splendor couched among the leaves 
 Of a tall ash, that near our cottage stood ; 
 Had watched her with fixed eyes while to and fro 
 In the dark summit of the waving tree 
 She rocked with every impulse of the breeze. 
 
 Even the grave of a dead companion is of sufficient 
 interest to arouse the active but mute gazing 
 tendency: 
 
MYSTICISM 119 
 
 The grassy churchyard hangs 
 Upon a slope above the village school, 
 And through that churchyard when my way was led 
 On summer evenings, I believe that there 
 A long half hour together I have stood 
 Mute, looking at the grave in which he lies! 
 
 Not only do we learn that Wordsworth "gazed and 
 gazed" at the daffodils, but often "gleams of sky 
 and clouds and intermingling mountain tops, in 
 one inseparable glory clad" bring on the rapt gaze : 
 
 On the fulgent spectacle 
 That neither passed away nor changed, I gazed 
 Enrapt. 
 
 In the above passages the common qualities are 
 volitional activity, fixed attention and deep stirrings 
 of the feelings. They are well on the way toward 
 the distinctly mystical consciousness. 
 
 Representative passages of a more highly 
 developed stage — a stage in which sense perceptions 
 begin to pale in the intense light of memory and 
 vision, and in which the moral and spiritual idea 
 is present — are the following: 
 
 I would stand, 
 If the night blackened with a coming storm, 
 Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are 
 The ghostly language of the ancient earth, 
 Or make their dim abode in distant winds. 
 
120 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Thence did I drink the visionary power ; 
 And deem not profitless those fleeting moods 
 Of shadowy exultation. 
 
 And the reason why he hstens so intently and 
 deems the exercise profitable is that the "soul 
 retains an obscure sense of possible sublimity," and 
 that it is through such an exercise that the sense 
 of its sublimity is heightened. Memory, sense per- 
 ceptions, and the moral idea are beautifully brought 
 together in this passage. Likewise in the passage: 
 Oh, then, the calm 
 And dead still water lay upon my mind 
 Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky, 
 Never before so beautiful, sank down 
 Into my heart, and held me like a dream ! 
 
 In the following passage the light of sense goes 
 out altogether under the volitional intensity of the 
 inner gaze, and the outer world of reality again 
 becomes "an insubstantial faery place" : 
 
 And sate among the woods 
 Alone upon some jutting eminence, 
 At the first gleam of dawn-light, when the Vale, 
 
 Yet slumbering, lay in utter solitude 
 
 Oft in these moments such a holy calm 
 Would overspread my soul, that bodily eyes 
 Were utterly forgotten, and what I saw 
 Appeared like something in myself, a dream 
 A prospect in the mind. 
 
 And likewise in the passage : 
 
MYSTICISM 121 
 
 But to my conscious soul I now can say 
 "I recognize thy glory" ; in such strength 
 Of usurpation, when the light of sense 
 Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed 
 The invisible world — 
 
 the light of sense goes out with a flash, and, in a 
 flash, the invisible world, a new order of moral and 
 spiritual truth is revealed ; physical sense is 
 transcended, and we have duly arrived at the 
 mystic's rapturous state of mind. 
 
 Just at the vanishing point of the senses is 
 where the mystical proper, the pure mystical, 
 begins. And the completest expression of the 
 highest stage of it is found in a passage in "Tintern 
 Abbey." To the beauteous forms that through a 
 long absence had not been to him like a landscape 
 to a blind man's eye, Wordsworth says he owed 
 a gift of sublime aspect, the gift of 
 
 That blessed mood, 
 In which the burthen of the mystery, 
 In which the heavy and the weary weight 
 Of all this unintelligible world, 
 Is lightened : — that serene and blessed mood, 
 In which the affections gently lead us on — 
 Until, the breath of this corporeal frame 
 And even the motion of our human blood 
 Almost suspended, we are laid asleep 
 In body, and become a living soul : 
 
122 WORDSWORTH 
 
 While with an eye made quiet by the power 
 Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, 
 We see into the life of things. 
 
 The critics have been loud in their praise of this 
 famous passage. Stedman, for example, speaks of 
 it as having been produced when Wordsworth's 
 vision penetrated the quintessence of nature, and 
 when he was "in his very highest mood." One 
 wonders whether after the burden of the mystery 
 and the heavy and the weary weight of all this 
 unintelligible world is lightened, and after the 
 motion of our human blood is almost suspended 
 and we are laid asleep in body — whether then our 
 being is in the proper condition to enter the very 
 highest experience known to men. One wonders 
 what acttially is seen when "we see into the life of 
 things." One naturally asks what are the fruits for 
 life of such a rare experience. Wordsworth himself 
 is wholly in doubt about the value of the experience 
 and its consequent results, for he immediately adds : 
 
 If this 
 Be but a vain belief, yet, oh ! how oft — . . . 
 How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, 
 O sylvan Wye ! thou wanderer thro' the woods — 
 
 and we again suddenly find ourselves in an 
 intelligible world. In fact, what has generally been 
 considered contemplation par excellence is con- 
 
MYSTICISM 123 
 
 lemplation in excess. After having committed the 
 •excess Wordsworth's essential sanity makes him 
 retract immediately and take more easily tenable 
 grounds. The passage, however, is a profound and 
 delicate rendering of a possible and somewhat 
 unusual mood. The description of the process by 
 which the mind enters into this mood is delicately 
 accurate. First the ordinary burdens of life are 
 removed and the mystery of the unintelligible 
 world is lightened, that is, since there is no 
 absoluteness but only relativity of knowledge of 
 our ordinary life, that knowledge is renounced as 
 an unintelligible world of knowledge, categories 
 of thought are given up, all distinctions of grades 
 and degrees are obliterated ; and what remains is 
 a mood divested of intellectual content, an ab- 
 straction without any concrete counterpart. Next 
 the human blood, smelling entirely too much of 
 earthiness, is suspended in its action, the body is 
 laid asleep, and the soul, having transcended 
 physical experience, enters into the "blessed con- 
 sciousness of unutterable reality." 
 
 The result of this intense excitation of the mind 
 is to produce two qualities which Professor William 
 James declares to be two of the chief qualities of 
 mysticism, namely, the noetic quality and that of 
 inefYability. According to the first, "we see into 
 
124 WORDSWORTH 
 
 the life of things." These states of mind are "states- 
 of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by 
 the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, 
 revelations full of significance and importance.'" 
 According to the second quality — inefifability — the 
 experience in this state of mind remains inarticulate 
 "The subject immediately says that no adequate 
 report of its contents can be given. ... It cannot 
 be imparted or transferred to others." For lack 
 of a sufficient number of points of connection with 
 ordinary life and of adequate terms of expression 
 the mystic can never communicate to others the 
 wonderful truths which he beholds. 
 
 To put the description of the process in other 
 words, the necessary conditions for producing this 
 extraordinary state of mind seem to be the mental 
 act of forcing the feelings to divest themselves of 
 their ordinary contents of concrete material and 
 the imagination of its ordinary intellectual content, 
 and to fix themselves upon some abstract spot — 
 which spot in some mysterious way begins to 
 illuminate under the focus of the feelings and 
 imagination. Under the strained condition into 
 which the will has forced the feelings and the 
 imagination a new order of truth is generated by 
 them, great gleams of light flash out in a thousand 
 directions from the radiating center, vast strata 
 
MYSTICISM 125 
 
 of wonderful truth are revealed. But when the 
 illuminating- process has once fairly set in, the will, 
 which has been the chief power at work thus far, 
 is temporarily held in abeyance, and for a short 
 time the subject "sees into the life of things." 
 
 It is a long way from the point where the heart 
 rather indifferently wastes "its kindliness on stocks 
 and stones, and on the vacant air" to the point 
 where its experience is so intense that it sees, or 
 thinks it sees, "into the life of things." We have 
 traced out a number of more or less distinct inter- 
 .mediary stages. We have seen that the very 
 highest stage is for the most part a moral and 
 intellectual abstraction ; yet it always held a certain 
 charm for Wordsworth : 
 
 Mighty is the charm 
 Of those abstractions to a mind beset 
 With images and haunted by herself, 
 And specially delightful unto me 
 Was that clear synthesis built up aloft 
 So gracefull3^ 
 
 His mind, haunted as it was by concrete images, 
 delighted to penetrate through the images and build 
 up a clear synthesis aloft and gracefully out of the 
 inner meanings and abstractions suggested by these 
 images. Almost constantly, however, Wordsworth 
 remained just below the very highest stage of the 
 
126 WORDSWORTH 
 
 mystical. His method seems to have been to force 
 his way as near to it as possible without losing the 
 vitality of passion and of concrete representation. 
 Here, in the next to the highest stage of the 
 mystical, where the light of sense does not quite 
 go out, where ordinarily intelligible distinctions 
 lemain, lies the most distinctive and the most solid 
 part of his work. Here is where the synthesis of 
 memory images, sense perceptions, and the moral' 
 idea, is most efifectively made. It is on this level 
 of the mystical that Wordsworth must be tested. 
 It is our next task, therefore, to consider the 
 meaning and validity of this mystical synthesis. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 MYSTICISM : ITS ETHICAL MEANING 
 
 The power of volition, of self-control, which is 
 true freedom, and the power of deep and intuitive 
 feelings, feelings of love, faith, joy, rapture — these 
 are the foundation stones of Wordsworth's mys- 
 ticism. The union of these powers is the union 
 of what is highest in man — self-control and freedom 
 — and of what is best in child life — passionate love, 
 faith, joy, and rapture. Volition and self-control 
 save the feelings from sentimentality, and from the 
 malign opprobrium with which cold-hearted critics 
 are wont to treat them. Thus Wordsworth attained 
 to a high dignity of life and at the same time 
 retained the simplicity of a child. Though the union 
 of these powers can hardly attain to the dignity of 
 a philosophic system of thought, yet the powers 
 themselves are grounded deep in the common heart 
 of man. They are little influenced by the accidents 
 of time or place, or by the force of environment. 
 
128 WORDSWORTH 
 
 It is for this reason that after a century (the Nine- 
 teenth Century) of prodigious efforts to lay bare 
 the heart of nature and to discover her laws, of a 
 vast collection of facts concerning her, giving us 
 new and profound insights into her mysterious 
 workings, the treatment of her by Wordsworth is 
 still fresh "with points of morning dew" and has 
 lost scarcely any of its meaning and vitality. With 
 the grasp of a giant, Wordsworth seized upon the 
 permanent and fundamental qualities of volition 
 and passion, at a point where man is not an object 
 apart from the vast forces that surround him and 
 play upon his life, but at a point where he is 
 essentially in harmony with the forces that are 
 constantly "breathing grandeur upon the humblest 
 face of human life." 
 
 Why, then, should there be any question as to 
 the meaning and validity of Wordsworth's mystical 
 synthesis of memory images, sense perceptions and 
 the moral idea. The question of doubt is not 
 usually raised with regard to the foundation upon 
 which it rests — although that may be questioned, 
 too, but with regard to the particular synthesis 
 Wordsworth built on that foundation. Is the way 
 of memory and the senses the true way of life? 
 Does moral virtue really flow from the heart of 
 •external nature into the heart of man? Is not this 
 
MYSTICISM 129 
 
 synthesis of memory, sense, and the moral idea 
 a factitious synthesis, and is it not true that the 
 quicker we get rid of the ilhision the better? Many 
 great and wise men have been against Wordsworth 
 on this score. We have seen in our study of 
 childhood memories and the "Intimations of Im- 
 mortality" that critics were temperamentally divided 
 on the question of the validity of those memories. 
 But here the temperamental dififerences are more 
 highly accentuated. There are represented here 
 two widely different ways of approaching some of 
 the most important problems of life — the common- 
 ; sense way and the mystical way. The common- 
 ! sense way holds in contempt the intuitions, the 
 dreams, and the raptures of the mystic. The mystic 
 way seems to subvert into strange and interfusing 
 presences the facts of every-day life that ought to 
 be taken as a matter of course. And perhaps 
 between these two ways of thinking, and especially 
 of feeling, no reconciliation can ever be made. The 
 only thing that can be done is to show, with as 
 much sympathy as possible, how far common sense 
 and reasonableness will be on the side of Words- 
 worth's way of feeling about the important facts 
 of life involved in his synthesis. 
 
 It has just been said that since the powers of 
 volition and passion, which are made the ground- 
 
 9 
 
130 li'ORDSWORTH 
 
 work of Wordsworth's mysticism, are deeply 
 grounded in the heart of man, they are not much 
 influenced by the accidents of time or place or by 
 the force of environment. But not so with the 
 particular synthesis he built on that groundwork. 
 That was due mainly to the accidents of his times 
 and to his particular environment. Have given 
 the man, his early surroundings, and the peculiar 
 circumstances of his life that we have previously 
 traced out, and the result must be this particular 
 synthesis. Mysticism manifests itself in outward 
 expression in many forms. Mysticism is intuitive, 
 deeply subjective, close to the very inner core of 
 life, to the very "beatings of the human heart." 
 But it craves outward expression; and just because 
 it is so deeply from within, its outward expression 
 differs in different individuals. Men do not differ 
 much in their statement of an outward fact of life, 
 say, of the statement of the law of gravitation. It 
 is objective and verifiable. But in the expression 
 of an inner experience a man must recur to some 
 form of pictorial or symbolical language. He must 
 work by hints and suggestions ; and the mystic 
 experience on its way to outward expression may 
 take diverse courses. Cathedrals, angels, seraphs, 
 symbolism ready made from the Bible, may serve 
 as a channel of expression for the different 
 
MYSTICISM 131 
 
 hierarchial stages of mystical excellence, as in 
 Swedenborg. Nature may even be mystically 
 interpreted in terms of Biblical symbols, as in 
 Newman. In speaking of the angels, Newman says, 
 "Every breath of air and ray of light and heat, 
 every beautiful prospect, is, as it were, the skirts 
 of their garments, the waving of the robes of those 
 whose faces see God." And the Catholic Church, 
 with its hierarchy of officers and its ritualistic forms 
 of worship, may serve as an outward embodiment 
 of the religious and mystical consciousness. So in 
 Wordsworth, different from Swedenborg and from 
 Newman respectively, the objects and powers of 
 external nature furnished the embodiment and 
 means of expression of his mystical and religious 
 consciousness. 
 
 But the tone in which we have just been 
 speaking of the mystics and their symbols is by 
 no means the tone in which they themselves speak. 
 The precise difficulty with them is that they take 
 themselves together with their symbols, with ab- 
 solute seriousness ; and this is what alienates the 
 critics. Swedenborg's religion to him is the true 
 religion. Catholicism to Newman is the only right 
 religion. And Wordsworth feels that he actually 
 draws unbounded moral and religious strength from 
 the heart of external nature. The synthesis stands 
 
132 WORDSWORTH 
 
 in his mind as an absolute fact, and admits of no 
 doubt. In the words of Tennyson, this state of 
 mind is "not a confused state, but the clearest, the 
 surest of the surest, utterly beyond words." It 
 is not the result of imagination, so called, but of 
 bare and unaided vision. Undoubtedly any and 
 all of these mystics make too great claims for their 
 particular formulas as means of the development 
 of character and life. They are too insistent in 
 making their particular cures the panacea for all 
 ills. A specific formula cannot have universal 
 validity. The method of each one, and of Words- 
 worth especially, is a little too exclusive. Moral 
 strength does not flow so exclusively from external 
 nature. Is it not possible that from the atmosphere 
 enveloping religious ceremonies — great cathedrals, 
 elaborate rituals, accumulations of historic associa- 
 tions — moral strength may flow into the mind as 
 effectively as from external nature? And is it not 
 true that these systems need not be mutually 
 exclusive? With these limitations in mind, let us 
 see what may be said in favor of Wordsworth's 
 mystical synthesis in particular. 
 
 First, we cannot really exclude the forces of 
 nature from us if we will. Whatever transcendental 
 qualities man may possess he has evolved out of 
 the very heart of nature, and is completely 
 
MYSTICISM 133 
 
 enveloped by her through his whole life. He is 
 fortunate if he can live where he can tread the solid 
 earth and can see the sky overhead. It is not 
 disputed that men, for their moral as well as their 
 physical well-being, should live in wholesome sun- 
 shine and in the presence of blowing breezes a 
 good part of their lives. These are the primal 
 necessities of life, and just as Wordsworth in his 
 poetry would use "a selection of language really 
 used by men," so in the appropriation of primal 
 necessities he would use a strictly selective process. 
 He would not be blind to the destructive power 
 of "the lightning, the fierce wind, and trampling 
 waves," but he would select the best portion of 
 natural influences. He would not all his life breathe 
 the murky atmosphere of a great city, but would 
 choose to let the "motions of delight that haunt 
 the sides of the green hills" touch his life. He 
 would allow the brooks, muttering "a busy noise 
 by day, a quiet sound in silent night," the waves 
 and the groves, to play upon his life and mold his 
 character. All this we must let Wordsworth him- 
 self tell in his own incomparable "selection of 
 language really used by men" : 
 
 Ye motions of delight that haunt the sides 
 Of the green hills ; ye breezes and soft airs, 
 Whose subtle intercourse with breathing flowers. 
 
134 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Feelingly watched, might teach Man's haughty race 
 How without injury to take, to give 
 Without offence ; ye who, as if to show 
 The wondrous influence of power gently used. 
 Bend the complying heads of lordly pines. 
 And, with a touch, shift the stupendous clouds 
 Through the whole compass of the sky ; ye brooks, 
 Muttering along the stones, a busy noise 
 By day, a quiet sound in the silent night; 
 Ye waves, that out of the great deep steal forth 
 In a calm hour to kiss the pebbly shore. 
 Not mute, and then retire, fearing no storm ; 
 And you, ye groves, whose ministry it is 
 To interpose the covert of your shades. 
 Even as a sleep, between the heart of man 
 And outward troubles, between man himself. 
 Not seldom, and his own uneasy heart: 
 Oh ! that I had a music and a voice 
 Harmonious as your own that I might tell 
 What ye have done for me. 
 
 This indeed sounds beautifully mystical, but it 
 may become a practical reality to any man. At 
 least, no man is capable to judge what nature can 
 or can not do for him until he has given her, at 
 her best, a fair and reasonable chance. 
 
 Secondly, it lies within the power of a man's 
 will to make Wordsworth's mystical synthesis his 
 own. Although his method may not be exclusive 
 of all others, it will work if one but gives it a 
 
MYSTICISM 135 
 
 cliancc. If one puts himself in the way of it, it will 
 produce character of a high order. To start with, 
 Wordsworth demands manliness, that is, humility 
 and courage, of every individual. Then one musr 
 use his luill — this is Wordsworth's peculiar lesson. 
 (3ne must will with mental alertness, not with 
 mental laziness, to give himself up, not passively, 
 but "in a ivise passiveness," to the powers that 
 are forever speaking. For the majority of human 
 beings it is a very hard task to be wisely passive 
 in the presence of great and enduring objects. It 
 is vastly easier to engage in a constant round of 
 aimless, nervous, and sporadic activities, which 
 really is mere passiveness. There is, therefore, a 
 wide difiference between mere passivity and wise 
 passiveness. And when that difference is taken 
 fully into account, the combination of a moral idea 
 and the life of the senses is not as factitious as it 
 may seem. 
 
 In the third place, there is nothing degrading 
 in the life of the senses themselves when under 
 proper restraint. It is only when they are made 
 an end in themselves that they are not elevating. 
 It is not only the will that puts a restraint on the 
 life of the senses, according to Wordsworth, but 
 memory also has an important purifying power. 
 The tone of much criticism on Wordsworth's 
 
136 IVORDSIVORTH 
 
 interpretation of nature is as though he held that 
 the power of high morals came only and immedi- 
 ately from and through the senses. This is 
 essentially unfair to Wordsworth's interpretation. 
 For the power of memory, as we have already 
 partially seen, plays an important part in Words- 
 worth's scheme of things. It is not only what the 
 eye and ear perceive, but what they half-create that 
 gives value to an experience with nature. And the 
 half-creating power of the mind lies in previous 
 experiences conserved and carried forward by the 
 means of memory, and present in every act of the 
 mind. "What want we?" he asks in the "Recluse"; 
 
 Have we not perpetual streams, 
 Warm woods, and sunny hills, and fresh green fields. 
 And mountains not less green, and flocks and herds, 
 And thickets full of songsters, and the voice 
 Of lordly birds, an unexpected sound 
 Heard now and then from morn to latest eve, 
 Admonishing the man who walks below 
 Of solitude and silence in the sky? 
 These have we and a thousand nooks of earth 
 Have also these, but nowhere else is found. 
 Nowhere (or is it fancy?) can be found 
 The one sensation that is here ; 'tis here, 
 Here as it found its way into my heart 
 In childhood, here as it abides by day, 
 By night, here only; or in chosen minds 
 That take it with them hence, where'er they go. 
 
MYSTICISM 137 
 
 — 'Tis, but I cannot name it, 'tis the sense 
 Of majesty, and beauty, and repose, 
 A blended holiness of earth and sky. 
 Something that makes this individual spot, 
 This small abiding place of many men, 
 A termination, and a last retreat, 
 A center, come from wheresoe'er you will, 
 A whole without dependence or defect, 
 Made for itself, and happy in itself. 
 Perfect contentment. Unity entire. 
 
 It is the "one sensation'' that found its way into 
 Wordsworth's heart in his childhood and that in 
 chosen minds goes with them wherever they go. 
 that possesses a power to purify and hallow the 
 present life of the senses. And when "the sense 
 of majesty, and beauty, and repose, a blended holi- 
 ness of earth and sky" join with the power of 
 memory, not only to purify and hallow, but to 
 restrain and control the life of the senses — do we 
 not have here a synthesis, mystical though it be, 
 that commends itself to reason and to common 
 sense? 
 
 The final test, however, of Wordsworth's mys- 
 ticism is the test of the foundation upon which its 
 synthesis rests. It is "the mind of man," Words- 
 worth says, that is "my haunt, the main region of 
 my song." The mystical experience, after all, is 
 mainly a subjective experience, whatever outward 
 
138 WORDSWORTH 
 
 ■expressions and connections it may have. "Words- 
 worth," says Emerson, "alone in his time, treated 
 the human mind well, and with an absolute trust." i 
 And it was a trust in the mind's power of self- 
 direction and self-support — its power of will. "The 
 trait," says Morley, "that really places Wordsworth 
 on an eminence above his poetic contempories, and 
 ranks him, as the ages are likely to rank hiifi, on 
 a line just short of the greatest of all time, is his 
 direct appeal to will and conduct." We have 
 already seen that in the production of poetry the 
 will has two functions to fulfil — to reproduce by 
 a species of reactions a former emotion and to hold 
 under restraint the new emotion. In the process 
 of life the will has still greater functions to fulfil, i 
 First of all, by the doctrine of recollection, it is ' 
 to conserve and transmute all that is valuable of 
 former experiences. Secondly, it is to hold the eyes \ 
 and the ears, heart and mind, close to the bosom 
 of mother earth : 
 
 Long have I loved what I behold — 
 
 The night that calms, the day that cheers ; 
 
 The common growth of mother earth 
 
 Suffices me — her tears, her mirth, 
 
 Her humblest mirth and tears. 
 
 And thirdly, the heart must "watch and receive." 
 Man is to "live within the light of high endeavors," 
 
MYSTICISM 139 
 
 and when he does so, he "daily spreads abroad his 
 being armed with strength that cannot fail." 
 
 There is naturally a certain similarity at this 
 point between the philosophy of Schopenhauer, the 
 great philosophical exponent of the will, and the 
 practices of Wordsworth ; but there is also a radical 
 difference. The chief difference is that according 
 to Schopenhauer the will creates ideas, while 
 according to Wordsworth the will causes the mind 
 to strike a proper attitude toward the powers that 
 lie without. It is most likely true that the will 
 cannot create ideas of its own accord and that 
 Schopenhauer's philosophy is futile. But in Words- 
 worth the mind, by means of the will, recalls old 
 ideas and absorbs new ones, and selects and retains 
 the best. And the chief function of these ideas is 
 to nourish the passions ; so that through the chan- 
 nel of ideas the will and the passions constantly 
 re-enforce each other. And thus the will is saved 
 from becoming barren and unproductive as in 
 Schopenhauer, and the passions are saved from the 
 excesses so common among the mystics. 
 
 But when the will does its work intensely and 
 passionately, then, by the stress of feeling, the 
 experience is carried along through the different 
 mystic stages, and it becomes more and more sub- 
 jective and intuitive, more and more inexplicable, 
 
140 WORDSWORTH 
 
 "the clearest, the surest of the surest"^ states of 
 mind, "utterly beyond words." And, like chemicals 
 that will act and form new combinations after a 
 certain intensity of heat has been reached, so the 
 will and the passions, counteracting and re- 
 enforcing each other, both strongly and highly- 
 wrought, beat out new combinations of highi 
 character. This is the groundwork of Wordsworth's 
 mystical synthesis, and it is solid groundwork — as 
 solid and enduring as the heart of man itself. Born 
 out of a time of revolution which stirred the vital 
 energies and deepest personal convictions of men^ 
 it yet bears the stamp of an original and masterful 
 mind. It is a truth arrived at not by the calculating 
 and analytical methods of a philosopher, but by the 
 demands of an intuitive and sensitive nature charged 
 with volitional and moral earnestness. It is no 
 doubt wrong to call this a system of philosophy — 
 it is rather a method of practice in the fundamental 
 terms of human life. It is when Wordsworth is 
 dealing with this original stuff of human nature 
 that he rises above the accidental influences of his 
 times and identifies himself powerfully with those 
 forces in men that are permanent and enduring,. 
 
 Their 'passions and their feelings, chiefly those 
 Essential and eternal in the heart. 
 
MYSTICISM 141 
 
 It is here that his utterances, in the words of 
 Lowell, "have the bare sincerity, the absolute ab- 
 straction from time and place, the immunity from 
 decay, that belong to the grand simplicities of the 
 Bible." 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 MYSTICISM: ITS ARTISTIC VALUE 
 
 Wordsworth always and primarily had before*, 
 him the purpose of writing- poetry about man, 
 nature, and childhood, however completely that 
 purpose may have been obscured at times by social, 
 political, or metaphysical interests. The poetry, 
 to be sure, was to be philosophical poetry. It 
 was to deal with new and original kinds of matter. 
 It was to reform the tastes of readers and was to 
 create a special taste for itself. It was to be an 
 enduring kind of poetry and was to teach mankind 
 enduring lessons. And. with these distracting- 
 interests, the only reason it proved to be genuine 
 poetry is that Wordsworth was at bottom a genuine 
 artist. We have seen that he, for the most part, 
 renounced the purely mystical, that he dispensed 
 with the pleasure of building charming abstractions 
 through the concrete images of the outer world, 
 and from seeinsf "into the life of thinsfs." We shall 
 
MYSTICISM 143 
 
 now see that he renounced the pleasure of the pure 
 mystic because of artistic purposes, because his 
 deepest impulse of life was the artistic impulse. 
 "Faith," says E. Recejac, "identifies mind with its 
 object in a way that artistic reflection can never 
 do. ^^^hen we reflect we find that we get the 
 feeling of love, joy, being, from within, and then 
 we picture them as belonging to all sorts of things : 
 but in the mystic state, the consciousness and the 
 world meet directly in a world that transcends them 
 both — in God who at once contains them and 
 carries the sense of their affinities to the highest 
 point. It is this meeting of the inner life of the 
 spirit and the outer life which leaves behind every 
 aesthetic effect.'' In the purely mystic conscious- 
 ness, then, the inner and outer life meet in such 
 close affinity that the artist, who must work in 
 concrete imagery, pictures, colors, etc., in order to 
 be effective, cannot find expression for the purely 
 mystical experience. The pure mystic may indeed 
 be able to "see into the life of things," as he says, 
 but it does not help the artist, for he has no way 
 of representing what he sees, and, as has just been 
 said, representation is essential to the artist. 
 
 Wordsworth, then, gave up for the most part 
 the mighty charm of abstraction because he chose 
 to be a poet primarily and not a mystic. But for 
 
144 WORDSWORTH 
 
 this very same reason, namely, that he chose to 
 be a poet, Wordsworth carried the mystic experi- 
 ence, by the intensity of will and passion, to as near 
 the vanishing- point of the senses as possible. In 
 the preceding chapter we have seen that, within 
 certain important limitations, the mystical synthesis 
 of Wordsworth possessed practical and ethical 
 validity. But in the last analysis it will be seen 
 that the chief function of childhood memories, sense 
 perceptions,' and the moral idea taken together (as 
 we have already seen in the case of childhood 
 memories taken separately), is to furnish material 
 for purely artistic purposes. "Every thing good," 
 says Emerson, "is on the highway. The middle 
 region of our being is the temperate zone. We 
 may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure 
 geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of 
 sensation. Between these extremes is the equator 
 of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry. . . . The 
 mid-world is the best." In this region of the 
 equator of life, however, Wordsworth kept along 
 the very highest zone ; and this is the prime 
 necessity for all great poetry. Volition and high 
 passion are not only the means by which character 
 is beaten into shape, but they are essential to the 
 production of great and enduring poetry. 
 
 Poetry may deal with common things and the 
 
MYSTICISM 145 
 
 common affairs of life, but it must deal with them 
 more intensely than their commonness would sug- 
 gest. Shakespeare, to use a familiar example, could 
 deal with the common affairs of English life, but 
 his great characters are filled with the mystery of 
 power and with the intensity of high passion. 
 Macbeth feels his heart knocking at his ribs and 
 clutches at air-drawn daggers in his delirium. 
 Othello is wrought upon by green-eyed jealousy 
 until he is thrown into a trance. Hamlet is familiar 
 with states of rapturous ecstasy. Lear, driven into 
 the storm by the heinous wickedness of his daugh- 
 ters, is stirred to mountain peaks of passion. We 
 do not call these experiences mystical because so 
 many other elements — elements of mind derange- 
 ment, which is permissible in drama, elements of 
 acting and dramatic effects, etc. — enter into them. 
 But they have essentially the same source with the 
 mystical experiences. Wordsworth believed the 
 truth could be found in the commonest things right 
 before one's eyes. But the penetration, the vision 
 necessary to discover the truth there really created 
 new values for them. Wordsworth wrote poems 
 about common objects, but the poems do not 
 especially have the element of commonality in them. 
 His poems about children are not for children ; 
 they are for mature minds. His poems about 
 
 10 
 
146 WORDSWORTH 
 
 peasants are not to be fully appreciated by peasants. 
 The intensity of treatment removes the poems a 
 great distance from the objects treated. The 
 intensity of treatment gave little chance for 
 ornamental display. It made the language of his 
 poetry as simple as that of common people, but 
 of a far different quality than that of common 
 people. Wordsworth found when the holy passion 
 was stirring that simple language would best 
 express his feelings, just as Lady Macbeth, in 
 the night walk scene, when she was charged with 
 the greatest possible intensity, found (that is, the 
 poet found for her,) simple language best suited 
 to her purpose. To produce the greatest poetry, 
 then, with common subjects, the poet must use 
 power and intensity, and must express himself in 
 the simplest language. 
 
 The chief question with Wordsworth, however, 
 was how to carry this mystic and poetic rapture to 
 the highest point without losing control of it and 
 without losing the vitality of concrete representa- 
 tion. Shakespeare's art was to create a storm of 
 passions and then ride successfully on the waves. 
 Wordsworth's art was to create deep undercurrent 
 stirrings of the water, but to retain a perfect calm 
 on the surface. If Shakespeare's art was greater, 
 Wordsworth's was perhaps more difficult. One 
 
P MYSTICISM 147 
 
 essential aid in carrying the mystic intensity to a 
 high point without going beyond the power of 
 poetic representation, is to deal with primary and 
 fundamental passions of human nature. The simple 
 and most permanent passions of the heart are 
 capable of being stretched farthest before breaking. 
 Like the physical heart, they are so deeply in- 
 wrought into the very structure of our being, that 
 they continue beating faithfully as long as life 
 lasts : 
 
 There is comfort in the strength of love ; 
 'Twill make a thing endurable, which else 
 Would overstrain the brain or break the heart.. 
 
 In the "Afiiictions of Margaret," the subdued self- 
 control of the character is matched only by the 
 intensity of her feelings. The surface is calm, but 
 there are stirrings to depths unfathomable : 
 
 Perhaps some dungeon hears thee groan,. 
 Maimed, mangled by inhuman men ; 
 Or thou upon a desert thrown 
 Inheritest the lion's den ; 
 Or hast been summoned to the deep, 
 Thou, thou and all thy mates, to keep 
 An incommunicable sleep. 
 
 I look for ghosts ; but none will force 
 Their way to me ; 'tis falsely said 
 That there was ever intercourse 
 Between the living and the dead ; 
 
148 WORDSWORTH 
 
 For, surely, then I should have signt 
 Of him I wait for day and night, 
 With love and longings infinite. 
 
 My apprehensions come in crowds ; 
 I dread the rustling of the grass ; 
 The very shadows of the clouds 
 Have power to shake me as they pass ; 
 I question things and do not find 
 One that will answer to my mind : 
 And all the world appears unkind. 
 
 Swinburne has compared this poem to Tennyson's 
 "Rizpah," much to the advantage of the latter. No 
 doubt "Rizpah" is in some respects the superior 
 poem, but from the standpoint from which we are 
 discussing poetry now, Tennyson's poem is quite 
 inferior to Wordsworth's. Take the following three 
 stanzas which hold practically the same relation 
 to the poem as a whole as do the three stanzas we 
 have quoted from "The Afflictions of Margaret" 
 to that poem as a whole : 
 
 Then since I couldn't but hear that cry of my boy that was 
 
 dead, 
 They seized me and shut me up : they fasten'd me down on 
 
 my bed. 
 ■"Mother, O Mother !"— he call'd in the dark to me year 
 
 after year — 
 They beat me for that, they beat me — you know that I 
 
 couldn't but hear ; 
 
MYSTICISM 149 
 
 And then at the last they found I had grown so stupid and 
 
 still, 
 They let me abroad again — but the creatures had worked 
 
 their will. 
 
 Flesh of my flesh was gone, but bone of my bone was left — 
 I stole them all from the lawyers — and you, will you call it 
 
 a theft?— 
 My baby, the bones that had suck'd me, the bones that had 
 
 laughed and had cried — 
 Theirs? Oh, no! they are mine — not theirs — they have 
 
 moved in my side. 
 
 Do' you think I was scared by the bones? I kiss'd 'em, I 
 
 buried 'em all^ 
 I can't dig deep, I am old— in the night by the churchyard 
 
 wall. 
 My Willy 'ill rise up whole when the trumpet of judgment 
 
 'ill sound, 
 But I charge you never to say that I laid him in holy ground. 
 
 There is complete abandonment in this character^ 
 lack of reserve and of quiet self-possession. There 
 is much excitement and even intensity in the poem,, 
 but it is comparatively more objective and on the 
 surface. There is not the firm grasp on the vital 
 and the deeply elemental, not the unfathomable 
 depths nor the subdued self-control as in the 
 "Afflictions of Margaret." 
 
 Another essential aid in carrying the mystic 
 intensity and rapture to a high point without 
 
150 WORDSWORTH 
 
 passing into abstraction, was the investiture of the 
 material universe with spirituality and movement. 
 Everything for him, Wordsworth says in the 
 Prelude, "respired with inward meaning." Every- 
 thing was transfused with a living spirit. All the 
 objects of nature, great and small, remote and near 
 — rocks and flowers and birds and trees, the very 
 air we breathe, the very earth upon which we tread, 
 the pageantry of earth and sea and sky, "the broad 
 ocean and the azure heavens spangled with kindred 
 multitude of stars" — all are, before our very eyes, 
 transfused by the "blessed power that rolls about, 
 below, above." We are made to feel that we our- 
 selves are "rolled round in earth's diurnal course, 
 with rocks, and stones, and trees." Charged with 
 mystical intensity, but void of mystical excess, 
 Wordsworth intensifies, with naturalness and spon- 
 taneity, the world round about us until it becomes 
 a new world for us. He makes it a transfusing and. 
 animating presence that mingles with our works 
 and pours its living spirit about us. This con- 
 ception gives suppleness and mobility to the 
 imagination and keeps it whole. And the mystic 
 intensity of it is thereby carried to a high point 
 without losing the vitality of concreteness. 
 
 With an unusual hold on fundamental passions 
 of hardy human characters and with attributin 
 
MYSTICISM 151 
 
 movement and moral power to the sense world in 
 which we live, Wordsworth succeeded in carrying 
 mystic intensity to its utmost in the realm of 
 poetry. We have seen in an earlier chapter that 
 the memories of childhood, as materials for artistic 
 use, have absolute validity. And now we can see 
 that the synthesis of those memories with the 
 physical world and moral power has the same 
 artistic validity. 
 
 It has validity because with it Wordsworth 
 remains close to actualit}^ and yet creates new and 
 ideal values. The highest function of the poet is 
 creation, of "widening nature without going beyond 
 it," of enlarging the sphere of life and freedom. 
 We demand from the poet enough contact with 
 the actual to make us sure we are on solid ground. 
 W'Q demand also new idealizations that are self- 
 supporting, and that seem to us reasonable and 
 worth while. Wordsworth at one and the same 
 moment gives us both solid substance and intense 
 idealizations. 
 
 The power of the mind by which this unity of 
 ideality and actuality is effected is penetration, or 
 vision. The measure of the mind's power is the 
 measure of the tension we feel resulting from the 
 attempt to express the universal in the particular, 
 the ideal in the actual. The whole history of 
 
152 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Wordsworth's literary life may be summed up as 
 a constant and persistent endeavor to substitute 
 this power of vision for imagination as ordinarily 
 conceived, to put himself at once at the center of 
 nature and at the center of his own life, and to 
 make those centers, not imaginatively but actually, 
 identical. To attain this end completely, however, 
 is an impossibility forever, for it is always by a 
 leap of the imagination that the final identity is 
 made. Perhaps in the "Ode to Duty" more nearly 
 than anywhere else, Wordsworth attained to this 
 identity by pure vision, as, for example, in the 
 following eight lines where he draws the power of 
 the inner and personal life into identity with the 
 "Stern Law Giver" of the outer world : 
 
 Flowers laugh before thee on their beds 
 And fragrance in thy footing treads ; 
 Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong; 
 And the most ancient heavens, through thee are fresh 
 and strong. 
 
 To humbler functions, awful Power ! 
 I call thee : I myself commend 
 Unto thy guidance from this hour; 
 Oh, let my weakness have an end ! 
 
 But even in these lines the transition from the 
 thought in the first four to that in the last four is 
 
MYSTICISM 153 
 
 made by a leap of the imagination. Thus the very 
 last step in the attempt at any such identity is an 
 imaginative step, and the result obtained is the 
 result almost, but not wholly, of pure vision. But 
 it is precisely by such an artistic aim (even though 
 it is not ideally attainable) and by such a mystical 
 conception of life and nature that Wordsworth has 
 won the distinction of depending more than any 
 other poet upon the power of unaided vision. 
 
 His method as the result of his artistic aim was 
 productive of many artistic effects that are charac- 
 teristically Wordsworthian. It led him, for example, 
 to renounce the conventional language of the poets, 
 to brand all extrinsic ornament as unnecessary and 
 insincere, and to depend absolutely upon the con- 
 creteness of the thing he was talking about for 
 poetic representation. He considered that every 
 object, however minute, was itself sufificient for the 
 stimulation of the senses. But by his intense 
 penetration upon minute objects of life and nature 
 he steeped those objects with a splendor not really 
 their own. For extrinsic ornamentation commonly 
 used by other poets he substituted visions of 
 universal nature and the power of his own spirit. 
 In a sonnet, for example, in which he addresses a 
 brook he has these words : 
 
154 WORDSWORTH 
 
 I would not do 
 Like Grecian Artists, give thee human cheeks, 
 Channels for tears ; no Naiad should'st thou be — 
 Have neither limbs, feet, feathers, joints nor hairs : 
 It seems the Eternal Soul is clothed in thee 
 With purer robes than those of flesh and blood, 
 And hath bestowed on thee a safer good; 
 Unwearied joy, and life without its cares. 
 
 The meadow-flower and the forest-tree are made to 
 possess individual life and universal freedom : 
 
 How does the meadow-flower its bloom unfold? 
 Because the lonely little flower is free 
 Down to its root, and, in that freedom, bold ; 
 And so the grandeur of the Forest-tree 
 Comes not by casting in a formal mould. 
 But from its otun divine vitality. 
 
 "Lives there a man?" Wordsworth asks in the 
 poem "To the Lady Fleming" : 
 
 Who never caught a noon-tide dream 
 From murmur of a running stream ; 
 Could strip, for aught the prospect yields 
 To him, their verdure from the fields ; 
 And take the radiance from the clouds 
 In which the sun his setting shrouds? 
 
 In like manner the sweet and simple "Highland 
 Girl" is identified with the spirit of her sur- 
 roundings : 
 
 J 
 
MYSTICISM 155 
 
 Nor am I loth, though pleased at heart, 
 
 Sweet Highland Girl! from thee to part: 
 
 For I, methinks, till I grow old. 
 
 As fair before me shall behold, 
 
 As I do now, the cabin small, 
 
 The lake, the bay, the waterfall ; 
 
 And Thee, the Spirit of them all ! 
 
 In one of the "Lucy" poems he makes the Spirit 
 of Nature say of Lucy : 
 
 "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. 
 
 "She shall be sportive as the fawn 
 That wild with glee across the lawn 
 
 Or up the mountain springs ; 
 And her's shall be the breathing balm, 
 And her's the silence and the calm 
 
 Of mute insensate things. 
 
 "The floating clouds their state shall lend 
 To her; for her the willow bend; 
 
 Nor shall she fail to see 
 Even in the motions of the Storm 
 Grace that shall mould the Maiden's form 
 
 By silent sympathy. 
 
iS6 WORDSWORTH 
 
 "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 brook, the flower, the tree, the child — small 
 and common objects indeed — are thus seen simply 
 but also intensely by the poet. And as a result of 
 that simple and intense penetration the poet reflects 
 in these objects visions of universal nature and the 
 power of his own spirit. To particularize from the 
 last of the illustrations just given, the child seen 
 thus simply and intensely, suggests, not by way 
 of comparison, but by means of the poet's direct 
 seeing, pictorial visions of floating clouds, bending 
 willows, moving storms, midnight stars and dancing 
 rivulets that subtly mold her life into shape ; and 
 the whole poem similarly suggests that the divine 
 spirit of the poet himself interpenetrates that subtle 
 power of nature which serves as law and impulse 
 to kindle or restrain the child and which lends balm 
 and grace and beauty to her spirit. This artistic 
 method and aim, together with his firm grasp upon 
 fundamental passions of hardy human characters 
 and with his attributing movement and moral power 
 to the sense world in which we live, makes Words- 
 
MYSTICISM IS7 
 
 Avortli successful not only in carrying mystic inten- 
 sity to its utmost in poetry but in giving us in his 
 own poetry solid substance and actuality on the 
 one hand, and, on the other, intense and highly 
 wrought idealizations. 
 
 That Wordsworth always aims to produce 
 idealizations he seems to deny in his "Elegiac 
 Stanzas" on the death of his brother John. This 
 denial, however, is made on the grounds of mys- 
 ticism rather than on the grounds of poetry. It 
 is due no doubt to \\'ordsworth's mystic earnest- 
 ness in taking the world he has half-created as the 
 world of absolute reality. We have seen, however, 
 that the light of the pure mystic's faith is too 
 intense for the attainment of artistic and poetic 
 effects, and it is best to be somewhat skeptical, 
 from the standpoint of the poet's art, after a certain 
 point of intensity has been reached. Let us first 
 get the poem itself before our minds. The poem 
 was suggested by a picture of Peele Castle in a 
 storm. The poet begins : 
 
 I was thy neighbor once, thou rugged Pile ! 
 Four summer weeks I dwelt in sight of thee : 
 I saw thee every day and all the while 
 Thy Form was sleeping on a glassy sea. 
 
 After telling in the next two stanzas "how perfect 
 was the calm," he continues: 
 
158 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Ah ! then if mine had been the Painter's hand 
 To express what then I saw ; and add the gleam, 
 The light that never was, on sea or land, 
 The consecration, and the Poet's dream; 
 
 I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile, 
 Amid a world how different from this ! 
 Beside a sea that could not cease to smile ;. 
 On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss. 
 
 The gleam of light that was to be added, it may- 
 be explained, was to be "borrowed from the youth- 
 ful poet's dream." After telling how, in the fond 
 illusion of his heart, he would have painted the 
 picture, he says : 
 
 So once it would have been — 'tis so no more ; 
 I have submitted to a new control : 
 A power is gone, which nothing can restore; 
 A deep distress hath humanized my Soul. 
 
 And in the conclusion : 
 
 Farewell, farewell, the heart that lives alone, 
 Housed in a dream, at distance from the kind! 
 Such happiness, wherever it be known. 
 Is to be pitied ; for 'tis surely blind. 
 
 But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer. 
 And frequent sights of what is to be borne ! 
 Such sights, or worse, as are before me here — 
 Not without hope we suft'er and we mourn. 
 
 The point in the poem to seize is that from hence- 
 forth to attain to happiness the poet means to see 
 
MYSTICISM 159 
 
 reality only, "frequent sights of what is to be 
 borne." Since he has submitted to a new control, 
 he means to paint pictures not as they might be, 
 but as they are in reality. He means to dispense 
 with the poet's dream, and thereby, it is implied, 
 with the power of idealization. 
 
 And this conception is in harmony with his 
 definition of imagination in the Fourteenth Book 
 of the Prelude which was written about the same 
 time as the "Elegiac Stanzas." There he explains 
 that imagination, in truth. 
 
 Is but another name for absolute power 
 And clearest insight, amplitude of mind. 
 And Reason in her most exalted mood. 
 
 And what he means by "Reason in her most exalted 
 mood," it must be remembered, is passion. This 
 he explains in the Fifth Book of the Prelude, where 
 he speaks of 
 
 Adamantine holds of truth 
 By reason built, or passion, which itself 
 Is highest reason in a soul sublime. 
 
 We have, then, in volition which is "absolute 
 power" and an adamantine hold on the truth, in 
 passion which "itself is highest reason," and in 
 insight which is sensitive and sympathetic vision — 
 in these we have the ingredients of the imagination. 
 And this, it may be added, is, for all practical 
 
i6o WORDSWORTH 
 
 purposes, an accurate description of the conscious 
 elements of Wordsworth's imagination. And we 
 have noted in an earlier chapter, it is peculiarly- 
 true of Wordsworth that his imagination is the 
 product of the elemental powers of volition, passion, 
 and sensitiveness. 
 
 The chief point of interest for us here, however, 
 is that this conception of the imagination has its 
 limitations, that when the poet attempts to sub- 
 stitute what he feels to be the facts of absolute 
 reality for imagination he goes beyond the limits 
 of the power of poetic representation. It is all 
 very well for a mystic who sees the absolute facts 
 of reality in his symbols or even in a deep distress 
 that has humanized his soul, to disparage the poet's 
 imagination that is "housed in a dream'' and that 
 loves to build an ideal castle 
 
 Beside a sea that could not cease to smile; 
 
 On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss. 
 
 But the mystic's sense of absolute reality, carried 
 to its logical sequence, places the poet's art in a 
 false light. For, in his substitution of the supposed 
 facts of absolute reality for imagination, he en- 
 croaches upon and limits the poet's power of 
 idealization and creation. The poet can never avoid 
 being a creator, for that is the highest function. 
 He is no doubt to try to see things as they are, 
 
MYSTICISM i6i 
 
 but it is equally important that he should create 
 new values for those things, and the mystic's ideal 
 of absolute reality is an impossibility in a world 
 where creation is going on. Are not the "Elegiac 
 Stanzas" themselves, from the artistic standpoint, 
 a refutation of the mystic's theory? Let us place 
 side by side two stanzas from the poem, one from 
 the earlier part, in which he tells how he once 
 would have painted the picture, and one from the 
 latter part, where the picture is given in reality; 
 
 A Picture had it been of lasting ease, 
 Elysian quiet, without toil or strife ; 
 No motion but the moving tide, a breeze, 
 Or merely silent Nature's breathing life. 
 
 And this huge Castle standing here sublime, 
 
 I love to see the look with which it braves, 
 
 Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time, 
 
 The lightning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves. 
 
 Are not both of these stanzas creations? Do thev 
 not both have the added gleam, the ""consecration 
 and the poet's dream"? And does not the first 
 possess as much reality as the latter, and is it not 
 just as legitimate as a poetic creation? Words- 
 worth's poetic art defies his mystic theory; and 
 though in theory he was often a pure mystic, in 
 practice he was a genuine creative artist. The 
 poet in him prevailed over the mystic. But the 
 
i62 WORDSWORTH 
 
 conflict and the renunciations which it brought 
 with it were boundlessly fruitful. For out of the 
 struggle between the mystic, who by the intensity 
 of pure vision would have his "eye on his object" 
 and would see "into the life of things," and the 
 poet, who, bound by his art, must find words and 
 concrete imagery in which to express his thoughts, 
 there was born a synthesis of the actual and the 
 ideal, of solid substance and idealization, that led 
 the poet a long way toward permanent and funda- 
 mental truths of human nature ; a long way toward, 
 yet somewhat on the hither side, of absolute truth 
 and absolute reality. 
 
 In the Second Book of the Prelude, which was 
 written considerably earlier than the Fourteenth 
 and the "Elegiac Stanzas," Wordsworth, in tracing 
 the growth of his poetic mind, gives a less mystical 
 and a more just account of the poet's idealizing 
 power : 
 
 An auxiliary light 
 Came from my mind, which on the setting sun 
 Bestowed new splendor : the melodious birds, 
 The fluttering breezes, fountains that run on 
 Murmuring so sweetly in themselves, obeyed 
 A like dominion, and the midnight storm 
 Grew darker in the presence of my eye : 
 Hence my obeisance, my devotion hence, 
 And hence my transport. 
 
MVSriCISM 163 
 
 Here the eye is on the object and it also idealizes 
 the object. This is in accordance with the facts 
 of realistic depiction and poetic creation, together 
 with the power of intensifying by mystical vision. 
 To give exhaustive illustrations of this artistic 
 principle would be to write down most of the poetry 
 that is truly characteristic of Wordsworth. But 
 perhaps no better short and single example can be 
 given than one of the "Lucy" poems. Here the 
 deepest heart passion is stirred to the depths, and 
 the movement of the whole universe intensely 
 idealized. But after many readings of the poem, 
 one is convinced of the utter inadequacy of any 
 words to describe its mystic intensity : 
 
 A slumber did my spirit seal ; 
 
 I had no human fears ; 
 
 She seemed a thing that could not feel 
 
 The touch of earthly years. 
 
 No motion has she now, no force; 
 She neither hears nor sees ; 
 Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, 
 With rocks, and stones, and trees. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 PHILOSOPHY: ITS LIMITATIONS 
 
 In the discussion of the memories of child- 
 hood and of mysticism in the preceding pages, 
 philosophic considerations tended to press in at 
 every turn, but the main philosophic issue has 
 been evaded until now. It has already been said, 
 however, that Wordsworth's doctrine of childhoo 
 memories did not possess the dignity of 
 philosophic system, but rather the simplicity o: 
 a psychological method, and that his mystica 
 synthesis of childhood memories, sense perceptio 
 and a moral idea, based on the union of self-contro 
 and passion, however closely bound up with philos- 
 ophy, could hardly attain to the dignity of a 
 philosophical system of thought. But Wordsworth 
 himself believed that "poetry is the breath and 
 finer spirit of all knowledge : the impassioned 
 expression which is in the countenance of all 
 science," and his highest ambition was to write 
 
 I 
 
PHILOSOPHY ids 
 
 what he called a "philosophic song of truth." 
 
 Then a wish, 
 My last and favorite aspiration, mounts 
 With yearning toward some philosophic song 
 Of Truth that cherishes our daily life ; 
 With meditations passionate from deep 
 Recesses in man's heart, immortal verse 
 Thoughtfully fitted to the Orphean lyre. 
 
 Was his ambition realized? How far and in what 
 sense is his poetry philosophic, and how far and 
 in what sense is he a philosopher? 
 
 Tn the various critical writings on Wordsworth 
 there is perhaps more confusion in the answers to 
 these questions than on any other question relating 
 to Wordsworth. Leslie Stephen, for example, says 
 that Wordsworth is "a true philosopher. His 
 poetry wears well because it gives solid substance. 
 He is a prophet and a moralist as well as a mere 
 singer. His ethical system in particular is as 
 distinctive and capable of systematic exposition as 
 that of Butler. By endeavoring to state it in plain 
 prose, we shall see how the poetical power implies 
 a sensitiveness to ideas, which, when extracted 
 from the symbolical embodiment, fall spontaneously 
 into a scientific system of thought." In contrast 
 to this, Morley says: "His theology and his ethics, 
 and his so-called Plantonical metaphysics, have a.s 
 
i66 WORDSWORTH 
 
 little to do with the power of his poetry over us, 
 as the imputed Arianism or any other aspect of 
 the theology of 'Paradise Lost' has to do with the 
 strength and the sublimity of Milton, and his claim 
 to a high perpetual place in the hearts of men. 
 It is best to be entirely skeptical as to the existence 
 of system and ordered philosophy in Wordsworth." 
 Again, Church says: "Wordsworth was, first and 
 foremost, a philosophical thinker ; a man whose 
 intention and purpose of life it was to think out 
 for himself, faithfully and seriously, the questions 
 concerning 'Man and Nature and Human Life' ;" 
 and Stopford Brooke finds ''ordered thought" and 
 a personal theology in Wordsworth, and thinks him 
 the greatest philosopher of the century. On the 
 contrary, Matthew Arnold says rather sharply: 
 "We must be on our guard against the Words- 
 worthians, if we would secure for Wordsworth his 
 due rank as a poet. The Wordsworthians are apt 
 to praise him for the wrong things, and to lay far 
 too much stress on what they call his philosophy — 
 so far, at least, as it may put on the form and 
 habit of a 'scientific system of thought,' and the 
 more that it puts them on — is the illusion. Perhaps 
 we shall one day learn to make this proposition 
 general, and to say : Poetry is the reality, philosophy 
 is the illusion. But in Wordsworth's case, at any 
 
PHILOSOPHY 167 
 
 rate, we cannot do him justice until we dismiss 
 his formal philosophy," and Swinburne sanctions 
 with all his heart this particular statement of 
 Arnold. 
 
 Of course, some of these statements have been 
 called out by some of the others. Arnold, for 
 example must have had Leslie Stephen's passage 
 in mind when he wrote the above. So that in most 
 of the cases some allowance must be made for 
 personal warmth in the controversy; but that does 
 not eradicate the differences. Is it that these 
 eminent critics use their terms with different mean- 
 ings? But how can the word "system" be mistaken 
 in its meaning? Allowing for possible difference 
 in the use of terms, there still remains a deep 
 underlying difference in their views of poetry and 
 philosophy and in their approach to the problems 
 of life. In our approach to the subject, then, it 
 will be necessary, first of all, to define our terms 
 somewhat, and to discuss briefly and in very general 
 terms the relation between philosophy and poetry. 
 Though poetry has glories all its own and 
 independent of philosophy, it will not be necessary 
 to discuss them here. On the contrary, the dis- 
 cussion shall be confined to the question as to what 
 poetry can do in the field of philosophy. 
 
 Many literary critics have insisted upon certain 
 
i68 WORDSWORTH 
 
 distinctions between poetry and science. They 
 have pointed out, that, while poetry and science 
 frequently make use of the same objective materials 
 — flowers, trees, birds, animals, land, sea, oceans, 
 stars, etc. — they have distinctly different purposes 
 in view and proceed by widely different methods: 
 so that either one can never be outgrown or super- 
 seded by the other. Similar distinctions have been 
 made between poetry and philosophy ; however, 
 not with the same emphasis, since the two are more 
 nearly alike in purpose and in method. It must 
 undoubtedly be admitted that the fields of poetry 
 and philosophy frequently overlap each other, but 
 this admission should not blind us to the fact that 
 there still remain fundamental and radical differ-; * 
 ences between the two. Although there is much 
 philosophy in Hamlet or in the Prelude one 
 instinctively feels that even here he is in a 
 different world than when he reads Kant or 
 Aristotle. The difference lies not so much in the 
 materials that are dealt with as in the temper and 
 the attitude of mind of the authors in their approach 
 to their respective subjects;. The most general 
 formula for this difference is, that, while they both 
 may apprehend the same world of material and 
 immaterial objects, the poet apprehends them 
 intuitively and emotionally through the imagination. 
 
PHILOSOPHY 169 
 
 and the philosopher intellectually through con- 
 templation. And the poet's way of apprehending 
 his objects carries two limitations with it. First, 
 he can only approach general and abstract truth 
 by way of and through the concrete ; and, secondly, 
 his method of procedure must be almost wholly 
 synthetic, scarcely at all analytic. Let us take 
 these points up separately and in detail. 
 
 I. In one sense philosophy has a wider range 
 than poetry. Philosophy can and does deal directly 
 with things in the abstract. This is especially 
 fitting to analytical processes and to contemplation. 
 Poetry, on the other hand, cannot deal directly with 
 the abstract. When it attempts to deal directly 
 with the abstract it loses its vitality, from the 
 simple fact that its moving power is passion and 
 its principal forming agency is the imagination, 
 and passion and imagination cannot long sustain 
 themselves in the barren fields of abstraction. 
 Poetry, limited as it is to deal mainly with the 
 concrete, is fully rewarded for the price it pays 
 for its limitations. It avoids barrenness, and 
 remains close to life — two things w;hich cannot 
 always be said of philosophy. 
 
 How, then, does it happen that poetry deals 
 with philosophical matters at all? It deals with 
 them only indirectly and by implication. The con- 
 
170 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Crete lends itself to this method quite readily. When 
 Wordsworth says : 
 
 My heart leaps up when I behold 
 
 A rainbow in the sky : 
 So was it when my life began ; 
 So is it now I am a man ; 
 So shall it be when I grow old, 
 
 Or let me die ! — 
 
 he implies much more than is explicitly stated. In 
 the third, fourth and fifth lines he implies that a 
 man's life should have continuity throughout, and 
 should be in harmony with itself. He also implies 
 the agency by which this continuity and harmony 
 is to be effected. Had Wordsworth not written 
 any more of this poem than the above lines, we 
 could, with considerable certainty, have decided 
 that the agency by which this harmony and con- 
 tinuity are to be effected is suggested in the first 
 two lines. The implications of these lines are that 
 not merely does his heart leap up at the sight of 
 the rainbow (for why should he especially single 
 out the rainbow from other beautiful objects?), but 
 that his heart is affected likewise by all beautiful 
 objects of the external world. The further im- 
 plication is that all hearts that are as sensitive and 
 as responsive to the beauty of external objects 
 as is the poet's will in the same manner be power- 
 
PHILOSOPHY \7i 
 
 fully affected, and their lives, as a result, will 
 possess continuity and harmony. To be sure, in 
 the lines that follow — 
 
 The Child is father of the Man; 
 And I could wish my days to be 
 Bound each to each by natural piety — 
 
 the poet, with considerable more directness, gives 
 expression to these generalizations. Still they are 
 stated in the concrete, and their implications cer- 
 tainly carry the mind far beyond the mere statement 
 of a wish. 
 
 It does not follow, however, that when one 
 traces out these philosophic implications to their 
 end that he has arrived at the best and essential 
 things in the poem. A child can read this poem 
 and enjoy the essential pleasure which the poem 
 ought to produce, without being aware of its 
 philosophic implications. He can enjoy the color, 
 the concrete pictures, the mood created by these 
 pictures, and the subtle beauty that slips in un- 
 consciously from every side ; and can realize that 
 the vague feelings he has had about a rainbow have 
 been expressed for him. A number of very young 
 students have been known who selected this poem 
 as their favorite, from a number of much simpler 
 poems, and who, when questioned, showed they 
 had no clear understanding of its philosophical 
 
1/2 WORDSWORTH 
 
 bearing. Perhaps the cause of their choice lay^ 
 in the strangely stirring and peculiarly heightening 
 effect of the first two lines. Is it not true, after 
 all, that the simplicity and the simple beauty which 
 commends itself directly to the affections of the 
 young student, and which produces that strangely 
 stirring and peculiarly heightening effect on the 
 minds of us all are the chief sources of the most 
 important poetic excellencies? And if a man pro- 
 fesses that he has actually outgrown the need of 
 feeling such effects, is he not therefore the less 
 wise? On the other hand, if the young student is 
 given a simple exposition of the philosophic im- 
 plications of the poem, his love for the poem is 
 not destroyed, but is deepened. In the best poetry 
 the philosophic implications are merely adjuncts 
 and concomitants to the poetry itself. In this 
 particular poem, they are unique adjuncts and 
 natural concomitants, and the fullest appreciation 
 of the poem demands an understanding of its 
 philosophy as well as the appreciation of its simpler 
 power and beauty. 
 
 It is not necessary to conclude that since such 
 a poem as "My Heart Leaps Up" contains by 
 implication a unique and profound philosophy that 
 all other equally good poems must likewise point 
 toward some far-reaching principle of philosophic 
 
PHILOSOPHY 173 
 
 truth. It would be difficult, for example, to 
 determine the underlying philosophy of the "Rime 
 of the Ancient Mariner" ; and, if one should under- 
 take the task, the result would be so shadowy that 
 he would hardly be rewarded for his pains. Poems 
 can be placed on a scale, beginning with those 
 whose philosophic implications are rather vague 
 or altogether wanting, and ending with those whose 
 philosophic implications are evident and pro- 
 nounced. Certainly the "Rime of the Ancient 
 Mariner" would be placed near one end of the 
 scale, and undoubtedly "My Heart Leaps Up" and 
 many another poem of Wordsworth would be 
 placed near the other end of the scale. Perhaps 
 Gray's "Elegy" would be placed somewhere near 
 the middle, since it contains some generalized truth, 
 but in the main simply recites the "short and simple 
 annals of the poor." The scale itself and the poems 
 ranged upon it would not determine the chief merits 
 of the poems. It would merely indicate how the 
 fields of poetry and philosophy overlap each other, 
 and how philosophy blends itself into poetry in all 
 sorts of varying shades and degrees. 
 
 Furthermore, if a poet deliberately undertakes 
 to write philosophical poems, he does not neces- 
 sarily commit himself to make his different poems 
 point toward- the same ethical or philosophical 
 
174 WORDSWORTH 
 
 1 
 
 system of thought. This is an important point in 
 our consideration of Wordsworth. Truth, as it 
 appeals to our intellect, is so vast and manysided 
 that it can never be reduced to a single system in 
 any absolute sense. And even though it were 
 capable of being systematized, poetry would cer- 
 tainly not be the instrument by which such sys- 
 tematization were to be accomplished. No one can 
 write good poetry for any length of time with his 
 eye primarily upon some particular ethical or 
 philosophical system of thought. His poetry will 
 lose that spontaneity, vitality and concreteness 
 without which no good poetry can exist. Besides, 
 such poems evidently would be written with a 
 bias ; and disinterestedness is a quality we insist 
 on in the best poetry. The true poet allows the 
 power of his passion and his selective imagination 
 to fashion the concrete material into such form 
 that is most natural and most consistent with that 
 material ; and thus the philosophic implications of 
 the poem will be determined mainly by the 
 intuitions, passion, and imagination of the poet, 
 together with the particular concrete material with 
 which he deals. For this reason each new poem 
 may point toward a different philosophical truth 
 from its predecessor, and the implications of dif- 
 ferent poems by the same author may, therefore^ 
 
PHILOSOPHY 175 
 
 not be reducable to the same system of ethical or 
 philosophical thought. 
 
 The truth is that it is in a poem rather than 
 in a poet that we should look for consistent prin- 
 ciples. A philosophical poem should be a self- 
 supporting whole in its philosophy as well as in 
 its artistic structure. It may be said with very little 
 fear of contradiction that if a poet attempts to 
 write a long poem and make it truly philosophical, 
 he will, from the fact of his constant elTort to make 
 its philosophy consistent with itself throvighout, 
 lose a certain spontaneity and freedom that belong 
 to the poet by right of his vocation. But whether 
 a poem be long or short, there are no laws of art 
 which compel its philosophy to be consistent with 
 the philosophy of another poem, even though it be 
 by the same author. As a work of art it must 
 stand independently. It is for these reasons that 
 it is impossible, for example, to reduce the poetry 
 of Shakespeare to a system. Lovers of Wordsworth 
 should therefore be reluctant to admit with Leslie 
 Stephen that "his ethical system, in particular, is 
 as distinctive and capable of systematic exposition 
 as that of Butler." One wishes that the chief 
 distinction between Wordsworth and Butler might 
 be that Wordsworth's ethical system, in particular, 
 might 770/ be as distinctive and capable of sys- 
 
T76 WORDSWORTH 
 
 lematic exposition as that of Butler. At any rate, 
 whatever philosophic implications the most charac- 
 teristic poems of Wordsworth may have, it can 
 hardly be said that these implications point toward 
 some one definitely formulated principle of ethics 
 or philosophy. They indicate rather an escape 
 from a formulated creed. As far as these poems 
 possess a philosophy, each possesses a distinct and 
 unique philosophy of its own. The poet here under 
 the sway of his imagination at white heat and the 
 power of his passion molded these poems, not 
 according to some preconceived system of ethics 
 or philosophy, but according to the deep impulses 
 of his own nature and according to the particular 
 concrete materials of each particular poem. Let 
 us look at these points more in detail and by 
 illustration. 
 
 The poet, according to this view, approaches a 
 general truth intuitively and emotionally through 
 the concrete. It is always through a flower, a star, 
 a rock, an animal, a personal mood, a particular 
 moral act, the serious act or the prank of a child, 
 an individual character — always through some bit 
 of concrete and detached experience or observation 
 that the poet attains to his larger generalizations. 
 In "My Heart Leaps Up" it was through the rain- 
 bow that the poet was led first to think of an 
 
PHILOSOPHY 177 
 
 earlier experience with it, then was led to push his 
 generalization farther until he had arrived at the 
 general truth that individual life should have con- 
 tinuity and that such continuity could be eflfected 
 by natural piety. 
 
 Likewise in the poem "The Primrose of the 
 Rock" a bit of concrete object attracts the poet's 
 attention : 
 
 A Rock there is whose homely front 
 
 The passing traveller slights ; 
 
 Yet there the glow-worms hang their lamps, 
 
 Like stars, at various heights ; 
 
 And one coy Primrose to that Rock 
 
 The vernal breeze invites. 
 
 In the next stanza the concrete description goes 
 on, but in the very last lines a generalization is 
 reached : 
 
 What hideous warfare has been wages, 
 
 What kingdoms overthrown, 
 
 Since first I spied that Primrose tuft 
 
 And marked it for my own; 
 
 A lasting link in Nature's chain 
 
 From highest heaven let down ! 
 
 And this generalization is worked out fully and 
 beautifully in the two following stanzas, and, as 
 good poetry must have it, all in the concrete : 
 
178 WORDSWORTH 
 
 The flowers still faithful to the stems, 
 
 Their fellowship renew ; 
 
 The stems are faithful to the root, 
 
 That worketh out of view ; 
 
 And to the rock the root adheres 
 
 In every fibre true. 
 
 Close, clings to earth the living rock, 
 Though threatening still to fall ; 
 The earth is constant to her sphere ; 
 And God upholds them all : 
 So blooms this lovely Plant, nor dreads 
 Her annual funeral. 
 
 Thus, starting from the little primrose, the poet 
 pushes his generalization out, as it were, through 
 the roots and the rock, out until the earth, "constan 
 to her sphere," and God upholding them all are] 
 included in his generalization. At this point the 
 complete generalization that there is a law in the 
 universe which binds the greatest and smalles 
 things indissolubly together has been reached, and 
 a natural division of the poem comes to a close. 
 Thus the approach to the abstract has been made 
 through the concrete. m 
 
 The latter division of the poem deals with 
 flowers and men in general. The moralizing and 
 generalizing tendency is somewhat palpable and 
 the poem here loses in spontaneity. Moreover, if 
 one cared to engage in philosophical niceties, he 
 
 t 
 
PHILOSOPHY 179 
 
 would find that at bottom the philosophy of the lat- 
 ter division of the poem is in contradiction to that 
 of the former. The poet morally and intuitively 
 takes the opposite position from his observations 
 made in the first division. He faces the facts in 
 the first and intuitively and moralizingly hopes the 
 opposite in the latter. The poem is not a self- 
 supporting- whole in its philosophy, but each 
 division makes such a whole. 
 
 This last consideration is only of secondary 
 importance to the poet, but to the philosopher it 
 is of prime importance. The philosopher seeks, 
 first of all, a system of general truths into the 
 scheme of Avhich all acts, objects and facts will 
 naturally fall. But the concrete things of this 
 universe are so various in their nature and so 
 infinite in number that the philosopher has never 
 yet found a system by which all facts can be 
 satisfactorily explained. The poet generally is noi 
 as ambitious as the philosopher to acquire a world- 
 view, and he approaches the truth by an opposite 
 method. He takes his concrete object, and if he 
 is not satisfied with pure description or exposition, 
 which he often is not, he will penetrate its inner 
 meaning and see how much of universal law is 
 reflected in this object. And the poem, if it is a 
 poem, that comes out of it, will be a philosophic 
 
i8o WORDSWORTH 
 
 poem. But his next bit of concrete matter will 
 perhaps reflect some general aspect of universal 
 truth different from the first, and the two poems j 
 will not fall into quite the same system of I 
 philosophy. % 
 
 To be sure, these poems will be an expression I 
 of the poet's personality, and the poet's personality I 
 is a distinct entity. But a distinct and recognizable 
 personality does not make a system of philosophy. 
 This statement needs further elucidation. What- 
 ever view we may hold about style — whether it is 
 the man himself, or the economy of attention, or 
 something else — it is certain that one of the great 
 outstanding facts of history is that a great poet, 
 more than a philosopher, impresses us with a 
 unique, profound and universal personality. And 
 whatever opprobrium may be attached to the word 
 "system" — and there really should be none — the 
 word in its highest and best sense (and that is 
 the sense in which it is used in this discussion) is * 
 peculiarly the thing for which a great philosopher 
 stands. There are many philosophers who are 
 partial poets, but let us think for a mon;ent of two 
 men who are distinctively philosophers, men with , 
 whom the exponents of philosophy are willing to J 
 rest their case — Aristotle and Kant. When we call 
 to mind the work of these men we see that in each 
 
PHILOSOPHY i8i 
 
 case there was a powerfully critical and minute 
 analysis of the possibility and meaning of human 
 knowledge, and then the construction of a marvel- 
 ous synthesis — a system, embracing in its ordered 
 outlines the chief facts of human life. There was 
 with each an analytic and synthetic grappling with 
 the seeming disordered universe in which we live, 
 that wins the profound respect and gratitude of all 
 thinking men. Now, set over against this the work, 
 say, of Shakespeare, and how very different it is I 
 Yet a work a little more enduring, and, on the 
 whole, a little more worth while, the literary critic 
 must confess, than that of the philosopher. And 
 the thing which the poet possesses to match the 
 gigantic intellect of the philosopher is the power 
 of a distinct and universal personality, however 
 completely it may be hid behind the conventions of 
 the poet's art — a personality, which, imaginatively 
 unified, tremblingly emotional, vibrating as it were, 
 in the whole essence of its being, goes out toward 
 its object, polarizes and vitalizes it, produces a 
 reflection of universal law and universal life in it — ■ 
 a personality which, thus unified, can completely 
 express itself in a single pregnant, sententious 
 phrase or line, in the presence of the most common 
 and simple situation in life — a personality which 
 is sensitively open to every new experience, and 
 
/ 
 
 i82 WORDSWORTH 
 
 is therefore essentially a growing and creative 
 personality. And it is for these reasons alone, if 
 for no others, that the poet cannot with his artistic 
 and intellectual furnishings engage in constructing 
 a system of philosophy. 
 
 By way of illustration we have now seen why 
 a poem, which must always be an artistic whole, 
 may with perfect consistency have by implication 
 and through the concrete a philosophy at its base, 
 and why the poet who may choose to write such 
 poems may not have — and should not hav e if he_ 
 would remain perfectly^ spontaneous, in touch with 
 concrete life, truly disinterested and creative — a 
 fixed and articulate system of philosophy. 
 
 But is this last statement in accord with 
 Wordsworth's experience and practice? Let us 
 bring together the generalizations of three poems 
 we have already analyzed — "My Heart Leaps Up," 
 "To the Cuckoo," and "The Primrose of the Rock" 
 (the division we have analyzed) — and see whether 
 they will fall into a system. In "My Heart Leaps 
 Up" we have seen that the general truth is that 
 individual life should have continuity and that such 
 continuity could be eflfected by natural piety. But 
 this continuity is made by the poet to rest chiefly 
 upon memory and sense, the memory of a sense 
 perception. The child has an experience with 
 
PHILOSOPHY 183 
 
 nature. His heart was made to leap up by the 
 sight of a rainbow, and since it was a precious 
 experience, let us retain it from day to day, or be 
 willing to die if we fail. Continuity, then, based 
 on the conserving power of the memory of natural 
 objects is the more comprehensive statement of the 
 general truth of this poem. Although in the poem 
 "To a Cuckoo" the mind's method of procedure 
 is very much the same as in "My Heart Leaps 
 Up," yet the philosophic implications in the former 
 point in an opposite direction. Here the outer 
 ^vorld is conceived as "an insubstantial faery place." 
 Reality is subjective. The physical world is trans- 
 cended. If there is reality in the outer world, it 
 is spiritual reality, not physical — physical things 
 are but appearances. On the other hand, in the 
 "Primrose of the Rock" the outer world is con- 
 ceived as a physical reality, as governed by an 
 inexorable law — a law which binds the smallest 
 things to the greatest. Now, how and on what 
 philosophic grounds are these three general con- 
 ceptions to be drawn into a single philosophic 
 system of thought? In philosophic terms, the first 
 would chiefly be recollection, the second trans- 
 cendentalism, and the third determinism, and they 
 naturally fall into different systems of thought. 
 But suppose we add to these general truths 
 
i84 WORDSWORTH 
 
 the general truths of "The Fountain," "Elegiac 
 Stanzas," "Ode to Duty," and especially a number 
 of the sonnets, and our systematization would 
 become impracticable, if not impossible. 
 
 Again, there are many poems of Wordsworth — 
 and some of his best ones are included here — of 
 which it can be said they belong to no system of 
 philosophic thought whatever. Of the story of Mich- 
 ael and that of Margaret, Professor Raleigh says : 
 "It is wrong, indeed, to call these works stories ; 
 they are all the very stuff of first-hand experience, 
 and their reader lives through many more hours 
 than they take in the telling," and for the same 
 reason that they cannot be called stories in the 
 proper sense, the reason, namely, that they are the 
 very stuff of first-hand experience, they cannot be 
 classified under the head of a philosophic system. 
 And what shall be said of such poems as "The 
 Daffodils," "She Was a Phantom," "The Solitary 
 Reaper," "To a Highland Girl," from the philo- 
 sophic standpoint? These poems are little patches 
 of transcend£ntal beauty, born of the overflow of 
 powerful emotions and rooted deeply in the concrete 
 of memory and sense perceptions, but whose con- 
 crete bases are sublimated into spiritual presences. 
 And two-thirds of the beauty and the powerful 
 feelings and the magic spiritualization vanish at 
 
PHILOSOPHY 185 
 
 the touch of cold philosophy. In truth, ipen who 
 have drawn any sort of connected philosophic sys- 
 tem from Wordsworth's writings, have left out of 
 account a goodly number of his best and most 
 characteristic poems. Our conclusion thus far, 
 then, is that a number of Wordsworth's poems 
 contain, by implication, unique and profomid 
 general philosophic truths, somewhat alike because 
 they are touched by the same personality, but 
 different because they are produced by a free, 
 creative energy of the mind, and because their 
 respective concrete bases suggest different phases 
 of general truth. 
 
 2. We have thus far been approaching the 
 philosophic question from the standpoint of poetry, 
 from the way poetry, by implication and through 
 the concrete, approaches the truths of philosophy. 
 Let us now look at the question of philosophy more 
 purely on the philosopher's own grounds, and see 
 what the poet can do with analysis. Let us take 
 some general and fundamental problem of philos- 
 ophy, say, the problem of free-will, and see what 
 the pages of Wordsworth will contribute to it. 
 The philosophic question with regard to the free- 
 dom of the will may be summed up under three 
 heads. First, is there such a thing as the freedom 
 of the will, that is, does self-consciousness possess 
 
i86 WORDSWORTH 'S 
 
 an independent, self-directing and self-developing 
 power, or, is self-consciousness an illusion, a mere 
 cerebration of cells, the product of a materialistic 
 evolution, subject wholly to the influence of en- 
 vironment? Secondly, if the philosopher assumes 
 that man has freedom of the will, then the question 
 arises : What are the grounds on which the 
 assumption rests, and what are the evidences in 
 favor of it? And thirdly, it is agreed on all hands 
 that the will is not absolutely free. How far, then, 
 and in what sense is it free? What are the con- 
 ditions that limit it? 
 
 Now, when the philosopher turns to the pages 
 of Wordsworth for light, he finds everywhere an 
 assumption of the freedom of the will. To instance 
 an example from the Fourth Book of the Excursion : 
 
 Within the soul a faculty abides, 
 That with interpositions, which would hide 
 And darken, so can deal that they become 
 Contingencies of pomp ; and serve to exalt 
 Her native brightness. As the ample moon, 
 In the deep stillness of a summer even 
 Rising behind a thick and lofty grove. 
 Burns, like an unconsuming fire of light, 
 In the green trees; and, kindling on all sides 
 Their leafy umbrage, turns the dusky veil 
 Into a substance glorious as her own. 
 Yea, with her own incorporated, by power 
 
PHILOSOPHY 187 
 
 Capacious, serene. Like power abides 
 In man's celestial spirit; virtue thus 
 Sets forth and magnifies herself; thus feeds 
 A calm, a beautiful, and silent fire. 
 From the encumbrances of mortal life, 
 From error, disappointment — nay, from guilt; 
 And sometimes, so relenting justice wills, 
 From palpable oppressions of despair. 
 
 By a self-directing faculty from within, tlie soul 
 can "exalt her native brightness," and "virtue thus 
 sets forth and magnifies herself." In the opening 
 of the Ninth Book of the Excursion, Wordsworth 
 says that this principle of freedom subsists in all 
 things : 
 
 Whate'er exists hath properties that spread 
 
 Beyond itself, from link to link. 
 
 It circulates, the Soul of all the worlds. 
 This is the freedom of the universe. 
 
 But he adds that "its most apparent home" is in 
 the human mind. And when the facts of life — the 
 fact, for example, that men, who in the morn ,of 
 youth defied the elements, must vanish — seem to 
 deny that freedom has its most apparent home in 
 the human mind, we are still intuitively to "feel 
 that we are greater than we know." As he ex- 
 presses it in the address to the river Duddon, in 
 the Sonnet "After Thought": 
 
i88 WORDSWORTH 
 
 I see what was, and is, and will abide ; 
 
 Still glides the Stream, and shall forever glide ; 
 
 The Form remains, the Function never dies ; 
 
 While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise. 
 
 We Men, who in our morn of youth defied 
 
 The elements, must vanish ;— be it so ! 
 
 Enough, if something from our hands have power 
 
 To live, and act, and serve the future hour ; 
 
 And if, as toward the silent tomb we go. 
 
 Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower. 
 
 We feel that we are greater than we know. 
 
 In many passages, then, in Wordsworth's poetry 
 we find the assumption of the freedom of the will. 
 But on what grounds does this assumption rest? 
 interrogates the philosopher. This very assumption 
 becomes the object of unsparing criticism and 
 analysis by the philosopher, for it is by this method 
 that he builds up his scientific and philosophic 
 system. The poet can make no appreciable con- 
 tribution to the problem, for at this point a sharp 
 line is drawn between poetry and scientific system 
 of thought. Poetry cannot be analytic, only 
 synthetic. Wordsworth himself understood the 
 limitations of his art in theory, although he seems 
 not always to have observed it strictly in practice. 
 Of the use that poetry can make of scientific 
 knowledge, he says, "The remotest discoveries of 
 the chemist, the botanist, or mineralogist will be 
 
 1 
 
PHILOSOPHY i8q 
 
 as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon 
 which it can be employed, if the time should ever 
 come when these things shall be familiar to us. 
 
 If the- time should ever come when what 
 
 is now called science, thus familiarized to men, shall 
 be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and 
 tlood, the poet will lend his divine spirit to aid 
 the transfiguration and will welcome the Being 
 thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate in the 
 liousehold of man." It is not the business of the 
 poet to make searching analyses and criticisms of 
 general truths, but to wait patiently and make use 
 of those that are familiarly known, to whatever 
 philosophical system they may belong; to make 
 them take on a form of flesh and blood ; to give 
 them, as it were, a new birth ; to make them give 
 us a new sense of their presence, their intimacy 
 and their reality; to idealize them and make them 
 liave new values for us. Thus the poet's con- 
 tribution is not a contribution to the problems of 
 philosophy but to life, y 
 
 As to the philosopher's third question, how far 
 and in what particular sense is the will free, the 
 limitations of the poet's art prevent him from 
 making any distinct or definite contribution. 
 ]\linute observation of many data, critical analysis 
 of them, close and careful reasoning on minute 
 
190 WORDSWORTH 
 
 differences — these are required to make an advance 
 on the problem. The critic may say these are mere 
 intellectual niceties. The literary critic is especially 
 prone to say so. Even so ; but it is precisely by 
 these analytical methods and by these marginal 
 differences that a system of philosophy makes an 
 advance on those of the past. Wordsworth's con- 
 ception of the marriage of the mind with external 
 nature, out of which some critics have tried to 
 make a great deal, is a conception entirely too A 
 general to be of service to the philosopher, and is ■ 
 indeed too vague to make a specific appeal to his 
 intellect. And because Wordsworth was a poet he II 
 was unable to enter into philosophical minutae and 
 subtilties, and was prevented from making a dis- 
 tinct contribution to the problem of free-will, or 
 to any other similar problem. 
 
 The fact is, however, that Wordsworth's mind, 
 with all its other tendencies, had a strong natural 
 tendency toward the minute and the analytical. 
 From his earliest childhood his bodily eye amid its. 
 
 Strongest workings evermore 
 Was searching out the lines of diflference 
 As they lie hid in all external forms, 
 Near or remote, minute or vast. 
 
 i 
 
 And with this exact knowledge of the lines of 
 
PHILOSOPHY igr 
 
 difference in the outward world, he had added care- 
 ful observation of 
 
 Those passages of life that give 
 Profoundest knowledge to what point, and how, 
 The mind is lord and master — outward sense 
 The obedient servant of her will. 
 
 These passages indicate that he was familiar with 
 both the sources and methods of science and 
 philosophy. And in the early days of the French 
 Revolution his mind was open to scientific and 
 philosophic truths, from whatever quarters they 
 might blow. He was extremely susceptible to the 
 influences of social and political systems of philos- 
 ophy. In France with Beaupy his constant theme 
 of conversation was how to build liberty 
 
 On firm foundations, making social life. 
 Through knowledge spreading and imperishable, 
 As just in regulation, and as pure 
 As individual in the wise and good. 
 
 But after the shock of the Revolution and his 
 experience with Godwinian and rational philos- 
 ophies of the times, he, from that time hence, put 
 his faith in no single system of philosophy. Al- 
 though his moral nature, as we have seen, pre- 
 emptorily demanded moral nurture, he now declared 
 his philosophical independence. His analytic and 
 philosophical bent of mind, however, was not taken 
 
192 WORDSWORTH 
 
 from him, and there was a long struggle between 
 his artistic and analytic faculties, between the poet 
 and the philosopher in him. But the poet came oflf 
 the victor : 
 
 The imaginative faculty was lord 
 Of observations natural. 
 
 His sister, he attests, helped him to attain the 
 victory : 
 
 She, in the midst of all, persevered me still 
 A poet, made me seek beneath that name 
 And that alone, my office upon earth. 
 
 And yet the analytic faculties at times would persist 
 in him. The results of the struggle were both Ij 
 fruitful and fruitless. It was fruitful in that region 
 where philosophic and poetic truth naturally over- 
 lap each other. Here it was Wordsworth's good 
 office to "lend his divine spirit to aid the trans- j 
 fguration" of familiar philosophic truth into poetic 
 truth. From various philosophies with which he 
 had been familiar — now from Platonic idealism, 
 now from German transcendentalism or Coleridgean 1 1 
 metaphysics, which is very much the same, and 
 sometimes even from the sterner and harsher i 
 philosophies of determinism and necessity — he dis- • 
 tilled material for various of his poems. His efforts 
 were also often fruitless. Sometimes his philosophic ' I 
 
PHILOSOPHY 193 
 
 material was too refractory for poetic treatment. 
 Sometimes it was too analytic, arid and abstruse 
 to be transfigured by the divine spirit of the poet; 
 and the evil results of these efforts were three- 
 fold : They produced a considerable body of poetry 
 that is of little worth ; they furnished abundant 
 material for too philosophically inclined critics to 
 find in Wordsworth an articulate and scientific 
 system of thought ; and their reactionary effect 
 tended to harden and solidify the character of 
 the poet. 
 
 If, then, we must forego calling Wordsworth a 
 philosopher in the strict sense of the term, there 
 are two other things that may with emphasis be 
 said of him, which these pages have tried to show. 
 Namely, that he is a psychologist and a mystic — 
 a psychologist of the memory and of the senses, of 
 the actions of men in states of excitement, of the 
 thoughts and intuitions of children ; and a patient 
 reader and describer of his own moods, thoughts 
 and volitions ; a mystic in interpreting the strange 
 and low-breathing intuitions that lie deep within us, 
 l)eckoning us into worlds of wonder, joy and 
 rapture. Wordsworth was master of the following 
 kinds of goings-on in the universe and in the heart 
 of man — activities which, under the inspiration of 
 poetry and in the light of mystic intensity, may be 
 
 13 
 
194 WORDSWORTH 
 
 conceived as subject to law, but which defy any 
 scientific or philosophic systematization : 
 
 Visionary power 
 Attends the motions of the viewless winds : 
 There darkness makes abode, and all the host 
 Of shadowy things work endless changes — there 
 As in a mansion like their proper home, 
 Even forms and substances are circumfused 
 By that transparent vale with light divine, 
 And through the turnings intricate of verse, 
 Present themselves as objects recognized. 
 In flashes, and with glory not their own. 
 
 Having given the psychological power of reading 
 the mind and feelings aright, and the mystic's 
 intense love of intuitive truth and suggestion, 
 together with its solid foundation in the enduring- 
 volitions and passions of men, one has practically 
 accounted for that permanent and solid substance] 
 in his work that has so constantly been praised by. 
 the lovers of Wordsworth. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 COXXLUSION 
 
 • 
 
 The formation of Wordsworth's character came 
 at a time of great social and political disturbances. 
 These disturbances wrought profoundly upon his 
 sensitive, finely moral and peace-loving nature, and 
 the burden of life early lay heavily upon him. He 
 not onl}^ felt the weight of great personal responsi- 
 bilities, but he bore the burden of the people. He 
 carried upon his heart for a time the burden of the 
 people of France, later the people of Switzerland 
 and of Spain ; and always felt deeply the rise and 
 the fall, the successes and failures of his own people. 
 He was a devotee of freedom — freedom in its 
 highest and purest forms. His political sonnets are 
 the finest of their kind in the language. They 
 lireathe the spirit of intense patriotism — a patriot- 
 ism that rises above narrowness, selfishness ana 
 provincialism. What he finely says of Milton is 
 true of himself: 
 
196 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Thou hast a voice whose sound was like the sea: 
 Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free. 
 
 With the trumpet tone of a statesman, with the 
 intensity of a mystic and the fine scorn of a 
 prophet, he conld denounce the avarice and selfish- 
 ness of the people : 
 
 The world is too much with us : late and soon, 
 Getting and spending we lay waste our powers : 
 Little we see in Nature that is ours ; 
 We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon ! 
 This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon ; 
 The winds that will be howling at all hours, 
 And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers ; 
 For this, for everything, we are out of tune ; 
 It moves us not. — Great God ! I'd rather be 
 A pagan suckled in a creed outworn; 
 So might I, standing on this pleasant lea. 
 Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 
 Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea ; 
 Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. 
 
 Yet he had faith in the people. He trusted the 
 general heart of humanity. He had the same faith 
 in human beings as he had in himself, and his faith 
 in himself was well-nigh unbounded. Upon a very 
 unfavorable reception of some of his poems, he 
 wrote to Lady Beaumont : "My ears are stone- 
 dead to this idle buzz, and my fiesh as insensible 
 as iron to these petty stings, and, after what I 
 
CONCLUSION 197 
 
 have said, I am sure yours will be the same. I 
 doubt not that you will share with me an invincible 
 confidence that my writings will co-operate with 
 the benign tendencies in human nature and society, 
 wherever found ; and that they will in their degree 
 be efficacious in making men wiser, better and 
 happier." Sometimes this faith in his genius and 
 his will faltered and the burden of his own free will 
 lay heavily upon him. In the "Leech Gatherer" 
 he says : 
 
 But as it sometimes chanceth, from the might 
 
 Of joy in minds that can no further go, 
 
 As high as we have mounted in delight 
 
 In our dejection do we sink as low; 
 
 To me that morning did it happen so ; 
 
 And fears and fancies thick upon me came ; 
 
 Dim sadness — and blind thoughts, I knew not, nor 
 could name. 
 
 But the lone leech gatherer on the moor taught 
 him the way of recovery: 
 
 I could have laughed myself to scorn to find 
 
 In that decrepit man so firm a mind. 
 
 "God, " said I, "be my help and stay secure, 
 
 I'll think of the leech-gatherer on the lonely moor." 
 
 Thus his despondency was only temporary and 
 most usually he was "insensible as iron to these 
 petty stings" of life. 
 
WORDSWORTH 
 
 i 
 
 But high as he had mounted in the "might of 
 joy" or in the strength of his genius, he held ideals 
 before himself that were beyond the power of his 
 mind. And there is something almost pathetic in 
 his "high endeavors" at purposes and ideals im- 
 possible to realize. He would write an Orphean 
 "philosophic song of truth." He would build a 
 grand cathedral-like edifice, "The Recluse," of 
 which the Prelude and the Excursion are parts. 
 The Excursion was to be the central part of the 
 building, the Prelude its ante-chapel, and his minor 
 pieces, "little cells, oratories and sepulchral recesses 
 ordinarily included" in such an edifice ; but the 
 edifice was never completed. He set himself to be 
 a teacher of mankind. "Every great poet," he said, 
 "is a teacher. I wish either to be considered as a 
 teacher or as nothing." But to be a teacher in his 
 sense of the word meant to write an original and 
 enduring kind of poetry, not with the "gaudiness 
 and inane phraseology of many modern writers," 
 but in a "selection of language really used by men" 
 — a poetry made up mainly from the original stuff 
 and first-hand experiences of human nature — a 
 poetry that was to be drawn from the "common 
 things that round us lie," from the common heart 
 of man : 
 
CONCLUSION T99 
 
 In common things that round us lie 
 Some random truths he can impart — 
 The harvest of a quiet eye 
 That broods and sleeps on his own heart. 
 
 The burden of his message, indeed, slept and 
 brooded on his own heart. The strenuousness of 
 it, the ideality of it, the mystic intensity of it, to- 
 gether with the burden of his own times and his 
 OAvn people, who often heard him with obloquy, 
 solidified and hardened the character that was some- 
 what "stiff and moody" from childhood. It tended 
 to eradicate from his mind a sense of values in 
 poetry. It made him "insensible as iron" to the 
 "amazing inequalities' of his own works, to the 
 "afflicting blocks of prose" that are there. It early 
 extracted all the humor out of his naturally serious 
 and somewhat juiceless character. It gradually 
 accumulated a deposit of stiffness and immobility 
 in his character. These were the reactionary results 
 of the eft'orts of a high-minded person to carry, in 
 times of revolutionary zeal, a revolutionary move- 
 ment into the field of morals and literary life. 
 
 Whatever pathos there is in some of his broken 
 hopes, it is relieved by the fact that he lived an 
 overcoming life. He willed mightily. He would 
 not be thwarted even though his ideals were 
 
200 WORDSWORTH 
 
 unattainable. He not only makes "a profound 
 application of ideas to life," but he has life itself, 
 abundant life, to offer. Out of the deep of his 
 own heart come calls to the deeps of our own. It 
 is his, as no other poet's perhaps, to make and 
 retain disciples. To explain his mystic power over 
 them, his early followers ascribed to him occult 
 wisdom, systematic philosophy and what not. It 
 is hard even now to speak of him perfectly un- 
 prejudiced when once caught in the iron grasp of 
 his will and the towering strength of his passion, 
 but it is best to be modest. To walk with him is to 
 learn humility and courage— humility in the pres- 
 ence of the awful forces of life that envelop us, 
 courage that steels the heart to meet calmly all 
 obstacles, pain, and even death : 
 
 A Power is passing from the earth 
 To breathless Nature's dark abyss ; 
 But when the great and good depart 
 What is it more than this — 
 
 That Man, who is from God sent forth, 
 Doth yet again to God return? — 
 Such ebb and flow must ever be, 
 Then wherefore should we mourn? 
 
 Wherefore, indeed, should we mourn, for out of 
 the deep come mystic echoes and beckoning voices : 
 
CONCLUSION 201 
 
 Yes, it was the mountain Echo, 
 Solitary, clear, profound, 
 Answering to the shouting Cuckoo, 
 Giving to her sound for sound ! 
 
 Have not we too? — yes, we have 
 Answers, and we know not whence; 
 Echoes from beyond the grave, 
 Recognized intelligence ! 
 
 Such rebounds our inward ear 
 Catches something from afar — 
 Listen, ponder, hold them dear; 
 For of God — of God they are. 
 
I 
 
 
INDEX 
 
 A Page 
 
 ■"Afflictions of Margaret" 147, 184 
 
 "After Thought" (sonnet) 187 
 
 "'Alice Fell" 103 
 
 "Anecdote for Fathers" 45 
 
 ■"A Poet— He Hath Put His Heart to School" (sonnet) . 154 
 
 -Aristotle 168, 180 
 
 Arnold, Matthew 85, 166 
 
 B 
 
 Beaupey 56, 191 
 
 Blois 56 
 
 "Borderers, The" Ill 
 
 "Brook! Whose Society the Poet Seeks" (sonnet).... 154 
 
 Brooke, Stopford 166 
 
 "Brothers, The" 98 
 
 Butler 165, 175 
 
 Byron 23, 100 
 
 C 
 
 Oarlyle 9 
 
 Catholic Emancipation 9 
 
 Catholicism 131 
 
 Church 166 
 
 "Characteristics of a Child Three Years Old" 93 
 
 Coleridgian Metaphysics 19^ 
 
 "Composed upon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendor 
 
 and Beauty" 94 
 
204 WORDSWORTH 
 
 D Page 
 
 "Daffodils, The" 184 
 
 DeQuincey 12 
 
 DeVere, Aubrey 37 
 
 Dowden 95 
 
 e" 
 
 "Elegiac Stanzas" 34, 157, 160, 184 
 
 "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" 173 
 
 Emerson 138, 144 
 
 Excursion, The 11, 34, 44, 69, 140, 186, 192, 19S 
 
 "Expostulation and Reply" 97. 112 
 
 F 
 
 "Fountain, The" 62, 184 
 
 France 29, 191, 195 
 
 French Revolution 29, 54, 114, 191 
 
 G 
 
 German Transcendentalism 192 
 
 'Gypsies, The" 103 
 
 H 
 
 Hall, G. Stanley 80 
 
 Hamlet 145, 168 
 
 "Happy Warrior, The" 99 
 
 Hume 1& 
 
 Hutton 37 
 
 I 
 
 "Infant, The" 93 
 
 "Influence of Natural Objects" 96 
 
 "It is a Beauteous Evening" (sonnet) 35, 86, 98 
 
 J 
 
 James, William 123 
 
 Jeffries 82 
 
INDEX 20S 
 
 K Page 
 
 Kant 168, 180 
 
 L 
 
 Lady Macbeth 146 
 
 Lear 145 
 
 'Leech Gatherer, The" 197 
 
 "Loud Is the Vale" 200 
 
 'Ivouisa" 99 
 
 Lowell 141 
 
 "Lucy" 34, 97, 155, 163 
 
 M r 
 
 Macaiiley .^ 82 
 
 Macbeth 145 
 
 "Memory" ? 107 
 
 "Michael" 98, 147, 184 
 
 Milton 166, 195 
 
 "Milton! Thou Shouldst Be Living" (sonnet) 195 
 
 Morley 113, 138, 165 
 
 Myers 2S 
 
 "My Heart Leaps Up" 96, 170, 172, 176, 182 
 
 N 
 
 Newman 131 
 
 "Nutting" 117 
 
 O 
 
 "Ode on Intimations of Immortality" 76, IL'9 
 
 "Ode Lo Duty" 152, 184 
 
 Orleans 56 
 
 Othello 145 
 
 P 
 
 "Paradise Lost" 166 
 
 "Peter Bell' 117 
 
 Platonic Idealism 192 
 
2o6 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Page 
 
 "Poet's Epitaph, The" 193 
 
 Pope 12, 115, 116 
 
 Preface to a Sonnet 21 
 
 Prefaces to Lyrical Ballads 41, 188 
 
 Prelude, The 10, 11, 22, 26, 27, 29, 33, 34, 
 
 38, 43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 
 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 74, 77, 99, 103, 118, 119, 
 120, 121, 125, 133, 159, 162, 165, 168, 190, 191, 
 
 192, 194, 198 
 "Primrose of the Rock, The" 177, 182 
 
 R 
 
 Raleigh 24, 184 
 
 Recejac, E 143 
 
 "Recluse, The" 136, 198 
 
 Reform Bill 9 
 
 "Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The" 130, 173 
 
 "Rizpah" 148 
 
 Romantic Movement 67, 101 
 
 S 
 
 Schopenhauer 139 
 
 Scott 102 
 
 September Massacre, The 56 
 
 Shakespeare 100, 145, 146, 175, 181 
 
 "She Was a Phantom" 32, 89, 184 
 
 Shelley 23 
 
 "Simon Lee" 103 
 
 "Solitary Reaper, The" 184 
 
 Stephen, Leslie 65, 79, 165, 175 
 
 Swedenborg 131 
 
 Swinburne 148, 167 
 
 Switzerland 195 
 
 T 
 
 "Tables Turned, The" 113 
 
 Tennyson 100, 132, 148 
 
INDEX 207 
 
 Page 
 
 'Thorn, The" 103 
 
 'Tintem Abbey" 26, 31, 96, 107, 121 
 
 'To a Butterfly" 98 
 
 'To a Highland Girl" 154, 184 
 
 'To a Mother" »3 
 
 'To Hartley Coleridge" 96 
 
 'To My Sister" 34, 112 
 
 "To the Cuckoo" 104, 109, 182 
 
 •'To the Lady Fleming" 154 
 
 "Two April Mornings" 9S 
 
 W 
 
 "We Are Seven" 91 
 
 Westmoreland Dalesmen 49 
 
 "With Ships the Sea Was Sprinkled" (sonnet) 46 
 
 Wordsworth, Dorothy 24, 60 
 
 "World Is Too Much With Us, The" (sonnet) 196 
 
 Y 
 
 "Yarrow Unvisited ' 75 
 
 "Yes, It Was the Mountain Echo" 201 
 
u s 
 
'-n^ v^ 
 
 Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
 Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
 Treatment Date: May 2009 
 
 PreservationTechnologies 
 
 A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 
 
 111 Thomson Park Drive 
 Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
 
•1\" 
 
 v*^ 
 
 - ^1 
 
 
 ,*-^ •'*. 
 
 '€•;;•:: 
 
 '*. * 
 
 ;^' 
 
 o> 
 
 oV' 
 
 
 
 
 ..-^^ 
 
 '?*-K .^-■■^ 
 
 
 
 .0' 
 
 
 ■^u 
 
 
 
 ^'i'^" 
 A^^' '^^, 
 
 O, '' 
 
 ^;p. 
 
 
 .>' 
 
 '*-. ' 
 
 
 ^■ 
 
 \" 
 
 
 ^>\^:. 
 
 <^ ■= 
 
 ,\V- --./>, 
 
 
 
 '.v , ^^ -^ '■ « ''b. : 
 
 cP'/^v.;; 
 
 « <p 
 
 t 'p 
 
 "oQ^ 
 
 -^■ 
 
 
 
 ^■^ •%. 
 
 ■^ ,3^/>S».''-' 
 
 
 a"^' r 
 
 .0 o