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on his own being; that he may dig out the treasures of thought contained in it; that he may unfold the precious stores of a mind for ever brooding over itself. His genius is the effect of his individual character. He stamps that character-that deep individual intereston whatever he meets. The object is nothing but as it furnishes food for internal meditation, for old associations. If there had been no other being in the universe, Mr. Wordsworth's poetry would have been just what it is. . . . . With a mind averse from outward objects, but ever intent upon its own workings, he hangs a weight of thought and feeling upon every trifling circumstance connected with his past history. The note of the cuckoo sounds in his ear like the voice of other years; the daisy spreads its leaves in the rays of boyish delight that stream from his thoughtful eyes; the rainbow lifts its proud arch in heaven but to mark his progress from infancy to manhood; an old thorn is buried, bowed down under the mass of associations he has wound about it; and to him, as he himself beautifully says,

The meanest flow'r that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.'"

Hazlitt's malicious genius delighted in this kind of thorny praise. His criticisms are always full of personal genius; and come short of the truth mainly from the deep scepticism which always leaves him perfectly contented with his own paradox. He has no conviction that apparent paradox is not real. He is quite willing to believe that mere egotism can be the root of genius or of any thing else that is noble, and is not driven back to his facts by any aversion to so startling a conclusion. He tells us further on, that Wordsworth's "strength, as it often happens, arises from excess of weakness." This is but the sceptic's bitter version of the truth, that 'weakness constantly arises from excess of strength;' a form of the proposition not only more true in itself, but far more applicable to Wordsworth's poetry. Rare gifts of mind almost always tend to some overbalance of habit, or thought, or feeling-to some narrowness, pride, or humour, that is in itself a weakness. But no weakness ever of itself tends to an opposite strength, even though, as Wordsworth so finely observes in a passage we have already quoted, the free and voluntary wisdom of man may transmute it into an occasion for developing the highest strength; but this is through the supernatural life, not through any natural gravitation of weakness towards its opposite. Strong affections may tend to feebleness of purpose, but not feebleness of purpose to strong affections. Great contemplative power will tend to self-occupation, but self-occupation does not tend to contemplative power. Hazlitt saw that the egotism and the genius in Wordsworth were closely related, and with half-malicious pleasure hastily assumed that the worse quality had the deeper root. When he says that Wordsworth's poetry is mainly derived from "looking at home into himself,"

he says what we have all along endeavoured to establish; but when he means by this the contradictory of "looking abroad into universality," we totally differ from him. There are two selfs in every man the private and the universal;-the source of personal crotchets, and the humanity that is our bond with our fellow-men, and gives us our large influence upon them. Half Wordsworth's weakness springs from the egotistic self, as he himself implies when he says,

"Or is it that when human souls a journey long have had,

And are returned into themselves, they cannot but be sad ?”’* But all his power springs from the universal self. Nor is it in the least true that Wordsworth's finest poems, as Hazlitt implies, are cocoons of arbitrary personal associations, spun around local and accidental centres. The worst element in Wordsworth is the arbitrary and occasional element. Freedom, indeed, enters into his very finest poems, but thoughtful, not arbitrary freedom he draws us out of the natural currents of thought and emotion; but if it be from "chance desires," if it be to have us "all to himself," and give us an egotistic lecture in his own little study, he is as far as possible from his true poetic mood.

It is to put us into communication with a part of his nature, which has a feebler counterpart in ourselves; to give us the joy of feeling latent intellectual powers quickened into conscious life,that, in all his finer poems, he gently intrudes upon us his own higher imaginative nature. It is an egotism, no doubt, when he ends a fine poem with the verse—

"Matthew is in his grave; yet now

But it is not an

Methinks I see him stand,

As at that moment, with a bough
Of wilding in his hand."

egotism to tell us, as he does in the Prelude (a poem that grows upon us, by the way, even more than the Excursion),-

O, when I have hung
Above the raven's nest, by knots of grass
And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock,
But ill-sustained, and almost (so it seemed1)
Suspended by the blast that blew amain,
Shouldering the naked crag,-0, at that time,
While on the perilous ridge I hung alone,
With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind
Blow through my ear! the sky seemed not a sky

Of earth, and with what motion moved the clouds!"

The difference lies in this, that in the former case the statement is a bare individual experience, which adds nothing to the living

* Star-gazers,-Poetical Works, vol. ii.

† Unless, indeed, this pedantic accuracy as to insignificant fact (not unusual 'n Wordsworth) be an egotism.

expression of the poem-the bough of "wilding" being entirely an "accidental grace"-while the whole verse breaks the unity of the subject by its abrupt transition to a different period and point of view; whereas the latter, though also a personal memory, paints to. the very life that fresh wonder which the excitement of a little physical danger will spread for any watching eye over the whole face of heaven and earth. There is no egotism or caprice in delineating personal experience that helps to widen or renew the essential life of others. Wordsworth was much excited on one occasion, at being told he had written a poem on

a daisy." "No," he said, "it was on the daisy-a very different thing." There was a difference, and it was a difference characteristic of his best poetry. His finest mood never descends to local or personal accidents alien to the experience or imagination of his readers. Coleridge truly says in the recently-published lectures, that Shakespeare never copied a character from a mere individual―never painted a unique character at all; each of his characters might represent a whole class; and so too, in his very different world, all Wordsworth's higher poems have a certain breadth of life and influence, without any of the abstractness which, in inferior poets, accompanies breadth.

In what, then, shall we say, in answer to Hazlitt's criticism, that Wordsworth's universality consists, if high universal intellect is to be found in his poems? Not in any power of elaborating what is usually understood by universal Truth: indeed, for so contemplative a poet, there is singularly little of the comprehensive grasp of Reason in his mind. Still less in any remarkable power of expressing universal emotions, though Hazlitt does regard him as essentially lyrical. His especial poetic faculty lies, we believe, in contemplatively seizing the characteristic individual influences which all living things, from the very smallest of earth or sea up to man and the Spirit of God, radiate around them to every mind that will surrender itself to their expressive power. It is not true that Wordsworth's genius lay mainly in the region of mere nature;—rather say it lay in detecting nature's influences just at the point where they were stealing unobserved into the very essence of our human soul. Nor is this all. His characteristic power lay no less in discovering divine influences, as they fall like dew upon the spirit. We may say that Wordsworth's poetry is fed on sympathy less, and on influences from natures differing in kind from his own more, than any other poetry in the world; and that he delineates these influences just as they are entering into the very substance of humanity. Strike out the human element from his natural poems, and they lose all their meaning: he did not paint nature, like Tennyson; he arrested and interpreted its spiritual expres

sions. He regarded other men chiefly as natural influences acting on himself; but he never was inclined to identify Nature with either Man or God; for freedom, immortality, and a spiritual God were of the very essence of his own meditative world. He is not specifically the poet of Nature, nor the poet of Man, nor the poet of Truth, nor the poet of Religion; he is the poet of all separate living emanations from Nature, or from Man or God. Contemplative as he is, his mind was too concentrated and intense for general Truth. He fixed his imagination and his life too entirely and intensely on single centres of influence. He could not pass from the one to the other, and grasp many at once, so as to discern their mutual relations, in the discrimination of which Truth consists. He kept to single influences: solitary contemplative communion with all forms of life which did not. disturb the contemplative freedom of his spirit, was his strength. His genius was universal, but was not comprehensive; it did not hold many things, but it held much. You see this especially in his larger poems: he is like one of his own "bees that murmur by the hour in foxglove-bells." He cannot move gradually through a train of thought or a consecutive narrative. He flies from bell to bell, and sucks all the honey deliberately out of each. Hence he was so fond of the sonnet, because it was just suited to embody one thought; yet it seldom exhausted for him one subject, and there is often an injury to his genius in the transition from sonnet to sonnet when he wrote a series on one theme. His "plain imagination and severe," as he himself called it, isolated whatever it dealt with, brought it into immediate contact with his own spirit, and so drew from it slowly and patiently every drop of sweet or sad or stern influence that it had the power give off. But it is with him consciously influence, and influence only. He never humanises the spirits of natural objects, as Shelley did. He puts no fairy into the flower,-no dryad into the tree,-no nymph into the river; he is too much of a realist for that, and he has far too intense a consciousness of the simple magnificence of moral freedom. Indeed he has far too inelastic a human centre of contemplation for that to be possible. He regards Nature as a tributary to Man, sending him influences and emanations which pass into the very essence of his life, but never constitute that life. They are not like in kind to humanity. To liken them to higher beings is but to find "loose types of things through all degrees ;" and when he addresses the river thus

O glide, fair stream, for ever glide,

Thy quiet soul on all bestowing,

Till all our minds for ever flow

As thy deep waters now are flowing,"

to

there is not even a momentary attempt to abstract from the

visible water, and bestow a human "soul" upon the river;-he only gathers up the spiritual influences which emanate from it into a living centre, just as he elsewhere spreads abroad the "soul of happy sound" through earth and air. He has the deepest conviction that different objects and scenes do radiate specific influences of their own, not dependent on the mere mood of the contemplative observer. So much is this the case, that to him even sleep is a calmer and more spiritual thing amongst the mountains than it can be among men,—

"Love had he found in huts where poor men lie;

His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,

The sleep that is among the lonely hills."

But these radiated influences are never human till they touch the human soul, and are transmuted by that touch. Rich and almost infinite streams of power and beauty Nature does pour into Man; but first when they reach that free and solitary spirit which draws down other and higher influences to meet them from God, do they fulfil their simple destiny. If any one chooses to deny that there is an absolute reality in the expressions of Nature to human minds,-that they are something as unalterable as the meaning of a smile or a frown,-he may and must say with Hazlitt that Wordsworth "never looks abroad into universality," but overwhelms natural objects with the weight of his own arbitrary associations. If the dancing daffodils are no real image of simple joy,-if the "power of hills" be a vague and misleading metaphor,-if the "welcome snowdrop"

"That child of winter, prompting thoughts that climb
From desolation towards the genial prime "-

can tell no true tale of immortality to the simple-hearted when sinking beneath the snows of age; if it be a "mere confusion of ideas" for a poet to believe

"That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved

To blend his murmurs with my nurse's song;
And from his alder shades and rocky falls,
And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice
That flowed along my dreams;"

if there be nothing ghostly in the yew-tree, no "witchery" in the sky, and no eternal voices in the sea; if, in a word, "the invisible things of Him from the creation" are not "clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made,"-then indeed was Wordsworth "vain in his imagination," and "his foolish heart was darkened."

But Wordsworth did not doubt about these things; he knew them; and he knew well too the kind of human character they

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