§ 32
Yet another country walk taken in England's North American dominions lives most pleasantly in my memory.
Two of the clock one autumn afternoon found me free. I had hoped to have lost no time in beginning to put enormous stretches of space between me and my desk. Not that this desk had not its pleasures, and many of them; but one craves a change of mental atmosphere, however salubrious that usually respired. The temptation, however, of calmly and in self-righteously indolent manner enjoying the sweets of freedom was too strong, so I lounged a whole afternoon, and not till daybreak on the following morning was I booted, knapsacked, and afoot.
The task of putting space between me and my desk was not one as easy as I had anticipated. It was hours before the dust of the city was shaken off, and the mud of the country allowed to take its place; the tedium of the streets at that unfrequented hour of the day made them seem interminable. For was I not craving and in search of country sights and sounds? And yet for miles not one met the eye or ear. Yes, I am forgetting: there was one which made up for much monotony. On a humble cottage wall facing the south, far out in the suburbs, was a wealth of flowering convolvulus such as I had rarely or only in India seen before. The sight was entrancing. The various-hued blossoms seemed blatantly to trumpet forth their beauty to the sun, to borrow the terms of sound and to apply them to colour. And what colour was there! That deep, soft, velvet purple, powdered with snowy pollen—what a profound, what an acute sense it produced of something altogether beyond the limitations of time and space, of something mysterious, beneficent, divine. Never before did I see so deep a meaning in those words: "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." How paltry, how tainted, seemed all human greatness beside those simple petals; how marred, how deformed! And why? Why should Nature alone be able to smile openly before her Maker's eyes, and man be ever hiding himself from the presence of the Lord God? Ah! there is more than one interpretation of the text, "All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." ... Those brilliant blossoms aroused many a thought. How earnestly have all poets of Nature striven to find expression for the emotions that natural beauty evokes! And yet none has completely succeeded, and none will succeed till the hidden links are discovered between the beautiful thing, the mind that perceives it, and the Hand that fashions it. How is it that a sunset, a landscape, a green field even, or a growing fern, will sometimes in a moment of time cause to blaze up in a man a thrill, a joy, so intense that under its influence one feels dazed and dumb? A great power is, as it were, suddenly let loose; beauty incarnated momentarily reveals its divine presence, and one feels an all but overwhelming impulse to yield oneself to it and be rapt away whithersoever it leads. But—whither it leads we cannot go.
Of all poets who have given utterance to this deep and mystical emotion, Wordsworth perhaps has best succeeded. What can rival the following lines?—which will bear constant quotation:—
"For I have learned
To look on Nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And 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 in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."
If only Wordsworth had written oftener in that strain of higher mood! To me this passage, even with just such narrow meaning as one not worthy to call himself a Wordsworthian can read into it, has been invaluable. In the mass of that hidden, cloudy, inner signification with which (I think it is Mr Ruskin who insists that) all poetry should be instinct, these lines are marvellous. They more nearly reach the goal of that "struggle to conceive the inconceivable, to utter the unutterable, that longing after the Infinite, that love of God," which Professor Max Müller describes as the basis of all religions, than all the creeds such religions have constructed.
Wordsworth saw, as perhaps no one before him ever quite so clearly saw, the Spiritual Unity underlying those two things:—the one called External Nature; the other, this spark of life called the Human Soul—the product of, and burning in, that External Nature, as a flame feeds upon the air which it illumines.—But to return to my walk.