| For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink Deep—and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil. |
The aspect of Wordsworth’s poetry which answers this question forms my last subject.
We may recall this aspect in more than one way. First, not a little of Wordsworth’s poetry either approaches or actually enters the province of the sublime. His strongest natural inclination tended there. He himself speaks of his temperament as ‘stern,’ and tells us that
| to the very going out of youth [He] too exclusively esteemed that love, And sought that beauty, which, as Milton says, Hath terror in it. |
This disposition is easily traced in the imaginative impressions of his childhood as he describes them in the Prelude. His fixed habit of looking
| with feelings of fraternal love Upon the unassuming things that hold A silent station in this beauteous world, |
was only formed, it would seem, under his sister’s influence, after his recovery from the crisis that followed the ruin of his towering hopes in the French Revolution. It was a part of his endeavour to find something of the distant ideal in life’s familiar face. And though this attitude of sympathy and humility did become habitual, the first bent towards grandeur, austerity, sublimity, retained its force. It is evident in the political poems, and in all those pictures of life which depict the unconquerable power of affection, passion, resolution, patience, or faith. It inspires much of his greatest poetry of Nature. It emerges occasionally with a strange and thrilling effect in the serene, gracious, but sometimes stagnant atmosphere of the later poems,—for the last time, perhaps, in that magnificent stanza of the Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg (1835),
| Like clouds that rake the mountain-summits, Or waves that own no curbing hand, How fast has brother followed brother From sunshine to the sunless land! |
Wordsworth is indisputably the most sublime of our poets since Milton.
We may put the matter, secondly, thus. However much Wordsworth was the poet of small and humble things, and the poet who saw his ideal realised, not in Utopia, but here and now before his eyes, he was, quite as much, what some would call a mystic. He saw everything in the light of ‘the visionary power.’ He was, for himself,