| Like—but oh, how different![19] |
It was among the mountains that Wordsworth, as he says of his Wanderer, felt his faith. It was there that all things
| Breathed immortality, revolving life, And greatness still revolving; infinite. There littleness was not; the least of things Seemed infinite; and there his spirit shaped Her prospects, nor did he believe,—he saw. |
And even if we count his vision a mere dream, still he put into words, as no other poet has, the spirit of the mountains.
| Two voices are there; one is of the sea, One of the mountains; each a mighty voice. |
And of the second of these we may say that ‘few or none hears it right’ now he is gone.
Partly because he is the poet of mountains he is, even more pre-eminently, the poet of solitude. For there are tones in the mountain voice scarcely audible except in solitude, and the reader whom Wordsworth’s greatest poetry baffles could have no better advice offered him than to do what he has probably never done in his life—to be on a mountain alone. But for Wordsworth not this solitude only, but all solitude and all things solitary had an extraordinary fascination.
| The outward shows of sky and earth, Of hill and valley, he has viewed; And impulses of deeper birth Have come to him in solitude. |
The sense of solitude, it will readily be found, is essential to nearly all the poems and passages we have been considering, and to some of quite a different character, such as the Daffodil stanzas. And it is not merely that the poet is alone; what he sees is so too. If the leech-gatherer and the soldier on the moon-lit road had not been solitary figures, they would not have awaked ‘the visionary power’; and it is scarcely fanciful to add that if the boy who was watching for his father’s ponies had had beside him any more than
| The single sheep and the one blasted tree, |