The Dalesmen may have aimed the deadly tube
—("The Recluse").
Thus, in "Lyrical Ballads," in "The Idiot Boy," Wordsworth wrote (and "I never wrote anything with so much glee"):—
And he must post without delay
Across the bridge and through the dale,
And by the church, and o'er the down,
To bring a Doctor from the town,
Or she will die, old Susan Gale.
Dr. Johnson had anticipated this theory of non-poetic diction in poetry:—
As with my hat upon my head,
I walk'd along the Strand,
I there did meet another man
With his hat in his hand.
Wordsworth stood courageously—all the more stiffly because he was laughed at—by his theory. In practice he made the poor woman of "The Affliction of Margaret" talk of "the incommunicable sleep" of the dead, here the not ordinary word has a meaning not ordinary.
"The Lyrical Ballads" contained poetry so remote from "The Idiot Boy" as the lines on Tintern Abbey; with
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.
Mens agitat molem: it is the philosophy of Virgil. The consciousness of this unity with nature and of both with that which is divine had been with Wordsworth from his childhood, as he records in "The Prelude" and elsewhere, and this aspect of his thought even affected Byron, in the last part of "Childe Harold".
Wordsworth's life was uneventful. He made tours, very fruitful in poetry, to Scotland (1813, 1814, 1831, 1833); they are dated by "Yarrow Unvisited," "Yarrow Visited," "Yarrow Revisited". The tour of 1831 gave occasion to the noble and tender sonnet "A Trouble not of Clouds, or Weeping Rain," on the departure of the dying Scott for Italy. With this (1831) in our memories we cannot say that save for the ode "Composed on an Evening of Extraordinary Splendour and Beauty," "all Wordsworth's good work was done in the decade between 1798 and 1808". His poems of the year 1807 are, no doubt, the least lacking in uniform success. Among them is the ode "On intimations of Immortality". But "The White Doe of Rylstone," published in 1815, and proclaimed by "The Edinburgh Review" to be the very worst poem that ever appeared in quarto, was written in 1807: written in such stress of the spirit that the poet was not punctual to the dinner bell, as he informs us. The poem was an excursion into Scott's metres, and one of Scott's historic periods, but its intention was purely spiritual, and very unpopular.