or—as in the words which to the sensitive Charles Lamb seemed too terrible for art—the irresponsive blankness of the universe—
The broad open eye of the solitary sky—
beneath which mortal hearts must make what merriment they may.
Or take those typical stanzas in Peter Bell, which so long were accounted among Wordsworth's leading absurdities.
In vain through, every changeful year
Did Nature lead him as before;
A primrose by the river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.
In vain, through water, earth, and air,
The soul of happy sound was spread,
When Peter, on some April morn,
Beneath the broom or budding thorn.
Made the warm earth his lazy bed.
At noon, when by the forest's edge
He lay beneath the branches high,
The soft blue sky did never melt
Into his heart,—he never felt
The witchery of the soft blue sky!
On a fair prospect some have looked
And felt, as I have heard them say,
As if the moving time had been
A thing as steadfast as the scene
On which they gazed themselves away.
In all these passages, it will be observed, the emotion is educed from Nature rather than added to her; she is treated as a mystic text to be deciphered, rather than as a stimulus to roving imagination. This latter mood, indeed, Wordsworth feels occasionally, as in the sonnet where the woodland sights become to him "like a dream of the whole world;" but it is checked by the recurring sense that "it is our business to idealize the real, and not to realize the ideal." Absorbed in admiration of fantastic clouds of sunset, he feels for a moment ashamed to think that they are unrememberable—
They are of the sky,
And from our earthly memory fade away.