"That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn, nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense. 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."
In this passage Wordsworth has delimited his territory, has poetically yet plainly indicated his special province. What a contrast to Byron, who seldom or never heard the human voice in nature, and certainly never except in harsh and grating tones—the man who in Childe Harold actually calls human life "a false nature—not in the harmony of things!"
But we have not yet come to the most remarkable lines in Tintern Abbey, namely those in which Wordsworth describes the silent influence on the mind of the hoarded, carefully preserved impressions of nature. He writes:—
"These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:—feelings, too,
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love."
And he asserts that he is indebted to the influence of nature for yet another gift,
"Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened";
and his train of thought reaches its conclusion in the feeling of assurance that this happiness produced in him by the sight of the familiar places is not mere momentary pleasure, but life and food for future years.
Again and again this last idea recurs in Wordsworth's poetry. We have it very marked, for instance, in No. xv. of the Poems of Imagination, in which he tells of the impression produced on him, during a lonely walk, by the sudden sight of "a host of golden daffodils,"
"Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought.
For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude,
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils."
Nothing could be more unlike the lyric poet's usual habit of living in the present, than this lyric poet's conscious saving of the present for future use. He himself tells us that he is of a saving disposition; he collects a winter store of bright summer moments; and there is in this something genuinely human, which is too often overlooked. But there is, above all, something national in it; it is not surprising that English Naturalism should begin by carefully and economically providing itself with a store, a capital, of impressions of nature.