But it was not so much from feelings of animal vivacity that my difficulty came, as from a sense of the indomitableness of the spirit within me. I used to brood over the stories of Enoch and Elijah, and almost to persuade myself that, whatever might become of others, I should be translated, in something of the same way, to heaven. With a feeling congenial to this, I was often unable to think of external existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in my own immaterial nature. Many times, while going to school, have I grasped at a wall or tree to recall myself from the abyss of idealism to the reality. At that time I was afraid of such processes. In later periods of life I have deplored, as we all have reason to do, a subjugation of an opposite character.”
Here Wordsworth defends the philosophy of the poem by making it an induction from his own experience. There will be found many to question its truth, because they have no recollections which correspond with the poet’s; and others who will claim that the poem is but a fanciful argument in behalf of the philosophic heresy of a preëxistent state. In my judgment, Wordsworth’s preface is somewhat misleading by its reference to this theory, although he has furnished hints in the same preface of his more integral thought. As I have noticed before, his artistic presentation is truer and more final than his exegesis. Whoever reads this great ode is aware of the rise and fall of the tide of thought; he hears the poet reasoning with himself; he sees him passing in imagination out of childhood into age, yet constantly recovering himself to fresh perception of the immortality which transcends earthly life. It is visible childhood with its intimation of immortality which brings to the poet, not regret for what is irretrievably lost, but firmer faith in the reality of the unseen and eternal. The confusion into which some have been cast by the ode arises from their bringing to the idea of immortality the time conception; they conceive the poet to be hinting of an indefinite time antedating the child’s birth, an indefinite time extending beyond the man’s death, whereas Wordsworth’s conception of immortality rests in the indestructibility of spirit by any temporal or earthly conditions,—an indestructibility which even implies an absence of beginning as well as of ending.
“Heaven lies about us in our infancy,”
he declares. It is the investment of this visible life by an unseen, unfelt, yet real spiritual presence for which he contends, and he maintains that the inmost consciousness of childhood bears witness to this truth; this consciousness fades as the earthly life penetrates the soul, yet it is there and recurs in sudden moments.
“Hence in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,