Thus the powers and impulses which converse with these qualities, as they exist in the external work, had quickened within his boyish mind, now once more in this reviving time asserted themselves, and filled him with a happiness which, if soberer, was sanctioned by his mature reason. The Universe therefore was to him no mere reverberation of his own voice, no mere reflection of hues cast from his own changeful moods. It was not a thing to practice the pathetic fallacy on. It was not true that, as Coleridge dreamed,
“Ours is the wedding garment, ours the shroud.”
Not this at all, but an existence independent of us and our moods, stable, equable, serene. And our wisdom is to receive her native impulses without imposing on her our caprices. Hence it is that Nature is to man a supporting, calming, cooling, and invigorating power. So it was that at this time he felt both emotion and calmness come to him from Nature, from the one energy to seek the truth, from the other that happy stillness which fits the mind to receive truth when it comes unsought. With clearer conviction than ever, he now saw in Nature a power, which is the shape and image of right reason—reason, in its highest sense, embodied and made visible. The order, the stability, “the calm obedience to eternal law,”—these, as I have just said, which are the image of right reason, satisfied his intellect, calmed and soothed his feelings. From Nature’s calmness, and from her slow and steadily-working processes, he received an admonition to cease from hoping to see man regenerated by sudden and violent convulsions, and yet to esteem and reverence what is permanent in human affection, and in man’s moral being, and to build his hope on the gradual expansion and purification of these. All these perceptions about Nature had been more or less present to him from boyhood, only now what were before but vague emotions came out as settled convictions.
But there was a further step, which he now made. He discovered that in order to attain the highest and truest vision of Nature, the soul of man must not be altogether passive, but must act along with and in unison with Nature, must send from itself abroad an emanation, which, meeting with natural objects, produces something better than either the soul itself or Nature by herself could generate. This creation is, as has been observed, “partly given by the object, partly by the poet’s mind,” is neither wholly mind, nor wholly object, but something, call it aspect, effluence, emanation, which partakes of both. It is the meeting or marriage of the life that is in the soul with the life that is in the Universe, which two are akin to each other, that produces the truest vision and the highest poetry. This view Wordsworth illustrates by the marvelous effect produced on a landscape by a change in the atmosphere, a clearing of the clouds, a sudden flood of moonlight let down into the darkness of mountain abysses, such as that he saw at midnight while ascending Snowdon. A like power he thinks the mind can exercise on outward things—what he calls
“An ennobling interchange
Of action from without and from within.
The excellence, pure function, and best power,
Both of the object seen and eye that sees.”
When his mind thus put forth its higher power on the actual familiar world, on life’s every-day appearances, he seemed to gain clear sight of a new world, not hitherto reflected in books, but worthy to be so reflected, and made visible to other eyes. This he set himself to accomplish, and the result still lives in many a pure and deathless creation. That combined action of the object seen and of the eye that saw, above spoken of, is especially embodied in such poems as “The Yew-Trees of Borrowdale,” “Stepping Westward,” “The Leech-Gatherer,” and “To the Cuckoo.” In all these, and many more, the poet, letting his own spirit pass forth into the scene before him, and become identified with it, has caught the inner spirit of the place and of the hour, brought it out, and interpreted it as no mere outward description could have done. A few strokes, giving one or two of the most characteristic features, as seen by a keenly-observant eye, and then he glides into that which no eye can see, but only the living power of a deep and sympathetic imagination. And though few other imaginations could have penetrated so deeply into the secret of Nature, and given articulate voice to her silences, yet every true imagination feels at once that he had gone to the quick, and truly rendered the invisible but not unfelt presence that dwells there. It is in this way that he has gathered up into himself the sleep that from oldest time has brooded over those Westmoreland mountains, and uttered it in his own perfect and melodious language. This has been done by him for that region once for all, and no other poet need attempt to repeat it, any more than a sculptor need essay another Apollo Belvedere, or a painter a new Transfiguration.
On many of the poems descriptive of Nature that followed his recovery from despondency,—that is, those composed between the years 1796 and 1808,—there rests an ethereal gleam, something of