"To me the humblest flower that blows, can give
Thoughts that too often lie too deep for tears."
In what would the poet differ from the worthy man of prose, if his imagination possessed not a beautifying and transmuting power over the objects of the inanimate world? Nay, even the naked truth itself is seen clearly but by poetic eyes; and were a sumph all at once to become a poet, he would all at once be stark-staring mad. Yonder ass licking his lips at a thistle, sees but water for him to drink in Windermere a-glow with the golden lights of setting suns. The ostler or the boots at Lowood-inn takes a somewhat higher flight, and for a moment, pausing with curry-comb or blacking-brush in his suspended hand, calls on Sally Chambermaid for gracious sake to look at Pull-wyke. The waiter, who has cultivated his taste from conversation with Lakers, learns their phraseology, and declares the sunset to be exceedingly handsome. The Laker, who sometimes has a soul, feels it rise within him as the rim of the orb disappears in the glow of softened fire. The artist compliments Nature, by likening her evening glories to a picture of Claud Lorraine—while the poet feels the 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."
Compare any one page, or any twenty pages, with the character given of Wordsworth's poetry in the obsolete criticism that sought to send it to oblivion. The poet now sits on his throne in the blue serene—and no voice from below dares deny his supremacy in his own calm dominions. And was it of him, whom devout imagination, dreaming of ages to come, now sees, placed in his immortality between Milton and Spenser, that the whole land once rang with ridicule, while her wise men wiped their eyes "of tears that sacred pity had engendered," and then relieved their hearts by joining in the laughter "of the universal British nation?" All the ineffable absurdities of the bard are now embodied in Seven Volumes—the sense of the ridiculous still survives among us—our men of wit and power are not all dead—we have yet our satirists, great and small—editors in thousands, and contributors in tens of thousands—yet not a whisper is heard to breathe detraction from the genius of the high-priest of nature; while the voice of the awakened and enlightened land declares it to be divine—using towards him not the language merely of admiration but of reverence—of love and gratitude due to the benefactor of humanity, who has purified its passions by loftiest thoughts and noblest sentiments, stilling their turbulence by the same processes that magnify their power, and showing how the soul, in ebb and flow, and when its tide is at full, may be at once as strong and as serene as the sea.
There are few pictures painted by him merely for the pleasure of the eye, or even the imagination, though all the pictures he ever painted are beautiful to both; they have all a moral meaning—many a meaning more than moral—and his poetry can be comprehended, in its full scope and spirit, but by those who feel the sublimity of these four lines in his "Ode to Duty,"—
"Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,
And fragrance in thy footing treads;
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong."
Is thy life disturbed by guilty or sinful passions? Have they gained a mastery of thee—and art thou indeed their slave? Then the poetry of Wordsworth must be to thee
"As is a picture to a blind man's eye;"
or if thine eyes yet see the light in which it is enveloped, and thy heart yet feels the beauty it reveals, in spite of the clouds that overhang and the storms that trouble them, that beauty will be unbearable, till regret become remorse, and remorse penitence, and penitence restore thee to those intuitions of the truth that illumine his sacred pages, and thou knowest and feelest once more that
"The primal duties shine aloft—like stars,"