we feel that he has not had before his eyes the real scenes of his Suffolk home, but that he has been content to recall and imitate the descriptive stock-in-trade that had passed current for so many years; even the later “Tales,” published up to the years when Shelley and Keats were beginning their activities, are not free from this defect.
About ten years before Wordsworth launched his manifestoes, there were published the two works of Erasmus Darwin, to which reference has already been made, and in which this stock language was unconsciously reduced to absurdity, not only because of the themes on which it was employed, but also because of the fatal ease and facility with which it was used. It is strange to think that but a few years before the famous sojourn of Coleridge and Wordsworth on the Quantocks, “The Loves of the Plants,” and its fellow, should have won instant and lasting popularity.[86]
That Darwin took himself very seriously is to be seen from “The Interludes,” in which he airs his views,[87] whilst in his two poems he gave full play to his “fancy” (“‘theory’ we cannot call it,” comments De Quincey) that nothing was strictly poetic except what is presented in visual image. This in itself was not bad doctrine, as it at least implied that poetry should be concrete, and thus reflected a desire to escape from the abstract and highly generalized diction of his day. But Darwin so works his dogma to death that the reader is at first dazzled, and finally bewildered by the multitude of images presented, in couplets of monotonous smoothness, in innumerable passages, such as
On twinkling fins my pearly nations play
Or wind with sinuous train their trackless way:
My plumy pairs in gay embroidery dressed
Form with ingenious bill the pensile nest.
(“Botanic Garden,” I)
Still there is something to be said for the readers who enjoyed having the facts and theories of contemporary science presented to them in so coloured and fantastic a garb.
Nor must it be forgotten that the youthful Wordsworth was much influenced by these poems of Darwin, so that his early work shows many traces of the very pseudo-poetic language which he was soon to condemn. Thus in “An Evening Walk”[88] there are such stock phrases as “emerald meads,” “watery plains,” the “forest train.”