It is plain that Wordsworth’s memory was playing him a trick here, misled by that instinct (it may almost be called) of consistency which leads men first to desire that their lives should have been without break or seam, and then to believe that they have been such. The more distant ranges of perspective are apt to run together in retrospection. How far could Wordsworth at fourteen have been acquainted with the poets of all ages and countries,—he who to his dying day could not endure to read Goethe and knew nothing of Calderon? It seems to me rather that the earliest influence traceable in him is that of Goldsmith, and later of Cowper, and it is, perhaps, some slight indication of its having already begun that his first volume of Descriptive Sketches (1793) was put forth by Johnson, who was Cowper’s publisher. By and by the powerful impress of Burns is seen both in the topics of his verse and the form of his expression. But whatever their ultimate effect upon his style, certain it is that his juvenile poems were clothed in the conventional habit of the eighteenth century. ‘The first verses from which he remembered to have received great pleasure were Miss Carter’s Poem on Spring, a poem in the six-line stanza which he was particularly fond of and had composed much in,—for example, Ruth.’ This is noteworthy, for Wordsworth’s lyric range, especially so far as tune is concerned, was always narrow. His sense of melody was painfully dull, and some of his lighter effusions, as he would have called them, are almost ludicrously wanting in grace of movement. We cannot expect in a modern poet the thrush-like improvisation, the impulsively bewitching cadences, that charm us in our Elizabethan drama and whose last warble died with Herrick; but Shelley, Tennyson, and Browning have shown that the simple pathos of their music was not irrecoverable, even if the artless poignancy of their phrase be gone beyond recall. We feel this lack in Wordsworth all the more keenly if we compare such verses as
Like an army defeated
The snow hath retreated
And now doth fare ill
On the top of the bare hill,
with Goethe’s exquisite Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh, in which the lines (as if shaken down by a momentary breeze of emotion) drop lingeringly one after another like blossoms upon turf.
The Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches show plainly the prevailing influence of Goldsmith, both in the turn of thought and the mechanism of the verse. They lack altogether the temperance of tone and judgement in selection which have made the Traveller and the Deserted Village perhaps the most truly classical poems in the language. They bear here and there, however, the unmistakable stamp of the maturer Wordsworth, not only in a certain blunt realism, but in the intensity and truth of picturesque epithet. Of this realism, from which Wordsworth never wholly freed himself, the following verses may suffice as a specimen. After describing the fate of a chamois-hunter killed by falling from a crag, his fancy goes back to the bereaved wife and son:
Haply that child in fearful doubt may gaze,
Passing his father’s bones in future days,
Start at the reliques of that very thigh
On which so oft he prattled when a boy.
In these poems there is plenty of that ‘poetic diction’ against which Wordsworth was to lead the revolt nine years later.
To wet the peak’s impracticable sides
He opens of his feet the sanguine tides,
Weak and more weak the issuing current eyes
Lapped by the panting tongue of thirsty skies.
Both of these passages have disappeared from the revised edition, as well as some curious outbursts of that motiveless despair which Byron made fashionable not long after. Nor are there wanting touches of fleshliness which strike us oddly as coming from Wordsworth.
Farewell! those forms that in thy noontide shade
Rest near their little plots of oaten glade,
Those steadfast eyes that beating breasts inspire
To throw the ‘sultry ray’ of young Desire;
Those lips whose tides of fragrance come and go
Accordant to the cheek’s unquiet glow;
Those shadowy breasts in love’s soft light arrayed,
And rising by the moon of passion swayed.
The political tone is also mildened in the revision, as where he changes ‘despotcourts’ into ‘tyranny’. One of the alterations is interesting. In the Evening Walk he had originally written