Satan with his perverted world; then raise
From the conflagrant mass, purged and refined,
New heavens, new earth, ages of endless date,”
may be found in Thomson, in his closing Hymn to the Seasons, in Coleridge's “Religious Musings,” (in Shelley's “Prometheus” even, but perverted and disguised), in Bailey's “Festus” (cumbered and entangled with his religious theory); and more rootedly, although less theologically, than in all the rest, in the poetry of Wordsworth.
The secret of Wordsworth's profound and peculiar love for Nature, even in her meaner and minuter forms, may lie, perhaps, here. De Quincey seeks for it in a peculiar conformation of the eye, as if he actually did see more in the object than other men—in the rose a richer red, in the sky a deeper azure, in the broom a yellower gold, in the sun a more dazzling ray, in the sea a finer foam, and in the star a more sparkling splendor, than even Nature's own “sweet and cunning” hand put on; but the critic has not sought to explain the rationale of this peculiarity. Mere acuteness of vision it can not have been, else the eagle might have felt, though not written, “The Excursion”—else the fact is not accountable why many of weak sight, such as Burke, have been rapturous admirers of Nature; and so, till we learn that Mr. De Quincey has looked through Wordsworth's eyes, we must call this a mere fancy. Hazlitt again, and others since, have accounted for the phenomenon by association—but this fails, we suspect, fully to explain the deep, native, and brooding passion in question—a passion which, instead of being swelled by the associations of after life, rose to lull stature in youth, as “Tintern Abbey” testifies. One word of his own, perhaps, better solves the mystery—it is the one word “consecration”—
“The consecration and the poet's dream.”
His eye had been anointed with eye-salve, and he saw, as his poet-predecessors had done, the temple in which he was standing, heard in every breeze and ocean billow the sound of a temple-service, and felt that the grandeur of the ritual, and of its recipient, threw the shadow of their greatness upon every stone in the corners of the edifice, and upon every eft crawling along its floors. Reversing the miracle, he saw “trees as men walking”—heard the speechless sins, and, in the beautiful thought of “the Roman,” caught on his ear the fragments of a “divine soliloquy,” filling up the pauses in a universal anthem. Hence the tumultuous, yet awful joy of his youthful feelings to Nature. Hence his estimation of its lowliest features; for does not every bush and tree appear to him a “pillar in the temple of his God?” The leaping fish pleases him, because its “cheer” in the lonely tarn is of praise. The dropping of the earth on the coffin lid, is a slow and solemn psalm, mingling in austere sympathy with the raven's croak, and in his “Power of sound” he proceeds elaborately to condense all those varied voices, high or low, soft or harsh, united or discordant, into one crushing chorus, like the choruses of Haydn, or of heaven. Nature undergoes no outward change to his eye, but undergoes a far deeper transfiguration to his spirit—as she stands up in the white robes, and with the sounding psalmodies of her mediatorial office, between him and the Infinite i am.
Never must this feeling be confounded with Pantheism. All does not seem to him to be God, nor even (strictly speaking) divine; but all seems to be immediately from God—rushing out from him in being, to rush instantly back to him in service and praise. Again the natal dew of the first morning is seen lying on bud and blade, and the low voice of the first evening's song becomes audible again. Although Coleridge in his youth was a Spinozist, Wordsworth seems at once, and forever, to have recoiled from even his friend's eloquent version of that creedless creed, that baseless foundation, that system, through the phenomenon of which look not the bright eyes of Supreme Intelligence, but the blind face of irresponsible and infinite necessity. Shelley himself—with all the power his critics attribute to him of painting night, animating Atheism, and giving strange loveliness to annihilation—has failed in redeeming Spinoza's theory from the reproach of being as hateful as it is false; and there is no axiom we hold more strongly than this—that the theory which can not be rendered poetical, can not be true. “Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty,” said poor Keats, to whom time, however, was not granted to come down from the first glowing generalization of his heart, to the particular creeds which his ripened intellect would have, according to it, rejected or received.
Nor, although Wordsworth is a devoted lover of Nature, down to what many consider the very blots—or, at least, dashes and commas in her page, is he blind to the fact of her transient [pg 580] character. The power he worships has his “dwelling in the light of setting suns,” but that dwelling is not his everlasting abode. For earth, and the universe, a “milder day” (words certifying their truth by their simple beauty) is in store when “the monuments” of human weakness, folly, and evil, shall “all be over-grown.” He sees afar off the great spectacle of Nature retiring before God; the embassador giving place to the King; the bright toys of this nursery—sun, moon, earth, and stars—put away, like childish things; the symbols of the Infinite lost in the Infinite itself; and though he could, on the Saturday evening, bow before the midnight mountains, and midnight heavens, he could also, on the Sabbath morn, in Rydal church, bow as profoundly before the apostolic word, “All these things shall be dissolved.”
With Wordsworth, as with all great poets, his poetical creed passes into his religious. It is the same tune with variations. But we confess that, in his case, we do not think the variations equal. The mediation of Nature he understands, and has beautifully represented in his poetry; but that higher mediation of the Divine Man between man and the Father, does not lie fully or conspicuously on his page. A believer in the mystery of godliness he unquestionably was; but he seldom preached it. Christopher North, many years ago, in “Blackwood,” doubted if there were so much as a Bible in poor Margaret's cottage (Excursion). We doubt so, too, and have not found much of the “true cross” among all his trees. The theologians divide prayer into four parts—adoration, thanksgiving, confession, and petition. Wordsworth stops at the second. No where do we find more solemn, sustained, habitual, and worthy adoration, than in his writings. The tone, too, of all his poems, is a calm thanksgiving, like that of a long blue, cloudless sky, coloring, at evening, into the hues of more fiery praise. But he does not weep like a penitent, nor supplicate like a child. Such feelings seem suppressed and folded up as far-off storms, and the traces of past tempests are succinctly inclosed in the algebra of the silent evening air. And hence, like Milton's, his poetry has rather tended to foster the glow of devotion in the loftier spirits of the race—previously taught to adore—than like that of Cowper and Montgomery, to send prodigals back to their forsaken homes; Davids, to cry, “Against thee only have I sinned;” and Peters, to shriek in agony, “Lord, save us, we perish.”