Can ever be a solitude to me.
Between 1803 and 1807, when a second volume of Lyrical Ballads was published, he wrote many of the most beautiful and sublime poems in his whole works. To this period belong “The Memorials of a Tour in Scotland,” (1803,) containing “The Solitary Reaper,” “The Highland Girl,” “Ellen Irwin,” “Rob Roy’s Grave,” and other exquisite and glowing impersonations—his grand sonnets dedicated to “National Independence and Liberty”—“The Horn of Egremont Castle,” “Heart-Leap Well,” “Character of a Happy Warrior,” “A Poet’s Epitaph,” “Vandracour and Julia,” the “Ode to Duty,” and, above all, the sublime “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from the Recollections of Childhood,” which appears not to have been struck off at one beat, but to have been composed at various periods between the years 1803 and 1806.
There are no events, in the common acceptation of the term, in Wordsworth’s life after the period of his marriage, except the publication of his various works, and the pertinacious war waged against them by the influential critics. Though his means were at first limited, he soon, through the friendship of the Earl of Lonsdale, received the appointment of Distributor of Stamps for the counties of Westmoreland and Cumberland, a sinecure office, the duties of which were done by clerks, but which seems to have given him an income sufficient for his wants. In 1809 he published a prose work on the “Convention of Cintra,” which, though designed as a popular appeal in favor of the oppressed Spaniards, was little read at the time, and is now forgotten. Southey, whose mind was on fire with sympathy for the Spanish cause, says of this pamphlet, in a letter to Scott—“Wordsworth’s pamphlet will fail of producing any general effect, because the sentences are long and involved; and his friend, De Quincey, who corrected the press, has rendered them more obscure by an unsound system of punctuation. This fault will outweigh all its merits. The public never can like any thing which they feel it difficult to understand. . . . I impute Wordsworth’s want of perspicuity to two causes—his admiration of Milton’s prose, and his habit of dictating instead of writing: if he were his own scribe his eye would tell him where to stop.”
But the great work to which Wordsworth was devoting the best years of his life, was his long philosophical poem of “The Recluse,” designed to give an account of the growth of his own mind, and to develop all the peculiarities, poetical, ethical and religious, of his system of thought. A large portion of this remains unpublished, but the second part was issued in quarto, in 1814, under the title of “The Excursion,” and was immediately lighted upon by all the wit-snappers and critics of the old school, and mercilessly “probed, vexed and criticised.” Jeffrey, who began his celebrated review of it in the Edinburgh with the sentence, “This will never do,” was successful in ridiculing some of its weak points, but made the mistake of stigmatizing its sublimest passages as “unintelligible ravings.” The choice of a pedler as the hero of a philosophical poem, though it was based on facts coming within the author’s knowledge, was a violation of ideal laws, because it had not sufficient general truth to justify the selection. A pedler may be a poet, moralist and metaphysician, but such examples are for biography rather than poetry, and indicate singularity more than originality in the poet who chooses them. Allowing for this error, substracting some puerile lines, and protesting against the tendency to diffusion in the style, “The Excursion” still remains as a noble work, rich in description, in narrative, in sentiment, fancy and imagination, and replete with some of the highest and rarest attributes of poetry. To one who has been an attentive reader of it, grand and inspiring passages crowd into the memory at the mere mention of its title. It is, more perhaps than any other of Wordsworth’s works, enveloped in the atmosphere of his soul, and vital with his individual life; and in all sympathetic minds, in all minds formed to feel its solemn thoughts and holy raptures, it feeds
“A calm, a beautiful, and silent fire.”
“The Excursion” was followed, in 1815, by the “White Doe of Rylstone,” a narrative poem, which Jeffrey said deserved the distinction of being the worst poem ever printed in a quarto volume, and which appears to us one of the very best. We do not believe the “White Doe” is much read, and its exceeding beauty, subtle grace, and profound significance, are not perceived in a hasty perusal. It is instinct with the most refined and ethereal imagination, and could have risen from the depths of no mind in which moral beauty had not been organized into moral character. Its tenderness, tempered by “thoughts whose sternness makes them sweet,” pierces into the very core of the heart. The purpose of the poem is to exhibit suffering as a purifier of character, and the ministry of sympathies,
“Aloft ascending, and descending quite
Even unto inferior kinds,”
in allaying suffering; and this is done by a story sufficiently interesting of itself to engage the attention, apart from its indwelling soul of holiness. In the representation of the Nortons we have the best specimens of Wordsworth’s power of characterization, a power in which he is generally deficient, but which he here exhibits with almost dramatic force and objectiveness.
“Peter Bell” and “The Wagoner,” which appeared in 1819, were executed in a spirit very different from that which animates the “White Doe.” They were originally written to illustrate a system, and seem to have been published, at this period, to furnish the enemies of Wordsworth some plausible excuse for attacking his growing reputation. “Peter Bell” was conceived and composed as far back as 1798, and though it exhibits much power and refinement of imagination, the treatment of the story is essentially ludicrous. But still it contains passages of description which are eminently Wordsworthian, and which the most accomplished of Wordsworth’s defamers never equaled. With what depth, delicacy, sweetness and simplicity are the following verses, for instance, conceived and expressed: