“The gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the poet’s dream.”
The first and grandest exercise, therefore, of his imagination is the creation of this harmonizing atmosphere, enveloping as it does the world of his creation with that peculiar light and air, indescribable but unmistakable, which enable us at once to recognize and to class a poem by Wordsworth. We do not hesitate to say that, in its peculiarity, there is nothing identical with it in literature—that it constitutes an absolutely new kind of poetry, in the Platonic sense of the word kind. An imagination which thus fuse all the faculties and emotions into one individuality, so that all the vital products of that individuality are characterized by unity of effect, is an imagination of the highest kind. The next question to be considered is the variety which this unity includes; for Shakspeare himself, the most comprehensively creative of human beings, never goes beyond the unity of his individuality, his multifarious variety always answering to the breadth of his personality. He is like the banyan tree in the marvelous fertility of his creativeness, and the province of humanity he covers; but the fertility all comes from one root and trunk, and indicates simply the greatness of the kind, as compared with other kinds of trees. The variety in the operation of Wordsworth’s imagination we will consider first in its emotional, and second in its intellectual, manifestation—of course, using these words as terms of distinction, not of division, because when we employ the word imagination we desire to imply a fusion of the whole nature of the man into one living power. In the emotional operation of Wordsworth’s imagination we discern his Sentiment. No term has been more misused than this, its common acceptation being a weak affectionateness; and, at best, it is considered as an instinct of the sensibility, as a simple, indivisible element of humanity. The truth is that sentiment is a complex thing, the issue of sensibility and imagination; and without imagination sentiment is impossible. We often meet excellent and intelligent people, whose affections are warm, whose judgments are accurate, and whose lives are irreproachable, but who lack in their religion, morality and affections an elusive something which is felt to be the grace of character. The solution of the problem is found in their want of sentiment—in their want of that attribute by which past scenes and events, and absent faces, and remote spiritual realities, affect the mind like objects which are visibly present. Now, without this Sentiment no man can be a poet, either in feeling or faculty; and Wordsworth has it in a transcendent degree. In him it is revealed, not only in his idealizing whatever in nature or life had passed into his memory, but in his religious feeling and in his creative art. Scenes which he had viewed years before, he tells us, still
Flash upon that inward eye,
Which is the bliss of solitude.
Thus Sentiment is that operation of imagination which recalls, in a more vivid light, things absent from the bodily eye, and makes them act upon the will with more force and inspiration than they originally exerted in their first passionate or thoughtful perception; and from its power of extracting the essence and heightening the beauty of what has passed away from the senses and passed into memory, it gives the impulse which sends the creative imagination far beyond the boundaries of actual life into the regions of the ideal, to see what is most beautiful here
—Imaged there
In happier beauty; more pellucid streams,
An ampler ether, a diviner air,