And fields invested with purpureal gleams,
Climes, which the sun, who sheds the brightest day
Earth knows, is all unworthy to survey.
It is needless to adduce passages to prove the depth and delicacy of Wordsworth’s sentiment, sanctifying as it does natural objects and the humblest life, and lending to his religious faith a mysterious, ineffable beauty and holiness. In our view of the quality it must necessarily be the limitation of a poet’s creativeness, for the imagination cannot represent or create objects to which it does not tend by a sentiment; and Wordsworth, while he has a sentiment for visible nature, a religious sentiment, a sentiment of humanity, is still confined to the serious side of things, and has no sentiment of humor. If he had humor as a sentiment, he, dowered as he is with imagination, would have it as a creative faculty, for humor is the intellectual imagination inspired by the sentiment of mirth.
Let us now survey the power and scope of Wordsworth’s imagination, considered in its intellectual manifestation. Here nothing bounds its activity but its sentiments. It is descriptive, pictorial, reflective, shaping, creative, and ecstatic; it can body forth abstract ideas in sensible imagery; it can organize, as in “The White Doe,” a whole poem round one central idea; it can make audible in the melody of words, shades of feeling and thought which elude the grasp of imagery; it can fuse and diffuse itself at pleasure, animating, coloring, vitalizing every thing it touches. In description it approaches near absolute perfection, giving not only the scene as it lies upon the clear mirror of the perceptive imagination, but representing it in its life and motion as well as form. The following, from “The Night Piece,” is one out of a multitude of instances:
He looks up—the clouds are split
Asunder—and above his head he sees
The clear Moon, and the glory of the heavens.
There, in a black blue vault she sails along,
Followed by multitudes of stars, that, small