Shall pass into her face.
But the most common exercise of Wordsworth’s imagination is what we may call its meditative action—its still, calm, searching insight into spiritual truth, and into the spirit of nature. In these, analysis and reflection become imaginative, and the “more than reasoning mind” of the poet overleaps the boundaries of positive knowledge, and, steadying itself on the vanishing points of human intelligence, scans the “life of things.” In the poems in which meditation predominates, there is a beautiful union of tender feeling with austere principles, and this austerity prevents his tenderness from ever becoming morbid. As his meditative poems more especially relate to practice, and contain his theory of life, they grow upon a studious reader’s mind with each new perusal. In them the Christian virtues and graces are represented in something of their celestial beauty and power, and the poet’s “vision and faculty divine” are tasked to the utmost in giving them vivid and melodious expression. He is not, in this meditative mood, a mere moralizing dreamer, a vague and puerile rhapsodist, as some have maliciously asserted, but a true poetic philosopher, whose wisdom is alive with the throbs of holy passion, and
Beauty—a living Presence of the earth—
Surpassing the most fair ideal Forms
Which craft of delicate spirits hath composed
From earth’s materials—waits upon his steps;
Pitches her tents before him as he moves,
An hourly neighbor.
But though these poems are essentially meditative in spirit, they are continually verging on two forms of the highest poetic expression, abstract imagination and ecstasy; and the clear, serene, intense vision which is their ordinary characteristic, is the appropriate mood out of which such forms of imagination naturally proceed. Let us first give a specimen of the creativeness of his imagination in its calmly contemplative mood, and we will select one of his many hundred sonnets.
Tranquillity! the sovereign aim wert thou