It is undoubtedly difficult for one who foregoes the passions to rise to a very high eminence as a poet, since the violent emotions of our nature are well adapted to verse, and full of dramatic effect. The bard of Rydal-Mount has, nevertheless, attained a lasting celebrity, after patiently enduring years—long years—of neglect and ridicule. He has carefully eschewed those stormy and harrowing subjects with which poets of the highest genius had, before his time, generally delighted to familiarize our minds. He leaves such themes as Prometheus bound by Jupiter to a rock, with a vulture preying perpetually on his entrails, [Footnote 58] Count Ugolino devouring the flesh of his own offspring in the Tower of Famine, [Footnote 59] and Satan summoning his fallen peers to council in the fiery halls of Pandemonium, [Footnote 60] to such masters as "AEschylus the Thunderous," Dante, and Milton, and addresses himself to the softer and more homely feelings, and to the calmer reason of men. He is firmly persuaded that a truer and deeper source of poetic inspiration is to be found in the every-day sights and sounds of Nature; that the changing clouds and falling waters, the forest-glades, wet with noon-tide dew, the rocky beach, musical with foaming waves, the sheep-walks on the barren hill-side, and the "primrose by the river's brim," supply the imagination with its best aliment, and effectually tend to calm, elevate, and hallow the mind. This is his great, his constant theme. His longer and more philosophical poems ring ever-varying changes on it, and may be called an Epithalamium on the espousals of Man and Nature. But for his devoting a long life to the poetic development of this fundamental idea, we should never have seen our literature enriched by the productions of Shelley and Tennyson's genius. In poetry, as in all that concerns the human mind, there is a law of progress. The poetic harvest-home of one generation is the seed-time of that which is to follow. Thus Dante speaks of two poets (Guinicelli and Daniello) now forgotten, or known only by name, in terms of strong admiration, as predecessors to whose writings he was considerably indebted. [Footnote 61] The following lines are but a sample of a thousand passages in Wordsworth which set forth the agency of natural scenery in the work of man's education and refinement. It is taken from the Prelude, a long introduction to the Excursion, which lay upon the author's shelves in manuscript during forty-five years: [Footnote 62]
"Was it for this,
That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved
To blend his murmurs with my nurse's song,
And from his alder-shades and rocky falls,
And, from his fords and shallows, sent a voice That flowed along my dreams? For this didst thou,
O Derwent! winding among grassy holms
Where I was looking on, a babe in arms.
Make ceaseless music, that composed my thoughts To more than infant softness, giving me,
Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind,
A foretaste, a dim earnest of the calm That Nature breathes among the hills and groves?"
[Footnote 58: Prometheus Vinctus.]
[Footnote 59: L' Inferno, c. xxxiii.]
[Footnote 60: Paradise Lost, Book i.]
[Footnote 61: Il Purgatorio, xi. 97; xxvi. 115, 142, 92, 97.]
[Footnote 62: 1805 to 1850.]
Wordsworth's life was an exemplification of the doctrine he taught. Cheerfulness and peace marked his character at each stage of his eighty years' pilgrimage, and, towards the close of his career, he had the satisfaction of perceiving that his works were slowly effecting the result to which he had destined them—making a lasting impression on the literature of his age, and leading many a thoughtful spirit from artificial to natural enjoyments, from the imagery of dreamland to that of daily life, from bombast to simplicity, from passion to feeling, and from turmoil to repose.
"O heavenly poet! such thy verse appears,
So sweet, so charming to my ravished ears,
As to the weary swain, with cares opprest.
Beneath the silvan shade, refreshing rest;
As to the fev'rish traveller, when first
He finds a crystal stream to quench his thirst." [Footnote 63]
[Footnote 63: Dryden's Virgil, Pastoral v.]
Nor was Wordsworth's love of nature and her soothing influences dissociated from religious belief. He was no materialist, maintaining the eternal existence and self-government of the universe by fixed and exclusively natural laws. He was no pantheist, worshipping nature as an indivisible portion of the divine essence—a body of which God is actually the soul. He believed in other laws besides those which regulate the movements of the celestial bodies, and the gradual formation and destruction of the strata that compose the surface of our globe. The view which he took of the material universe was such as became a Christian, and is luminously expressed by him in the following lines:
"I have seen
A curious child applying to his ear
The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell.
To which, in silence hushed, his very soul
Listened intensely, and his countenance soon
Brightened with joy; for murmurings from within
Were heard—sonorous cadences! whereby,
To his belief, the monitor expressed
Mysterious union with its native sea.
E'en such a shell the universe itself
Is to the ear of faith, and doth impart
Authentic tidings of invisible things.
Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power,
And central peace subsisting at the heart
Of endless agitation."
It is impossible to read the Prelude and the Excursion without perceiving that Wordsworth's passion for natural scenery was no fictitious emotion, assumed for the purpose of appearing brimful of philosophy and sentiment, and making an effective parade of moon and stars, flowers and rivulets, in verse. No, it was a deep and abiding principle—a feeling of which he could no more have divested himself than Newton of his bent toward science, or Beethoven of his ear for music. This unaffected enthusiasm enabled him to speak with the authority of a master, and to instil into the minds of disciples the ideas that had taken so strongly possession of his own.