CHAPTER VII

NATURE

E

VERYBODY knows that Wordsworth is in

an especial sense the poet of out-of-doors. Remove from his work all that which was directly or indirectly inspired by the phenomena of the external world, and you have taken away full two-thirds of all that is of permanent familiarity and value. It was the outdoor life of his boyhood in Hawkshead that had prompted his first efforts at verse. After his early period of enthusiasm for liberty and its disappointment he had turned away from men and action to live the life of placid observation and reflection. His world was a narrow and secluded one, and in that world he seemed to live rather with things than with men, and sometimes with trivial things. His early critics charged that his strange interest in merely nature objects led him sometimes into puerility and sometimes into mysticism. The Edinburgh in its notice of the Lyrical Ballads de

clared the lines to the Lesser Celandine "a piece of namby-pamby," and The Cuckoo "a rapturous mystical ode in which the author, striving after force and originality, produces nothing but absurdity."

TO THE CUCKOO

O blithe New-comer! I have heard,

I hear thee and rejoice.

O Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird,
Or but a wandering Voice?

While I am lying on the grass
Thy twofold shout I hear,
From hill to hill it seems to pass,
At once far off, and near.

Though babbling only to the Vale,
Of sunshine and of flowers,

Thou bringest unto me a tale

Of visionary hours.

Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring!

Even yet thou art to me

No bird, but an invisible thing,

A voice, a mystery;

The same whom in my school-boy days

I listened to; that Cry

Which made me look a thousand ways

In bush, and tree, and sky.

To seek thee did I often rove

Through woods and on the green;
And thou wert still a hope, a love;
Still longed for, never seen.

And I can listen to thee yet;
Can lie upon the plain
And listen, till I do beget
That golden time again.

O blessed Bird! the earth we pace
Again appears to be

An unsubstantial, faery place;

That is fit home for Thee!

As late as 1850, when The Prelude appeared, Macaulay could see little in it but "the old raptures about mountains and cataracts; the old flimsy philosophy about the effect of scenery on the mind; the old crazy mystical metaphysics." Even so genuine a lover of Wordsworth as Arthur Hugh Clough, regretted the poet's tendency to consider "larks and linnets, celandines and daisies, 'the proper subject of mankind." But to Wordsworth's thought, nothing in nature was really trivial. For himself he always believed that in the development of his own moral life the influence of Man had been distinctly subservient to that of Nature. In a familiar passage, he accounts himself fortunate that,

from the first dawn of childhood, his thoughts and passions had been intwined

With high objects, with enduring things,
With life and nature.

This early sensitiveness to the spiritual influence of nature, which is recorded vividly in The Prelude, continued through all the most poetic period of his life, and explains much that is most characteristic in his work.

Wordsworth is not, strictly speaking, a descriptive poet. He did not see the landscape in all its details of form and color. He did not wish to. He knew that the mere seeing, the minute and accurate inspection, was sometimes a positive hindrance to the imagination. Speaking of his eager and unimaginative youth, he says:

I speak in recollection of a time

When the bodily eye, in every stage of life
The most despotic of our senses, gained
Such strength in me as often held my mind
In absolute dominion.

This tyranny of the eye is doubtless one obstacle in any attempt to render directly the impressions derived from nature. It is matter of familiar expe

rience with us who are not poets that beautiful things often seem more beautiful in memory than they did before our eyes, and derive an added charm from the fact that we have dropped out of our picture all irrelevant and blurring elements. The first. task of the descriptive poet must always be to select among the many details given in sight or in memory, and then so to arrange and combine these details that they can be imaged together and will give the impression of a whole. This art of detailed description is comparatively new in English literature. Tennyson may be called the first master of it in poetry, Ruskin in prose. Shelley could render the changing scenery of the clouds and sky, now flooded with light, and now torn by the wild tumult of storm; but no poet before Tennyson has quite his power to accumulate and combine beautiful details. His poetry is a gallery of pictures, vivid in form and color. Sometimes in a line or two

The rounded moon

Through the tall oriel on the rolling sea,

but more often Tennyson loves to enumerate one by one the exquisite features of his landscape, dwelling in imagination upon each as they coalesce in one gra