LIKE

INTRODUCTION

IKE Milton, to whose influence he owed much that was best in his work, Wordsworth belongs to that chosen band of poets to whom poetry is a priesthood, demanding a special consecration and undisturbed devotion. His life was spent in the exercise of his natural gift, in daily intimacy with its inspirer, Nature. Although, at a critical period, he was tempted to follow Milton's example and take an active part in the strife for political liberty, his destiny ruled otherwise. His part in the movements of his age was the liberation of poetry from convention. In this he did not stand alone. Other poets brought a diversity of gifts to the same task. But Wordsworth's interpretation of the inner meaning of Nature, which became his life's mission, was a thing by itself. It was his peculiar achievement to reveal the invisible impulses at work behind the outward beauty of Nature, and to manifest her sustaining influence upon the spirit of man.

The association of human emotion with natural objects was brought home to him early in life. The music of his native river, the Derwent, gave him

A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm

That Nature breathes among the hills and groves.

In his schooldays at Hawkshead, the mountains lay round him ‘like giants at a hunting,' their stillness broken by whisperings of other and mightier presences, on which, in his moonlit wanderings, he trembled to intrude. He learned instinctively that fear which is inseparable from the love of Nature: his passion for her external charm was checked and disturbed by momentary revelations of her hidden power, 'gleams like the flashings of a shield,' which transfigured sensible objects and awakened doubts as to their reality. When, in later years, he was able to understand these visitations, he was disposed to regard the state in which they were still obscure as one of blind devotion to the concrete allurements of sight and sound. But there was no time at which those

notes that are

The ghostly language of the ancient earth,
Or make their dim abode in distant winds

ceased to stir him with their mystery. His point of view underwent no sudden revolution. Confident calm in process of time took the place of vague terrors: the hauntings of invisible forces still thrilled him with reverence, but he regarded them with perfect trust and understanding.

Communion with Nature, however, pursued as a solitary enjoyment, could not by itself awaken his poetic genius. During his residence at Cambridge, where he associated freely with his contemporaries, indulging in what he severely described as a 'heartless chase of trivial

pleasures' and shewing no signs of exclusive dedication to the service of poetry, he was attracted by new and wider interests. Human society exercised its definite claims upon him. The outbreak of the French revolution moved him with enthusiasm for the prospect of human liberty. In the long vacation of 1790, he landed at Calais on the eve of the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. Everywhere joy was manifest,

France standing on the top of golden hours,
And human nature seeming born again.

Wordsworth was in complete sympathy with the ambitions of the new era. Returning to France in November, 1791, he identified himself with the liberal patriots whose aim was the overthrow of tyranny and the reign. of reason and nature, and he even contemplated taking an active part in the councils of the Girondins. Fortunately for poetry, he abandoned a scheme which in all probability would have been fatal to him. When he came back to England in October 1792, it was still with unabated confidence in revolutionary principles, but with apprehensions raised by a visit to Paris while the memory of the September massacres was fresh. successive acts of the drama which rapidly unfolded itself perplexed and depressed him. He felt shame for his country, the fatherland of Milton and the home of liberty, when she joined the war against the nascent French republic. France, goaded into madness by the coalition of the European powers, became the scene of 'domestic carnage.' With the fall of Robespierre,

The

Wordsworth's hopes revived. The news reached him one summer evening on the sands of Morecambe bay, and he then and there hailed the end of the Terror and the new reign of righteousness and peace with 'a hymn of triumph.' Once more, however, England disappointed him her anti-revolutionary panic seemed to him a menace to justice and liberty, of which France, though stained with the blood of her own children, was still the champion. But, if he had lost faith in his own country, the course of affairs in France was to disillusionise him

still more. Her war of self-defence expanded into a war of conquest: she lost sight of her ideal and began to threaten the independence of her smaller neighbours. The swift transformation of the republic into a conquering empire was to Wordsworth a catastrophe less bearable than the excesses of the revolution. He was left to console himself with the mere idea of liberty, to be evoked from the study of the law of nations and the framework of society. This barren comfort drove him to confess moral problems insoluble and to take refuge in the conviction that man is governed by necessity. His reliance upon reason was shaken, and for a time he sought to restore it by leaving questions of space and time and turning to abstract science. Gradually he recognised that his heart

had been turned aside

From Nature's way by outward accidents

and that he was steadily losing his way as he entangled

himself in fruitless speculations alien to Nature's intentions. It was at this point that Nature again began to exercise her undivided mastery over him and to lead him to 'genuine knowledge, fraught with peace.'

He ascribed this return to confidence largely to the influence of his sister Dorothy, his constant companion from 1795, who, unsaddened by disillusion, retained the enthusiasm for natural beauty which had filled his own mind in early youth. In her he had always before him the spectacle of a mind dedicated to the service of Nature without distraction, and from her he learned the value of the inward freedom of the soul, the guarantee of genuine liberty. He spoke without reserve of his debt to her:

She gave me eyes, she gave me ears;
And humble cares, and delicate fears;
A heart, the fountain of sweet tears;
And love, and thought, and joy.

In his quiet life with her at Racedown he found his incentive to that poetic activity which woke into vigorous life during the epoch of his association with Coleridge. At Alfoxden and Grasmere, and in the wanderings of which her Journals preserve a minute and accurate record, her devoted companionship was his constant support and inspiration.

His friendship with Coleridge was no less fruitful. The characters of the two poets were entirely different. There could be no greater contrast than that which existed between Wordsworth's single-minded devotion