There where the flutter of his wings While thus before my eyes he gleams, His little song in gushes: As if it pleased him to disdain And mock the Form which he did feign, Of Leaves among the bushes." Or the description of the blue-cap, and of the noon-tide silence,11 41 [P. W., ii., p. 71. Where is he that giddy Sprite Hung with head towards the ground, Bound himself and then unbound; Lithest, gaudiest Harlequin! Prettiest Tumbler ever seen! Light of heart, and light of limb, What is now become of Him? Lambs, that through the mountains went Frisking, bleating merriment, When the year was in its prime, They are sobered by this time. If you look to vale or hill, If you listen, all is still, Save a little neighboring Rill, That from out the rocky ground Strikes a solitary sound, Vainly glitters hill and plain, Vainly Morning spreads the lure 5 p. 284; or the poem to the cuckoo, p. 299;42 or, lastly, though I might multiply the references to ten times the number, to the poem, so completely Wordsworth's, commencing "Three years she grew in sun and shower"-43 Fifth a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with sensibility; a sympathy with man as man; the sympathy of a contemplator, rather than a fellow-sufferer or co-mate (spectator, haud particeps), but of a contemplator, from whose view no difference of rank conceals the sameness of the nature; no injuries of wind or weather, of toil, or even of ignorance, wholly disguise the human face divine. The superscription and the image of the Creator still remain legible to him under the dark lines, with which guilt or calamity had cancelled or cross-barred Is it that they have a fear Or that other pleasures be Sweeter even than gaiety?" S. C.] 42 [P. W., ii., p. 81.] 43 [Lucy. stanzas P. W., ii., p. 91. This poem contains those most beautiful OF 45 46 it. Here the Man and the Poet lose and find themselves in each other, the one as glorified, the latter as substantiated. In this mild and philosophic pathos, Wordsworth appears to me without a compeer. Such as he is so he writes. See vol. i., page 134 to 136,44 or that most affecting composition, THE AFFLICTION OF MARGARET page 165 to 168, which no mother, and, if I may judge by my own experience, no parent can read without a tear. Or turn to that genuine lyric, in the former edition, entitled, THE MAD MOTHER, page 174 to 178, of which I cannot refrain from quoting two of the stanzas, both of them for their pathos, and the former for the transition in the two concluding lines of the stanza, so expressive of that deranged state, in which, from the increased sensibility, the sufferer's attention is abruptly drawn off by every trifle, and in the same instant plucked back again by the one despotic thought, bringing home with it, by the blending, fusing power of Imagination and Passion, the alien object to which it had been so abruptly diverted, no longer an alien but an ally and an inmate. "Suck, little babe, oh suck again! It cools my blood; it cools my brain; 44 ['Tis said, that some have died for love. P. W., i., p. 154. Amongst the Poems founded on the Affections is one called, from its first line, "I travelled among unknown men," which ends with these lines, wherein the poet addresses his native land: Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed The bowers where Lucy played; And thine too is the last green field That Lucy's eyes surveyed. A friend, a true poet himself, to whom I owe some new insight into the merits of Mr Wordsworth's poetry, and who showed me, to my surprise, that there were nooks in that rich and varied region, some of the shy treasures of which I was not perfectly acquainted with, first made me feel the great beauty of this stanza; in which the Poet, as it were, spreads day and night over the object of his affections, and seems, under the influence of passionate feeling, to think of England, whether in light or darkness, only as her play-place and verdant home. S. C.] 45 [The Affliction of Margaret. P. W., i., p. 177. S. C.] 46 [Her eyes are wild P. W., i., p. 256. S. C.] Last, and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of Imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word. In the play of fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is not always 47 [" Meditative pathos," "the union of subtle thought with sensibility,” is highly manifested in a poem among those On the Naming of Places, entitled "When to the attractions of the busy world." The last paragraph contains those lines of marked expression, Even so didst thou become A silent poet; from the solitude Of the vast sea didst bring a watchful heart Still couchant, an inevitable ear, And an eye practised like a blind man's touch. P. W., ii., p. 301. The speech of Francis to his sister in Canto II. of The White Doe, especially from the lines, For thee, for thee, is left the sense Of trial past without offence To God or man, is a beautiful and lofty strain, breathing, amid deep pathos, a spiritual elevation, for which dignity seems a poor word. S. C.] graceful, and sometimes recondite. The likeness is occasionally too strange, or demands too peculiar a point of view, or is such as appears the creature of predetermined research, rather than spontaneous presentation. Indeed his fancy seldom displays itself, as mere and unmodified fancy.48 But in imaginative 48 [How true this is! The Fancy in Mr. Wordsworth's poems I feel disposed, in my own mind, to resign to my Father's stricture; it is rather like the miniature painting of one who has been accustomed to a bold style in crayons. But most of the poems, placed by the author himself under the head of Fancy, are superficially fanciful, but internally far more. The Green Linnet derives its charm from the exquisite description of the bird, and the feeling conveyed, through him, of vernal rapture-of "the music and the bloom, And all the mighty ravishment of Spring." In the little poem To a Sexton, Fancy does but flit, like a swallow, over a depth of human tenderness. Stanzas VIII. and IX. of The Oak and Broom contain a lovely natural description. The first poem, To the Daisy, is full of sweet sentiment, reminding one a little of Burns. The poems to the Celandine abound in happy expressions and images. What truth of nature poetically exhibited is there in this stanza! Ere a leaf is on a bush, In the time before the thrush When we've little warmth or none. Of all common flowers, the small celandine is the most burnished; it seems as if the sun had enclosed a bit of gold in its cup when he sent it forward as his harbinger. In the poems To a Skylark and The Danish Boy the general conception seems to me imaginative, though the particulars in each case are instances of Fancy To call up that "spirit of Noon-day," to clothe him with the attributes of Spring and of Day-time, and, by an exquisite metathesis, to invest his habitation,—the "lovely dell" in which "he walks alone," with the spirituality of his presence, was surely the work of imagination; no mere effort of memory, or of the associative power alone, for the result of the whole is something which acts upon the mind "like a new existence." (See Mr. Wordsworth's Preface to the edit. of 1815. P. W., p. xxviii.) This poem seems to illustrate the joint action of Fancy and Imagination. The mere 66 aggregation or association" of images,-that part of the process, in any example, however, upon the whole, imaginative,—my Father would, I suppose, have assigned to Fancy; |