Be as a presence or a motion-one

Among the many there; and while the mists
Flying, and rainy vapours, call out shapes
And phantoms from the crags and solid earth
As fast as a musician scatters sounds

Out of an instrument; and while the streams
(As at a first creation and in haste
To exercise their untried faculties)
Descending from the region of the clouds,
And starting from the hollows of the earth
More multitudinous every moment, rend
Their way before them—what a joy to roam
An equal among mightiest energies;
And haply sometimes with articulate voice,
Amid the deafening tumult, scarcely heard
By him that utters it, exclaim aloud,

'Rage on, ye elements! let moon and stars
Their aspects lend, and mingle in their turn

With this commotion (ruinous though it be)

From day to night, from night to day, prolonged!"

The spirit of science, which has found no loftier or loyaller prophet than Wordsworth, may have cast a chill and a shadow of uncertainty on some of man's most ancient hopes. But it has loosened the clutch of fear at his heart, and has taught him that the universe is not like his morbid dreams, grotesque and indecent. It has shown him that joy and sacrifice are eternal principles of nature, and that he need not transgress the natural to find the marvellous. It has left scope enough for the loftiest imagination and the deepest insight of any poet who "rejoices in the presence of truth as

our visible friend and hourly companion." And Wordsworth, by fulfilling this ideal, has given substance and meaning to his own splendid definition :-"Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science."

CHAPTER V

HUMANITY

WORDSWORTH's exaltation of Nature as the best teacher of man might seem to involve him in difficulties. He held fast to the loftiest conception of the poet's office, and advanced the largest claims for the poet's power to benefit mankind. But if to live in communion with Nature, to enter by sympathy into her greater and more elemental life, be the most enlightening discipline for mankind, this highest reach of wisdom may be achieved by men who never wrote or read a single line of What need of priests and temples if the temple of Nature stands open, and all that the priest can do is to comment, in poor and halting language, on the mysteries there discovered to the sincere worshipper?

verse.

This difficulty is admitted, or rather emphatically asserted, by Wordsworth. It appears in the Excursion:

Oh! many are the Poets that are sown
By Nature; men endowed with highest gifts,
The vision and the faculty divine;

Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse;

These favoured Beings,

All but a scattered few, live out their time,
Husbanding that which they possess within,
And go to the grave, unthought of.

And again, yet more emphatically, in the Third
Book of the Prelude :-

There's not a man

That lives who hath not known his god-like hours,
And feels not what an empire we inherit

As natural beings in the strength of Nature.

Does the poet differ from other men only by virtue of his gift of expression, which is greater than theirs by nature, and has been improved and strengthened by constant practice? Is it the chief of his business, as an earlier poet believed, to give utterance to "what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed"?

In the preface to the later editions of the Lyrical Ballads, where he gives a careful analysis of the character of the poet, Wordsworth makes only the barest allusion to this essential gift of expression. Yet the delight in giving a resonant voice to feeling, the love of the exquisitely turned phrase and of the gorgeous trappings of imagery are found in many, if not all, of the best poets.

Both Shakespeare and Keats, in the days of their youth, fell head over ears in love with language. Of Shakespeare, indeed, it has been maintained, absurdly enough, but not without plausible argument, that his delight in voluble expression so far outran his powers of thought that it was only by some unknown accident of his prime that he became a thinking being and the world's greatest poet. Certainly it is possible in the case of Keats, whose poetic development can be traced from an earlier point, to note how growing powers of thought may take up and utilise the rich stores of diction and imagery that have been acquired by the devout student during his nonage. And Wordsworth had this same gift of expression, but, as he thought, it had misled him, and he did not prize it. The claims of a teacher and prophet must be deeper and surelier based than on a ready command of beautiful and appropriate speech. The poet, he says, is a man "who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him ; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them."