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The conclusion of the whole matter is stated in those lines towards the end of the Prelude where the poet breaks out in protest against the vanity of verbal education, and declares himself

convinced at heart

How little those formalities, to which
With overweening trust alone we give
The name of Education, have to do
With real feeling and just sense; how vain
A correspondence with the talking world
Proves to the most.

When he was more than seventy years old he was impelled, he says, "by the disgusting frequency with which the word artistical, imported with other impertinences from the Germans, is employed by writers of the present day," to compose the sonnet beginning

A Poet! He hath put his heart to school;

so that the old prophet continued impenitent to the end.

Protests like this last, directed against the weary cant of technical criticism, have, of course, been uttered by many writers; among others by Goethe. But it is not easy to match this case of a great poet who pays scant respect to the formal aspects of his craft, and who distrusts his own boyhood because it delighted in melody and choice diction and gorgeous phrasing. Wordsworth, it

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cannot be too early stated, was a pure spiritualist in poetry, and disliked poetic ritual, not for itself, but for its power to overlay and endanger the simple and delicate processes of the soul.

The consequences of his resolute spiritualism are seen in his poetic history. Poetry is "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge," but it is blown through instruments of human devising, complex and various. Wordsworth of course knew this; more than once, in his letters, he expresses his conviction that " "poetry is infinitely more of an art than the world is disposed to believe." But when his message came to him, and his eyes were opened upon a new heaven and a new earth, the instruments that he had learned to handle in his childhood seemed to him to be feeble and false. The music of the spheres asked for a larger, simpler expression, and the poet set himself to devise it. Here and there he succeeds, and finds his own incomparable, bleak, noble style. But the memories and admirations and habits of his childhood reasserted themselves, so that his style and his thought were never thoroughly adapted to each other; he never had a sure touch with language. In many passages of his poetry, some of them among the most admired, he is a pensioner upon the art of others, and even in the Excursion the sentiments of Wordsworth often come clothed, against the doctrine of Wordsworth,

in the phrase and manner of Shakespeare. If these passages were indeed the best of his gifts to English poetry, this little treatise would be idle. His theory of poetic diction has been attacked as an inadequate explanation of his own poetry. So far as that attack is directed only to compelling admiration for kinds of poetic expression other than Wordsworth's best, it is completely successful. No one can deny that the much-quoted stanza from the Affliction of Margaret is fine poetry :

Perhaps some dungeon hears thee groan,
Maimed, mangled by inhuman men;
Or thou upon a desert thrown
Inheritest the lion's den ;

Or hast been summoned to the deep,
Thou, thou and all thy mates, to keep
An incommunicable sleep.

But even the sonorous roll and pomp of that verse cannot overwhelm the purer and more wonderful beauty of the verse that follows later in the same poem, where Wordsworth's theory is illustrated in the best of his own practice :

My apprehensions come in crowds;
I dread the rustling of the grass;
The very shadows of the clouds
Have power to shake me as they pass :
I question things and do not find
One that will answer to my mind;
And all the world appears unkind.

Poetry like this is not to be produced voluminously in a single lifetime, and although he clung stubbornly to his old doctrine, in his later work he fell back more and more on the poetic and rhetorical devices that had charmed his boyhood.

The vastly more important education of his feelings, passions, and receptive powers was (he lived to teach it) the work of Nature. Behind and around the activities of his boyhood there was spread the solemn theatre of Nature-" a temperate show of objects that endure." The work of Wordsworth in poetry might be compared, not unjustly, with the kindred art of Corot and Millet and the modern school of French painters. He brought the background of human life into true and vital relation with the smaller interests and incidents that monopolise most men's attention. He emancipated the eye from the utilitarian preferences that have been imposed on it by the necessities of the struggle for life, whereby things in motion, things near, things dangerous, things whose behaviour cannot be certainly predicted, are allowed to annul all consideration of the great visions and presences which stand around, and watch, and judge. He fixed his attention on the wide spaces of earth and sky, and against that calm unresting expanse he learned to see men as trees walking. And although his intercourse with beauty old as creation was at first almost uncon

scious, he attributed a chief influence over the growth of his genius to the work of these ministering powers. There are many passages of poetic rapture in the Prelude where the debt is acknowledged, and some prosaic passages, more useful for the present purpose, where the doctrine is stated :

Attention springs,

And comprehensiveness and memory flow
From early converse with the works of God
Among all regions; chiefly where appear
Most obviously simplicity and power.

It is not that the works of God among cities and crowded communities are less worthy of study; but they are more difficult to read. They too will come to be seen in the same clear and large light by him whose eye has been trained in the quiet places of Nature

Who looks

In steadiness, who hath among last things
An undersense of greatest; sees the parts

As parts, but with a feeling of the whole.

To be surrounded in childhood by the larger aspects of Nature, to have them visible, a daily sight, is in itself, according to Wordsworth, the greater part of education. The eagernesses and impulses of his own boyish life he judged

Not vain

Nor profitless, if haply they impressed

Collateral objects and appearances,

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