Part 9 (1/2)

The Being, that is in the clouds and air, That is in the green leaves aroves, Maintains a deep and reverential care For the unoffending creatures whom he loves

_Hartleap Well_ is a beautiful poem, but whether it is entirely successful is, perhaps, doubtful There can be no sort of doubt as to _Resolution and Independence_, probably, if we must choose, the most Wordsworthian of Wordsworth's poems, and the best test of ability to understand hiu We should expect for it, too, a ballad form somewhat like that of _Simon Lee_ When we read it, we find instead lines of extraordinary grandeur, but, led with them, lines more pedestrian than could be found in an impressive poe to his side, to hilorious day'

or,

'How is it that you live, and what is it you do?'

We meet also with that perplexed persistence, and that helpless reiteration of a question (in this case one already clearly answered), which in other poems threatens to become ludicrous, and on which a writer with a keener sense of the ludicrous would hardly have ventured

Yet with all this, and by dint of all this, we read with bated breath, almost as if ere in the presence of that 'majestical' Spirit in _Hah not this time by terror And one source of this effect is the confusion, the al atherer, and hears, without understanding, his plain reply to the enquiry about himself and the prosaic 'occupation' he 'pursues':

The oldby my side; But now his voice to me was like a stream Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide; And the whole body of the man did seem Like one whoion sent, To give th, by apt adain, and the ansas repeated But

While he was talking thus, the lonely place, The old man's shape, and speech, all troubled me

'Trouble' is a word not seldom employed by the poet to denote the confusion caused by sos fros of the soul's infinity

Out of many illustrations I will choose three ly rese _Resolution and Independence_ that I merely refer to it) where Wordsworth describes an old soldier suddenly seen, leaning against athing appeared in earth or air; And, save the floater's peaceful voice, Sound there was none

still his form Kept the same awful steadiness--at his feet His shadow lay, and host was never ghostlier than he And by hiar of _Prelude_, vii:

How oft, aone forith the crowd, and said Unto myself, 'The face of every one That passes by me is a mystery!'

Thus have I looked, nor ceased to look, oppressed By thoughts of what and whither, when and how, Until the shapes before lides Over still mountains, or appears in dreams; And once, far-travelled in such mood, beyond The reach of coeant, I was sht not rare) Of a blind Beggar, ith upright face, Stood, propped against a wall, upon his chest Wearing a written paper, to explain His story, whence he caht by the spectacle ht of waters; an apt type This label seemed of the utmost we can know, Both of ourselves and of the universe; And, on the shape of that unazed, As if admonished froically is the passage, in the preceding book of the _Prelude_, which tells us of a similar shock and leads to the description of its effects The e, the better Wordsworth and Jones ('Jones, as from Calais southward you and I') set out to walk over the Siha peasant, discovered fro it, they '_had crossed the Alps_' This may not sound important, and the italics are Wordsworth's, not ination--here the Power so called Through sad incompetence of human speech, That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps, At once, some lonely traveller I was lost; Halted without an effort to break through; But to lory': in such strength Of usurpation, when the light of sense Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed The invisible world, doth greatnessor old, Our destiny, our being's heart and home, Is with infinitude, and only there; With hope it is, hope that can never die, Effort, and expectation, and desire, And so evermore about to be

And as the result of this shock? The poet lish poetry The travellers proceeded on their way down the Defile of Gondo

Doards we hurried fast, And, with the half-shaped road which we had missed, Entered a narrow chasloomy strait, And with them did we journey several hours At a slow pace The i, never to be decayed, The stationary blasts of waterfalls, And in the narrow rent at every turn Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn, The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky, The rocks that s that spake by the way-side As if a voice were in the streaion of the Heavens, Tuht-- Were all like workings of one mind, the features Of the sareat Apocalypse, The types and symbols of Eternity, Of first, and last, and midst, and without end[18]

I hardly think that 'the poet of Surrey, say, and the prophet of its life' could have written thus And of all the poees I have quoted, there are but two or three which do not cry aloud that their birth-place was the moor or the mountain, and that severed from their birth-place they would perish

The more sublime they are, or the nearer they approach sublimity, the more is this true The cry of the cuckoo in _O blithe new-coh visionary, is not sublime; but, echoed by the mountain, it is

Like--but oh, how different![19]

It was a the mountains that Wordsworth, as he says of his Wanderer, _felt_ his faith It was there that all things

Breathed i; infinite

There littleness was not; the least of things Seemed infinite; and there his spirit shaped Her prospects, nor did he believe,--he _saw_

And even if we count his vision a mere dream, still he put into words, as no other poet has, the spirit of the mountains