LITMIR.BIZ

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again!

      It cools my blood; it cools my brain;

      Thy lips, I feel them, baby! They

      Draw from my heart the pain away.

      Oh! press me with thy little hand;

      It loosens something at my chest

      About that tight and deadly band

      I feel thy little fingers prest.

      The breeze I see is in the tree!

      It comes to cool my babe and me.”

      “Thy father cares not for my breast,

      ‘Tis thine, sweet baby, there to rest;

      ‘Tis all thine own! — and if its hue

      Be changed, that was so fair to view,

      ‘Tis fair enough for thee, my dove!

      My beauty, little child, is flown,

      But thou wilt live with me in love;

      And what if my poor cheek be brown?

      ‘Tis well for me, thou canst not see

      How pale and wan it else would be.”

      Last, and preeminently, 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 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. But in imaginative power, he stands nearest of all modern writers to Shakespeare and Milton; and yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and his own. To employ his own words, which are at once an instance and an illustration, he does indeed to all thoughts and to all objects —

      “ —— — add the gleam,

      The light that never was, on sea or land,

      The consecration, and the Poet’s dream.”

      I shall select a few examples as most obviously manifesting this faculty; but if I should ever be fortunate enough to render my analysis of Imagination, its origin and characters, thoroughly intelligible to the reader, he will scarcely open on a page of this poet’s works without recognising, more or less, the presence and the influences of this faculty. From the poem on the YEW TREES, vol. I. page 303, 304.

      “But worthier still of note

      Are those fraternal Four of Borrowdale,

      Joined in one solemn and capacious grove;

      Huge trunks! — and each particular trunk a growth

      Of intertwisted fibres serpentine

      Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved;

      Not uninformed with phantasy, and looks

      That threaten the profane; — a pillared shade,

      Upon whose grassless floor of red-brown hue,

      By sheddings from the pinal umbrage tinged

      Perennially — beneath whose sable roof

      Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked

      With unrejoicing berries — ghostly shapes

      May meet at noontide; FEAR and trembling HOPE,

      SILENCE and FORESIGHT; DEATH, the Skeleton,

      And TIME, the Shadow; there to celebrate,

      As in a natural temple scattered o’er

      With altars undisturbed of mossy stone,

      United worship; or in mute repose

      To lie, and listen to the mountain flood

      Murmuring from Glazamara’s inmost caves.”

      The effect of the old man’s figure in the poem of RESOLUTION AND INDEPENDENCE, vol. II. page 33.

      “While he was talking thus, the lonely place,

      The Old Man’s shape, and speech, all troubled me

      In my mind’s eye I seemed to see him pace

      About the weary moors continually,

      Wandering about alone and silently.”

      Or the 8th, 9th, 19th, 26th, 31st, and 33rd, in the collection of miscellaneous sonnets — the sonnet on the subjugation of Switzerland, page 210, or the last ode, from which I especially select the two following stanzas or paragraphs, page 349 to 350.

      “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

      The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

      Hath had elsewhere its setting,

      And cometh from afar.

      Not in entire forgetfulness,

      And not in utter nakedness,

      But trailing clouds of glory do we come

      From God, who is our home:

      Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

      Shades of the prison-house begin to close

      Upon the growing Boy;

      But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,

      He sees it in his joy!

      The Youth who daily further from the East

      Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,

      And by the vision splendid

      Is on his way attended;

      At length the Man perceives it die away,

      And fade into the light of common day.”

      And page 352 to 354 of the same ode.

      “O joy! that in our embers

      Is something that doth live,

      That nature yet remembers

      What was so fugitive!

      The thought of our past years in me doth breed

      Perpetual benedictions: not indeed

      For that which is most worthy to be blest;

      Delight and liberty, the simple creed

      Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,

      With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast: —

      Not for these I raise

      The song of thanks and praise;

      But for those obstinate questionings

      Of sense and outward things,

      Fallings from us, vanishings;

      Blank misgivings of a Creature

      Moving about in worlds not realized,

      High instincts, before which our mortal Nature

      Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised!

      But for those first affections,

      Those shadowy recollections,

      Which, be they what they may,

      Are yet the fountain light of all our day,

      Are yet a master light of all our seeing;

      Uphold us — cherish — and have power to make

      Our noisy years seem moments in the being

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