My early visitation and my last At even, which I bred up with tender hand And wild? how shall we breathe in other air Less pure, accustom'd to immortal fruits?' This is the lamentation of Eve on being driven out of Paradise. Adam's reflections are in a different strain, and still finer. expressing his submission to the will of his Maker, he says: "This most afflicts me, that departing hence On this mount he appeared, under this tree I heard, here with him at this fountain talk'd: So many grateful altars I would rear Of grassy turf, and pile up every stone Or monument to ages, and thereon Offer sweet-smelling gums and fruits and flow'rs: After W. H. No. 29.] OBSERVATIONS ON MR. WORDSWORTH'S POEM THE EXCURSION [AUG. 21, 28, 1814. THE poem of The Excursion resembles that part of the country in which the scene is laid. It has the same vastness and magnificence, with the same nakedness and confusion. It has the same overwhelming, oppressive power. It excites or recalls the same sensations which those who have traversed that wonderful scenery must have felt. We are surrounded with the constant sense and superstitious awe of the collective power of matter, of the gigantic and eternal forms of nature, on which, from the beginning of time, the hand of man has made no impression. Here are no dotted lines, no hedge-row beauties, no box-tree borders, no gravel walks, no square mechanic inclosures; all is left loose and irregular in the rude chaos of aboriginal nature. The boundaries of hill and valley are the poet's only geography, where we wander with him incessantly over deep beds of moss and waving fern, amidst the troops of red-deer and wild animals. Such is the severe simplicity of Mr. Wordsworth's taste, that we doubt whether he would not reject a druidical temple, or time-hallowed ruin as too modern and artificial for his purpose. He only familiarises himself or his readers with a stone, covered with lichens, which has slept in the same spot of ground from the creation of the world, or with the rocky fissure between two mountains caused by thunder, or with a cavern scooped out by the sea. His mind is, as it were, coeval with the primary forms of things; his imagination holds immediately from nature, and owes no allegiance' but to the elements.' The Excursion may be considered as a philosophical pastoral poem, -as a scholastic romance. It is less a poem on the country, than on the love of the country. It is not so much a description of natural objects, as of the feelings associated with them; not an account of the manners of rural life, but the result of the poet's reflections on it. He does not present the reader with a lively succession of images or incidents, but paints the outgoings of his own heart, the shapings of his own fancy. He may be said to create his own materials; his thoughts are his real subject. His understanding broods over that which is without form and void,' and 'makes it pregnant.' He sees all things in himself. He hardly ever avails himself of remarkable objects or situations, but, in general, rejects them as interfering with the workings of his own mind, as disturbing the smooth, deep, majestic current of his own feelings. Thus his descriptions of natural scenery are not brought home distinctly to the naked eye by forms and circumstances, but every object is seen through the medium of innumerable recollections, is clothed with the haze of imagination like a glittering vapour, is obscured with the excess of glory, has the shadowy brightness of a waking dream. The image is lost in the sentiment, as sound in the multiplication of echoes. And visions, as prophetic eyes avow, Hang on each leaf, and cling to every bough.' In describing human nature, Mr. Wordsworth equally shuns the common 'vantage-grounds of popular story, of striking incident, or fatal catastrophe, as cheap and vulgar modes of producing an effect. He scans the human race as the naturalist measures the earth's zone, without attending to the picturesque points of view, the abrupt inequalities of surface. He contemplates the passions and habits of men, not in their extremes, but in their first elements; their follies and vices, not at their height, with all their embossed evils upon their heads, but as lurking in embryo,-the seeds of the disorder inwoven with our very constitution. He only sympathises with those simple forms of feeling, which mingle at once with his own identity, or with the stream of general humanity. To him the great and the small are the same; the near and the remote; what appears, and what only is. The general and the permanent, like the Platonic ideas, are his only realities. All accidental varieties and individual contrasts are lost in an endless continuity of feeling, like drops of water in the ocean-stream! An intense intellectual egotism swallows up every thing. Even the dialogues introduced in the present volume are soliloquies of the same character, taking different views of the subject. The recluse, the pastor, and the pedlar, are three persons in one poet. We ourselves disapprove of these interlocutions between Lucius and Caius' as impertinent babbling, where there is no dramatic distinction of character. But the evident scope and tendency of Mr. Wordsworth's mind is the reverse of dramatic. It resists all change of character, all variety of scenery, all the bustle, machinery, and pantomime of the stage, or of real life,-whatever might relieve, or relax, or change the direction of its own activity, jealous of all competition. The power of his mind preys upon itself. It is as if there were nothing but himself and the universe. He lives in the busy solitude of his own heart; in the deep silence of thought. His imagination lends life and feeling only to the bare trees and mountains bare'; peoples the viewless tracts of air, and converses with the silent clouds! We could have wished that our author had given to his work the form of a didactic poem altogether, with only occasional digressions or allusions to particular instances. But he has chosen to encumber himself with a load of narrative and description, which sometimes hinders the progress and effect of the general reasoning, and which, instead of being inwoven with the text, would have come in better in plain prose as notes at the end of the volume. Mr. Wordsworth, indeed, says finely, and perhaps as truly as finely: VOL. I.: H "Exchange the shepherd's frock of native grey 113 Amid the groves, beneath the shadowy hills, The internal pangs, are ready; the dread strife Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny.' But he immediately declines availing himself of these resources of the rustic moralist: for the priest, who officiates as the sad historian of the pensive plain' says in reply: 'Our system is not fashioned to preclude That sympathy which you for others ask: Loth to disturb what Heaven hath hushed to peace.' There is, in fact, in Mr. Wordsworth's mind an evident repugnance to admit anything that tells for itself, without the interpretation of the poet, a fastidious antipathy to immediate effect, a systematic unwillingness to share the palm with his subject. Where, however, he has a subject presented to him, such as the meeting soul may pierce,' and to which he does not grudge to lend the aid of his fine genius, his powers of description and fancy seem to be little inferior to those of his classical predecessor, Akenside. Among several others which we might select we give the following passage, describing the religion of ancient Greece: In that fair clime, the lonely herdsman, stretch'd And in some fit of weariness, if he, When his own breath was silent, chanced to hear A beardless youth, who touched a golden lute, When winds are blowing strong. The traveller slaked The zephyrs fanning as they passed their wings The simple shepherd's awe-inspiring God.' The foregoing is one of a succession of splendid passages equally enriched with philosophy and poetry, tracing the fictions of Eastern mythology to the immediate intercourse of the imagination with Nature, and to the habitual propensity of the human mind to endow the outward forms of being with life and conscious motion. With this expansive and animating principle, Mr. Wordsworth has forcibly, but somewhat severely, contrasted the cold, narrow, lifeless spirit of modern philosophy: 'How, shall our great discoverers obtain From sense and reason less than these obtained, To explore the world without and world within, And they who rather dive than soar, whose pains The thinking principle-shall they in fact Prove a degraded race? And what avails Renown, if their presumption make them such? |