That walls and roofs a dim hush'd lake, O gorgeous Erumango! isle Have I been part of thee; Part of some saffron hue that lingers Above thy sapphire mountains; One of thy spice-groves' full-voiced singers; Or he is in the "country of the palm," where Long red reaches of the cane, Verdant isle and amber river What a strange visionary rapture is this! and yet, how true to botanical fact; note the "soft explosion" of anthers when the seed is ripe for fertilisation. It finds a parallel, if anywhere, in the Sensitive Plant of Shelley-an artist of larger scope indeed, yet hardly more ecstatically imaginative. Unlike as the two poets are, Chaucer was not more devoted to humanity as his subject than O'Shaughnessy. His landscape art, except in the poem inspired by tropical scenery, has but one conspicuous example, written seemingly toward the close of his life, just before that happy marriage which death ended soon and left him miserable. From this piece, describing a visit to "yet unspoil'd" Lynmouth, I quote a few stanzas, the clear, the imaginative simplicity of which may tempt some to the work of that poet who, among those of recent years, seems to me one of those most unjustly neglected I have brought her I love to this sweet place, life. Around my love and me the brooding hills, And over which there rules the summer sky. And now another hill shuts out the sound. And now we breathe the odours of the glen, The bee that scents the flower and draweth near. Had he lived to pursue and perfect this simpler style, O'Shaughnessy might have reached an acceptance more worthy of his singular genius. CHAPTER XVI THE LANDSCAPE OF WORDSWORTH We now reach the first of those two illustrious poets, who for England's lasting and priceless benefit carried on their art, in this century, to an age rarely granted man; while by the time of Wordsworth's death his work in poetry, I firmly hold, had placed him, then (for Tennyson's highest height was not yet reached), next in succession to Milton. But whether this opinion find assent or rejection, it should be remembered how many of our most gifted poets just preceding Wordsworth were cut down in youth. It is by the harvest-the opus operatum—~ the magnificent breadth and range-that he actually left us, not by what may have been the inborn genius, the natural power bestowed, that I am here venturing to measure him : largior hic campos aether et lumine vestit purpureo. Through his lifetime runs an under-current of belief in his superiority amongst his great brethren in verse-Scott, Shelley, Coleridge, Keats, even Byron; they all seem to recognise him. as the eldest brother; they know that he is the head of the family.1 The scenery in which William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was born, bred, and wherein he mostly spent his long lifethat of the English Lake region-passed as it were into his very soul, and forms a very large portion of his pictures and 1 Here and elsewhere quotations have been made from former attempts of my own in criticism of poetry. his teachings from Nature. The landscape of the five contemporaries just named, with the peculiar gifts of each, I have tried briefly to set forth. Great as has been the range and the splendid quality of their work-great as also that of Wordsworth's successors who remain for later notice-I yet venture to place him at the head of English, indeed of the world's poet-landscapists; his verse, in this respect, may be regarded as the consummation of the whole mighty effort from Homer's days to our own. What, then, are Wordsworth's special characteristics in this field? By virtue of what gifts does he deserve the throne? It is a difficult and complex task to give a distinct answer, and I must beg leave to take some space for the attempt. Wordsworth has himself defined in the Preface to the Excursion, in his letters, and, above all, in the Prelude, his attitude towards Nature; and to these materials I shall mainly trust. His childhood at once reveals that magnificent gift of imagination, in which, as Coleridge notes, he was "nearest of "all modern writers to Shakespeare and Milton, yet in a kind "1 perfectly unborrowed and his own.' But, as coexisting and working with this imagination, I would also name the singular intenseness of his sensibility. And this quality itself, possibly, was intensified by virtue of the very fact that he descended from a long line of north country landholders, retaining hence throughout life no small share of Norse qualities—the iron in the blood, a certain austerity, even rigidity, of nature. By this infusion, I would argue, his native sensitiveness was deepened and concentrated, as the hardest substances are fused only by the greatest heat. And perhaps to the Northern blood and ancient traditions of life surviving in those valleys, we might ascribe that stately yet kindly reserve which still, in old age, when I had the privilege of meeting him, marked his demeanour, and was sometimes misinterpreted into mere personal vanity—a weakness from which Wordsworth, I should judge, was essentially free. He was indeed isolated in mind, self-absorbed by nature; yet it is a mistake to describe 1 From that strange farrago of genius, the Biographia Literaria, ch, xxii, him as indifferent to contemporary genius. With that sensitive imagination (into which we lesser men can perhaps but dimly enter), unbalanced or unregulated in early years by the actualities of life, he tells us he felt the reality of the soul so strongly, and grasped it so personally, that the outer world, the phenomena of Nature, even death itself, appeared to him like a dream. I was often unable," he writes, "to think of external things as having external existence, and I communed with all that "I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in, my own "immaterial nature. Many times while going to school have I grasped at a wall or a tree to recall myself from this abyss "of idealism to the reality."1 Shadowy and inevitably transient as these strange influences of the childish imagination were, they doubtless lay at the root of that peculiarly spiritual tone in which Wordsworth always looked on the world. Nature, as he rambled about in his school-days, gave him at first only a "pure organic pleasure"; presently came flashing gleams of deeper thought :-As when wandering at night he says Moon and stars Were shining o'er my head. I was alone, Or when, moving away, over the nearer hills --A huge peak, black and huge, As if with voluntary power instinct, Or, soon after, when upon a rock in Windermere a boy was fluting Oh, then, the calm And dead still water lay upon my mind Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky 1 Let me compare these words with a passage from Cardinal Newman's Apologia. Speaking of himself as a schoolboy: "I thought life might be a dream, or I an Angel, and all this world a deception, my fellow-angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me, and deceiving me with the "semblance of a material world." |