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dition. Poets we may not be; but a little lifted out 

 of ordinary prose we may be often to our advantage. 

 'To compare our small measures with larger let us 

 take a recorded experience of a full-grown poet. 

 Wordsworth, only greater in poetic sensibility than 

 any one of us, not differently organized, not differently 

 affected by medicine, came home from a painful 

 experience in France after its great revolution, sick, 

 broken down, unfit for business. Everything was 

 going wrong with him. His sister Dorothy, of whom 

 it was well said that she was the greater poet of the 

 two, only that she was not a literary poet, watched 

 his symptoms, saw the nature of his troubles, and 

 divined their cure. She persuaded him to let her 

 guide him into the midst of charming scenery, and 

 subject himself for a time to its influence/ and thus, 

 says Dr. Shairp, telling the story, 'began the sanative 

 process which restored him to his true self and made 

 that blessing to the world that he has become.' 

 Commenting further on Wordsworth's case he writes, 

 1 continuing the study of nature (not with the science 

 of the botanist, or the florist, but the poet), he at last 

 came to hold the conscious conviction, what he had at 

 first felt it, hardly knowing that he felt it, that nature 

 had a life of her own, which streamed through and 

 stimulated his life, a spirit which, in itself invisible, 

 spoke through visible things to his spirit/ x That the 

 characteristics of this spirit were calmness, which 



1 The Poetic Interpretation of Nature, p. 249, Dr. John Campbell 

 Shairp. 



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