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INDIANA UNIYERSITY STUDIES 



objectively, for their own sake, or at most for the amorous thrills 

 they conventionally produced. And the eighteenth century, seeing 

 mainty obvious, outward aspects, was never so perverse as to dream 

 that 



One impulse from a verual wood 

 May teach you more of man, 

 Of moral evil and of good 

 Than all the sages can. 



For the eighteenth century studied man at first hand, whatever it 

 did Avith nature, and never forsook the sages. But Wordsworth's 

 reaction from the preceding age lay exactly in this, that while neg- 

 lecting the normal view of nature for what at first seemed, and 

 frequently was, a strangely whimsical naturalism, he found new 

 images for man's relation to man, and great poetic symbols of his 

 regeneration. 



As distinguished from the moralizer of the last century, 'a rea- 

 soning, self-sufficing thing, an intellectual All-in-all,' the Words- 

 worthian poet is retired 'as noon-tide dew,' and murmurs near the 

 running brooks 'a sweeter music than their own.' 



The outward shows of sky and earth, 

 Of hill and valley, he has viewed — 



like the realist of the past age, but 



Impulses of deeper birth 

 Have come to him in solitude. 



New purposes, new ways of seeing, in the transitory show, the en- 

 during. Nature is to yield — even the 'unassuming commonplace of 

 nature' is to yield 'a wisdom fitted to the needs of hearts at leisure.' 

 Standing by the River Wye, he has not only 'the sense of present 

 pleasure,' but 'pleasing thoughts that in this moment there is life 

 and food for future years.' This simple, and, at first sight whim- 

 sical, philosophy Wordsworth is always bent on involving in texture 

 of his descriptive verse. 



It Avas not, AAdth him, an entirely orignal matter. Though it has 

 in general little relation Avith the eighteenth century, common- 

 sense AdeAV of nature, it is not an entirely ncAv vicAV, CA^en in the 

 eighteenth century, nor is it exi^ressed in an entirely ncAV spirit. 

 Though it is WordsAvorth 's peculiar refinement of the eighteenth 

 century doctrines of the Return to Nature, containing a deeper 

 morality than they represent, much of it may still have been had 

 from certain poets of the previous age. 



