﻿wobdsworth's mind 



15 



The Wordsworthian note, as a term applied to certain pre- 

 Wordsworthian verse, should denote qualities that Wordsworth 

 might have caught from his forerunners. It is possible to list many 

 passages. One may point to Bowles's sonnets, Cowper's 'Task,' or 

 Akenside's 'Pleasures of the Imagination,' for general resem- 

 blances in style ; and there are a score of other sources. If a poet 

 says, 



As oil this floAveiiiig turf I lie, 

 My soul conversing with the sky : 



or. 



Whatever charms the ear or eye, 

 All beauty and all harmony, 

 If sweet sensations they produce, 

 I know they have their moral use ; 



you exclaim about these lines of William Hamilton's and John 

 Langhorne's — 'Wordsworth's philosophy!' There is 'A Fragment' 

 of Gray's that declares, 



The meanest floweret of the vale, 

 The simplest note that swells the gale. 

 The common sun, the air, the skies. 

 To him are opening Paradise. 



'Almost Wordsworthian,' you say. And what of this? — 



Nor voice nor S3und broke on the deep serene — 

 But the soft murmur of the gushing rills, 

 Forth issuing from the mountain's distant steei) 

 (Unheard till now, and now scarce heard) proclaimed 

 All things at rest, and imaged the still voice 

 Of Quiet whisi'.ering to the ear of Night. 



This is from 'A Fragment of a Rhapsody,' written by a Dr. John 

 Brown at the lakes of Westmoreland about 1750. 'How very 

 Wordsworthian ! ' In fact Wordsworth himself has noticed much 

 the same phenomenon, in less Wordsworthian fashion, in his ' Even- 

 ing A¥alk.' 



The song of mountain streams, unheard by day, 

 Now hardly heard, beguile my homeward way. 



John Logan has a song 'To the Cuckoo,' not unlike Wordsworth's 

 poem of that title, and Charlotte Smith's sonnet 'To Night,' which 

 Wordsworth much admired, is as a whole a conception that might 

 have originated in his mind, though here and there expressed with 

 a different skill. 



