﻿WOEDSWOETir 'S MIND 



19 



Of vulgar wisdom, move me to disclaim 

 Those studies which possessed me in the dawn 

 Of life, and fixed the color of my mind 

 For every future year. 



While Dr. Akenside lets this recollection of early sympathy 

 with an insight into the meanings of nature remain an entirely 

 moral pleasure, Wordsworth combines the idea with a more vividly 

 sensuous picture of his own emotion : 



Wisdom and Spirit of the universe ! 

 Thou Soul that art the Eternity of thought! 

 That giv'st to forms and images a breath 

 And everlasting motion ! not in vain 

 By day or star-light, thus from my first dawn 

 Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me 

 The passions that build up our human soul; 

 Not with the mean and vulgar works of Man; 

 But with high objects, with enduring things. 

 With life and nature ; purifying thus 

 The elements of feeling and of thought, 

 And sanctifying by such discipline, 

 Both pain and fear — until we recognize 

 A grandeur in the beatings of the heart. 

 Nor was this fellowship vouchsafed to me 

 With stinted kindness. In November days, 

 When vapours rolling down the valley made 

 A lonely scene mare lonesome; among woods 

 At noon ; and 'mid the calm of summer nights, 

 When, by the margin of the trembling lake, 

 Beneath the gloomy hills homeward I went 

 In solitude, such intercourse was mine : 

 Mine ^^•as it in the fields both day and night, 

 And by the waters, all the summer long. 



This is the complete expression of Wordsworth's sense that nature 

 is a divine teacher. But I do not think he was so much influenced 

 in these ideas by Akenside as by certain 17th century poets like 

 Henry Vaughan, whose poem, 'The Retreat,' in 'Thalia Rediviva,' 

 1678, may have suggested the ode on 'Intimations of Immortality.' 

 Also, the recently published poetry and 'Meditations' of Traherne, 

 though Wordsworth never read them, are, it is interesting to 

 note here, of a more Wordsworthian spirit than anything in the 

 eighteenth century. The spirit of Akenside 's poetry is, as a whole, 

 far from Wordsworth. 



It is Cowper of whom one naturally thinks in connection with 

 Wordsworth as a descriptive poet. And he is, I believe, the poet 

 of the eighteenth century to whom Wordsw^orth is most largely 



