﻿WORDSWORTH 'S MIND 



27 



As was the case with nearly all the romantic poets, Words- 

 worth 's over-sensitive, over-passionate youth remained vivid in rec- 

 ollection to the end of his life. As we shall see more definitely in 

 onr study of 'The Prelude,' his lasting interest in his early sensa- 

 tions was one of his chief characteristics. The continuity of his 

 sensational states he felt to be his inspiration and the secret war- 

 rant of his poetic genius. Nevertheless, another chief character- 

 istic may be said, paradoxically, to be the restraint he imposed on 

 this undercurrent of sensation; and it is this restraint that gives 

 him his power, that preserves his insight, and (once more) that en- 

 ables him to render his feelings consonant to nature. 



Without this self-imposed restraint, which Mr. Hutton calls his 

 spiritual frugality, he would have indulged his youthful romantic 

 fancies to their full extent. All through 'The Prelude' there runs 

 a strain of half -regret over his maturer view of life and its displace- 

 ment of the haunting vividness of boyish impressions. As it was, 

 he by no means lost his enthusiasm for the strange, for mere 

 strangeness' sake. The boy who loved melancholy November days, 

 when vapors rolling down the valleys made a lonely scene more 

 lonesome, who liked to contemplate a 'lonely yew tree far from all 

 human dwelling,' and rejoiced secretly in 'the sublime attractions 

 of the grave, ' is not greatly modified in the young man who crosses 

 the Simplon in 1790, or by any means forgotten in the old man who 

 explores lona and the Cave of Staffa in 1833. All through his life 

 desolate places, the romantic spell of isolation, attracted him 

 strongly. The Kirkstone pass, which thrilled him with its wind- 

 swept, barren aspect ; the top of Scawf ell, or of Blackcomb — ' dread 

 name derived from clouds and storms;' Wallace's Tower; Kilchurn 

 Castle — a ruin embodying 'the memorial majesty of time;' Glen 

 Almain where Ossian ' lies buried in this lonely place ; ' in fact every 

 nook and corner of the wild districts he roamed about have for him 

 their peculiar glamor. While it is a glamor to which some of the 

 romantic poets of his day abandoned themselves too completely, we 

 cannot help wishing that Wordsworth might have expressed it with 

 more fervor and with more poetry, as Byron did ; and that he might 

 not have exercised so often that restraint which made him prone to 

 lose the romantic spirit in a dull and vague morality. 



Wardsworth's own experience in life no doubt led him to dis- 

 trust the enthusiasm of youth and to assume a moral attitude about 

 its most innocent manifestations. In the ' Ode to Lycoris, ' speak- 

 ing of the medley and prodigal excess of sensation in youth, he 

 concludes 



