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is tempered, it possesses a new energy — things strike his mind as 

 ideas, and simultaneously ideas find in things their symbols. It is 

 the blending of poetic fancy and philosophic imagination. It is 

 personally, for the poet, the recognition of his calling. The poet's 

 peculiar form of energy which I call, from inability to invent a 

 better phrase, his emotional egotism, has discovered the milieu for 

 its expression. 



A new and intense sympathy, bred partly of the loneliness of 

 his soul among men, becomes with him a vision, perhaps more im- 

 mediate than any poet has ever had, of the meaning of natural 

 beauty for man. Having once caught a glimpse of this, nothing 

 more in heaven or earth appears obvious to him. Hidden secrets, 

 to which he alone has the key, lie all about him. This is the second 

 phase of his egotism. The milieu of its expression is therefore 

 everything in nature, especially what has not been much noticed 

 before or thought to be poetical. That which completes his experi- 

 ence is the discovery here of a further meaning. Nature, which is 

 consonant in all its parts and with man, having for him stores of 

 companionship, thus becomes the uniter of man with man, the great 

 symbol of the consonance of all human purposes. This is the social 

 thesis. Hence the long description of the poet's sojourn in revolu- 

 tionary France, the conversations, the arguments, the final recog- 

 nition that the humanitarian ideas of the Revolution — equality, fra- 

 ternity, liberty — must remain mere theoretical ideas unless taught 

 by nature to the heart, unless seen to be vitally a part of nature. 

 It was undoubtedly this sojourn in France that, as Professor 

 Harper has said in his essay on 'Rousseau, Godwin, and Words- 

 worth,' 'enal^led him to gather into the solidity of a system those 

 faint impulses of love for humanity which were stirring in him 

 already. . . . Had those months of his life been spent at Cam- 

 liridge or in London or in the Lake Country, he could never have 

 written the ' ' Prelude ; ' ' there would have been no ' ' Excursion, ' ' 

 no fragment of a "Recluse," and from all his best poetry we should 

 miss the deepest note. Not only so, but the underlying principle, 

 which is profoundly philosophical, which is political, which is dem- 

 ocratic, would be lacking. " ' i 



So at the end, he returns to those simpler influences of his native 

 hills, now understanding how nature is both to be reconciled with 

 reason and how she is the source of emotion. The poet who under- 

 stands this, who dedicates his life to understanding it, 'may become 

 a power like one of Nature's.' 



• 'Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.' No. V : 1912. 



