﻿WOKDSWORTTl's MIND 



35 



This will serve to indicate the course and expansion of Words- 

 worth's thought, and to have perceived this here will bring us more 

 intelligently into the mood of the poem. Obviously it is impossible 

 that thought separated from the images over which the poet has 

 spread it should be poetic thought. Indeed, a chief difference be- 

 tween prose and poetry is that whereas prose thought, the thought 

 of criticism, let us say, may be abstracted without essential change 

 of meaning, poetic thought requires the images and the atmosphere 

 of sensation which have created it. Critical thought is thus more 

 purely intellectual; poetical thought has more reality in so far as 

 it has sensational texture. Wordsworth, as a critic, might well have 

 written his biography in prose. As a poet, he required an at- 

 mosphere of sensation in which — not 'to feel,' as some one has put 

 it, but — to think. It is this atmosphere which makes Wordsworth's 

 Essay on Man, in 'The Prelude,' poetry. 



To distinguish the mood of 'The Prelude' from that of certain 

 other contemporary romantic poems which are also lyric biogra- 

 phies, one might say that Wordsworthian thought neither moves 

 through the ether of a luminous void, nor, adapting the phrase of 

 another critic, through so heavy an air as to overwhelm it with 

 its own sensibility. Wordsworth surrounds himself, to adopt his 

 own famous phrase, with an atmosphere where emotion is recol- 

 lected in tranquility. 'The emotion,' he adds, 'is contemplated 

 till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, 

 and an emotion kindred to that which was before the subject of 

 contemplation is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist 

 in the mind.' It is in this manner than he defines the essence of 

 poetry, and it is in this manner that he contemplates his own life. 

 Thought, once passionate, here discloses itself in vivid and perma- 

 nent images, which are tempered, not distorted, by the sharp recol- 

 lection of feeling. 



This is the mood of 'The Prelude' as a record of the poetical 

 temper, a record of the poet's 'trances of thought and mountings 

 of the mind,' whereby he shakes off the burden of his own 'un- 

 natural self.' It tells how, inspired by nature, he could see the 

 'auxiliar light' coming from his mind, 'which on the setting sun 

 1 bestowed new splendor ; ' how he could feel his expanding soul, 

 as it mirrored itself in external things — 'forms, images' — his vital 

 soul, 'where the immortal spirit grows like harmony in music,' and 

 gives 'to forms and images a breath and everlasting motion.' It 

 is a description of how poetic power feels to the poet. 



With high seriousness Wordsworth felt his genius to be a gift 



