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INDIANA UNIYEESITY STUDIES 



of nature, carrying with it a debt to art. Because of his unusual 

 sensitiveness to natural beauty, cultivated by correspondingly un- 

 usual opportunities to observe it in his native district, poetry was to 

 hira a duty growing out of his genius; and his genius was the 

 foster-child of the hills. Hence there is a fine poetic egotism in his 

 worship of nature. It meant to him self-realization ; it was the 

 source of his character. Every artist, who says in the cant phrase 

 that he is devoted to his art, has in reality some special object of 

 devotion there, which, if it were exactly known, would be the index 

 of his artistic character. Wordsworth's chief object of devotion 

 was the very highest which artistic egotism can conceive — the in- 

 fluences that appeared to him to have formed and purified his 

 mind. Nature, which thus spoke 'perpetual logic' to his soul, and 

 by an unrelenting agency did bind his feelings 'even as in a chain," 

 was in a supremely vivid way the milieu of his consciousness. 



I had a ^Y0^1d about me — "twas my own ; 

 I made it, for it only lived to me. 

 And to the God wlio sees into my lieart. 



At the point in the third book where these lines occur, Words- 

 worth says he has retraced his life up to an eminence, and told 

 a tale which may not falsely be called the glory of his youth. This 

 glory is the constantly discovered power to image in nature his 

 innermost emotions. It is precisely what he refers to at the begin- 

 ning of the first book when he says that liberty to roam at Avill 

 through the country-side would avail nothing, 'but for a gift that 

 consecrates the joy.' In other words, this glory is the fact that he 

 is a poet. Hence he at once exclaims here, on this eminence — 



Of genius, power. 

 Creation and divinity itself 



I have been speal^ing, for my theme has been 

 What passed within me. . . . 

 O Heavens ! how awful is the might of souls, 

 And what they do within tliemselves wliile yet 

 The yoke of earth is new to them. 



So intensely, so consciously has he lived under Nature's influ- 

 ences, and so vivid is the recollected pleasure of his emotional 

 experiences, that this inner mind, this correspondent creative 

 force is only 'a gift that consecrates the joy.' 



Vivid emotional memory — the ability to live and think at the 

 top, so to speak, of one's total experience, conscious of it all, faith- 

 ful to it all — is the chief trait of creative genius. I have heard it 

 said by a man who asked George Meredith how does genius feelf 



