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IJs^DIAXA rXIYEESITY STUDIES 



he gives thanks to Nature for the impressions of his boyhood that 

 created in him the poet's power of filling objects with spirit and 

 idea. It is to the 'visions of the hills and Souls of lonely places,' 

 which haunted him among his boyish games, that he owes his emo- 

 tional memory, this faculty that keeps the poetic impulse fresh 

 within him. 



This education was constant. Nature spoke ' rememberable 

 things, ' and ' daily the range of visible things grew dear ' to him. 

 Gradulaay, beyond those 'incidental charms' which first attached 

 his heart to the country-side, he began to see the unity and meaning 

 of nature — 'that universal power and fitness in the latent quali- 

 ties and essences of things. ' This came to him ' strengthened with 

 a superadded soul,' with his inheritance, that is, from the other 

 world — his share of divinity. Wordsworth's extremely poetic idea 

 that this earl}^ imaginativeness mRj be taken as a sign that poetry 

 is a prenatal inheritance, and normal in each of us till other 

 things suppress it, is embodied in his great Ode and here somewhat 

 explained. In him, he says, 'this infant sensibility, great birthright 

 of our being,' was augmented and sustained. With the true poet, 

 the haunting imagination of childhood continues into maturity and 

 lets the soul remember how she felt when yet a part of immortality. 

 In conversation about the Ode, he once said: 'I record my own 

 feelings at that time — my absolute spirituality, my " all-soulness, " 

 if I may so speak ; ' and in a note on the Ode he has written : ' I 

 was often unable to think of external things as having external 

 existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something not 

 apart from, but inherent in, my own immaterial nature. Many 

 times while going to school have I grasped at a wall or a tree to 

 recall myself from this ahyss of idealism to the reality. ' It is from 

 this period that the poet inherits his imaginative faculty. 'Let 

 this be not forgotten, ' says AYordsworth at this point in ' The Pre- 

 lude, ' that I still retained my first creative sensibility. * * * A 

 plastic power abode with me. * * * An auxiliar light came 

 from my mind, which on the setting sun bestowed new splendor 

 * * * and the midnight storm grew darker in the presence of 

 my eye.' 



From Nature and lier overflowing soul 



I had received so mnch. that all my thoughts 



Were steeped in feeling ; I was only then 



Contented, when with bliss ineffable 



I felt the sentiment of Being spread 



O'er all that moves and all that seemeth still ; 



