﻿Wordsworth's minId 



39 



O'er all that, lost beyond the i-ench of thought 

 And human knowledge, to the human eye 

 Invisible, yet Iheth to the heai-t. 



This marks the first great development in his poetic thought 

 about nature. In this consciousness of his relation to nature and 

 to the eternity of thought, he gives shape to a type of pantheism. 

 His mind, growing from out the past and merging with the future, 

 appears to him a time-link, a thought of eternity taking shape in 

 the present. He looks now in all things for the universal, the 

 moral. 



Even the loose stones that cover the highway, 

 I gave a moral life ; I saw them feel. 

 Or linked them to some feeling ; the great mass 

 Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all 

 That I beheld respired with inward meaning. 



And it is here that he exclaims — 'I had a world about me — 'twas 

 my own. I made it, for it lived only to me, and to the God who 

 sees into my heart.' This is the function of the poet, to relate 

 the transitory to the everlasting, to infuse objects with that part 

 of the eternity of thought which has its course through him. What- 

 ever experience Wordsworth deals with is illuminated by this view 

 of the function of art which nature has taught him. It is the 

 mirror of his philosoj^hy of life. Hence he describes it so carefully 

 before describing the active experiences of his life in Cambridge, 

 London, the Alps, France, and those of his return to seclusion in 

 England. 



At Cambridge, in the midst of the butterfly crowd of under- 

 graduates, in the medley and smattering of knowledge, he discov- 

 ered that he had already in his mind independent solaces 'to 

 mitigate the injurious sway of place or circumstance. ' Turning his 

 mind ' in upon herself, ' not in morbid introspection, but to perceive 

 the light that was not darkened there, he spread his thoughts with 

 'a wider creeping,' till he felt 



Incumbencies more awful, visitings 

 Of the Upholder of the tranquil soul. 

 That tolerates the indignities of Time, 

 And from the centre of Eternity 

 ' All finite motions overruling, lives 



In glory immutable. 



Serenity, spaces of solitude, an atmosphere for communication with 

 spiritualities, were his need. So he endeavored to maintain his own 

 mood amid the inconsequentialities of the place, studjdng in every- 



