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INDIANA UNIVERSITY STUDIES 



thing to see the moral and the universal, learning among the man- 

 ners of the crowd to judge of men and moral laws. 



But while he seemed to feel at college something of the quiet 

 and repose of books and the stability of learning — finding, for ex- 

 ample, in the abstractions of geometry a refuge from his poet's 

 mind so continually 'beset with images and haunted by herself — 

 he yet never came to regard books and learning, as Lord Byron 

 regarded antiquity symbolized in the Coliseum, as a 'long-explored 

 ])ut still exhaustless mine of Contemplation.' Art, except as it ex- 

 pressed his own feelings for nature, except therefore, as it was his 

 own creation, never long retained the lure of romance for him. 

 Books — philosophy, fiction, poetry, did not sufficiently stimulate 

 the emotions he required. The study of literature at Cambridge 

 was ' the dangerous craft of culling term and phrase ; ' and though 

 he says, 'I was a better judge of thoughts than words,' philosophy 

 was 'words for things' — 



The self-created sustenance of a mind 

 Debarred from Nature's living images, 

 Compelled to be a life unto herself. 



Here in books was not the atmosphere of sensation. His whole 

 experience at Cambridge is written against the background of 

 Cumberland. 



That experience, however, matured him socially. His view of 

 nature was now bound to include man and society, as his sub-title 

 for 'The Recluse' indicates — 'Views of Man, Nature, and Society' 

 — and, on returning in the summer vacation to Hawkshead, he 

 discovers that he cares for his hills with more 'human-heartedness. ' 

 In one sense, all this means is that, viewing the beauty of the world 

 and feeling at the same time the friendliness of men, he became 

 abstractly enthusiastic over human nature. Whether this is a more 

 or less poetical feeling than, let us say, the love of a particular 

 youth for a particular maiden, depends entirely on how it is 

 imaged, on what symbols it creates. It is certainly a characteristic 

 defect of Wordsworth's humanity that it lacks the intimate touch 

 of Burns, and often attains, in an effort to portray men in an unus- 

 ual aspect, only to a fanciful and whimsical symbolism. 



But there is another aspect to this, as I have previously sug- 

 gested, which is part of his pantheism. Something of mystery sur- 

 rounds his characters, of the same mystery that haunts the rocks 

 and the clouds about them. Even when the poet's peculiar coloring 

 of imagination individualizes them, it also relates them at the same 



