﻿WORDSWORTH'S MIXD 



43: 



Of calmness equally are Nature's gift : 

 Tliis is her glory ; these two attributes 

 Are sister horns that constitute her strength. 

 Hence Genius, born to thrive by interchange 

 Of peace and excitation, finds in her 

 His best and purest friend : fvom her receives 

 That energy by which he seeks the truth. 

 From her that happy stillness of the mind 

 Which lits him to receive it when unsought. 



The meaning of the title of these two books, the twelfth and thir- 

 teenth, is now clear — 'Imagination and Taste, How Impaired and 

 Restored. ' 



Objects — all that one sees with the eye — are significant for the 

 poet only when associated with emotion. They are the images of 

 the soul. And so it is that Whitman, who conld not have seen as. 

 deeply as he did without Wordsworth, says, 'We know the soul 

 only by you, you faithful solids and fluids ! ' Wordsworth 's final 

 explanation of the development of his poetic consciousness is- 

 nothing more than that. He tells how emotional memory is aug- 

 mented and sustained by means of objects — that is, of images. He 

 recalls here, for example, how certain scenery vividly associated 

 in his mind with the time of his father's death, not only haunted 

 his memory then, but how even now, over twenty years later, when 

 similar external conditions are reproduced, 



when storm and rain 

 Beat on my roof, or, haply, at noon-day. 

 While in a grove I walk, whose lofty trees. 

 Laden with summer's thickest foliage, rock 

 In a strong wind, some working of the spirit. 

 Some inward agitations thence are brought, 

 Whate'er their office, whether to beguile 

 Thoughts over-busy in the course they took, 

 Or animate an hour of vacant ease. 



There is this function of the poet — to let nature become ani 

 image of the inward mind. There is something more which this, 

 may lead to: the perception of the Infinite Mind in all objects of 

 all thought. At the end of the poem, he describes how, standing 

 on a ridge of Snowdon at night, he perceived, in a scene of trans- 

 'cendent beauty — moonlight over a sea of mountain tops swathed irL 

 mist. Nature as ' the emblem of a mind that feeds upon infinity, ' 



a mind sustained 

 By recognition of transcendant power, 



