This text is part of:
[246]
this ominous phenomenon, and how another day he saw a cow. These marginal annotations have been carelessly taken up into the text, have been religiously held by the pious to be orthodox scripture, and by dexterous exegesis have been made to yield deeply oracular meanings.
Presently the real prophet takes up the word again and speaks as one divinely inspired, the Voice of a higher and invisible power.
Wordsworth's better utterances have the bare sincerity, the absolute abstraction from time and place, the immunity from decay, that belong to the grand simplicities of the Bible.
They seem not more his own than ours and every man's, the word of the inalterable Mind.
This gift of his was naturally very much a matter of temperament, and accordingly by far the greater part of his finer product belongs to the period of his prime, ere Time had set his lumpish foot on the pedal that deadens the nerves of animal sensibility.1 He did not grow as those poets do in whom the artistic sense is predominant.
One of the most delightful fancies of the Genevese humorist, Toepffer.
is the poet Albert, who, having had his portrait drawn by a highly idealizing hand, does his best afterwards to look like it. Many of Wordsworth's later poems
1 His best poetry was written when he was under the immediate influence of Coleridge. Coleridge seems to have felt this, for it is evidently to Wordsworth that he alludes when he speaks of
those who have been so well pleased that I should, year after year, flow with a hundred nameless rills into their main stream. Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. C., Vol. I. pp. 5-6.
Wordsworth found fault with the repetition of the concluding sound of the participles in Shakespeare's line about bees:Wordsworth writes to Crabb Robinson in 1837, ‘My ear is susceptible to the clashing of sounds almost to disease.’ One cannot help thinking that his training in these niceties was begun by Coleridge.The singing masons building roofs of gold.This, he said, was a line that Milton never would have written. Keats thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in harmony with the continued note of the singers. Leigh Hunt's Autobiography.
Houghton, Mifflin and Company, Boston, 1876.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.