Слике страница
PDF
ePub

the beech, thoughts shall descend like angels, comforting his spirit; he shall never go unattended upon his way,

'The common things that round him lie,
Some random blessings will impart.'

Profound meditation will everywhere salute him, the ages with all their deeds, the strifes of the little battlers on this grave, our world, law, and order, and government, will unfold their pages to him, and above all and around all, for him there will be a presence palpable to the soul although invisible to the sense, the solemn presence of an active living power, every spot of ground will be charmed, this will make the world to him whatever it may be to others, one wide temple o'ercanopied with its fire-fretted concave; will impart to all his feelings the holiness of worship, and make his life a perpetual sabbath. The lessons of nature in this spirit obtained, impart to the mind a consecrating, all-hallowing love of rectitude and duty, training down the wild passions of the soul, and chastening and beautifying the austere." Thus far the Rhapsodist on Nature; still this is the key to the rich and wonderful charm of the verses we are now noticing. Passing by the peculiarity of Wordsworth's diction for the moment, or noticing it only to say that every great poet creates his own diction, that it is the result of his mental character, and that its fluency or dignity are the transcript of his own mind, we notice now the intense love of nature in our poet moulds the thought, and moulds the

WORDSWORTH'S IMAGERY OF NATURE.

51

speech to the thought. Let the reader again and again revolve these most affecting images,

"It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,

The holy time is quiet as a Nun, breathless with adoration."

"The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up gathered now like sleeping flowers."

In the following bold imagery he embodies the idea of Duty.

"Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,

And fragrance in thy footing treads;

Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,

And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong."

But the poem in which this lofty feeling of intimate communion with nature is most unfolded as a Philosophy and an Experience, is that written at Tintern Abbey, that poem like a mighty organ gives breath to every note and key of the poet's mind; the poem is lengthy, and a few sentences therefore must suffice this picture of the boyhood of an enthusiast.

"The sounding cataract,

Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood;
Their colours and their forms were then to me

An appetite; a feeling and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm

By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye."

So the following sublime description of a mind dependent on nature for its inspiration and its power,

"For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity;

Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime,
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man

A motion and a spirit that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things."

And yet one other passage on the Consolations of Nature,

"Knowing that nature never did betray

The heart that lov'd her; 'tis her privilege
Through all the years of this our life to lead
From joy to joy, for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all

The dreary intercourse of daily life

Shall e'er prevail against us or disturb

Our cheerful faith that all which we behold
Is full of blessings."

But it will not do-it will not do-we reach a point and stage in our moral history from which even the rush of eloquent music in the Tintern Abbey only dizzies the brain and dazzles the vision like the mag

NATURE-RATIO MERSA ET CONFUSA.

53

nificent star dust, the gorgeous and hazy nebulous chaos of an unformed system. The beautiful Panthea we find transforms herself into a horrible Sphynx with cold stony eyes, and rends in pieces her idolatrous children. A grinding, an inexorable destiny and fatalism seems to glare upon us through the rustling folds and robes of nature. Among the gorgeous blossoms and spicy gums of aromatic trees in the fiery but voluptuous South, lurks the fanged Cobra and Boa, and there we are not safe, while miasma and pestilence steam up from the plain and the garden, and the heavens become livid with the tempest and the storm; and in the North the sleets of winter overtake the fair heavens of the autumn, and the east winds chill the cheeks of our fainting darlings; very poor consolation indeed is that which is found in the benevolence of all compensating nature-the goddess-ship of nature-very poor is the comfort to be found in the boasted wisdom of Natural Theology; for our part we had much rather believe with the great Cudworth, that "nature is drunk. Nature," said he, "is ratio mersa et confusa. Reason immerged and plunged into matter, and as it were fuddled in it and confounded with it." Nature is master neither of art nor wisdom, most true, nature is a great poem, but not as her portrait has usually been sketched; nature is not more divine than man, for both nature and man are broken temples; ruins of a glory so sublime and infinite that nothing can hide the ancient grandeur or bury the marks of the divine original beneath the encumbering ruins. Nature like man is fallen, and can never

inspire love for her perfections; there is cruelty and implacability in nature; nature has "betrayed the heart that loved her;" there is evil in nature, and there are defects, and negations in nature; it is not on the present scheme of things the eye can quietly and lovingly rest; it is the future-the end; the present cannot be the object of God's preserving power; nature only becomes lovely when seen through the glass of faith, and that faith, the faith in Christ.

But those who take this period of Wordsworth's history as the portrait of his whole life, do as wrongly as those who judge Schiller's whole being by the Robbers, or Goethe's by the Sorrows of Werter. Rocks are dewless, as hard hearts are tearless. It was the gifted and wonderful sensibility within him that reflected the impressions of all natural objects; the passion was in his own soul-he stands before us like a young Greek in an infant world; nature to him appeared as one great soul-he called on all things; rocks, and stars, and waters, as one to whom the Apostrophe and Prosopopaia was not merely a vain, rhetorical and artistic cry, but an invocation to be heard and answered. The universe was a theatre of boundless wonder, if afterwards he did attain to the questionable advice of the old Roman,

"Nil admirari, prope res est una,

Solaque, quæ possit facere et servare beatum."

He was far enough from it yet; he had a being as

* Horace.

« ПретходнаНастави »