nd,
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn:--
And that green corn all day is rustling in thine ears!

Clear and delicate at once as he is in the outlining of visible
imagery, he is more finely scrupulous still in the noting of sounds; he
conceives of noble sound as even moulding the human countenance to
nobler types, and as something actually "profaned" by visible form or
colour. He has a power likewise of realizing and conveying to the
consciousness of his reader abstract and elementary impressions,
silence, darkness, absolute motionlessness, or, again, the whole
complex sentiment of a particular place, the abstract expression of
desolation in the long [99] white road, of peacefulness in a particular
folding of the hills.

That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a
rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was
for him almost literal fact. To him every natural object seemed to
possess something of moral or spiritual life, to be really capable of a
companionship with man, full of fine intimacies. An emanation, a
particular spirit, belonged not to the moving leaves or water only, but
to the distant peak arising suddenly, by some change of perspective,
above the nearer horizon of the hills, to the passing space of light
across the plain, to the lichened Druidic stone even, for a certain
weird fellowship in it with the moods of men. That he awakened "a sort
of thought in sense" is Shelley's just estimate of this element in
Wordsworth's poetry.

It was through nature, ennobled in this way by the semblance of passion
and thought, that the poet approached the spectacle of human life. For
him, indeed, human life is, in the first instance, only an additional,
and as it were incidental grace, upon this expressive landscape.

[100] When he thought of men and women, it was of men and women as in
the presence and under the influence of those effective natural
objects, and linked to them by many associations. Such influences have
sometimes seemed to belittle those who are the subject of them, at the
least to be likely to narrow the range of their sympathies. To
Wordsworth, on the contrary, they seemed directly to dignify human
nature, as tending to tranquillize it. He raises physical nature to
the level of human thought, giving it thereby a mystic power and
expression; he subdues man to the level of nature, but gives him
therewith a certain breadth and vastness and