culty of
Browning, but he is easy reading compared with a great deal of
Wordsworth. It is just the apparent simplicity of Wordsworth's thought
which is so misleading. A statement about him of the following kind
would be fairly generally accepted as the truth. Wordsworth was a
simple-minded poet with a passion for nature, he found great joy and
consolation in the contemplation of the beauty of hills and dales and
clouds and flowers, and urged others to find this too; he lived, and
recommended others to live a quiet retired unexciting kind of life, and
he preached a doctrine of simplicity and austerity. Now, except that
Wordsworth had a passion for Nature, there is not a single true
statement here. Wordsworth was not only a poet, he was also a seer, a
mystic and a practical psychologist with an amazingly subtle mind, and
an unusual capacity for feeling; he lived a life of excitement and
passion, and he preached a doctrine of magnificence and glory. It was
not the beauty of Nature which brought him joy and peace, but the _life_
in Nature. He himself had caught a vision of that life, he knew it and
felt it, and it transformed the whole of existence for him. He believed
that every man could attain this vision which he so fully possessed, and
his whole life's work took the form of a minute and careful analysis of
the processes of feeling in his own nature, which he left as a guide for
those who would tread the same path. It would be correct to say that the
whole of his poetry is a series of notes and investigations devoted to
the practical and detailed explanation of how he considered this state
of vision might be reached. He disdained no experience--however trivial,
apparently--the working of the mind of a peasant child or an idiot boy,
the effect produced on his own emotions by a flower, a glowworm, a
bird's note, a girl's song; he passed by nothing which might help to
throw light on this problem. The experience which Wordsworth was so
anxious others should share was the following. He found that when his
mind was freed from pre-occupation with disturbing objects, petty cares,
"little enmities and low desires," that he could then reach a condition
of equilibrium, which he describes as a "wise passiveness," or a "happy
stillness of the mind." He believed this condition could be deliberately
induced by a kind of relaxation of the will, and by a stilling of the
busy intellect and striving desires. It is a purifying process, an
e