nd
nature:--

Love had he found in huts where poor men lie;
His daily teachers had been woods and hills,
The silence that is in the starry skies,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.

Without the love, the silence and the sleep would have had no spiritual
meaning. They are valuable as giving intensity and solemnity to the
positive emotion.

The same remark is to be made upon Wordsworth's favourite teaching of
the advantages of the contemplative life. He is fond of enforcing the
doctrine of the familiar lines, that we can feed our minds 'in a wise
passiveness,' and that

One impulse from the vernal wood
Can teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

And, according to some commentators, this would seem to express the
doctrine that the ultimate end of life is the cultivation of tender
emotions without reference to action. The doctrine, thus absolutely
stated, would be immoral and illogical. To recommend contemplation in
preference to action is like preferring sleeping to waking; or saying,
as a full expression of the truth, that silence is golden and speech
silvern. Like that familiar phrase, Wordsworth's teaching is not to be
interpreted literally. The essence of such maxims is to be one-sided.
They are paradoxical in order to be emphatic. To have seasons of
contemplation, of withdrawal from the world and from books, of calm
surrendering of ourselves to the influences of nature, is a practice
commended in one form or other by all moral teachers. It is a sanitary
rule, resting upon obvious principles. The mind which is always occupied
in a multiplicity of small observations, or the regulation of practical
details, loses the power of seeing general principles and of associating
all objects with the central emotions of 'admiration, hope, and love.'
The philosophic mind is that which habitually sees the general in the
particular, and finds food for the deepest thought in the simplest
objects. It requires, therefore, periods of repose, in which the
fragmentary and complex atoms of distracted feeling which make up the
incessant whirl of daily life may have time to crystallise round the
central thoughts. But it must feed in order to assimilate; and each
process implies the other as its correlative. A constant interest,
therefore, in the joys and sorrows of our neighbours is as essential as
quiet, self-centred rumination. It is when the eye 'has