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Page 57
[G] The Prelude, Book III.
"Authentic tidings of invisible things!" Just what this hidden presence
in nature was, which Wordsworth so rapturously felt, and in the light of
which he lived, tramping the hills for days together, the poet never
could explain logically or in articulate conceptions. Yet to the reader
who may himself have had gleaming moments of a similar sort the verses
in which Wordsworth simply proclaims the fact of them come with a
heart-satisfying authority:--
"Magnificent
The morning rose, in memorable pomp,
Glorious as ere I had beheld. In front
The sea lay laughing at a distance; near
The solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds,
Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light;
And in the meadows and the lower grounds
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn,--
Dews, vapors, and the melody of birds,
And laborers going forth to till the fields."
"Ah! need I say, dear Friend, that to the brim
My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly,
A dedicated Spirit. On I walked,
In thankful blessedness, which yet survives."[H]
[H] The Prelude, Book IV.
As Wordsworth walked, filled with his strange inner joy, responsive thus
to the secret life of nature round about him, his rural neighbors,
tightly and narrowly intent upon their own affairs, their crops and
lambs and fences, must have thought him a very insignificant and foolish
personage. It surely never occurred to any one of them to wonder what
was going on inside of _him_ or what it might be worth. And yet that
inner life of his carried the burden of a significance that has fed the
souls of others, and fills them to this day with inner joy.
Richard Jefferies has written a remarkable autobiographic document
entitled The Story of my Heart. It tells, in many pages, of the rapture
with which in youth the sense of the life of nature filled him. On a
certain hill-top he says:--
"I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. Lying down on the
grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the
distant sea, far beyond sight.... With all the intensity of feeling
which exalted me, all the intense communion I held with the earth, the
sun and sky, the stars hidden by the light, with the ocean,--in no
manner can the thrilling depth of these feelings be written,--with these
I prayed as if they were the keys of an instrument.... The great sun,
burning with light, the strong earth,--dear earth,--the warm sky, the
pure air, the thought of ocean, the inexpressible beauty of all filled
me with a rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus. With this inflatus, too, I
prayed.... The prayer, this soul-emotion, was in itself, not for an
object: it was a passion. I hid my face in the grass. I was wholly
prostrated, I lost myself in the wrestle, I was rapt and carried
away.... Had any shepherd accidentally seen me lying on the turf, he
would only have thought I was resting a few minutes. I made no outward
show. Who could have imagined the whirlwind of passion that was going
on in me as I reclined there!"[I]
[I] _Op. cit._, Boston, Roberts, 1883, pp. 5, 6.
Surely, a worthless hour of life, when measured by the usual standards
of commercial value. Yet in what other _kind_ of value can the
preciousness of any hour, made precious by any standard, consist, if it
consist not in feelings of excited significance like these, engendered
in some one, by what the hour contains?
Yet so blind and dead does the clamor of our own practical interests
make us to all other things, that it seems almost as if it were
necessary to become worthless as a practical being, if one is to hope to
attain to any breadth of insight into the impersonal world of worths as
such, to have any perception of life's meaning on a large objective
scale. Only your mystic, your dreamer, or your insolvent tramp or
loafer, can afford so sympathetic an occupation, an occupation which
will change the usual standards of human value in the twinkling of an
eye, giving to foolishness a place ahead of power, and laying low in a
minute the distinctions which it takes a hard-working conventional man a
lifetime to build up. You may be a prophet, at this rate; but you cannot
be a worldly success.
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