The picture is one of those which come home to many a country heart
with one of those sudden "revulsions into the natural" which
philosophers assert to be the essence of human joy. But noblest and
hest known of all these poems is the _Sonnet on Westminster Bridge_,
"Earth hath not anything to show more fair;" in which nature has
reasserted her dominion over the works of all the multitude of men;
and in the early clearness the poet beholds the great City--as
Sterling imagined it on his dying-bed--"not as full of noise and
dust and confusion, but as something silent, grand and everlasting."
And even in later life, when Wordsworth was often in London, and was
welcome in any society, he never lost this external manner of
regarding it. He was always of the same mind as the group of
listeners in his _Power of Music_:
Now, Coaches and Chariots! Roar on like a stream!
Here are twenty Souls happy as souls in a dream:
They are deaf to your murmurs, they care not for you,
Nor what ye are flying, nor what ye pursue!
He never made the attempt,--vulgarized by so many a "fashionable
novelist," and in which no poet has succeeded yet,--to disentangle
from that turmoil its elements of romance and of greatness; to enter
that realm of emotion where Nature's aspects become the scarcely
noted accessory of vicissitudes that transcend her own; to trace the
passion or the anguish which whirl along some lurid vista toward a
sun that sets in storm, or gaze across silent squares by summer
moonlight amid a smell of dust and flowers.
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