Paul." How was it that poems so simple in outward form that the
reviewers of the day classed them with the _Song of Sixpence_, or at
best with the _Babes in the Wood_, could affect a critic like De
Quincey,--I do not say with admiration, but with this exceptional
sense of revelation and awe?
The explanation of this anomaly lies, as is well known, in something
new and individual in the way in which Wordsworth regarded Nature;
something more or less discernible in most of his works, and
redeeming even some of the slightest of them from insignificance,
while conferring on the more serious and sustained pieces an
importance of a different order from that which attaches to even the
most brilliant productions of his contemporaries. To define with
exactness, however, what was this new element imported by our poet
into man's view of Nature is far from easy, and requires some brief
consideration of the attitude in this respect of his predecessors.
There is so much in the external world which is terrible or
unfriendly to man, that the first impression made on him by Nature
as a whole, even in temperate climates, is usually that of awfulness;
his admiration being reserved for the fragments of her which he has
utilized for his own purposes, or adorned with his own handiwork.
Pages:
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170