And it is to be noted that though Wordsworth at times
presents it as a coherent theory, yet it is not necessarily of the
nature of a theory, nor need be accepted or rejected as a whole; but
is rather an inlet of illumining emotion in which different minds
can share in the measure of their capacities or their need. There
are some to whom childhood brought no strange vision of brightness,
but who can feel their communion with the Divinity in Nature growing
with the growth of their souls. There are others who might be
unwilling to acknowledge any spiritual or transcendent source for
the elevating joy which the contemplation of Nature can give, but
who feel nevertheless that to that joy Wordsworth has been their
most effective guide. A striking illustration of this fact may be
drawn, from the passage in which John Stuart Mill, a philosopher of
a very different school, has recorded the influence exercised over
him by Wordsworth's poems; read in a season of dejection, when there
seemed to be no real and substantive joy in life, nothing but the
excitement of the struggle with the hardships and injustices of
human fates.
"What made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of
mind," he says in his Autobiography, "was that they expressed,
not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought
coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty.
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