How came he here?
thought I, or what can he be doing? I then describe him, whether ill
or well is not for me to judge with perfect confidence; but this I
_can_ confidently affirm, that though I believe God has given me a
strong imagination, I cannot conceive a figure more impressive than
that of an old man like this, the survivor of a wife and ten children,
travelling alone among the mountains and all lonely places, carrying
with him his own fortitude, and the necessities which an unjust
state of society has laid upon him. You speak of his speech as
tedious. Everything is tedious when one does not read with the
feelings of the author. _The Thorn_ is tedious to hundreds; and so
is _The Idiot Boy_ to hundreds. It is in the character of the old
man to tell his story, which an impatient reader must feel tedious.
But, good heavens! Such a figure, in such a place; a pious,
self-respecting, miserably infirm and pleased old man, telling such
a tale!"
The naive earnestness of this passage suggests to us how constantly
recurrent in Wordsworth's mind were the two trains of ideas which
form the substance of the poem; the interaction, namely, (if so it
may be termed,) of the moods of Nature with the moods of the human
mind; and the dignity and interest of man as man, depicted with no
complex background of social or political life, but set amid the
primary affections and sorrows, and the wild aspects of the external
world.
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