We may apply,
indeed, to all these girls Wordsworth's description of leverets
playing on a lawn, and call them--
Separate creatures in their several gifts
Abounding, but so fashioned that in all
That Nature prompts them to display, their looks,
Their starts of motion and their fits of rest,
An undistinguishable style appears
And character of gladness, as if Spring
Lodged in their innocent bosoms, and the spirit
Of the rejoicing Morning were their own.
My limits forbid me to dwell longer on these points. The passages
which I have been citing have been for the most part selected as
illustrating the novelty and subtlety of Wordsworth's view of Nature.
But it will now be sufficiently clear how continually a strain of
human interest is interwoven with the delight derived from impersonal
things.
Long have I loved what I behold,
The night that calms, the day that cheers:
The common growth of mother earth
Suffices me--her tears, her mirth,
Her humblest mirth and tears.
The poet of the _Waggoner_--who, himself a habitual water-drinker,
has so glowingly described the glorification which the prospect of
nature receives in a half-intoxicated brain--may justly claim that
he can enter into all genuine pleasures, even of an order which he
declines for himself.
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