He early conceived himself to be, and through life was
confirmed by circumstances in the faith that he was, a "dedicated
spirit,"[324] a state of mind likely to further an intense but at the
same time one-sided development of the intellectual powers. The solitude
in which the greater part of his mature life was passed, while it
doubtless ministered to the passionate intensity of his musings upon man
and nature, was, it may be suspected, harmful to him as an artist, by
depriving him of any standard of proportion outside himself by which to
test the comparative value of his thoughts, and by rendering him more and
more incapable of that urbanity of mind which could be gained only by
commerce with men more nearly on his own level, and which gives tone
without lessening individuality. Wordsworth never quite saw the
distinction between the eccentric and the original. For what we call
originality seems not so much anything peculiar, much less anything odd,
but that quality in a man which touches human nature at most points of
its circumference, which reinvigorates the consciousness of our own
powers by recalling and confirming our own unvalued sensations and
perceptions, gives classic shape to our own amorphous imaginings, and
adequate utterance to our own stammering conceptions or emotions.
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