He forced his readers to come to
his poetry with a certain amount of conscious preparation, and thus gave
them beforehand the impression of something like mechanical artifice, and
deprived them of the contented repose of implicit faith. To the child a
watch seems to be a living creature; but Wordsworth would not let his
readers be children, and did injustice to himself by giving them an
uneasy doubt whether creations which really throbbed with the very
heart's-blood of genius, and were alive with nature's life of life, were
not contrivances of wheels and springs. A naturalness which we are told
to expect has lost the crowning grace of nature. The men who walked in
Cornelius Agrippa's visionary gardens had probably no more pleasurable
emotion than that of a shallow wonder, or an equally shallow
self-satisfaction in thinking they had hit upon the secret of the
thaumaturgy; but to a tree that has grown as God willed we come without a
theory and with no botanical predilections, enjoying it simply and
thankfully; or the Imagination recreates for us its past summers and
winters, the birds that have nested and sung in it, the sheep that have
clustered in its shade, the winds that have visited it, the cloud-bergs
that have drifted over it, and the snows that have ermined it in winter.
Pages:
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332