Wordsworth | Page 6

was without connexions, and he felt if he were ordered to the West Indies his talents would not save him from the yellow fever, and he gave that up." He therefore repaired to London, and lived there for a time on a small allowance and with no definite aim. His relations with the great city were of a very slight and external kind. He had few acquaintances, and spent his time mainly in rambling about the streets. His descriptions of this phase of his life have little interest. There is some flatness in an enumeration of the nationalities observable in a London crowd, concluding thus:--
Malays, Lascars, the Tartar, the Chinese, And Negro Ladies in white muslin gowns.
But Wordsworth's limitations were inseparably connected with his strength. And just as the flat scenery of Cambridgeshire had only served to intensify his love for such elements of beauty and grandeur as still were present in sky and fen, even so the bewilderment of London taught him to recognize with an intenser joy such fragments of things rustic, such aspects of things eternal, as were to be found amidst that rush and roar. To the frailer spirit of Hartley Coleridge the weight of London might seem a load impossible to shake off. "And what hath Nature," he plaintively asked,--
And what hath Nature but the blank void sky And the thronged river toiling to the main?
But Wordsworth saw more than this. He became, as one may say, the poet not of London considered as London, but of London considered as a part of the country. Like his own Farmer of Tilsbury Vale--
In the throng of the Town like a Stranger is he, Like one whose own Country's far over the sea; And Nature, while through the great city be hies, Full ten times a day takes his heart by surprise.
Among the poems describing these sudden shocks of vision and memory none is more exquisite than the Reverie of Poor Susan:
At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears, Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years; Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard In the silence of morning the song of the Bird.
'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees A mountain ascending, a vision of trees; Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide, And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.
The picture is one of those which come home to many a country heart with one of those sudden "revulsions into the natural" which philosophers assert to be the essence of human joy. But noblest and hest known of all these poems is the Sonnet on Westminster Bridge, "Earth hath not anything to show more fair;" in which nature has reasserted her dominion over the works of all the multitude of men; and in the early clearness the poet beholds the great City--as Sterling imagined it on his dying-bed--"not as full of noise and dust and confusion, but as something silent, grand and everlasting." And even in later life, when Wordsworth was often in London, and was welcome in any society, he never lost this external manner of regarding it. He was always of the same mind as the group of listeners in his Power of Music:
Now, Coaches and Chariots! Roar on like a stream! Here are twenty Souls happy as souls in a dream: They are deaf to your murmurs, they care not for you, Nor what ye are flying, nor what ye pursue!
He never made the attempt,--vulgarized by so many a "fashionable novelist," and in which no poet has succeeded yet,--to disentangle from that turmoil its elements of romance and of greatness; to enter that realm of emotion where Nature's aspects become the scarcely noted accessory of vicissitudes that transcend her own; to trace the passion or the anguish which whirl along some lurid vista toward a sun that sets in storm, or gaze across silent squares by summer moonlight amid a smell of dust and flowers.
But although Wordsworth passed thus through London unmodified and indifferent, the current of things was sweeping him on to mingle in a fiercer tumult,--to be caught in the tides of a more violent and feverish life. In November 1791 he landed in France, meaning to pass the winter at Orleans and learn French. Up to this date the French Revolution had impressed him in a rather unusual manner,--namely, as being a matter of course. The explanation of this view is a somewhat singular one. Wordsworth's was an old family, and his connexions were some of them wealthy and well placed in the world; but the chances of his education had been such, that he could scarcely realize to himself any other than a democratic type of society. Scarcely once, he tells us, in his school