Wordsworth | Page 4

at Cambridge more peculiarly his own--that exultation which a boy born among the mountains may feel when he perceives that the delight in the external world which the mountains have taught him has not perished by uprooting, nor waned for want of nourishment in field or fen; that even here, where nature is unadorned, and scenery, as it were, reduced to its elements,--where the prospect is but the plain surface of the earth, stretched wide beneath an open heaven,--even here he can still feel the early glow, can take delight in that broad and tranquil greenness, and in the august procession of the day.
As if awakened, summoned, roused, constrained, I looked for universal things; perused The common countenance of earth and sky-- Earth, nowhere unembellished by some trace Of that first Paradise whence man was driven; And sky, whose beauty and bounty are expressed By the proud name she bears--the name of Heaven.
Nor is it only in these open-air scenes that Wordsworth has added to the long tradition a memory of his own. The "storied windows richly dight," which have passed into a proverb in Milton's song, cast in King's College Chapel the same "soft chequerings" upon their framework of stone while Wordsworth watched through the pauses of the anthem the winter afternoon's departing glow:
Martyr, or King, or sainted Eremite, Whoe'er ye be that thus, yourselves unseen, Imbue your prison-bars with solemn sheen, Shine on, until ye fade with coming Night.
From those shadowy seats whence Milton had heard "the pealing organ blow to the full-voiced choir below," Wordsworth too gazed upon--
That branching roof Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells Where light and shade repose, where music dwells Lingering, and wandering on as both to die-- Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof That they were born for immortality.
Thus much, and more, there was of ennobling and unchangeable in the very aspect and structure of that ancient University, by which Wordsworth's mind was bent towards a kindred greatness. But of active moral and intellectual life there was at that time little to be found within her walls. The floodtide of her new life had not yet set in: she was still slumbering, as she had slumbered long, content to add to her majesty by the mere lapse of generations, and increment of her ancestral calm. Even had the intellectual life of the place been more stirring, it is doubtful how far Wordsworth would have been welcomed, or deserved, to be welcomed, by authorities or students. He began residence at seventeen, and his northern nature was late to flower. There seems, in fact, to have been even less of visible promise about him than we should have expected; but rather something untamed and insubordinate, something heady and self-confident; an independence that seemed only rusticity, and an indolent ignorance which assumed too readily the tones of scorn. He was as yet a creature of the lakes and mountains, and love for Nature was only slowly leading him to love and reverence for man. Nay, such attraction as he had hitherto felt for the human race had been interwoven with her influence in a way so strange that to many minds it will seem a childish fancy not worth recounting. The objects of his boyish idealization had been Cumbrian shepherds--a race whose personality seems to melt into Nature's--who are united as intimately with moor and mountain as the petrel with the sea.
A rambling schoolboy, thus I felt his presence in his own domain As of a lord and master--or a power, Or genius, under Nature, under God; Presiding; and severest solitude Had more commanding looks when he was there. When up the lonely brooks on rainy days Angling I went, or trod the trackless hills By mists bewildered, suddenly mine eyes Have glanced upon him distant a few steps, In size a giant, stalking through thick fog, His sheep like Greenland bears; or, as he stepped Beyond the boundary line of some hill-shadow, His form hath flashed upon me, glorified By the deep radiance of the setting sun; Or him have I descried in distant sky, A solitary object and sublime, Above all height! Like an a?rial cross Stationed alone upon a spiry rock Of the Chartreuse, for worship. Thus was man Ennobled outwardly before my sight; And thus my heart was early introduced To an unconscious love and reverence Of human nature; hence the human form To me became an index of delight, Of grace and honour, power and worthiness.
"This sanctity of Nature given to man,"--this interfusion of human interest with the sublimity of moor and hill,--formed a typical introduction to the manner in which Wordsworth regarded mankind to the end,--depicting him as set, as it were, amid impersonal influences, which make his passion and struggle but a little thing; as when