Wordsworth | Page 6

afterwards, "good enough for the Church; he

felt that his mind was not properly disciplined for that holy office, and
that the struggle between his conscience and his impulses would have
made life a torture. He also shrank from the law. He had studied
military history with great interest, and the strategy of war; and he
always fancied that he had talents for command; and he at one time
thought of a military life; but then he 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