Gents Mag 1850 part 2 p.461
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Gentleman's Magazine 1850 part 2 p.461
and uniform; grand in their isolation, dignified in their sorrows. They are not creatures of the market or the haven, of the senate or the forum. His lovers do not whisper under moonlit balconies; his heroes are not the heroes of war or the tournament. To this exemption or defect in his mind may be ascribed, in some measure, the tardy reception of his earlier poetry. It was not merely that its unadorned diction proved insipid to palates long vitiated by a conventional phraseology. It was not merely that his occasional negligence of structure seemed bald and shapeless to eyes accustomed to the eleborate architecture of Pope and Gray. But even the more imaginative and indulgent portion of his audience perceived a want in one of the prime aliments of poetic inspiration, at least in Christian literature. Wordsworth therefore, in consequence of this want, was enforced beyond any poet on record to create and discipline the sympathies of his readers before he could receive his merited "Plaudite." His Prelude reveals the secrets of his idiosyncrasy, and in the growth of his mind and his early circumstances, we discover many of the conditions which his works require and presuppose in the readers of them. We will now, under the guidance of Wordsworth's own disclosures, proceed to trace the progress and maturity of that imagination, which having at a very early period banished from his verse all traditional and meretricious ornament, replaced English poetry upon the solid and lofty basis that it occupied under the dynasty commencing with Chaucer and closing with Milton. We say from a very early, but not the earliest period of his writings. For the "Descriptive Sketches," which were afterwards condemned by Wordsworth himself as vicious in their principles of composition, were in the general character of their diction more nearly allied to the style of Goldsmith, and the best portions of Darwin, than to any subsequent productions of the Lake school. "His soul," he tells us, "had a fair seed time." Fairer indeed had none for the mission it was hereafter to fulfil. Chaucer in the centre of a spledid court and amid the symbols of a gorgeous ritual; Spenser lapped in chivalrous romance and familiar with the stately paladins and ceremonial of the "western Gloriana;" Shakespere "full of dealings with the world, yet shielded from its grosser contacts by the saturnian orb of his compact imagination; or Milton surrounded by scrolls and volumes of all time, and nerved by the stern zealotry of Puritanism - had none of them more befitting training for his vocation than the poet of Helvellyn, Glaramara, and Borrowdale. The Derwent, "fairest of rivers," Blended its murmurs with his nurse's song, And from its alder shades and rocky falls, And from its fords and shallows, sent a voice That flowed along his dreams. He was "ere he had told ten birthdays" a keen sportsman, setting springes to catch woodcocks on the open heights, bearing his rod and angle into the heart of solitary glens: bold and fearless a rider as the erl king himself, and yet he would beguile a long summer day as willingly as Walter Scott himself in listening to the simple annals of the dalesman or the legends of village schoolmasters and garrulous dames. Bird-nesting is a part of most boys' education. But few boys would seem to have run more imminent risks, and none certainly have given a more graphic description of them than is contained in the following lines, - Nor less when spring had warmed the cultured vale Moved we as plunderers where the mother-bird Had in high places built her lodge: though mean Our object and inglorious, yet the end Was not ignoble. Oh! when I have hung Above the raven's nest, by knots of grass And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock But ill sustained, and almost (so it seemed) Suspended by the blast that blew amain, |
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