Of this
new landscape sense the poetry of Wordsworth is the elementary and
central exposition; he is more exclusively occupied with its
development than any other poet. Wordsworth's own character, as we
have already observed, was dominated by a certain contentment, a sort
of naturally religious placidity, not often found in union with a
poetic sensibility so [97] active as his; and this gentle sense of
well-being was favourable to the quiet, habitual observation of the
inanimate, or imperfectly animate, world. His life of eighty placid
years was almost without what, with most human beings, count for
incidents. His flight from the active world, so genially celebrated
in this newly published poem of The Recluse; his flight to the Vale
of Grasmere, like that of some pious youth to the Chartreuse, is the
most marked event of his existence. His life's changes are almost
entirely inward ones; it falls into broad, untroubled, perhaps
somewhat monotonous, spaces; his biographers have very little to
tell. What it really most resembles, different as its superficies
may look, is the career of those early mediaeval religious artists,
who, precisely because their souls swarmed with heavenly visions,
passed their fifty or sixty years in tranquil, systematic industry,
seemingly with no thoughts beyond it.
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