This placid life developed in
Wordsworth, to an extraordinary degree, an innate sensibility to
natural sights and sounds--the flower and its shadow on the stone,
the cuckoo and its echo. The poem of [98] "Resolution and
Independence" is a storehouse of such records; for its fulness of
lovely imagery it may be compared to Keats's "Saint Agnes' Eve." To
read one of his greater pastoral poems for the first time is like a
day spent in a new country; the memory is crowded for a while with
its precise and vivid incidents:--
The pliant harebell swinging in the breeze,
On some grey rock:
The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,
And the bleak music from that old stone wall:--
In the meadows and the lower ground,
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn:--
And that green corn all day is rustling in thine ears!
Clear and delicate at once as he is in the outlining of visible
imagery, he is more finely scrupulous still in the noting of sounds;
he conceives of noble sound as even moulding the human countenance to
nobler types, and as something actually "profaned" by visible form or
colour. He has a power likewise of realizing and conveying to the
consciousness of his reader abstract and elementary impressions,
silence, darkness, absolute motionlessness, or, again, the whole
complex sentiment of a particular place, the abstract expression of
desolation in the long [99] white road, of peacefulness in a
particular folding of the hills.
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