That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but
a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what
was for him almost literal fact. To him every natural object seemed
to possess something of moral or spiritual life, to be really capable
of a companionship with man, full of fine intimacies. An emanation,
a particular spirit, belonged not to the moving leaves or water only,
but to the distant peak arising suddenly, by some change of
perspective, above the nearer horizon of the hills, to the passing
space of light across the plain, to the lichened Druidic stone even,
for a certain weird fellowship in it with the moods of men. That he
awakened "a sort of thought in sense" is Shelley's just estimate of
this element in Wordsworth's poetry.
It was through nature, ennobled in this way by the semblance of
passion and thought, that the poet approached the spectacle of human
life. For him, indeed, human life is, in the first instance, only an
additional, and as it were incidental grace, upon this expressive
landscape.
[100] When he thought of men and women, it was of men and women as in
the presence and under the influence of those effective natural
objects, and linked to them by many associations.
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