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I wanted to go to church, I wanted to maintain, when it was on me, that exaltation I dimly felt as communion with a higher power, with God, and which also was identical with my desire to write, to create.... I bought books, sets of Wordsworth and Keats, of Milton and Shelley and Shakespeare, and hid them away in my bureau drawers lest Tom and my friends should see them.
This group of poets, who had met one another first in the south of England, came afterward to be called the Lake Poets, from their residence in the mountainous lake country of Westmoreland and Cumberland, with which their names, and that of Wordsworth, especially, are forever associated. The so-called "Lakers" did not, properly speaking, constitute a school of poetry.
Like Mary Stuart, it is, at least, somewhat better than its worst repute, as formulated by its enemies. Estimates change; even the excellent Wordsworth was held by the English reviewers to be fantastic and vague in his Ode to Duty. We should not forget that the most shocking pronouncements of the Romanticists were uttered half-ironically, to say the least.
I was at Cambridge when Wordsworth was there, and I never met him and I dined with him twenty years afterwards at Cartwright's. There's an oddity in things, now. But Davy was there: he was a poet too. Or, as I may say, Wordsworth was poet one, and Davy was poet two. That was true in every sense, you know." Dorothea felt a little more uneasy than usual.
But no study of Goethe is complete without some recognition of the qualities which caused Wordsworth to hurl the book across the room with an indignant perception of its sensuality. For the sins of his life Goethe was perhaps sufficiently punished in his life by his final marriage with Christiane; for the sins of his literature many others must suffer.
Since tea I have taken a stroll from the hotel in a different direction from heretofore, and passed the Swan Inn, where Scott used to go daily to get a draught of liquor, when he was visiting Wordsworth, who had no wine nor other inspiriting fluid in his house.
Wordsworth once wrote of true poets who possessed "The vision and the faculty divine, Though wanting the accomplishment of verse." Let us venture to apply Wordsworth's terminology to the process already described. The "vision" of the poet would mean his sense-impressions of every kind, his experience, as Goethe said, of "the outer world, the inner world and the other world."
Is it an infirmity to wish for an instant that some such phrase of generous hope had escaped from Burke; that he had for a day or an hour undergone that fine illusion which was lighted up in the spirits of men like Wordsworth and Coleridge? Those great poets, who were destined one day to preach even a wiser and a loftier conservatism than his own, have told us what they felt
Not every pilgrim was a reader, but the vogue was established, and the stream of pilgrims came. Mr. Tennyson's decisive appearance dates from 1842. One cannot say that he effaced Wordsworth as Scott and Byron had effaced him.
But there is something more to be noted still. The poet had caught and was utilising the spirit of his time in two ways, one of them almost entirely new. That he constantly sang the subjective view of nature may be set down to the fact that he came after Wordsworth, though the fact that he sang it without the Wordsworthian dryness and dulness must be set down to his own credit.
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