United States or Saint Lucia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"The Doctor" was no poet, though the best of his historical prose the well-known passage in the Roman History, for instance, on the death of Marcellus has some of the essential notes of poetry passion, strength, music. But the gentle Wordsworthian quality of his few essays in verse will be perhaps interesting to those who are aware of him chiefly as the great Liberal fighter of eighty years ago.
The pomps and vanities of this world had it against love or liking, and she gave me up. I thank God that the pomps and vanities prevailed; for this happy chance gave me Mary, my sweet Wordsworthian damsel, found, like the violet or the celandine, by the wayside, in Wordsworth's own country.
The impression that any naïf person gets who plants himself innocently in the flux of things is that things are off their balance. Whatever equilibriums our finite experiences attain to are but provisional. Martinique volcanoes shatter our wordsworthian equilibrium with nature.
Nay, the fervent Wordsworthian will add, as Mr. Leslie Stephen does, that Wordsworth's poetry is precious because his philosophy is sound; that his "ethical system is as distinctive and capable of exposition as Bishop Butler's"; that his poetry is informed by ideas which "fall spontaneously into a scientific system of thought."
Finally, the "scientific system of thought" in Wordsworth gives us at least such poetry as this, which the devout Wordsworthian accepts
"The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills," he is combining words that are immemorially familiar into a total effect that is peculiarly "Wordsworthian." Diction is obviously only a part of a greater whole in which ideas and emotions are also merged.
The picture, first, of drooping health and spirits, and then of the flaming out of the old poetic fire, will, I think, interest any true Wordsworthian. We found the Poet seated at his fireside, and a little languid in manner.
The boy can direct his plough lightly along its straight furrow, anticipating each movement of his oxen, and he can turn a corner "straight as a bug's leg;" nevertheless, he would like those persons who have a Wordsworthian idea of following the plough along the mountain-side in glory and in joy to witness the struggles of a green hand learning to plough of a tramp hired man, say, one of the sort that can't milk and don't know "haw" from "gee."
I am not going to do anything of the kind. My story is written for the sole purpose of amusing you, and as a form of diversion for your leisure moments I would select neither the Wordsworthian pastoral, nor the platonic doctrine of Ideas.
Thus, we are gravely told by the too zealous Wordsworthian that the so-called poets of the eighteenth century were simply men of letters; they had various accomplishments and great general ability, but their thoughts were expressed in prose, or in mere metrical diction, which passed current as poetry without being so.
Word Of The Day