725 Living amid the same perpetual whirl Of trivial objects, melted and reduced To one identity, by differences That have no law, no meaning, and no end; Oppression under which even highest minds
730 Must labour, whence the strongest are not free! But though the picture weary out the eye, By nature an unmanageable sight, It is not wholly so to him who looks In steadiness, who hath among least things
735 An undersense of greatest; sees the parts As parts, but with a feeling of the whole.
This did I feel in London's vast Domain; The Spirit of Nature was upon me there; The Soul of Beauty and enduring life Vouchsafed0 her inspirations; and diffused, granted.
770 Through meagre lines and colours, and the press Of self-destroying transitory things, Composure, and ennobling harmony.
From Book Eighth Retrospect, Love of Nature leading to Love of Man1
[THE SHEPHERD IN THE MIST]
* * * A rambling School-boy, thus I felt his? presence in his own domain the shepherd's As of a Lord and Master; or a Power Or Genius,0 under Nature, under God presiding spirit
260 Presiding; and severest solitude Had more commanding looks when he was there. When up the lonely brooks on rainy days Angling I went, or trod the trackless hills By mists bewildered, suddenly mine eyes
4. Of daring creativity. In Greek mythology Pro-twenty-one years of his life to trace the transfer of metheus made man out of clay and taught him the his earlier feelings for nature to the shepherds and arts. other working people who inhabited the landscape 1. In this book Wordsworth reviews the first he loved.
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36 8 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
265 Have glanced upon him distant a few steps, In size a Giant, stalking through thick fog,2 His sheep like Greenland bears;0 or, as he stepped -polar bears Beyond the boundary line of some hill-shadow, His form hath flashed upon me, glorified
270 By the deep radiance of the setting sun:3 Or him have I descried in distant sky, A solitary object and sublime, Above all height! like an aerial cross Stationed alone upon a spiry rock
275 Of the Chartreuse,4 for worship. Thus was Man Ennobled outwardly before my sight, And thus my heart was early introduced To an unconscious love and reverence Of human nature; hence the human Form
280 To me became an index of delight, Of grace, and honor, power, and worthiness. Meanwhile this Creature, spiritual almost As those of Books, but more exalted far; Far more of an imaginative Form 285 Than the gay Corin of the groves, who lives For his own fancies, or to dance by the hour In coronal, with Phillis5 in the midst? Was, for the purposes of Kind,6 a Man With the most common; husband, father; learned, 290 Could teach, admonish, suffered with the rest From vice and folly, wretchedness and fear; Of this I little saw, cared less for it; But something must have felt. * * *
From Book Ninth Residence in France1
[PARIS AND ORLEANS. BECOMES A 'PATRIOT']
?France lured me forth, the realm that I had crossed
35 So lately, journeying toward the snow-clad Alps. But now relinquishing the scrip0 and staff2 knapsack And all enjoyment which the summer sun Sheds round the steps of those who meet the day With motion constant as his own, I went
2. Wordsworth borrows this image from James Thomson's Autumn (1730), lines 727?29. 3. A 'glory' is a mountain phenomenon in which the enlarged figure of a person is seen projected by the sun on the mist, with a radiance about its head. Cf. Coleridge's 'Dejection: An Ode,' line 54 (p. 467). 4. In his tour of the Alps, Wordsworth had been deeply impressed by the Chartreuse, a Carthusian monastery in France, with its soaring cross visible against the sky. 5. Corin and Phillis, shepherd and shepherdess dancing in their coronals, or wreaths of flowers, were stock characters in earlier pastoral literature.
6. I.e., in carrying out the tasks of humankind. 1. Wordsworth's second visit to France, while he was twenty- one and twenty-two years of age (1791?92), came during a crucial period of the French Revolution. This book deals with his stay at Paris, Orleans, and Blois, when he developed his passionate partisanship for the French people and the revolutionary cause. 2. Emblems of the pilgrim traveling on foot.
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THE PRELUDE, BOOK THIRTEENTH / 369
40 Prepared to sojourn in a pleasant Town3 Washed by the current of the stately Loire. Through Paris lay my readiest course, and there Sojourning a few days, I visited In haste each spot, of old or recent fame, 45 The latter chiefly; from the field of Mars4 Down to the suburbs of St. Anthony;5 And from Mont Martyr6 southward to the Dome Of Genevieve.7 In both her clamorous Halls, The National Synod and the Jacobins,8 so I saw the Revolutionary Power Toss like a Ship at anchor, rocked by storms; The Arcades I traversed, in the Palace huge Of Orleans,9 coasted round and round the line Of Tavern, Brothel, Gaming-house, and Shop, 55 Great rendezvous of worst and best, the walk Of all who had a purpose, or had not; I stared, and listened with a Stranger's ears To Hawkers and Haranguers, hubbub wild! And hissing Factionists, with ardent eyes, 60 In knots, or pairs, or single. Not a look Hope takes, or Doubt or Fear are forced to wear, But seemed there present, and I scanned them all, Watched every gesture uncontrollable Of anger, and vexation, and despite, 65 All side by side, and struggling face to face With Gaiety and dissolute Idleness. ?Where silent zephyrs0 sported with the dust breezes Of the Bastille,1 I sate in the open sun, And from the rubbish gathered up a stone 70 And pocketed the Relic in the guise Of an Enthusiast; yet, in honest truth, I looked for Something that I could not find, Affecting more emotion than I felt; For 'tis most certain that these various sights, 75 However potent their first shock, with me Appeared to recompence the Traveller's pains Less than the painted Magdalene of Le Brun,2 A Beauty exquisitely wrought, with hair Dishevelled, gleaming eyes, and rueful cheek so Pale, and bedropp'd with everflowing tears. But hence to my more permanent Abode3
3. Orleans, on the Loire River, where Wordsworth stayed from December 1791 until he moved to Blois early the next year. 4. The Champ de Mars, where during the Festival of the Federation in 1790 Louis XVI swore fidelity to the new constitution. 5. Faubourg St. Antoine, near the Bastille, a militant working-class district and center of revolutionary violence. 6. Montmartre, a hill on which revolutionary meetings were held. 7. Became the Pantheon, a burial place for heroes of the Revolution such as Voltaire and Rousseau. 8. The club of radical democratic revolutionists, named for the ancient convent of St. Jacques, their meeting place. 'National Synod': the newly
