caused him to find food for poetic musing in what they passed by unheeded, it caused him to magnify trifles, to aim at dignifying the meanest objects, and to struggle, not merely to seek good, but to find poetry in everything. He himself tells us:
"To every natural rock, or fruit, or flower,
Even the loose stones that cover the highway,
I gave a moral life. I saw them feel,
Or linked them to some feeling"
This would be harmless enthusiasm enough, were it not that an undue exultation of what is small has a tendency to weaken our appreciation of what is great. A man who is all wonder at stocks and stones will find his capacities for admiration somewhat taxed by a mountain or a cathedral.[1] Nimium admirari may be less dangerous than its stoical converse, but did it not engender, at any rate, in some of the writings of Wordsworth, garrulous egotism and silly simplicity? He seems to have been totally deficient in a sense of the ridiculous, or, at any rate, to have been blinded to it in his own lucubrations by an overweening self-confidence, and a full realisation of what Swift called "the importance of a man to himself." But for something akin to this feeling, in spite of his disclaimer, what could have induced him to spend years of his life in the composition of such a long, unimpassioned narrative as "The Prelude," which, with the exception of a few gems glittering in the arid waste, is a tedious prosaic account, in blank verse, of a very ordinary existence, in which the author wanders on, registering the minutest and least important incidents with heavy
- ↑ Mr. Leigh Hunt, who is an enthusiastic admirer of Wordsworth, condemns this attempt to exalt trifles in his "Seer." "The consequence of this," he writes, "carried into a system, would be that we could make anything or nothing important, just as diseased or healthy impulses told us; a straw might awake in us as many profound, but certainly not as useful reflections, as the fellow-creature that lay upon it."
