e, and deprived them of the contented
repose of implicit faith. To the child a watch seems to be a living
creature; but Wordsworth would not let his readers be children, and
did injustice to himself by giving them an uneasy doubt whether
creations which really throbbed with the very heart's-blood of genius,
and were alive with nature's life of life, were not contrivances of
wheels and springs. A naturalness which we are told to expect has lost
the crowning grace of nature. The men who walked in Cornelius
Agrippa's visionary gardens had probably no more pleasurable emotion
than that of a shallow wonder, or an equally shallow self-satisfaction
in thinking they had hit upon the secret of the thaumaturgy; but to a
tree that has grown as God willed we come without a theory and with
no botanical predilections, enjoying it simply and thankfully; or the
Imagination recreates for us its past summers and winters, the birds
that have nested and sung in it, the sheep that have clustered in its
shade, the winds that have visited it, the cloud-bergs that have
drifted over it, and the snows that have ermined it in winter. The
Imagination is a faculty that flouts at foreordination, and Wordsworth
seemed to do all he could to cheat his readers of her company by
laying out paths with a peremptory _Do not step off the gravel!_ at
the opening of each, and preparing pitfalls for every conceivable
emotion, with guide-boards to tell each when and where it must be
caught.

[46] How far he swung backward toward the school under whose
influence he grew up, and toward the style against which he
had protested so vigorously, a few examples will show. The
advocate of the language of common life has a verse in his
_Thanksgiving Ode_ which, if one met with it by itself, he
would think the achievement of some later copyist of Pope:

While the _tubed engine_ [the organ] feels the inspiring blast.

And in _The Italian Itinerant_ and _The Swiss Goatherd_ we
find a thermometer or barometer called

The well-wrought scale
Whose sentient tube instructs to time
A purpose to a fickle clime.

Still worse in the _Eclipse of the Sun_, 1821:

High on her speculative tower
Stood Science, waiting for the hour
When Sol was destined to endure
That darkening.

So in _The Excursion_,

The cold March wind raised in her tender throat