rom Rousseau and St. Pierre to Chateaubriand,
from Chateaubriand to Victor Hugo; it has no doubt some obscure
relationship to those pantheistic theories which have greatly occupied
people's minds in many modern readings of philosophy; it makes as much
difference between the modern and the earlier landscape art as there is
between the roughly outlined masks of a Byzantine mosaic and a portrait
by Reynolds or Romney. Of this new landscape sense the poetry of
Wordsworth is the elementary and central exposition; he is more
exclusively occupied with its development than any other poet.
Wordsworth's own character, as we have already observed, was dominated
by a certain contentment, a sort of naturally religious placidity, not
often found in union with a poetic sensibility so [97] active as his;
and this gentle sense of well-being was favourable to the quiet,
habitual observation of the inanimate, or imperfectly animate, world.
His life of eighty placid years was almost without what, with most
human beings, count for incidents. His flight from the active world,
so genially celebrated in this newly published poem of The Recluse; his
flight to the Vale of Grasmere, like that of some pious youth to the
Chartreuse, is the most marked event of his existence. His life's
changes are almost entirely inward ones; it falls into broad,
untroubled, perhaps somewhat monotonous, spaces; his biographers have
very little to tell. What it really most resembles, different as its
superficies may look, is the career of those early mediaeval religious
artists, who, precisely because their souls swarmed with heavenly
visions, passed their fifty or sixty years in tranquil, systematic
industry, seemingly with no thoughts beyond it. This placid life
developed in Wordsworth, to an extraordinary degree, an innate
sensibility to natural sights and sounds--the flower and its shadow on
the stone, the cuckoo and its echo. The poem of [98] "Resolution and
Independence" is a storehouse of such records; for its fulness of
lovely imagery it may be compared to Keats's "Saint Agnes' Eve." To
read one of his greater pastoral poems for the first time is like a day
spent in a new country; the memory is crowded for a while with its
precise and vivid incidents:--

The pliant harebell swinging in the breeze,
On some grey rock:
The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,
And the bleak music from that old stone wall:--
In the meadows and the lower grou