is the life of one of those early Italian or Flemish
painters, who, just because their minds were full of heavenly visions,
passed, some of them, the better part of sixty years in quiet,
systematic industry. This placid life matured a quite unusual
sensibility, really innate in him, to the sights and sounds of the
natural world--the flower and its shadow on the stone, the cuckoo and
its echo. The poem of Resolution and Independence is a storehouse of
such records: for its fulness of imagery it may be compared to Keats's
Saint Agnes' Eve. To [45] read one of his longer 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 ground
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn;--

And that green corn all day is rustling in thine ears.

Clear and delicate at once, as he is in the outlining of visible
imagery, he is more clear and delicate still, and finely scrupulous, in
the noting of sounds; so that he conceives of noble sound as even
moulding the human countenance to nobler types, and as something
actually "profaned" by colour, by visible form, or image.

He has a power likewise of realising, and conveying to the
consciousness of the reader, abstract and elementary
impressions--silence, darkness, absolute motionlessness: or, again, the
whole complex sentiment of a particular place, the abstract expression
of desolation in the long white road, of peacefulness in a particular
folding of the hills. In the airy building of the brain, a special day
or hour even, comes to have for him a sort of personal identity, a
spirit or angel given to it, by which, for its exceptional [46]
insight, or the happy light upon it, it has a presence in one's
history, and acts there, as a separate power or accomplishment; and he
has celebrated in many of his poems the "efficacious spirit," which, as
he says, resides in these "particular spots" of time.

It is to such a world, and to a world of congruous meditation thereon,
that we see him retiring in his but lately published poem of The
Recluse--taking leave, without much count of costs, of the world of
business, of action and ambition; as also of all that for the majority
of mankind counts as sensuous en