joyment.*

And so it came about that this sense of a life in natural objects,
which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, is with Wordsworth
the assertion of what for him is almost literal fact. To him every
natural object seemed to possess more or less of a moral or spiritual
life, to be [47] capable of a companionship with man, full of
expression, of inexplicable affinities and delicacies of intercourse.
An emanation, a particular spirit, belonged, not to the moving leaves
or water only, but to the distant peak of the hills arising suddenly,
by some change of perspective, above the nearer horizon, to the passing
space of light across the plain, to the lichened Druidic stone even,
for a certain weird fellowship in it with the moods of men. It was
like a "survival," in the peculiar intellectual temperament of a man of
letters at the end of the eighteenth century, of that primitive
condition, which some philosophers have traced in the general history
of human culture, wherein all outward objects [48] alike, including
even the works of men's hands, were believed to be endowed with
animation, and the world was "full of souls"--that mood in which the
old Greek gods were first begotten, and which had many strange
aftergrowths.

In the early ages, this belief, delightful as its effects on poetry
often are, was but the result of a crude intelligence. But, in
Wordsworth, such power of seeing life, such perception of a soul, in
inanimate things, came of an exceptional susceptibility to the
impressions of eye and ear, and was, in its essence, a kind of
sensuousness. At least, it is only in a temperament exceptionally
susceptible on the sensuous side, that this sense of the expressiveness
of outward things comes to be so large a part of life. That he awakened
"a sort of thought in sense," is Shelley's just estimate of this
element in Wordsworth's poetry.

And it was through nature, thus ennobled by a semblance of passion and
thought, that he approached the spectacle of human life. Human life,
indeed, is for him, at first, only an additional, accidental grace on
an expressive landscape. When he thought of man, it was of man as in
the presence and under the influence of these effective natural
objects, and linked to them by many associations. The close connexion
of man with natural objects, the habitual association of his thoughts
and feelings with a particular spot of earth, has sometimes seemed to
[49] degrade th