The Poets of the Dawn – 2 135intimate voice that speaks from flower and bird, sky and star,
mountain and stream, this he knew, felt and lived in as no poet
before or after him has done, with a spiritual closeness and
identity which is of the nature of a revelation, the first spiritual
revelation of this high near kind to which English poetry had
given voice. Some soul of man, too, he sees, not in revolt, —
he has written unforgettable lines about liberty, but a calm and
ordered liberty, — in harmony with this tranquil soul in Nature,
finding in it some original simplicity and purity of his being
and founding on it a life in tune with the order of an eternal
law. On this perception the moralist in Wordsworth founds a
rule of simple faith, truth, piety, self-control, affection, grave
gladness in which the sentimental naturalism of the eighteenth
century disappears into an ethical naturalism, a very different
idealisation of humanity in the simplicity of its direct contact
with Nature unspoiled by the artifice and corruption of a too
developed society. All that Wordsworth has to say worth saying
is confined to these motives and from them he draws his whole
genuine thought inspiration.
But it is in the Nature strain of which he is the discoverer
that he is unique, for it is then that the seer in him either speaks
the revelatory thought of his spirit or gives us strains greater than
thought’s, the imperishable substance of spiritual consciousness
finding itself in sight and speech. At other times, especially when
he fuses this Nature-strain with his thought and ethical motive,
he writes sometimes poetry of the very greatest; at others again
it is of a varying worth and merit; but too often also he passes
out from his uninspired intelligence work with no stamp of en-
durance, much less of the true immortality. In the end the poet in
him died while the man and the writer lived on; the moralist and
concentred thinker had killed the singer, the intellect had walled
up the issues of the imagination and spiritual vision. But even
from the beginning there is an inequality and uncertainty which
betray an incomplete fusion of the sides of his personality, and
the heavy weight of intellectuality shadows over and threatens
the spiritual light which it eventually extinguished. A certain
number of his shorter poems rank among the greatest things