the moods of the human

How came he here? thought I, or what can he be doing? I then describe him, whether ill or well is not for me to judge with perfect confidence; but this I can confidently affirm, that though I believe God has given me a strong imagination, I cannot conceive a figure more impressive than that of an old man like this, the survivor of a wife and ten children, travelling alone among the mountains and all lonely places, carrying with him his own fortitude, and the necessities which an unjust state of society has laid upon him. You speak of his speech as tedious. Everything is tedious when one does not read with the feelings of the author. The Thorn is tedious to hundreds; and so is The Idiot Boy to hundreds It is in the character of the old man to tell his story, which an impatient reader must feel tedious. But, good heavens! Such a figure, in such a place; a pious, self-respecting, miserably infirm and pleased old man, telling such a tale!”The naive earnestness of this passage suggests to us how constantly recurrent in Wordsworth’s mind were the two trains of ideas which form the substance of the poem; the interaction, namely, (if so it may be termed,) of the moods of Nature with mind; and the dignity and interest of man as man, depicted with no complex background of social or political life, but set amid the primary affections and sorrows, and the wild aspects of the external world International scholarship..

Among the pictures which Wordsworth has left us of the influence of Nature on human character, Peter Bell may be taken as marking one end, and the poems on Lucy the other end of the scale. Peter Bell lives in the face of Nature untouched alike by her terror and her charm; Lucy’s whole being is moulded by Nature’s self; she is responsive to sun and shadow, to silence and to sound, and melts almost into an impersonation of a Cumbrian valley’s peace. Between these two extremes how many are the possible shades of feeling! In Ruth, for instance, the point impressed upon us is that Nature’s influence is only salutary so long as she is herself, so to say, in keeping with man; that when her operations reach that degree of habitual energy and splendour at which our love for her passes into fascination and our admiration into bewilderment, then the fierce and irregular stimulus consorts no longer with the growth of a temperate virtue.

I will give one other instance of this subtle method of dealing with the contrasts in Nature. It is from the poem entitled “Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree which stands near the Lake of Esthwaite, on a desolate part of the Shore, commanding a beautiful Prospect.” This seat was once the haunt of a lonely, a disappointed, an embittered man .