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Full Title
The complete poetical works of William Wordsworth: together with a description of the country of the lakes in the north of England, now first published with his works ... / edited by Henry Reed.
Author
Wordsworth, William, 1770-1850. Melville, Herman, 1819-1891.
Date Added
8 January 2014
Language
English
Publish Date
1839
Publisher
Philadelphia: J. Kay, Jun. and brother; Boston: J. Munroe and Co.; [etc., etc.]
Source
Woodstock Theological Center Library, Georgetown University.
Topic
Wordsworth, William, 1770-1850. Melville, Herman, 1819-1891. English poetry.
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PREFACE. . xiii
to the Sea-beast; and the Sea-beast stripped of
some of its vital qualities to assimilate it to the
stone; which intermediate image is thus treated
for the purpose of bringing the original image,
that of the stone, to a nearer resemblance to the
figure and condition of the aged Man; who is di-
yested of so much’ of the indications of life and
motion as to bring him to the point where the two
objects unite and coalesce in just comparison.
After what has been said, the image of the Cloud
need not be commented upon.
Thus far of an endowing or modifying power:
but the Imagination also shapes and creates ; and
how? By innumerable processes; and in none
does it more delight than in that of consolidating
numbers into unity, and dissolving and separating
unity into number,—alternations proceeding from,
and governed by, a sublime consciousness of the
soul in her own mighty and almost divine powers.
Recur to the passage already cited from Milton.
When the compact Fleet, as one Person, has been
introduced “ Sailing from Bengala,” “ They,” 7. e.
the “ Merchants,” representing the Fleet, resolved
into a Multitude of Ships, “ply” their voyage
towards the extremities of the earth: ‘ So” (re-
ferring to the word “As” in the commencement)
“seemed the flying Fiend ;” the image of his Per-
son acting, to recombine the multitude of Ships
into one body,—the point from which the compa-
rison set out. “So seemed,” and to whom seemed?
To the heavenly Muse who dictates the poem, to
the eye of the Poet’s mind, and to that of the
Reader, present at one moment in the wide Ethio-
pian, and the next in ‘the solitudes, then first
broken in upon, of the infernal regions!
“ Modo me Thebis, modo ponit Athenis.”
Hear again this mighty Poet,—spcaking of the
Messiah going forth to expel. from Heaven the
rebellious Angels,
“ Attended by ten thousand thousand Saints
He onward came: far off his coming shone,”—
the retinue of Saints, and the Person of the Mes-
siah himself, lost almost and merged in the splen-
dour -of that indefinite abstraction, ‘‘ His -com-
ing!”
As I do not mean here to treat this subject fur-
ther than to throw some light upon the present
Poems, and especially upon one division of them,
I shall spare myself and the Reader the trouble
of considering the Imagination as it deals with
thoughts and sentiments, as it regulates the com-
position of characters, and determines the course
of actions: I will not consider it (more than I
have already done by implication) as that power
which, in the language of one of my most es-
teemed Friends, “ draws all things to one ; which
makes things animate or inanimate, beings with
their attributes, subjéts with their accessarics,
take one colour and serve to one effect.”* The
grand store-houses of enthusiastic and meditative
Imagination, of poetical, as contradistinguished
from human and dramatic Imagination, are the
prophetic and lyrical parts of the Holy Scriptures,
and the works of Milton, to which I cannot for-
bear to add those of Spenser. I select these
writers in preference to those of ancient Greece
and Rome, because the anthropomorphitism of the
Pagan religion subjected the minds of the greatest
poets in those countries too much to the bondage
of definite form; from which the Hebrews were
preserved by their abhorrence of idolatry. This
abhorrence was almost as strong in our great epic
Poet, both from circumstances of his life, and from
the constitution of his mind. However imbued
the surface might be with classical literature, he
was a Hebrew in soul; and all things tended in
him towards the sublime. Spenser, of a. gentler
nature, maintained his freedom by aid of his alle-
gorical spirit, at one time inciting him to create
persons out of abstractions; and, at another, by
a superior effort of genius, to give the universality
and permanence of abstractions to his human be-
ings, by means of attributes and emblems that
belong to the highest moral truths and the purest
sensations,—of which his character of Una is a
glorious example. Of the human and dramatic
Imagination the works of Shakspeare are an inex-
haustible source.
“TI tax not you, ye Elements, with unkindness,
I never gave you Kingdoms, called you Daughters!”
And if, bearing in mind the many Poets distin-
guished by this prime quality, whose names |
omit to mention; yet justified by a recollection
of the insults which the Ignorant, the Incapable
‘}and the Presumptuous, have heaped upon these
and my other writings, I may be permitted to an-
ticipate the judgment of posterity upon myself;
I shall declare (censurable, I grant, if the noto-
riety of the fact above stated does not justify me)
that I have given, in these’ unfavourable times,
evidence of exertions of this faculty upon its
worthiest objects, the external universe, the moral |
and religious sentiments of Man, his natural af-
fections, and his acquired passions; which have
the same ennobling tendency as the productions
* Charles Lamb upon the genius of Hogarth.
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