A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry. Critics of literary history have again [96] and again remarked upon it; it is a characteristic which reveals itself in many different forms, but is strongest and most sympathetic in what is strongest and most serious in modern literature; it is exemplified by writers as unlike Wordsworth as the French romanticist poets. As a curious chapter in the history of the human mind, its growth might be traced from Rousseau and St. Pierre to Chateaubriand, from Chateaubriand to Victor Hugo; it has no doubt some obscure relationship to those pantheistic theories which have greatly occupied people's minds in many modern readings of philosophy; it makes as much difference between the modern and the earlier landscape art as there is between the roughly outlined masks of a Byzantine mosaic and a portrait by Reynolds or Romney. Of this new landscape sense the poetry of Wordsworth is the elementary and central exposition; he is more exclusively occupied with its development than any other poet. Wordsworth's own character, as we have already observed, was dominated by a certain contentment, a sort of naturally religious placidity, not often found in union with a poetic sensibility so [97] active as his; and this gentle sense of well-being was favourable to the quiet, habitual observation of the inanimate, or imperfectly animate, world. His life of eighty placid years was almost without what, with most human beings, count for incidents. His flight from the active world, so genially celebrated in this newly published poem of The Recluse; his flight to the Vale of Grasmere, like that of some pious youth to the Chartreuse, is the most marked event of his existence. His life's changes are almost entirely inward ones; it falls into broad, untroubled, perhaps somewhat monotonous, spaces; his biographers have very little to tell. What it really most resembles, different as its superficies may look, is the career of those early mediaeval religious artists, who, precisely because their souls swarmed with heavenly visions, passed their fifty or sixty years in tranquil, systematic industry, seemingly with no thoughts beyond it. This placid life developed in Wordsworth, to an extraordinary degree, an innate sensibility to natural sights and sounds--the flower and its shadow on the stone, the cuckoo and its echo. The poem of [98] "Resolution and Independence" is a storehouse of such records; for its fulness of lovely imagery it may be compared to Keats's "Saint Agnes' Eve." To read one of his greater 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:--