Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXVII, No. 2, August 1850Various
General
Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXVII, No. 2, August 1850
Various
Literature -- Periodicals; Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals
We have no space to particularize the felicity of Wordsworth’s muse in
dealing with the affections, or the depth and power of his pathos.
Before leaving the subject of his genius, however, we cannot withhold a
reference to his “Ode on the Power of Sound,” which appears to be little
known even to readers of the poet, though in the thronging abundance of
its ideas and images, in the exquisite variety of its music, and in the
soul of imagination which animates it throughout, it yields the palm to
no ode in the language.
Wordsworth is most assuredly not a popular poet in the sense in which
Moore and Byron are popular; and he probably never will be so among
those readers who do not distinguish between being passionate and being
impassioned, and who prefer the strength of convulsion to the strength
of repose; readers who will attend only to what stirs and startles the
sensibility, who read poetry not for its nourishing but its inflaming
qualities, and who look upon poetic fire as properly consuming the mind
it animates. Wordsworth is not for them, except they go to him as a
spiritual physician, in search of “balm for hurt minds.” Placed in a
period of time when great passions in the heart generated monstrous
paradoxes in the brain, he clung to those simple but essential elements
of human nature on which true power and true elevation must rest; and,
while all around him sounded the whine of sentimentality and the hiss of
Satanic pride, his mission, like that of his own beautiful blue
streamlet, the Duddon, was “to heal and cleanse, not madden and
pollute.” His rich and radiant imagination cast its consecrating and
protecting light on all those dear immunities of humanity, which others
were seeking to discard for the delusions of haughty error, or the
fancies of ripe sensations. Accordingly, though many other poets of the
time have a fiercer or fonder charm for young and unrestrained minds, he
alone grows upon and grows into the intellect, and “hangs upon the
beatings of the heart,” as the soul advances in age and reflection; for
there is a rich substance of spiritual thought in his poetry to meet the
wants of actual life—consolations for sorrow, help for infirmity,
sympathy for bereavement, a holy gleam of awful splendor to irradiate
the dark fear of death; a poetry, indeed, which purifies as well as
pleases, and penetrates into the vitalities of our being as wisdom no
less than loveliness:
“Filling the soul with sentiments august—
The beautiful, the brave, the holy and the just.”
P.
* * * * *
BRIDGET KEREVAN.
BY ENNA DUVAL.
I will tell you, scholar, I have heard a grave divine say that
God has two dwellings, one in heaven, and the other in a meek
and thankful heart; which Almighty God grant to me and to my
honest scholar. Isaak Walton.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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