Then, as I grew older, I began to see that quotations
from Wordsworth had a sort of grandeur in their very substance,
which was unlike any other grandeur. And then I took the whole of
the poems away for a vacation, and worked at them; and then I found
how again and again Wordsworth touches a thought to life, which is
like the little objects you pick up on the seashore, the evidence
of another life close at hand, indubitably there, and yet unknown,
which is being lived under the waste of waters. When Wordsworth
says such things as
And many love me, but by none
Am I enough beloved,
or when he says,
Some silent laws our hearts may make
Which they shall long obey--
then he seems to uncover the very secrets of the world, and to
speak as when in the prophet's vision the seven thunders uttered
their voices. Only to-day I was working with a pupil; in his essay
he had quoted Wordsworth, and we looked up the place. While I was
speaking, my eye fell upon "The Poet's Epitaph," and I saw,
Come hither in thy hour of strength,
Come, weak as is a breaking wave!
Those two lines of unutterable magic; he could not understand why I
stopped and faltered, nor could I have explained it to him. But it
was as Coleridge says,
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes in holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of paradise.
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