Charles Lamb - The Collected Works of Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb

It opens with the meeting of the poet with an aged man whom he had known from his school days; in plain words, a Scottish pedlar; a man who, though of low origin, had received good learning and impressions of the strictest piety from his stepfather, a minister and village schoolmaster. Among the hills of Athol, the child is described to have become familiar with the appearances of nature in his occupation as a feeder of sheep; and from her silent influences to have derived a character, meditative, tender, and poetical. With an imagination and feelings thus nourished—his intellect not unaided by books, but those, few, and chiefly of a religious cast—the necessity of seeking a maintenance in riper years, had induced him to make choice of a profession, the appellation for which has been gradually declining into contempt, but which formerly designated a class of men, who, journeying in country places, when roads presented less facilities for travelling, and the intercourse between towns and villages was unfrequent and hazardous, became a sort of link of neighbourhood to distant habitations; resembling, in some small measure, in the effects of their periodical returns, the caravan which Thomson so feelingly describes as blessing the cheerless Siberian in its annual visitation, with "news of human kind."

In the solitude incident to this rambling life, power had been given him to keep alive that devotedness to nature which he had imbibed in his childhood, together with the opportunity of gaining such notices of persons and things from his intercourse with society, as qualified him to become a "teacher of moral wisdom." With this man, then, in a hale old age, released from the burthen of his occupation, yet retaining much of its active habits, the poet meets, and is by him introduced to a second character—a sceptic—one who had been partially roused from an overwhelming desolation, brought upon him by the loss of wife and children, by the powerful incitement of hope which the French Revolution in its commencement put forth, but who, disgusted with the failure of all its promises, had fallen back into a laxity of faith and conduct which induced at length a total despondence as to the dignity and final destination of his species. In the language of the poet, he

——broke faith with those whom he had laid

In earth's dark chambers,

Yet he describes himself as subject to compunctious visitations from that silent quarter.

——Feebly must They have felt,

Who, in old time, attired with snakes and whips

The vengeful Furies. Beautiful regards Were turned on me—the face of her I loved; The Wife and Mother; pitifully fixing Tender reproaches, insupportable!—p. 133.

The conversations with this person, in which the Wanderer asserts the consolatory side of the question against the darker views of human life maintained by his friend, and finally calls to his assistance the experience of a village priest, the third, or rather fourth interlocutor, (for the poet himself is one,) form the groundwork of the "Excursion."

It will be seen by this sketch that the poem is of a didactic nature, and not a fable or story; yet it is not wanting in stories of the most interesting kind—such as the lovers of Cowper and Goldsmith will recognise as something familiar and congenial to them. We might instance the Ruined Cottage, and the Solitary's own story, in the first half of the work; and the second half, as being almost a continued cluster of narration. But the prevailing charm of the poem is, perhaps, that, conversational as it is in its plan, the dialogue throughout is carried on in the very heart of the most romantic scenery which the poet's native hills could supply; and which, by the perpetual references made to it either in the way of illustration or for variety and pleasurable description's sake, is brought before us as we read. We breathe in the fresh air, as we do while reading Walton's Complete Angler; only the country about us is as much bolder than Walton's, as the thoughts and speculations, which form the matter of the poem, exceed the trifling pastime and low-pitched conversation of his humble fishermen. We give the description of the "two huge peaks," which from some other vale peered into that in which the Solitary is entertaining the poet and companion. "Those," says their host,

——if here you dwelt, would be

Your prized Companions.—Many are the notes

Which in his tuneful course the wind draws forth

From rocks, woods, caverns, heaths, and dashing shores;

And well those lofty Brethren bear their part

In the wild concert—chiefly when the storm

Rides high; then all the upper air they fill

With roaring sound, that ceases not to flow,

Like smoke, along the level of the blast

In mighty current; theirs, too, is the song

Of stream and headlong flood that seldom fails;

And in the grim and breathless hour of noon,

Methinks that I have heard them echo back

The thunder's greeting:—nor have Nature's laws

Left them ungifted with a power to yield

Music of finer frame; a harmony,

So do I call it, though it be the hand

Of silence, though there be no voice;—the clouds,

The mist, the shadows, light of golden suns,

Motions of moonlight, all come thither—touch,

And have an answer—thither come, and shape

A language not unwelcome to sick hearts

And idle spirits:—there the sun himself

At the calm close of summer's longest day

Rests his substantial Orb;—between those heights

And on the top of either pinnacle,

More keenly than elsewhere in night's blue vault,

Sparkle the Stars as of their station proud.

Thoughts are not busier in the mind of man

Than the mute agent stirring there:—alone

Here do I sit and watch.—p. 84.

To a mind constituted like that of Mr. Wordsworth, the stream, the torrent, and the stirring leaf—seem not merely to suggest associations of deity, but to be a kind of speaking communication with it. He walks through every forest, as through some Dodona; and every bird that flits among the leaves, like that miraculous one [31]in Tasso, but in language more intelligent, reveals to him far higher lovelays. In his poetry nothing in Nature is dead. Motion is synonymous with life. "Beside yon spring," says the Wanderer, speaking of a deserted well, from which, in former times, a poor woman, who died heart-broken, had been used to dispense refreshment to the thirsty traveller,

——beside yon Spring I stood,

And eyed its waters till we seem'd to feel

One sadness, they and I. For them a bond

Of brotherhood is broken: time has been

When, every day, the touch of human hand

Dislodged the natural sleep that binds them up

In mortal stillness;—p. 27.

[31]

With partie coloured plumes and purple bill,

A woondrous bird among the rest there flew,

That in plaine speech sung love laies loud and shrill,

Her leden was like humaine language trew,

So much she talkt, and with such wit and skill,

That strange it seemed how much good she knew.

Fairefax's Translation [Book 16, Stanza 13].

To such a mind, we say—call it strength or weakness—if weakness, assuredly a fortunate one—the visible and audible things of creation present, not dim symbols, or curious emblems, which they have done at all times to those who have been gifted with the poetical faculty; but revelations and quick insights into the life within us, the pledge of immortality:—

——the whispering Air

Sends inspiration from the shadowy heights,

And blind recesses of the caverned rocks;

The little Rills, and Waters numberless,

Inaudible by day-light,

"I have seen," the poet says, and the illustration is an happy one: