Divine science _has_ put it together, but
only for the sake of the outshining soul that shall cause it to live,
and move, and have a being of its own in God. When you see the face
lighted up with soul, when you recognize in it thought and feeling, joy
and love, then you know that here is the end for which it was made. Thus
you see the relation that poetry has to science; and you find that, to
speak in an apparent paradox, the surface is the deepest after all; for,
through the surface, for the sake of which all this building went on, we
have, as it were, a window into the depths of truth. There is not a form
that lives in the world, but is a window cloven through the blank
darkness of nothingness, to let us look into the heart, and feeling, and
nature of God. So the surface of things is the best and the deepest,
provided it is not mere surface, but the impassioned expression, for the
sake of which the science of God has thought and laboured.
Satisfied that this was the nature of poetry, and wanting to convey this
to the minds of his fellow-men, "What vehicle," Wordsworth may be
supposed to have asked himself, "shall I use? How shall I decide what
form of words to employ? Where am I to find the right language for
speaking such great things to men?" He saw that the poetry of the
eighteenth century (he was born in 1770) was not like nature at all, but
was an artificial thing, with no more originality in it than there would
be in a picture a hundred times copied, the copyists never reverting to
the original.
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