Chapter LI: Letter 167: TO

(-- 1816?)

In a copy of verses, entitled _A Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni_, I describe myself under the influence of strong devotional feelings, gazing on the mountain, till as if it had been a shape emanating from and sensibly representing her own essence, my soul had become diffused through the mighty vision: and there,

As in her natural form, swell'd vast to Heaven.

Mr. Wordsworth, I remember, censured the passage as strained and unnatural, and condemned the hymn in toto, (which, nevertheless, I ventured to publish in my _Sibylline Leaves_,) as a specimen of the mock sublime. It may be so for others, but it is impossible that I should myself find it unnatural, being conscious that it was the image and utterance of thoughts and emotions in which there was no mockery. Yet, on the other hand, I could readily believe that the mood and habit of mind out of which the hymn rose, that differs from Milton's and Thomson's and from the psalms, the source of all three, in the author's addressing himself to _individual_ objects actually present to his senses, while his great predecessors apostrophize _classes_ of things presented by the memory, and generalized by the understanding;--I can readily believe, I say, that in this there may be too much of what our learned _med'ciners_ call the _idiosyncratic_ for true poetry.--For, from my very childhood, I have been accustomed to _abstract_, and as it were, unrealize whatever of more than common interest my eyes dwelt on, and then by a sort of transfusion and transmission of my consciousness to identify myself with the object; and I have often thought within the last five or six years, that if ever I should feel once again the genial warmth and stir of the poetic impulse, and refer to my own experiences, I should venture on a yet stranger and wilder allegory than of yore--that I would allegorize myself as a rock, with its summit just raised above the surface of some bay or strait in the Arctic Sea, "while yet the stern and solitary night brooked no alternate sway"--all around me fixed and firm, methought, as my own substance, and near me lofty masses, that might have seemed to "hold the moon and stars in fee," and often in such wild play with meteoric lights, or with the quiet shine from above, which they made rebound in sparkles, or dispand in off-shoot, and splinters, and iridescent needle shafts of keenest glitter, that it was a pride and a place of healing to lie, as in an apostle's shadow, within the eclipse and deep substance-seeming gloom of "these dread ambassadors from earth to heaven, great hierarchs!" And though obscured, yet to think myself obscured by consubstantial forms, based in the same foundation as my own. I grieved not to serve them--yea, lovingly and with gladsomeness I abased myself in their presence: for they are my brothers, I said, and the mastery is theirs by right of older birth, and by right of the mightier strivings of the hidden fire that uplifted them above me.