Page:On the Margin; notes and essays, by Aldous Huxley.pdf/152

146 sion of the emotions aroused in him by the contemplation of nature, Wordsworth some times stumbles doubtfully along philosophical byways that are at the best parallel to the direct road for which he is seeking. Everywhere in literature this difficulty in finding an expression for any undramatic, ill-defined emotion is constantly made apparent.

Thomas's limpid honesty of mind saves him from the temptation to which so many others succumb, the temptation to express one thing, because it is with difficulty describable, in terms of something else. He never philosophizes the emotions which he feels in the presence of nature and beauty, but presents them as they stand, transmitting them directly to his readers without the interposition of any obscuring medium. Rather than attempt to explain the emotion, to rationalize it into something that it is not, he will present it for what it is, a problem of which he does not know the solution. In "Tears" we have an example of this candid confession of ignorance:

It seems I have no tears left. They should have fallen— Their ghosts, if tears have ghosts, did fall—that day When twenty hounds streamed by me, not yet combed out