Page:Studies of a Biographer 1.djvu/244

 —rather oddly, it seems to an Alpine traveller—that the path is inviting him to 'ascend a lofty mountain.' A peasant, luckily, informs him that he has crossed the Alps already, and must go down hill thenceforwards. This remark does not (in the poem at least) suggest a prospect of dinner, but a series of reflections upon c that awful power' Imagination. It convinces, or reminds, him that 'our being's' heart and home

Is with infinitude and only there.

When a trivial incident starts a man at once upon such distant reveries, serving as a mere taking-off place for a flight into the clouds, we see that we must not count upon definite, concrete information. We pass at a bound from the common earth into a world lying beyond political or historical circumstance. Even when he speaks, not of external facts, but of the history of his own opinions, he generally plunges into generalities so wide that their precise application is not very easy to discover. We can see that Wordsworth was deeply moved by the Revolution, but the reflections stirred in him are beyond, or beneath, any tangible political issue. They seem at first sight as if they might be adopted with equal facility