Then poetry is made; this
emotion "recollected" as Wordsworth said (we may add, recreated) "in
tranquillity" passes into enduring verse. He treasured numberless
experiences of this kind in his own life. Some of them are set forth in
the _Prelude_, that for instance on which the poem _The Thorn_ in the
_Lyrical Ballads_ is based; they were one or other of them the occasion
of most of his poems; the best of them produced his finest work--such a
poem for instance as _Resolution and Independence_ or _Gipsies_, where
some chance sight met with in one of the poet's walks is brooded over
till it becomes charged with a tremendous significance for him and for
all the world. If we ask how he differentiated his experiences, which
had most value for him, we shall find something deficient. That is to
say, things which were unique and precious to him do not always appear
so to his readers. He counted as gold much that we regard as dross. But
though we may differ from his judgments, the test which he applied to
his recollected impressions is clear. He attached most value to those
which brought with them the sense of an indwelling spirit, transfusing
and interpenetrating all nature, transfiguring with its radiance, rocks
and fields and trees and the men and women who lived close enough to
them to partake of their strength--the sense, as he calls it in his
_Lines above Tintern Abbey_ of something "more deeply interfused" by
which all nature is made one.
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