1800.
AMERICAN IDEALS.
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not more poetical than that of any Cumberland beggar he might have met in his morning walk:—
- "Long-wished-for sight, the Western World appeared;
- And when the ship was moored, I leaped ashore
- Indignantly,—resolved to be a man,
- Who, having o'er the past no power, would live
- No longer in subjection to the past,
- With abject mind—from a tyrannic lord
- Inviting penance, fruitlessly endured.
- So, like a fugitive whose feet have cleared
- Some boundary which his followers may not cross
- In prosecution of their deadly chase,
- Respiring, I looked round. How bright the sun,
- The breeze how soft! Can anything produced
- In the Old World compare, thought I, for power
- And majesty, with this tremendous stream
- Sprung from the desert? And behold a city
- Fresh, youthful, and aspiring! . . .
- Sooth to say,
- On nearer view, a motley spectacle
- Appeared, of high pretensions—unreproved
- But by the obstreperous voice of higher still;
- Big passions strutting on a petty stage,
- Which a detached spectator may regard
- Not unamused. But ridicule demands
- Quick change of objects; and to laugh alone,
- . . . in the very centre of the crowd
- To keep the secret of a poignant scorn,
- . . . is least fit
- For the gross spirit of mankind."
Thus Wordsworth, although then at his prime, indulging in what sounded like a boast that he alone had felt the sense sublime of something interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the
