The Liberal Imagination (New York Review Books Classics) by Trilling Lionel

Author:Trilling, Lionel [Trilling, Lionel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781590175514
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2012-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

but rather to what Wordsworth calls “those first affections.”

I am inclined to think that with this phrase Wordsworth refers to a later stage in the child’s development which, like the earlier stage in which the external world is included within the ego, leaves vestiges in the developing mind. This is the period described in a well-known passage in Book II of The Prelude, in which the child learns about the world in his mother’s arms:

Blest the infant Babe,

(For with my best conjecture I would trace

Our Being’s earthly progress), blest the Babe,

Nursed in his Mother’s arms, who sinks to sleep,

Rocked on his Mother’s breast; who with his soul

Drinks in the feelings of his Mother’s eye!

For him, in one dear Presence, there exists

A virtue which irradiates and exalts

Objects through widest intercourse of sense.

No outcast he, bewildered and depressed:

Along his infant veins are interfused

The gravitation and the filial bond

Of nature that connect him with the world.

Is there a flower, to which he points with hand

Too weak to gather it, already love

Drawn from love’s purest earthly fount for him

Hath beautified that flower; already shades

Of pity cast from inward tenderness

Do fall around him upon aught that bears

Unsightly marks of violence or harm.

Emphatically such a Being lives,

Frail creature as he is, helpless as frail,

An inmate of this active universe:

For feeling has to him imparted power

That through the growing faculties of sense,

Doth like an agent of the one great Mind

Create, creator and receiver both,

Working but in alliance with the works

Which it beholds.—Such, verily, is the first

Poetic[7] spirit of our human life,

By uniform control of after years,

In most, abated or suppressed; in some,

Through every change of growth and of decay

Pre-eminent till death.

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