“pencil and note-book, and jots down whatever strikes him most,” adding, “Nature does not permit an inventory to be made of her charms!  He should have left his pencil and note-book at home; fixed his eye as he walked with a reverent attention on all that surrounded him, and taken all into a heart that could understand and enjoy.  Afterwards he would have discovered that while much of what he had admired was preserved to him, much was also most wisely obliterated. That which remained, the picture surviving in his mind, would have presented the ideal and essential truth of the scene, and done so in large part by discarding much which, though in itself striking, was not characteristic. In every scene, many of the most brilliant details are but accidental.”

The two last sentences of this extract give admirable expression to one feature of Wordsworth’s interpretation of Nature.  In the deepest poetry, as in the loftiest music,—­in Wordsworth’s lyrics as in Beethoven’s sonatas—­it is by what they unerringly suggest and not by what they exhaustively express that their truth and power are known.  “In what he leaves unsaid,” wrote Schiller, “I discover the master of style.”  It depends, no doubt, upon the vision of the “inward eye,” and the reproductive power of the idealising mind, whether the result is a travesty of Nature, or the embodiment of a truth higher than Nature yields.  On the other hand, it is equally certain that the identification of localities casts a sudden light in many instances upon obscure passages in a poem, and is by far the best commentary that can be given.  It is much to be able to compare the actual scene, with the ideal creation suggested by it; as the latter was both Wordsworth’s reading of the text of Nature, and his interpretation of it.  In his seventy-third year, he said, looking back on his ‘Evening Walk’, that there was not an image in the poem which he had not observed, and that he “recollected the time and place where most of them were noted.”  In the Fenwick notes, we constantly find him saying, “the fact occurred strictly as recorded,” “the fact was as mentioned in the poem”; and the fact very often involved the accessories of place.

Any one who has tried to trace out the allusions in the “Poems on the Naming of Places,” or to discover the site of “Michael’s Sheepfold,” to identify “Ghimmer Crag,” or “Thurston-Mere,”—­not to speak of the individual “rocks” and “recesses” near Blea Tarn at the head of Little Langdale so minutely described in ’The Excursion’,—­will admit that local commentary is an important aid to the understanding of Wordsworth.  If to read the ‘Yew Trees’ in Borrowdale itself,

  in mute repose
  To lie, and listen to the mountain flood
  Murmuring from Glaramara’s inmost caves,