"The oldest man he seemed that ever wore grey hairs.
As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie Couched on the bald top of an eminence; Wonder to all who do the same espy, By what means it could thither come and whence; So that it seems a thing endued with sense: Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself;
Such seemed this man, not all alive nor dead, Nor all asleep--in his extreme old age: His body was bent double, feet and head Coming together in life's pilgrimage; As if some dire constraint of pain, or rage Of sickness felt by him in times long past, A more than human weight upon his frame had cast. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Motionless as a cloud the old man stood, That heareth not the loud winds when they call; And moveth all together, if it move at all."
How clever the double simile is, and what a feeling of mystery it produces! The old man is like the gigantic stone on the top of the hill; and the stone in its turn resembles some sea-beast which must have crawled up there. The impression of great age is most forcibly produced. This old man seems the oldest man that has ever lived. If we were in Germany or any other territory of Romanticism, we should not be surprised to learn that we had the shoemaker of Jerusalem before us. But we are in England, and our guide is Wordsworth; and the old man turns out to be a most ordinary human being, by trade a leech-gatherer, an occupation suited to the capacity of the frail old inhabitants of a marshy district. The old man's confident, piously resigned words, his tranquillity of mind even in extreme loneliness and poverty, allay the young man's fears for the future; and he resolves, whenever such fears beset him, to think of the leech-gatherer on the lonely moor. "This is not ode-flight," as Ewald[3] remarks somewhere or other; but it is a good specimen of Wordsworth's power of giving a certain imprint of fantasy and grandeur to the most everyday, most realistic material by his manner of treating it.
The attempt to exercise this capacity has, in not a few of Wordsworth's poems, resulted in caricature. It has always done so when he has tried to produce a mystically religious or terrifying effect by endowing some simply painful or odd incident with the so-called supernatural quality. We can call it nothing but childish when, in the poem entitled _The Thorn_, the narrator (whose position in life is not indicated, but whom Wordsworth himself told Coleridge he had imagined as an old ship captain, almost in his dotage) tells in the strain of horror with which one relates a ghost story, the tale of the poor mad woman who sits at night in a scarlet cloak, weeping and wailing, under the thorn tree. And _Peter Bell_, the poem which Wordsworth presented to the public with such a flourish of trumpets, but which, had it not been for Shelley's satire of the same name, would have been forgotten by this time, produces the effect of a parody. It tells of the terror induced in a coarse, cruel man by the supernatural fortitude with which a poor ass bears the most terrible blows rather than move--a terror which, in combination with the excited imaginings due to the darkness, brings about a complete change in the man. Time showed the reason of the ass's fortitude to have been its desire to draw attention to the fact that its master had fallen into the river at the spot where it was standing. We have here a striking contrast--the moral greatness of the brute and the brutish stupidity of the man--and Wordsworth, who had no sense of the comic, did not fail to enlarge on the subject.