(To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] Sts,—Reading in the Spectator
of April 20th an article on the meaning of Wordsworth's famous lines— "Failings from us, vanishing,s, Blank misgivings e of a creature Moving about in worlds not realised"— we were =prised to see that the writer called his article "Vastness and Isolation," and seemed to think that the lines referred to moods in which one is frightened, unhappy, desolated, as well as isolated. But if he will notice, Words- worth expressly says that he is thankful for such moments, and speaks of them elsewhere as "blessed moods." To us the meaning of those lines has always been most satisfactorily conveyed by an idea of Mr. William James, the psychologist. Precisely as dogs, he says, are passing intimately through this human life of ours, all its ideals and inspirations, and yet hardly, if at all, sensing them, so we may be passing through a spiritual world, which in certain rarefied moments we do all but sense. This mood, described by Mr. James, is altogether lacking in the horror of Kinglake's "Pyramids," quoted by your writer, nor would le mal de l'isolement of Berlioz in any way chime in with it. In other words, vastness may have been in Wordsworth's mind when he wrote his famous lines, but not horror and isolation; rather oneness and exaltation.—
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