ABSTRACT
Wordsworth applies spatial metaphors to the mind in a way that recalls the excesses of Night Thoughts; but unlike Young he makes a genuinely poetic attempt to bridge the gap between mind and nature. Prolong' both takes meaning from the word forms' and gives it. Because we have been partly persuaded that the forms of nature exist inwardly as well as outwardly, it makes literal sense to speak of the forms prolonging human feeling. The contradiction between the extreme ordinariness of this picture composed as it is of common plumes and weeds and spear-grassand the quantity of moral meaning it is called upon to express gives to the conclusion of the Wanderer's tale an appearance almost of paradox. Wordsworth explicates the paradox with some deliberation: the colours and forms of cottage, elms and so on impress themselves at one and the same time on an outer and an inner eye.
