V

The beauteous forms are the external shapes or visible aspects of cliff, river, wood etc and the ideal shapes that have lived for five years in the memory. By using the word forms without the word colours, its frequent partner Wordsworth has given us at least some encouragement to dwell on the contours of the landscape in abstraction from the substances that fill those contours. We accept Wordsworth's assurance that the forms and colours are, ambiguously, passive-and-active, submissive-and-powerful, because the poetry convinces us unawares that the epistemological status of these forms and colours is itself ambiguous. The accord is both an aesthetic fact and a moral one, both the harmonious disposition of forms and colours outside and inside the mind and the serene and harmonious feelings which these have induced. Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley together in such a context are somewhat misleading. The confusion may have been disastrous in philosophy but Wordsworth, who inherited it, turned it to good account.