ABSTRACT
The sublime landscape, the real language of men, the noble savage, were ideas at once of escape and of critique, normative and persuasive in their literary use, and as conventional and mythological in their way as the beliefs of the old dispensation they were supplanting. In depending upon a spatial mapping of the self in a known landscape, William Wordsworth is broadly representative of nineteenth-century English writers. Wordsworth tests the limits of his landscape assumptions when he tries to show that there is a non-tragic form of heroism in sheer suffering, in states rather than in active sequences of feeling. In Wordsworth, landscape feeling undergoes a difficult passage to ethical consciousness, fastening on the combined exposure and seclusion of buildings which makes them emblems, not only of mind in world, but perhaps also of self in society. The gap is between outer loveliness and the solitary’s inward, barren landscape of despair.
