If this be so, it is not well to encourage...

§ 10. "If this be so, it is not well to encourage the observance of landscape, any more than other ways of dreamily and ineffectually spending time?"
Stay a moment. We have hitherto observed this love of natural beauty only as it distinguishes one man from another, not as it acts for good or evil on those minds to which it necessarily belongs. It may, on the whole, distinguish weaker men from stronger men, and yet in those weaker men may be of some notable use. It may distinguish Byron from St. Bernard, and Shelley from Sir Isaac Newton, and yet may, perhaps, be the best thing that Byron and Shelley possess—a saving element in them; just as a rush may be distinguished from an oak by its bending, and yet the bending may be the saving element in the rush, and an admirable gift in its place and way. So that, although St. Bernard journeys all day by the Lake of Geneva, and asks at evening "where it is," and Byron learns by it "to love earth only for its earthly sake," it does not follow that Byron, hating men, was the worse for loving the earth, nor that St. Bernard,abstract oil painting, loving men, was the better or wiser for being blind to it. And this will become still more manifest if we examine somewhat farther into the nature of this instinct, as characteristic especially of youth.
§ 11. We saw above that Wordsworth described the feeling as independent of thought, and, in the particular place then quoted, he therefore speaks of it depreciatingly. But in other places he does not speak of it depreciatingly, but seems to think the absence of thought involves a certain nobleness:

"In such high hour
Of visitation from the living God
Thought was not."

And he refers to the intense delight which he himself felt, and which he supposes other men feel, in nature, during their thoughtless youth, as an intimation of their immortality, and a joy which indicates their having come fresh from the hand of God. cheap oil paintings

Now, if Wordsworth be right in supposing this feeling to be in some degree common to all men, and most vivid in youth, we may question if it can be entirely explained as I have now tried to explain it. For if it entirely depended on multitudes of ideas, clustering about a beautiful object, it might seem that the youth could not feel it so strongly as the man, because the man knows more, and must have more ideas to make the garland of. Still less can we suppose the pleasure to be of that melancholy and languid kind, which Scott defines as "Resignation" and "Content;" boys being not distinguished for either of those characters, but for eager effort and delightsome discontent. If Wordsworth is at all right in this matter, therefore, there must surely be some other element in the feeling not yet detected. frames for oil paintings