Hazlitt's Response to Wordsworth: "Distant Objects"

Hazlitt’s “Distant Objects” could be read as a reply to Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.” It was published twenty years after Wordsworth’s poem, and seems to deal specifically what many of the points Wordsworth raises. Wordsworth recollects his first visit to the Wye as a child during a visit in his adulthood. He concludes that he has “learned/ To look on nature, not as in the hour/ Of thoughtless youth” when it is least appreciated, but rather to consider nature and its beauty in adulthood, when one is of “elevated thoughts; a sense sublime/ Of something far more deeply infused” (89-97). Conversely, Hazlitt argues that physical space and designated time are inextricably linked, and nature’s is best considered in one’s memory. While Wordsworth insists that a child’s mind is not mature enough to behold pastoral landscapes and there must be a mindfulness about natural observation, Hazlitt argues that the sincerity of childhood is mindful enough, and the alertness of adult senses render passivity to something beautiful, or sensory overload especially through vision. What is most interesting is Hazlitt’s opinion of “distant objects.” He notes that anything “placed beyond the reach of sense and knowledge…passion claims for its own, and brooding over it with wings outspread, stamps it with an image of itself,” implying that we project expectations onto distant or romanticized images that ultimately fail us. Our senses are no longer keen enough to “unmold their essence.” This is possibly a commentary on canonical romantic literature trends as a whole. We are not equipped to experience the sublime each time we see a mountainscape, but the startling, breath-taking feeling that comes with experiencing a beautiful image or landscape is referring back to a time when it was truly beheld through the genuineness of childhood or a time when we were not immune to what we view.