sp just what makes it special or wonderful. For what some experience means to us depends upon what came before it and, even more, what will follow from it. And, in the middle of an experience, we may forget what lead up to it and cannot know what will come of it. It is only in retrospect that we can revel in the experience, appreciate aspects of it that we could not at the moment, and grasp the meaning of it for our lives.Then Wordsworth points to the way in which our past experiences affect the way we live with others. Why are the “best portion of a good man’s life” “His little, nameless, unremembered, acts of kindness and of love?” Because they are uncalculated and unmotivated by self-concern. They come so freely from us that it is only in retrospect that we recognize them for what they were. However they are the true measure of what we are, and what we are is determined in large part by what we remember of our lives, by the shape we give our lives in memory. It is the recollection of good memories, the naming of nameless pleasures, that help make us the kind of people who commit nameless unremembered acts of kindness and love.So the mood that leads the author to see into the life of things begins with recollection and memory, of pleasures of good deeds. But these memories occur in what seems like and otherwise dreary time for the author, when he is weary and lonely. They occur in times when the “fever of the world” has burdened the author, when his worries have lead him to fruitless endeavors, and when he has suffered from the “evil tongues,” “rash judgments,’ and “the sneers of selfish men” he points to later in the poem. Memories of the Wye raise the author’s spirits, and distance him from the concerns of his daily life. The author is able to step back and look at himself from above. The vision he presents of the soul leaving the body i...
