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The corrective that the “old man” administers to the speaker’s eloquent, if extravagant, surmise would appear on the surface to represent a return to the ordinary, especially as a subset of what Wordsworth, in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, terms the “more than common” (595). But if the ordinary is ultimately anywhere in the poem, it is located and characteristically missing in the space between the two linguistic moments. The initial description, which constitutes most of the poem, is nothing less than poetry itself or a particular version of representation aligned with interior or imaginative projection.

This is the central theme of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. The modern analog of this account is of course Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp. 2. See especially Phillips. 3. I treat this aspect of Austen, first noted by her earliest readers, in The Historical Austen. 4. This becomes especially apparent when, in Miss Bates’s company, both the protagonist and the narrative pegged to her viewpoint must acknowledge an always-present but otherwise unnoticed world of other people and other things of which Miss Bates is always mindful.

He is by nature led To peace so perfect, that the young behold With envy, what the old man hardly feels. —I asked him whither he was bound, and what The object of his journey; he replied “Sir! ” The corrective that the “old man” administers to the speaker’s eloquent, if extravagant, surmise would appear on the surface to represent a return to the ordinary, especially as a subset of what Wordsworth, in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, terms the “more than common” (595). But if the ordinary is ultimately anywhere in the poem, it is located and characteristically missing in the space between the two linguistic moments.