same shall sustain thee on high; and the nest that thou warmest, the same shall keep thee warm. Where most is to be gained, there also is most to be lost. Ah me, how great is that loss! A bewildered light leadeth on into the marsh, and vanisheth. The foot sinketh in what is soft. In sloth is sought content. Aspirations wither and drop as plumes of a moulting wing. Perforce the sympathies cling to what is near. In self-defence, the soul forgetteth what it prized of old. The larger charities it banisheth: the loftier hope it rebuketh. Such is the way downward; yet, through God's high mercy, no step is there on that downward way, beside which there goeth not forth that narrow path which leadeth again into the perfect way. While fall the ruins of the Empire daily, and the Barbarians lay waste even the Holy City, thus have I written unto thee, less as worthy to instruct than as willing to detain thee. For so, on that first morning when thy Mother led thy childish steps up to this cloister of lonely Apennine, didst thou stand with dark devout eyes in attention raised, nor thinking to withdraw them till all was said. Such remembrances haunt age. Now writeth my hand no more— - not chilled by age alone, but also by the evening wind that sigheth past the rocky summits. So passeth life as a sigh. But cast thou thy wings thereon, and lightly shall it bear thee aloft! The sun sinketh, and Soractè, as a dial, flingeth its shadow far across the plain. Swan of the mountain-lake, that didst in VOL. II T solitariness stem the black water under the granite peak, float thou never upon yellow Tiber; for Clitumnus leadeth also most placid and pure waters through the peaceful mead; and beside it grazeth the milkwhite steer, and the bird singeth, and man doth build. -Farewell! XV RECOLLECTIONS OF WORDSWORTH It was about eight years before his death that I made acquaintance with Wordsworth. During the next four years I saw a great deal of him, chiefly among his own mountains; and, besides many delightful walks with him, I had the great honour of passing some days under his roof. The strongest of my impressions respecting him was that made by the manly simplicity and lofty rectitude which characterised him. In one of his later sonnets he writes of himself thus: "As a true man who long had served the lyre;" it was because he was a true man that he was a true poet; and it was impossible to know him without being reminded of this. In any case he must have been recognised as a man of original and energetic genius; but it was his strong and truthful moral nature, his intellectual sincerity, the abiding conscientiousness of his imagination, so to speak, which enabled that genius to do its great work, and bequeath to the England of the future the most solid mass of deep-hearted and authentic poetry which has been bestowed on her by any poet since the Elizabethan age. There was in his nature a veracity which, had it not been combined with an idealising imagination not less remarkable, would to many have appeared prosaic; yet, had he not possessed that characteristic, the products of his imagination would have lacked reality. They might still have enunciated a deep and sound philosophy; but they would have been divested of that human interest which belongs to them in a yet higher degree. All the little incidents of the neighbourhood were to him important. The veracity and the ideality which are so signally combined in Wordsworth's poetic descriptions of Nature made themselves at least as much felt whenever Nature was the theme of his discourse. In his intense reverence for Nature he regarded all poetical delineations of her with an exacting severity; and if those descriptions were not true, and true in a twofold sense, the more skilfully executed they were the more was his indignation roused by what he deemed a pretence and a deceit. An untrue description of Nature was to him a profaneness, a heavenly message sophisticated and falsely delivered. He expatiated much to me one day, as we walked among the hills above Grasmere, on the mode in which Nature had been described by one of the most justly popular of England's modern poets-one for whom he preserved a high and affectionate respect. "He took pains," Wordsworth said; "he went out with his pencil and notebook, and jotted down whatever struck him most-a river rippling over the sands, a ruined tower on a rock above it, a promontory, and a mountain-ash waving its red berries. He went home, and wove the whole together into a poetical description." After a pause Wordsworth resumed with a flashing eye and impassioned voice: "But Nature does not permit an inventory to be made of her charms! He should have left his pencil and notebook at home; fixed his eye, as he walked, with a reverent attention on all that surrounded him, and taken all into a heart that could understand and enjoy. Then, after several days had passed by, he should have interrogated his memory as to the scene. He would have discovered that while much of what he had admired was preserved to him, much was also most wisely obliterated. That which remained-the picture surviving in his mind-would have presented the ideal and essential truth of the scene, and done so, in a large part, by discarding much which, though in itself striking, was not characteristic. In every scene many of the most brilliant details are but accidental. A true eye for Nature does not note them, or at least does not dwell on them." On the same occasion he remarked: Scott misquoted in one of his novels my lines on Yarrow. He makes me write "The swans on sweet St. Mary's lake but I wrote "The swan on still St. Mary's lake. |