صور الصفحة
PDF
النشر الإلكتروني

300

XI.

And O ye fountains, meadows, hills, and groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!

Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquished one delight,
To live beneath your more habitual sway.

I love the brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born day

Is lovely yet;

The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober coloring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality!
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

LITERARY ANALYSIS.-189. only. What does the word modify?
201, 202. With what beautiful thought does the poem close?

[blocks in formation]

NOTE BY WORDSWORTH.-This was composed during my residence at Town-End, Grasmere. Two years at least passed between the writing of the first four stanzas and the remaining part. To the attentive and competent reader the whole sufficiently explains itself, but there may be no harm in adverting here to particular feelings or experiences of my own mind on which the structure of the poem partly rests. Nothing was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being. I have elsewhere said,

A simple child

That lightly draws its breath
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?

But it was not so much from the source of animal vivacity that my difficulty came as from a sense of the indomitableness of the spirit within me. I used to brood over the stories of Enoch and Elijah, and almost persuade myself that, whatever might become of others, I should be translated in something of the same way to heaven. With a feeling congenial to this, I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I com

muned with all that I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in, my own immaterial nature. Many times while going to school have I grasped at a wall or tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality. At that time I was afraid of mere processes. In later periods of life I have deplored, as we have all reason to do, a subjugation of an opposite character, and have rejoiced over the remembrances, as is expressed in the lines Obstinate Questionings, etc. To that dreamlike vividness and splendor which invests objects of sight in childhood, every one, I believe, if he would look back, could bear testimony, and I need not dwell upon it here; but having in the poem regarded it as a presumptive evidence of a prior state of existence, I think it right to protest against a conclusion which has given pain to some good and pious persons, that I meant to inculcate such a belief. It is far too shadowy a notion to be recommended to faith as more than an element in our instincts of immortality. But let us bear in mind that though the idea is not advanced in Revelation, there is nothing there to contradict it, and the fall of man presents an analogy in its favor. Accordingly, a pre-existent state has entered into the creed of many nations, and among all persons acquainted with classic literature is known as an ingredient in Platonic philosophy. Archimedes said that he could move the world if he had a point whereon to rest his machine. Who has not felt the same aspirations as regards his own mind? Having to wield some of its elements when I was impelled to write this poem on the immortality of the soul, I took hold of the notion of preexistence as having sufficient foundation in humanity for authorizing me to make for my purpose the best use of it I could as a poet.

[merged small][merged small][merged small][graphic]

In willer feel

CHARACTERIZATION BY R. H. HUTTON.'

1. The most striking feature of Scott's romances is that, for the most part, they are pivoted on public rather than mere private interests and passions. With but few exceptions-The An

1 From Sir Walter Scott, by Richard H. Hutton.

tiquary, St. Ronan's Well, and Guy Mannering are the most important-Scott's novels give us an imaginative view, not of mere individuals, but of individuals as they are affected by the public strifes and social divisions of the age. And this it is which gives his books so large an interest for old and young, soldiers and statesmen, the world of society and the recluse alike. You can hardly read any novel of Scott's and not become better aware what public life and political issues mean. And yet there is no artificiality, no elaborate attitudinizing before the antique mirrors of the past, like Bulwer's, no dressing-out of clothes-horses, like G. P. R. James. The boldness and freshness of the present are carried back into the past, and you see Papists and Puritans, Cavaliers and Roundheads, Jews, Jacobites, and freebooters, preachers, school-masters, mercenary soldiers, gypsies, and beggars, all living the sort of life which the reader feels that in their circumstances, and under the same conditions of time and place and parentage, he might have lived, too. Indeed, no man can read Scott without being more of a public man, whereas the ordinary novel tends to make its readers rather less of one than before.

2. Next, though most of these stories are rightly called romances, no one can avoid observing that they give that side of life which is unromantic quite as vigorously as the romantic side. This was not true of Scott's poems, which only expressed one half of his nature, and were almost pure romances. But in the novels the business of life is even better portrayed than its sentiments. Indeed, it was because Scott so much enjoyed the contrasts between the high sentiments of life and its dry and often absurd detail, that his imagination found so much freer a vent in the historical romance than it ever found in the romantic poem. Yet he clearly needed the romantic excitement of picturesque scenes and historical interests, too. I do not think he would ever have gained any brilliant success in the narrower region of the domestic novel. He said himself, in expressing his admiration of Miss Austen: "The big bow-wow strain I can do myself, like any now going, but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiments, is denied to me." Indeed, he tried it to some extent in St. Ronan's Well, and, so far

as he tried it, I think he failed. Scott needed a certain largeness of type, a strong-marked class-life, and, where it was possible, a free, out-of-doors life, for his delineations. No one could paint beggars and gypsies, and wandering fiddlers, and mercenary soldiers, peasants and farmers and lawyers, and magistrates, and preachers, and courtiers, and statesmen, and, best of all, perhaps, queens and kings, with anything like his ability.

3. I think the deficiency of his pictures of women, odd as it seems to say so, should be greatly attributed to his natural chivalry. His conception of women of his own or a higher class was always too romantic. He hardly ventured, as it were, in his tenderness for them, to look deeply into their little weaknesses and intricacies of character. With women of an inferior class, he had not this feeling. Nothing can be more perfect than the manner in which he blends the dairy-women and women of business in Jeanie Deans with the lover and the sister. But once make a woman beautiful, or in any way an object of homage to him, and Scott bowed so low before the image of her that he could not go deep into her heart. He could no more have analyzed such a woman, as Thackeray analyzed Lady Castlewood, or Amelia, or Becky, or as George Eliot analyzed Rosamond Vincy, than he could have vivisected Camp or Maida.' To some extent, therefore, Scott's pictures of women remain something in the style of the miniatures of the last age-bright and beautiful beings without any special character in them. He was dazzled by a fair heroine. He could not take them up into his imagination as real beings as he did men. But then how living are his men, whether coarse or noble !

4. Some of the finest touches of Scott's humor are no doubt much heightened by his perfect command of the genius as well as the dialect of a peasantry in whom a true culture of mind and sometimes also of heart is found in the closest possible contact with the humblest pursuits and the quaintest enthusiasm for them. But Scott, with all his turn for irony-and Mr. Lockhart says that even on his death-bed he used towards his children the same sort of good-humored irony to which he had always accustomed them in his life-certainly never gives us any example of

1 Scott's dogs.

« السابقةمتابعة »