POSTSCRIPT
A poet, whose works are not yet known as they deserve to be,[GN] thus enters upon his description of the "Ruins of Rome":
The rising Sun
Flames on the ruins in the purer air
Towering aloft;
and ends thus—
The setting Sun displays
His visible great round, between yon towers,
As through two shady cliffs.
Mr. Crowe, in his excellent loco-descriptive Poem, Lewesdon Hill, is still more expeditious, finishing the whole on a May-morning before breakfast.
To-morrow for severer thought, but now
To breakfast, and keep festival to-day.
No one believes, or is desired to believe, that these Poems were actually composed within such limits of time; nor was there any reason why a prose statement should acquaint the Reader with the plain fact, to the disturbance of poetic credibility. But, in the present case, I am compelled to mention, that the above series of Sonnets was the growth of many years;—the one which stands the 14th was the first produced; and others were added upon occasional visits to the Stream, or as recollections of the scenes upon its banks awakened a wish to describe them. In this manner I had proceeded insensibly, without perceiving that I was trespassing upon ground preoccupied, at least as far as intention went, by Mr. Coleridge; who, more than twenty years ago, used to speak of writing a rural Poem, to be entitled "The Brook," of which he has given a sketch in a recent publication. But a particular subject, cannot, I think, much interfere with a general one; and I have been further kept from encroaching upon any right Mr. C. may still wish to exercise, by the restriction which the frame of the Sonnet imposed upon me, narrowing unavoidably the range of thought, and precluding, though not without its advantages, many graces to which a freer movement of verse would naturally have led.
May I not venture, then, to hope, that instead of being a hindrance, by anticipation of any part of the subject, these Sonnets may remind Mr. Coleridge of his own more comprehensive design, and induce him to fulfil it?[GO]——There is a sympathy in streams,—"one calleth to another"; and, I would gladly believe, that "The Brook" will, ere long, murmur in concert with "The Duddon." But, asking pardon for this fancy, I need not scruple to say, that those verses must indeed be ill-fated which can enter upon such pleasant walks of nature, without receiving and giving inspiration. The power of waters over the minds of Poets has been acknowledged from the earliest ages;—through the "Flumina amem sylvasque inglorius" of Virgil,[GP] down to the sublime apostrophe to the great rivers of the earth, by Armstrong,[GQ] and the simple ejaculation of Burns,[GR] (chosen, if I recollect right, by Mr. Coleridge, as a motto for his embryo "Brook"),
The Muse, nae poet ever fand her,
Till by himsel' he learned to wander,
Adown some trotting burn's meander,
And no think lang.
W. W. 1820.
As an illustration of the extraordinary freaks of contemporary criticism—freaks which still tarnish much that issues from the press—an estimate of those Duddon Sonnets, which appeared in The Monthly Review in 1820, may be referred to. All that posterity now admires in this exquisite series of descriptive poems is decried; and those passages which posterity regards as blemishes, are held up to admiration; e.g. the lines with which the tenth sonnet, in "The Stepping-Stones," concludes, which are so frigid and affected, were hailed as "a complete return into the regions of antiquity," and as a sign that "Mr. Wordsworth is certainly improving"! They are the very feeble lines:—
The frolic Loves, who, from yon high rock, see
The struggle, clap their wings for victory!
while the
. . . unculled floweret of the glen,
Fearless of plough and scythe; or darkling wren
That tunes on Duddon's banks her slender voice,
is held up to ridicule!—Ed.
FOOTNOTES:
[GN] John Dyer. The Ruins of Rome, 4to, London, 1740. Compare Wordsworth's lines To the Poet, John Dyer, vol. iv. p. 273.—Ed.
[GO] Compare p. 302, "Why is the Harp of Quantock silent?"—Ed.
[GP] See Georgics II. 486.—Ed.
[GQ] Armstrong's "apostrophe to the great rivers of the earth" is in his Art of Preserving Health (book ii. ll. 355-364)—
. . . . . . I hear the din
Of waters thund'ring o'er the ruined cliffs.
With holy reverence I approach the rocks
Whence glide the streams renowned in ancient song.
Here from the desert down the rumbling steep
First springs the Nile; here vents the sounding Po
In angry waves; Euphrates hence devolves
A mighty flood to water half the East;
And there, in Gothic solitude reclined,
The cheerless Tanais pours his hoary urn. Ed.
[GR] From his Epistle to William Simpson, Ochiltree; stanza 15.—Ed.