Shouteth faint tidings of some gladder place!'
“BLEA-POND.”
‘What!’ methinks we hear a voice exclaim—‘Is that a description of bare, dull, dreary, moorland Blea-Pond, where a man and a Christian would die of mere blank vacancy, of weary want of world, of eye and ear?’ Hush, critic, hush! forget you that there are sermons in stones, and good in everything? In what would the poet differ from the worthy man of prose, if his imagination possessed not a beautifying and transmuting power over the objects of the inanimate world?”
It is indisputable that the poet must possess something that may be called “a transmuting power” of vision, for to the unpoetical optics of any “worthy man of prose,” like you or me, Blea Tarn is much more like a platter than “an urn.” Once upon a time, I—even I myself—in a very sentimental mood, perpetrated a sonnet upon Blea Tarn, and, if you can tolerate such enormity, here it is:
It is the very home of loneliness
This lonely dell, with lonely hills around,
Whose hundred rills emit one lonely sound—
A hum which doth the lonely soul oppress,
When joined with the lone scene you look upon.
The lonely pool with murky shadows thrown