[66] The wish realized. See Poem xcv. s. 9.
[67] Somersby may be described as being utterly secluded from the “madding crowd”—the most rural retirement that the most agricultural country can show. I find the population was recorded in 1835, when the family still resided there, as being sixty-one, whilst the church accommodation was for sixty. Small, however, as both church and parish were, and still are, the so-called Rectory is a roomy family house, with its back to the road, on which there can be but little traffic, and it fronts a very extensive stretch of country, on which you enter by a steep slope of ground. There are no striking features in this expanse of soft undulations, but you feel a consciousness that the sea is not far off, and that the scenery is well adapted for fine cloud and sunset effects. The air seems to have a bracing tone, and the several equally small churches around, tell of thin populations, and a general condition of rustic simplicity and peace.
“They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead:
They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed;
I wept, as I remember’d how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking, and sent him down the sky.
“And now that thou are lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake,
For death he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.”
I cannot resist quoting these touching lines, which are translated from the Greek of Callimachus, librarian of Alexandria, 260 B.C., on his friend Heraclitus of Halicarnassus.
[69] See P. cix., s. 3.
“Jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops.”
Romeo and Juliet, Act iii., s. 5.
[71] Ignis fatuus—“Will o’ the Wisp.”
[72] That is, the ursa minor, or little bear, which is a small constellation that contains the pole star, and never sets in our latitude.