With gladness and involuntary songs.
Light were her sallies, as the tripping fawn’s,
Forth startled from the form where she lay couched;
Unthought of, unexpected, as the stir
Of the soft breeze ruffling the meadow flowers.”
Yet De Quincey, arrogantly interpreting the deep-seated affections of that father’s heart, says, “She was no favorite with Wordsworth;” but he “himself was blindly, doatingly, fascinated” by this child of three. And of her death, before she is four, when De Quincey is on a visit in London, he says, with crazy exaggeration:
“Never, perhaps, from the foundations of those mighty hills was there so fierce a convulsion of grief as mastered my faculties on receiving that heart-shattering news.… I had always viewed her as an impersonation of the dawn and the spirit of infancy.… I returned hastily to Grasmere; stretched myself every night, for more than two months running, upon her grave; in fact often passed the night upon her grave … in mere intensity of sick, frantic yearning after neighborhood to the darling of my heart.”[11]
This is a type of his ways of feeling, and of his living, and of his speech—tending easily to all manner of extravagance: black and white are too tame for his nerve-exaltation; if a friend looks sharply, “his eye glares;” if disturbed, he has a “tumult of the brain;” if he doubles his fist, his gestures are the wildest; and a well-built son and daughter of a neighbor Dalesman are the images of “Coriolanus and Valeria.”