But the sadness has at the heart of it peaceful hope. This is Wordsworth’s own comment:—‘As recorded in my sister’s Journal, I had first seen the Trossachs in her and Coleridge’s company. The sentiment that runs through this sonnet was natural to the season in which I again visited this beautiful spot; but this and some other sonnets that follow were coloured by the remembrance of my recent visit to Sir Walter Scott, and the melancholy errand on which he was going.’]
There’s not a nook within this solemn Pass,
But were an apt confessional for One
Taught by his summer spent, his autumn gone,
That Life is but a tale of morning grass
Withered at eve. From scenes of art which chase
That thought away, turn, and with watchful eyes
Feed it ’mid Nature’s old felicities,
Rocks, rivers, and smooth lakes more clear than glass
Untouched, unbreathed upon. Thrice happy quest,
If from a golden perch of aspen spray
(October’s workmanship to rival May)
The pensive warbler of the ruddy breast
That moral sweeten by a heaven-taught lay,
Lulling the year, with all its cares, to rest!
NOTES.
[2] Note 1.—‘Hatfield was condemned.’—Page 2.
James Hatfield, indicted for having, in the Lake district, under the assumed name of Hon. Alexander Augustus Hope, brother of the Earl of Hopetoun, forged certain bills of exchange. He was condemned to death at Carlisle on August 16, 1803. His atrocious treatment of a beautiful girl, known in the district as ‘Mary of Buttermere,’ had drawn more than usual attention to the criminal.
[5] Note 2.—‘In Captain Wordsworth’s ship.’—Pages xxx, 3.
The ‘Brother John’ here alluded to was a sailor. He was about two years and eight months younger than the poet, who found in him quite a congenial spirit. He perished, with nearly all his crew, in the ‘Earl of Abergavenny,’ East-Indiaman, which he commanded, and which, owing to the incompetency of a pilot, was in his last outward voyage wrecked on the Shambles of the Bill of Portland on the night of Friday, February 5, 1805. His brother William speaks of him in verse, as ‘a silent poet,’ and in prose describes him as ‘meek, affectionate, silently enthusiastic, loving all quiet things, and a poet in everything but words.’ Allusions to this sailor-brother occur in several of the poems, as in those lines beginning ‘When to the attractions of the busy world,’ to be found among the ‘Poems on the Naming of Places,’ also in the ‘Elegiac Stanzas suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm,’ and in other poems.
[3] Note 3.—‘There is no stone to mark the spot.’—Page 5.
‘The body of Burns was not allowed to remain long in this place. To suit the plan of a rather showy mausoleum, his remains were removed into a more commodious spot of the same kirkyard on the 5th July 1815. The coffin was partly dissolved away; but the dark
curling locks of the poet were as glossy, and seemed as fresh, as on the day of his death.’—Life of Burns, by Allan Cunningham.