Not fur off wuz the grave of Hartley Coleridge, son of Wordsworth’s friend—a son who inherited all the splendor and weakness of his father’s nater.
He drinked!
But some of his sonnets are upliftin’ in the extreme.
“Poor creeter! what he could have been if he had left stimulants alone,” I sez to my pardner, as we looked down on his quiet grave.
And he sez, “There you be agin—meetin’-housen and castles can’t stop you, nor buryin’-grounds skair you out; I’m sick of your dum W. C. T. U. talk!”
I felt too riz up to argy with him, but I felt deeply the truth of what whiskey had done in his case. And as to his pa, I said to myself, “Weakness of will, and opium, mebby, stood in the way of the world’s seein’ another Shakespeare—not jest like him, but a new and uneek type of poet; jest as great and dazzlin’, but different as one big star differs from another—all on ’em a-flashin’ out light onto a dark, dull world.
Alice felt deeply the sweet sadness of the spot—the quiet beauty of the landscape round us, the bird’s song in the green branches overhead, and the low, sweet song of the little stream, the south wind amongst the trees.
She stood under a tree lookin’ up through it into the sky overhead, followin’ the flight of a bird. Her face looked so sweet—so sweet that I thought if Wordsworth was here he would be reminded of his own lines, and think that—
“Beauty born of murmuring sound
Had passed into her face.”