When Bunyan was young he loved ringing the bells with the ringers in the steeple of the village church of Elstow, where he was born, and where his grandfather, Thomas Bonyon, was "a common baker of human bread."
All these "Homely rhimes" are followed in this particular Book for Boys and Girls by comparisons", as here: first the bells; then a lesson about them. They are parables. But in Mr. Nahum's copying, many of the lessons were omitted; perhaps because he preferred to think out his own. Not that the poetry that is intended to teach, to praise virtue, and to instil wisdom in the heart and mind of its readers is any the less poetry for this reason. Nevertheless, every beautiful thing in this world—the hyssop in the wall and the cedar of Lebanon, Solomon in all his glory and the ring on his finger, carries with it joy and wonder of the life that is ours, and gratitude to the Maker of all. And poets who, when writing, are too intent upon teaching, are apt to forfeit their rarest poetry.
[232].
Dorothy was William Wordsworth's only sister and his friend Coleridge's close friend. What she squandered on these two poets—her self, her talk, her imagination, her love—only they could tell. "She gave me eyes, she gave me ears," once wrote her brother; she shared his visionary happiness. With Coleridge she used to walk and talk so nearly and dearly that again and again in her Journal she uses all but the very words—that "thin gray cloud," the line on Spring, or on the one red leaf, for instance—which are so magically his own in Christabel (No. 345).
[233]. "To Autumn."
I read this—perhaps the loveliest of John Keats's odes, many times before I realised that the whole of it is addressed to the musing apparition or phantasm of Autumn whom in its second stanza he describes as if she were in image there before him. This, perhaps, was partly because the poem is usually printed with a full stop after "clammy cells," and partly because of my own stupidity.
Thomas Hood, in his scarcely less beautiful Ode, sees Autumn first as an old man:
I saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like Silence, listening
To silence, for no lonely bird would sing