WORDSWORTH’S PROTEST.
Lines written by Wordsworth as a protest against making a railway from Kendal to Windermere:—
“Is there no nook of English ground secure
From rash assault? Schemes of retirement sown
In youth, and ’mid the world kept pure
As when their earliest flowers of hope were blown,
Must perish; how can they this blight endure?
And must he, too, his old delights disown,
Who scorns a false, utilitarian lure
’Mid his paternal fields at random thrown?
Baffle the threat, bright scene, from Orrest-head,
Given to the pausing traveller’s rapturous glance!
Plead for thy peace, thou beautiful romance
Of nature; and if human hearts be dead,
Speak, passing winds; ye torrents, with your strong
And constant voice, protest against the wrong!”
THE HON. EDWARD EVERETT’S REPLY TO WORDSWORTH’S PROTEST.
The Hon. Edward Everett in the course of his speech at the Boston Railroad Jubilee in commemoration of the opening of railroad communication between Boston and Canada, observed, “But, sir, as I have already said, it is not the material results of this railroad system in which its happiest influences are seen. I recollect that seven or eight years ago there was a project to carry a railroad into the lake country in England—into the heart of Westmoreland and Cumberland. Mr. Wordsworth, the lately deceased poet, a resident in the centre of this region, opposed the project. He thought that the retirement and seclusion of this delightful region would be disturbed by the panting of the locomotive and the cry of the steam whistle. If I am not mistaken, he published one or two sonnets in deprecation of the enterprise. Mr. Wordsworth was a kind-hearted man, as well as a most distinguished poet, but he was entirely mistaken, as it seems to me, in this matter. The quiet of a few spots may be disturbed, but a hundred quiet spots are rendered accessible. The bustle of the station-house may take the place of the Druidical silence of some shady dell; but, Gracious Heavens, sir, how many of those verdant cathedral arches, entwined by the hand of God in our pathless woods, are opened to the grateful worship of man by these means of communication?
“How little of rural beauty you lose, even in a country of comparatively narrow dimensions like England—how less than little in a country so vast as this—by works of this
description. You lose a little strip along the line of the road, which partially changes its character; while, as the compensation, you bring all this rural beauty,
‘The warbling woodland, the resounding shore,
The pomp of groves, the garniture of fields,’
within the reach, not of a score of luxurious, sauntering tourists, but of the great mass of the population, who have senses and tastes as keen as the keenest. You throw it open, with all its soothing and humanizing influences, to thousands who, but for your railways and steamers, would have lived and died without ever having breathed the life-giving air of the mountains; yes, sir, to tens of thousands who would have gone to their graves, and the sooner for the prevention, without ever having caught a glimpse of the most magnificent and beautiful spectacle which nature presents to the eye of man, that of a glorious curving wave, a quarter-of-a-mile long, as it comes swelling and breasting toward the shore, till its soft green ridge bursts into a crest of snow, and settles and digs along the whispering sands.”