“As a proof of personal regard for you, I promise to hold my tongue in private life; but you can’t expect me not to take steps for the recovery of the stone.”
“How so?” Sir Simon started.
“It is pretty certain to get into the diamond market before long, and, unless the police are put on the watch, it will slip out of the country most likely, and for ever beyond my reach, and I would give double the money to get it back again. But I pledge myself not to mention the affair except to the officers.”
He bowed another good-night to the company, and was gone. The rest quickly followed, and soon the noise of wheels crushing the wet gravel died away, and Sir Simon Harness was left alone to meditate on the events of the evening and many other unpleasant things.
TO BE CONTINUED.
RECOLLECTIONS OF WORDSWORTH.[131]
BY AUBREY DE VERE, ESQ.
PART I.
It was about eight years before his death that I had the happiness of making acquaintance with Wordsworth. During the next four years I saw a good deal of him, chiefly among his own mountains, and, besides many delightful walks with him, I had the great honor of passing some days under his roof. The strongest of my impressions respecting him was that made by the manly simplicity and lofty rectitude which characterized him. In one of his later sonnets he writes of himself thus: “As a true man who long had served the lyre”; it was because he was a true man that he was a true poet; and it was impossible to know him without being reminded of this. In any case he must have been recognized as a man of original and energetic genius; but it was his strong and truthful moral nature, his intellectual sincerity, the abiding conscientiousness of his imagination, so to speak, which enabled that genius to do its great work, and bequeath to the England of the future the most solid mass of deep-hearted and authentic poetry which has been the gift to her of any poet since the Elizabethan age. There was in his nature a veracity which, had it not been combined with an idealizing imagination not less remarkable, would to many have appeared prosaic; yet, had he not possessed that characteristic, the products of his imagination would have lacked reality. They might still have enunciated a deep and sound philosophy; but they would have been divested of that human interest which belongs to them in a yet higher degree. All the little incidents of the neighborhood were to him important.