Wordsworth was one of the divinities at Stoke Newington, and just before Frank visited Fenmarket that week, he had heard the Intimations of Immortality read with great fervour. Thinking that Madge would be pleased with him if she found that he knew something about that famous Ode, and being really smitten with some of the passages in it, he learnt it, and just as they were about to turn homewards one sultry evening he suddenly began to repeat it, and declaimed it to the end with much rhetorical power.
‘Bravo!’ said Madge, ‘but, of all Wordsworth’s poems, that is the one for which I believe I care the least.’
Frank’s countenance fell.
‘Oh, me! I thought it was just what would suit you.’
‘No, not particularly. There are some noble lines in it; for example—
“And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!”
But the very title—Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood—is unmeaning to me, and as for the verse which is in everybody’s mouth—
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;”
and still worse the vision of “that immortal sea,” and of the children who “sport upon the shore,” they convey nothing whatever to me. I find though they are much admired by the clergy of the better sort, and by certain religiously-disposed people, to whom thinking is distasteful or impossible. Because they cannot definitely believe, they fling themselves with all the more fervour upon these cloudy Wordsworthian phrases, and imagine they see something solid in the coloured fog.’
It was now growing dark and a few heavy drops of rain began to fall, but in a minute or two they ceased. Frank, contrary to his usual wont, was silent. There was something undiscovered in Madge, a region which he had not visited and perhaps could not enter. She discerned in an instant what she had done, and in an instant repented. He had taken so much pains with a long piece of poetry for her sake: was not that better than agreement in a set of propositions? Scores of persons might think as she thought about the ode, who would not spend a moment in doing anything to gratify her. It was delightful also to reflect that Frank imagined she would sympathise with anything written in that temper. She recalled what she herself had said when somebody gave Clara a copy in ‘Parian’ of a Greek statue, a thing coarse in outline and vulgar. Clara was about to put it in a cupboard in the attic, but Madge had pleaded so pathetically that the donor had in a measure divined what her sister loved, and had done her best, although she had made a mistake, that finally the statue was placed on the bedroom mantelpiece. Madge’s heart overflowed, and Frank had never attracted her so powerfully as at that moment. She took his hand softly in hers.