Unwearied in that service; rather say
With warmer love, oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods, and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear both for themselves and for thy sake!"
Was there something in "the shooting gleams of those wild eyes," which foretold that, like the lights of a fitful sky, they should flash and quickly disappear? The mind of that beloved sister has for many years gone, as it were, before her, and she lives on in a second infancy, carefully cherished in the poet's home.
Wordsworth, as I have observed, devoted himself to no profession but that of poetry. He followed the stream of life as it led him down the retired vale of poetic meditation, but not without, at times, being visited by fears of what the end might be. Of this he gives a graphic description in his poem of Resolution and Independence, the hero of which is the old leech gatherer.
"I heard the skylark warbling in the sky;