"[July] 30.[A]—Left London between five and six o'clock of the morning outside the Dover coach. A beautiful morning. The city, St. Paul's, with the river—a multitude of little boats, made a beautiful sight as we crossed Westminster Bridge; the houses not overhung by their clouds of smoke, and were hung out endlessly; yet the sun shone so brightly, with such a pure light, that there was something like the purity of one of Nature's own grand spectacles."
This sonnet underwent no change in successive editions.
In illustration of it, an anecdote of the late Bishop of St. David's may be given, as reported by Lord Coleridge.
"In the great debate on the abolition of the Irish Establishment in 1869, the Bishop of St. David's, Dr. Thirlwall, had made a very remarkable speech, and had been kept till past daybreak in the House of Lords, before the division was over, and he was able to walk home. He was then an old man, and in failing health. Some time after, he was asked whether he had not run some risk to his health, and whether he did not feel much exhausted. 'Yes,' he said, 'perhaps so; but I was more than repaid by walking out upon Westminster Bridge after the division, seeing London in the morning light as Wordsworth saw it, and repeating to myself his noble sonnet as I walked home.'"
This anecdote was told to the Wordsworth Society, at its meeting on the 3rd of May 1882, after a letter had been read by the Secretary, from Mr. Robert Spence Watson, recording the following similar experience:
"... As confirming the perfect truth of Wordsworth's description of the external aspects of a scene, and the way in which he reached its inmost soul, I may tell you what happened to me, and may have happened to many others. Many years ago, I think it was in 1859, I chanced to be passing (in a pained and depressed state of mind, occasioned by the death of a friend) over Waterloo Bridge at half-past three on a lovely June morning. It was broad daylight, and I was alone. Never when alone in the remotest recesses of the Alps, with nothing around me but the mountains, or upon the plains of Africa, alone with the wonderful glory of the southern night, have I seen anything to approach the solemnity—the soothing solemnity—of the city, sleeping under the early sun:
"How simply, yet how perfectly, Wordsworth has interpreted it! It was a happy thing for us that the Dover coach left at so untimely an hour. It was this sonnet, I think, that first opened my eyes to Wordsworth's greatness as a poet. Perhaps nothing that he has written shows more strikingly the vast sympathy which is his peculiar dower."'Earth has not any thing to show more fair.'
'Earth has not any thing to show more fair.'
Ed.
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