"'By force of sorrows high
Uplifted to the purest sky
Of undisturbed mortality.'
The point upon which the whole moral interest of the piece hinges, when that speech is closed, occurs in this line,—
"'He kissed the consecrated Maid;'
And to bring back this to the reader, I repeated the epithet."
In a letter to Wordsworth about The Waggoner, Charles Lamb wrote, June 7, 1819, "I re-read [The White Doe of Rylstone]; the title should be always written at length, as Mary Sabilla Novello, a very nice woman of our acquaintance, always signs hers at the bottom of the shortest note.... Manning had just sent it home, and it came as fresh to me as the immortal creature it speaks of. M. sent it home with a note, having this passage in it: 'I cannot help writing to you while I am reading Wordsworth's poem.... 'Tis broad, noble, poetical, with a masterly scanning of human actions, absolutely above common readers.'" (See The Letters of Charles Lamb, edited by Alfred Ainger, vol. ii. pp. 25, 26.)
Henry Crabb Robinson's judgment, as given in his Diary, June 1815, is interesting. (See vol. i. p. 484.)
The following is from Principal Shairp's estimate of [The White Doe of Rylstone] in his Oxford Lectures, Aspects of Poetry (chapter xii. pp. 373-76). "What is it that gives to it" (the poem) "its chief power and charm? Is it not the imaginative use which the poet has made of the White Doe? With her appearance the poem opens, with her re-appearance it closes. And the passages in which she is introduced are radiant with the purest light of poetry. A mere floating tradition she was, which the historian of Craven had preserved. How much does the poet bring out of how little! It was a high stroke of genius to seize on this slight traditionary incident, and make it the organ of so much. What were the objects which he had to describe and blend into one harmonious whole. They were these:
"1. The last expiring gleam of feudal chivalry, ending in the ruin of an ancient race, and the desolation of an ancestral home.
"2. The sole survivor, purified and exalted by the sufferings she had to undergo.
"3. The pathos of the decaying sanctities of Bolton, after wrong and outrage, abandoned to the healing of nature and time.