Which sends so far its melancholy light,
Perhaps are seated in domestic ring
A gay society with faces bright,
Conversing, reading, laughing;—or they sing,
While hearts and voices in the song unite.
The light of the "Taper" referred to shone from Allan Bank; the "black recess of mountains" described the heights of Silver Howe, and Easdale, round to Helm Crag; the "lake below," which "reflected it not" (because of the distance of Allan Bank from the side of the mere), was, of course, Grasmere. Wordsworth is looking at this "lamp suddenly glaring through sepulchral damp," however, from the eastern side of the lake, perhaps from the neighbourhood of "The Wishing Gate." I am indebted to the Rev. W. A. Harrison, Vicar of St. Anne's, Lambeth, for the following note to this sonnet:—
'In the Sonnet No. xxiv., 'Poems of the Imagination,' [i.e. 'Miscellaneous Sonnets'] these lines occur:—
Even as a dragon's eye that feels the stress
Of a bedimming sleep, or as a lamp