In the first warmth of their original sunshine,
Loth should I be to use it: passing sweet
Are the domains of tender memory!
The spot described in this sequel to Lycoris is, I think, the bower in the rock on Nab Scar, alluded to in Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal (see note to The Waterfall and the Eglantine, vol. ii. p. 172). The description in that Journal, taken in connection with the text of this poem, warrants the suggestion that the "Friend" with whom he had "known such happy hours together" was his own sister Dorothy. The extreme probability that it was on Nab Scar that the snow patches lay, which were reflected in Rydal mere, and which his imagination transformed into the swans that carried Venus' car through heaven, adds to the likelihood of this conjecture. The following extracts from the Sister's journal may be compared with passages in the poem:—"We pushed on to the foot of the Scar. It was very grand when we looked up, very stony.... Coleridge went to search for something new. We saw him climbing up towards a rock. He called us, and we found him in a bower,—the sweetest that was ever seen. The rock on one side is very high, and all covered with ivy, which hung loosely about, and bore bunches of brown berries." With this compare—
Yon wild cave, whose jaggèd brows are fringed
With flaccid threads of ivy, in the still
And sultry air, depending motionless.
And with the following, "We looked down on the Ambleside vale, that seemed to wind away from us, the village lying under the hill," compare—
Mount toward the empire of the fickle clouds,
Each weary step, dwarfing the world below.