BY THE LATE SIR AUBREY DE VERE.
'What we beheld scarce can I now recall
In one connected picture; images
Hurrying so swiftly their fresh witcheries
O'er the mind's mirror, that the several
Seems lost, or blended in the mighty all.
Lone lakes; rills gushing through rock-rooted trees:
Peaked mountains shadowing vales of peacefulness:
Glens echoing to the flashing waterfall.
Then that sweet twilight isle! with friends delayed
Beside a ferny bank 'neath oaks and yews;
The moon between two mountain peaks embayed;
Heaven and the waters dyed with sunset hues:
And he, the Poet of the age and land,
Discoursing as we wandered hand in hand.'
The above-written sonnet is the record of a delightful day spent by my father in 1833 with Wordsworth at Rydal, to which he went from the still more beautiful shores of Ulswater, where he had been sojourning at Halsteads. He had been one of Wordsworth's warmest admirers, when their number was small, and in 1842 he dedicated a volume of poems to him.[273] He taught me when a boy of 18 years old to admire the great bard. I had been very enthusiastically praising Lord Byron's poetry. My father calmly replied, 'Wordsworth is the great poet of modern times.' Much surprised, I asked, 'And what may his special merits be?' The answer was, 'They are very various, as for instance, depth, largeness, elevation, and, what is rare in modern poetry, an entire purity. In his noble "Laodamia" they are chiefly majesty and pathos.' A few weeks afterwards I chanced to take from the library shelves a volume of Wordsworth, and it opened on 'Laodamia.' Some strong, calm hand seemed to have been laid on my head, and bound me to the spot, till I had come to the end. As I read, a new world, hitherto unimagined, opened itself out, stretching far away into serene infinitudes. The region was one to me unknown, but the harmony of the picture attested its reality. Above and around were indeed
'An ampler ether, a diviner air,
And fields invested with purpureal gleams;'
and when I reached the line,
'Calm pleasures there abide—majestic pains,'
I felt that no tenants less stately could walk in so lordly a precinct. I had been translated into another planet of song—one with larger movements and a longer year. A wider conception of poetry had become mine, and the Byronian enthusiasm fell from me like a bond that is broken by being outgrown. The incident illustrates poetry in one of its many characters, that of 'the deliverer.' The ready sympathies and inexperienced imagination of youth make it surrender itself easily despite its better aspirations, or in consequence of them, to a false greatness; and the true greatness, once revealed, sets it free. As early as 1824 Walter Savage Landor, in his 'Imaginary Conversation' between Southey and Porson, had pronounced Wordsworth's 'Laodamia' to be 'a composition such as Sophocles might have exulted to own, and a part of which might have been heard with shouts of rapture in the regions he describes'—the Elysian Fields.
Wordsworth frequently spoke of death, as if it were the taking of a new degree in the University of Life. 'I should like,' he remarked to a young lady, 'to visit Italy again before I move to another planet.' He sometimes made a mistake in assuming that others were equally philosophical. We were once breakfasting at the house of Mr. Rogers, when Wordsworth, after gazing attentively round the room with a benignant and complacent expression, turned to our host, and wishing to compliment him, said, 'Mr. Rogers, I never see this house, so perfect in its taste, so exquisite in all its arrangements, and decorated with such well-chosen pictures, without fancying it the very house imaged to himself by the Roman poet, when, in illustration of man's mortality, he says, "Linquenda est domus."' 'What is that you are saying?' replied Mr. Rogers, whose years, between eighty and ninety, had not improved his hearing. 'I was remarking that your house,' replied Wordsworth, 'always reminds me of the Ode (more properly called an Elegy, though doubtless the lyrical measure not unnaturally causes it to be included among Horace's Odes) in which the Roman poet writes "Linquenda est domus;" that is, since, ladies being present, a translation may be deemed desirable, The house is, or has to be, left; and again, "et placens uxor"—and the pleasing wife; though, as we must all regret, that part of the quotation is not applicable on the present occasion.' The Town Bard, on whom 'no angle smiled' more than the end of St. James's-place, did not enter into the views of the Bard of the Mountains. His answer was what children call 'making a great face,' and the ejaculation, 'Don't talk Latin in, the society of ladies.' When I was going away he remarked, 'What a stimulus the mountain air has on the appetite! I made a sign to Edmund to hand him the cutlets a second time. I was afraid he would stick his fork into that beautiful woman who sat next him.' Wordsworth never resented a jest at his own expense. Once when we had knocked three times in vain at the door of a London house, I exclaimed, quoting his sonnet written on Westminster-bridge,
'Dear God, the very houses seem asleep.'
He laughed heartily, then smiled gravely, and lastly recounted the occasion, and described the early morning on which that sonnet was written. He did not recite more than a part of it, to the accompaniment of distant cab and carriage; and I thought that the door was opened too soon.