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Gentleman's Magazine 1851 part 2 p.114
foreign speech. They told us that we might sit in the
ferry-house till the return of the boat, went in with us,
and made a good fire as fast as possible to dry our wet
clothes. We were glad to be housed with our feet upon a warm
hearth-stone, and our attendants were so active and good
humoured that it was pleasant to have to desire them to do
anything. The elder made me think of Peter Bell's Highland
girl:-
As light and beauteous as a squirrel, As beauteous and as
wild."
In the next extract we find the genesis of a very
important portion of Wordsworth's poetry:-
"In the cottage of Town End, one afternoon in 1801, my
sister read to me the Sonnets of Milton. I had long been
well acquainted with them, but I was particularly struck on
that occasion with the dignified simplicity and majestic
harmony that runs through most of them - in character so
totally different from the Italian, and still more so from
Shakspeare's fine sonnets. I took fire, if I may be allowed
to say so, and produced three sonnets the same afternoon,
the first I ever wrote, except an irregular one at school.
Of these three the only one I distinctly remember is 'I
grieved for Bonaparte,' &c. one of the others was never
written down; the third, which was I believe preserved, I
cannot particularise."
And in a sentence or two from a letter of recollections of a
Tour in Italy in 1837, addressed to the editor by
Wordsworth's accomplished friend Mr. H. C. Robinson, we have
a glimpse of the manner in which objects of universal
interest brought to his mind absent objects dear to him:-
"When we were on that noble spot, the amphitheatre at
Nismes, I observed his eyes were fixed in a direction where
there was least to be seen; and, looking that way, I beheld
two very young children at play with flowers; and I
overheard him say to himself, 'Oh! you darlings, I wish I
could put you in my pocket and carry you to Rydal Mount."
With one more specimen of Mr. Wordsworth's studies we
must bring this portion of our extracts to a close -
"I have been often asked," writes Mr. Robinson, in the
letter from which we have just cited, "whether Mr. W. wrote
anything on the journey, and my answer has always been
'Little or nothing.' Seeds were cast into the earth, and
they took root slowly. This reminds me that I once was privy
to the conception of a sonnet, with a distinctness which did
not once occur on the longer Italian journey. This was when
I accompanied him into the Isle of Man. We had been drinking
tea with Mr. and Mrs. Cookson, and left them when the
weather was dull. Very soon after leaving them we passed the
church tower of Bala Sala. The upper part of the tower had a
sort of frieze of yellow lichens. Mr. W. pointed it out to
me and said 'It's a perpetual sunshine.' I thought no more
of it till I read the beautiful sonnet,
Broken in fortune, but in mind entire;
and then I exclaimed, I was present at the conception of
this sonnet, at least of the combination of thought out of
which it arose."
We have already observed Wordsworth's willingness to make
his own writings the subject of discourse and even piercing
disquisition. He was, however, a generous and even profound
critic of the works of others; and the following remarks are
at once valuable in themselves and characteristic of their
author. They are selected from many more of equal worth
which the reader will find in the sixty-third chapter of the
second volume. His observations upon Homer anticipate
briefly some of the most genial paragraphs in Colonel Mure's
recent history of Greek literature.
"The first book of Homer appears to be independent of the
rest. The character of Achilles seems to me one of the
grandest ever conceived. There is something awful in it,
particularly in the circumstance of his acting under an
abiding foresight of his own death. One day, conversing with
Payne Knight and Uvedale Price concerning Homer, I expressed
my admiration of Nestor's speech, as eminently natural,
where he tells the Greek leaders that they are mere
children in comparison with the heroes of old whom
he had known. 'But,' said Knight and Price, 'that
passage is spurious!' However, I will not part with it, it
is interesting to compare the same characters (Ajax, for
instance) as treated by Homer, and then afterwards by the
Greek dramatists, and to mark the difference of handling. In
the plays of Euripedes, politics come in as a disturbing
force; Homer's characters act on physical impulse. I admire
Virgil's high moral tone; for instance, that sublime 'Aude,
hospes, contemnere opes,' &c. and 'His dantem jura
Catonem!' What courage and independence of spirit is there!
There is
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