The vapours linger round the Heights, But that I know, where'er I go, "FROM THE DARK CHAMBERS OF DEJECTION FREED" 1814. 1815 Composed in Edinburgh, during my Scotch tour with Mrs. Wordsworth and my sister Miss Hutchinson, in the year 1814. Poor Gillies never rose above that course of extravagance in which he was at that time living, and which soon reduced him to poverty and all its degrading shifts, mendicity being far from the worst. I grieve whenever I think of him, for he was far from being without genius, and had a generous heart, not always to be found in men given up to profusion. He was nephew of Lord Gillies the Scotch judge, and also of the historian of Greece. He was cousin to Miss Margaret Gillies, who painted so many portraits with success in our house. ARTEGAL AND ELIDURE (SEE THE CHRONICLE OF GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH AND MILTON'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND) This was written at Rydal Mount, as a token of affectionate respect for the memory of Milton. "I have determined," says he, in his preface to his History of England, "to bestow the telling over even of these reputed tales, be it for nothing else but in favour of our English Poets and Rhetoricians, who by their wit will know how to use them judiciously." WHERE be the temples which, in Britain's Isle, For his paternal Gods, the Trojan raised ? Gone like a morning dream, or like a pile Of clouds that in cerulean ether blazed! Ere Julius landed on her white-cliffed shore, They sank, delivered o'er To fatal dissolution; and, I ween, No vestige then was left that such had ever been. |