1831.

LVII.

The Trossachs.

For an account of this visit to Scotland, see note to Yarrow Revisited, and On the Departure of Sir Walter Scott. Wordsworth says that the remembrance of his recent farewell to Sir Walter Scott colored this and the two following sonnets. Wordsworth first saw the Trossachs in company with his sister and Coleridge. See Memorials of a Tour in Scotland, 1803.

In Sonnet LIV. we had the critical and the descriptive; here we have the moral and the descriptive.

Mr. Walter Bagehot cites this poem as an illustration of Wordsworth's purity of style.

See Stepping Westward, written on the same ground in 1803.

LVIII.

The Pibroch's Note.

The following is from Duncan MacIntyre's poem, Ben Doran ; it is fitted to the pibroch's tune:

Honor o'er all Bens

On Bendoran be!

Of all hills the sun kens,
Beautifullest he;

Mountain long and sweeping,

Nooks the red deer keeping,

Light on braesides sleeping;

There I've watched delightedly.

Translated by Professor SHAIRP.

LIX.

Highland Hut.

Wordsworth, the great poet of our times, has gone to common life, to the feelings of our universal nature, to the obscure and neglected portions of society, for beautiful and touching themes. The grand truth which pervades his poetry is that the beautiful is not confined to the rare, the new, the distant - to scenery and modes of life open only to the few. He is the poet of humanity; he teaches reverence

for our universal nature; he breaks down the factitious barriers between human hearts. - WM. E. CHANNING, D. D.

1833.

LX.

To the River Derwent.

Although this sonnet was written in 1819, Wordsworth republished it as introductory to the following tour.

In the summer of 1833 Wordsworth, accompanied by his son, the Rev. John Wordsworth, and Henry Crabb Robinson, made a short tour in Scotland. His course was down the Derwent to Whitehaven and the Isle of Man, thence to Staffa and Iona, returning to England by Loch Awe, through Ayrshire to Carlisle, and by the river Eden and Ullswater. This and the following four sonnets mark his route. The Derwent, the river of his youth, rises in Borrowdale near the Eagle's Crag.

See Prelude, i. 269–300; also note to The Sparrow's Nest, 1801.

LXI.

In Sight of the Town of Cockermouth.

Wordsworth's mother died in 1778 and his father in 1783; they were buried at Cockermouth.

See Sonnet LX. and references.

LXII.

Address from the Spirit of Cockermouth Castle.

Cockermouth Castle stands on an eminence not far from the manorhouse in which Wordsworth was born. It was built by the first lord of Allerdale, in the reign of William I., as a Border defence against Cumberland's old enemies, the Scots. It was captured by Douglas in 1387, and in 1568 was the prison of Mary Queen of Scots. It is one of the finest castle ruins in England.

See Sonnet LX., references; also Prelude, i. 269–287, and Historic Towns, Carlisle, chap. v. Cf. To a Butterfly.

LXIII.

Mary Queen of Scots.

Landing at the mouth of the Derwent, Workington.

Mary, in making her escape from Scotland after the battle at Langside, 1568, made a fruitless effort to reach Dumbarton, and then sought refuge in Galloway. After a ride of ninety miles she reached the Solway; then jumping into a fishing boat, with a handful of attendants she landed at Workington, and under escort of the Warden and gentry of Cockermouth before evening was safe in the Castle of Carlisle. See Historic Towns, Carlisle, chap. vii.

LXIV.

"There!' said the Stripling.

"It is remarkable," says Wordsworth, "that though Burns lived some time here, he nowhere adverts to the splendid prospects stretching towards the sea, and bounded by the peaks of Arran, which he must have had daily before his eyes. Soon after we had passed Mossgiel farm we crossed the Ayr murmuring and winding through a narrow woody hollow."

See Burns's Daisy.

LXV.

66 Most Sweet it is."

This sonnet reveals to us the method of the Poet's work, and if rightly understood will show us the grounds of his criticism upon Scott's method, which he considered as too conscious approaching Nature with pencil and note-book and jotting down an inventory of her charms. "In every scene," says Wordsworth, " many of the most brilliant details are but accidental; a true eye for Nature does not note them, or at least does not dwell on them." Matthew Arnold says: "This sonnet cannot be matched from Milton."

See Essays on Poetry, vol. ii. chap. xv., by Aubrey de Vere.

1837.

LXVI.

The Pine of Monte Mario, at Rome.

In March, 1837, Wordsworth, in company with his friend, Henry Crabb Robinson, visited Italy.

This pine had been bought by Sir George Beaumont to save it from the axe. Wordsworth says that he could not resist the temptation to embrace the trunk of this interesting monument of his friend's feelings for the beauties of Nature.

See Memoirs of Wordsworth.

1838.

LXVII.

Composed on a May morning, 1838.

This sonnet was composed upon the "Far Terrace at Rydal Mount, "where," says Wordsworth, "I have murmured out many thousands of verses."

Wordsworth's soul, "wedded to this goodly universe in love and holy passion," could find no sphere from which the divine life was excluded, no sphere where joy was not "in widest commonalty spread." It is this element in Wordsworth's work that makes it so uplifting.

LXVIII.

66 Blest Statesman He."

Cf. Character of the Happy Warrior.

The earth waits for exalted manhood.

1841.

EMERSON.

LXIX., LXX.

To a Painter.

Miss Margaret Gillies, the accomplished artist, was a friend of the Wordsworths, and often visited in the family. She painted several portraits of the Poet; the first was at the suggestion of Moon, the publisher, for the purpose of engraving. Wordsworth was so much pleased with it that he requested that it be reproduced, and Mrs. Wordsworth's added. It was to this portrait that these sonnets refer. See She was a Phantom of Delight.

1842.

LXXI.

"A Poet!"

He would be a very bold man who would assert that Wordsworth, when at his best, was not an artist in a very high degree, and yet in the writings of no other poet do we find so clearly illustrated the limits between poetry and verse. In both of his long poems we have poetry of as lofty character as our language can boast, and in the same poems we also meet passages of the plainest verse.

The subtle relation existing between the conscious and the unconscious elements in Art is a mystery; it is generally true, however, that as the one increases the other diminishes. Thus the prevalence of the one or the other of these tendencies conscious effect or lofty inspiration, spiritual disease or spiritual health, reason or faith-constitutes the ebb and flow in English poetry.

In the first part of this sonnet Wordsworth gives us something of the method of the poets of the Restoration, who, as Keats says, taught that to write poetry was

"to smooth, inlay, and clip and fit.

easy was the task,

A hundred handicraftsmen wore the mask

Of Poesy." 1

Of these writers Mr. Gosse says that for the direct appeal to Nature they substituted generalities and second-hand allusions, and the result of coining these conventional counters for groups of ideas was that the personal, the exact, was lost in literature.

It was against such a perversion of Art that Wordsworth did battle; he insisted that true Art was the product of the whole nature, intellect, sensibility, and will, aglow with a lofty spiritual imagination where "form is lost in the effulgence of the soul breathing through it." In that battle there was needed "the service of a mind and heart heroically fashioned."

Mr. Gosse again says that the poetry of these classical versemen received blow upon blow from the naturalistic poets, until by Wordsworth and Coleridge it was destroyed altogether.

1 Sleep and Poetry.