To many a secret place Where rivulets dance their wayward round, Reference has already been made to the power possessed by the family of floods over the minds of poets, old and young. Our poet finds a friend in every babbling brook; "he loves the brooks far better than the sage's books." "Fondly I pursued," he tells us, "even when a child, the streams, unheard, unseen." "They taught me random cares and truant joys, That shield from mischief and preserve from stains Vague minds, while men are growing out of boys." "The Derwent, fairest of all rivers, loved to Blend his murmurs with my nurse's song, And, from his alder shades and rocky falls, And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice That flowed along my dreams." Certain rivers will always be associated with the name of Wordsworth. Everybody knows those sweetest and tenderest of poems, the three poems to the River Yarrow, "Yarrow Stream! To dream-light dear while yet unseen, And dearer still, as now I feel, The sonnets to The River Duddon, though little known, are, indeed, refreshing when read on a summer day. They suggest what is cool, and sweet, and restful: you feel soft breezes; you hear glad bird-notes; you smell the delicate scent of wild flowers; you rejoice in green bowers and quivering sunbeams; you follow the smooth, glistening River "through dwarf willows gliding and by ferny brake; you linger under the shade of green alders and silver birch-trees. As you advance with the majestic Duddon, in its "radiant progress toward the Deep," you feel your heart joining in the Poet's prayer that you may be 1 "Prepared, in peace of heart, in calm of mind And soul, to mingle with Eternity;" you find your spirit attuned to the noble dignity of the concluding sonnet of the series : "I thought of Thee, my partner and my guide, Still glides the Stream, and shall forever glide; The Form remains; the Function never dies; While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise, We Men, who in our morn of youth defied The elements, must vanish;-be it so! Enough, if something from our hands have power To live, and act, and serve the future hour; And if, as toward the silent tomb we go, Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower, We feel that we are greater than we know." "Memorial Matthew Arnold, in his verses," says, "Keep fresh the grass upon his grave, Sing him thy best! for few or none Wordsworth repeatedly uses the figure of the stream, or brook, or lake. In the introductory sonnet to "Ecclesiastical Sonnets," he likens the Christian church to a Holy River, and follows the course of this Stream from its source, marking its progress through the centuries, until, in the closing sonnet of the series, he exclaims, "Look forth!-that Stream behold, That Stream upon whose bosom we have passed Floating at ease while nations have effaced Nations, and Death has gathered to his fold Long lines of mighty kings-look forth my Soul! (Nor in this vision be thou slow to trust) The living waters, less and less by guilt Stained and polluted, brighten as they roll, Till they have reached the eternal city-built For the perfected Spirits of the just!" In "The Prelude," the poet tells how, in that time of depression and bewilderment which followed the failure of the French Revolution, his beloved sister maintained for him a saving intercourse with his true self, "Now speaking in a voice Of sudden admonition-like a brook league." a In "The Excursion" the Solitary thus describes the grief of his young wife: "Calm as a frozen lake when ruthless winds Blow fiercely, agitating earth and sky, The Mother now remained." We find the same figure in the poem entitled "Memory." The serenity of old age, when the life has been pure and the conscience is clear, is compared to the calm of -"lakes that sleep In frosty moonlight glistening, Or mountain rivers, where they creep |