William Wordsworth

“ AMONG THE RUINS OF A CONVENT IN THE APENNINES
[The political revolutions of our time have multiplied, on the Continent, objects that unavoidably call forth reflections such as are expressed in these verses, but the Ruins in those countries are too recent to exhibit, in anything like an equal degree, the beauty with which time and nature have invested the remains of our Convents and Abbeys. These verses, it will be observed, take up the beauty long before it is matured, as one cannot but wish it may be among some of the desolations of Italy, France, and Germany.—I.F.]
Ye Trees! ”

“ Byron, Walter Scott, and in a lesser degree Thomas Moore, were the only writers of Great Britain whose works told on our literature at that time. Villemain, in his criticism of Byron, contemptuously dismisses all the so-called lake-poets to fix on his hero. He calls them: “Des métaphysiciens, raisonneurs sans invention, mélancoliques sans passion, qui, dans l’éternelle rêverie d’une vie étroite et peu agitée, n’avaient produit que des singularités sans puissance sur l’imagination des autres hommes. Tel était Woodsworth (sic) et le subtil mais non touchant Coléridge.” ”

“ Locked in our world’s embrace through weal and woe;
Thought that should teach the zealot to forego 5
Rash schemes, to abjure all selfish agitation,
And seek through noiseless pains and moderation
The unblemished good they only can bestow.
Alas! with most, who weigh futurity
Against time present, passion holds the scales: 10
Hence equal ignorance of both prevails,
And nations sink; or, struggling to be free,
Are doomed to flounder on, like wounded whales
Tossed on the bosom of a stormy sea.
[161] This date was omitted in the edition of 1842. ”

“ Wordsworth lui semblait plus grand que Byron, qu’il trouvait trop emphatique, trop solennel, pas assez près de la nature. L’auteur de l’Excursion a exercé une pénétrante influence sur l’esprit et le cœur de la Morvonnais, nous trouvons dans ses cahiers des traductions en vers de Wordsworth, de Coléridge, de Crabbe, qui, lui, ne faisait pas partie de ce groupe. Nous les publierons peut-être un jour; elles ont d’autant plus d’intérêt que l’on ne connaît guère les lakistes en France, que par de rares extraits. ”

“ These are followed by a few lines, some of which were afterwards used in The Prelude (see vol. iii. p. 269) :—
Shall he who gives his days to low pursuits,
Amid the undistinguishable crowd
Of cities, ’mid the same eternal flow
Of the same objects, melted and reduced
To one identity, by differences
That have no law, no meaning, and no end,
Shall he feel yearning to those lifeless forms,
And shall we think that Nature is less kind
To those, who all day long, through a long life,
Have walked within her sight? It cannot be. [224]
Mary Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, William Wordsworth. ”

“ But the Ode was intended for such readers only as had been accustomed to watch the flux and reflux of their inmost nature, to venture at times into the twilight realms of consciousness, and to feel a deep interest in modes of inmost being, to which they know that the attributes of time and space are inapplicable and alien, but which yet cannot be conveyed, save in symbols of time and space. ”

“ Since every mortal power of Coleridge 15
Was frozen at its marvellous source; [40]
The rapt One, of the godlike forehead, [41]
The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth:
And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle,
Has vanished from his lonely hearth. ”

“ My ideal in attempting to prepare a Bibliography of Wordsworth in America was high. I hoped to see each edition, or at least to identify the editions hinted at in the various catalogues. I determined to read every article, in criticism, or review; and to know if the many references, given by Poole and other authorities, were correct. As is usually the case, the reality has fallen far short of the ideal. ”

“ I know no other immediate proof of this influence. Perhaps Barbier and Brizeux have consigned it somewhere. Anyhow Brizeux with his glorification of his youthful years and school-time, with his intense love of his native Brittany, his fond attachment to local customs and habits, his lamentations on the death of the poetical poet as embodied in his own province (Élégie de la Bretagne) , is to all extent and purposes the most thoroughly Wordsworthian of all our poets. There may be more of Wordsworth’s philosophy in Lamartine, but there is more of his poetry proper in Brizeux. ”

“ I have endeavoured to include in this list every distinctive American edition of Wordsworth, published during the poet’s lifetime, and since his death. There are many others, issued with the imprints of honourable publishers; which, upon investigation, were found to be English reprints; to say nothing of those editions made from worn-out plates, and issued by houses of less reputation for honourableness. I was puzzled to account for so many editions of Matthew Arnold’s Selections, some of them bearing the imprint of Harper Brothers, some of Macmillan, and several of Crowell. ”

“ And the bitter decline of this glorious feeling, though many note it not, partly owing to the cares and weight of manhood, which leave them not the time nor the liberty to look for their lost treasure, and partly to the human and divine affections which are appointed to take its place, yet have formed the subject, not indeed of lamentation, but of holy thankfulness for the witness it bears to the immortal origin and end of our nature, to one whose authority is almost without appeal in all questions relating to the influence of external things upon the pure human soul. ”

“ Robert Perceval Graves, of Windermere, and afterwards of Dublin, wrote to me in 1850:—“I remember Mr. Wordsworth saying, that at a particular stage of his mental progress, he used to be frequently so rapt into an unreal transcendental world of ideas that the external world seemed no longer to exist in relation to him, and he had to reconvince himself of its existence by clasping a tree, or something that happened to be near him. ”

“ To that dream-like vividness and splendour which invest objects of sight in childhood, every one, I believe, if he would look [190] back, could bear testimony, and I need not dwell upon it here; but having in the poem regarded it as presumptive evidence of a prior state of existence, I think it right to protest against a conclusion, which has given pain to some good and pious persons, that I meant to inculcate such a belief. It is far too shadowy a notion to be recommended to faith, as more than an element in our instincts of immortality. ”

“ There was no copy of the Silex Scintillans in the Rydal Mount sale-catalogue. I believe that he had read The Retreate, and forgotten it more completely perhaps than Coleridge forgot Sir John Davies’ Orchestra, a Poem on Dancing, when he wrote The Ancient Mariner.
The following may be added from The Friend (the edition of 1818) , vol. i. p. 183:—“To find no contradiction in the union of old and new to contemplate the Ancient of Days with feelings as fresh as if they then sprang forth at his own fiat, this characterizes the minds that feel the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it! ”

“ Sight is at first sight a sad enemy to imagination and to those pleasures belonging to old times with which some exertions of that power will always mingle: nothing perhaps brings this truth home to the feelings more than the city of Rome ”

“ You are quite right, thought I, if the labour encroaches upon the time due to teach truth as a steward of the mysteries of God: if there be cause to fear that, write less: but, if poetry is to be produced at all, make what you do produce as good as you can. ”

“ Survive not Judgment that requires his own?
[202] “The sixth sonnet adverts to the effect of the law in preventing the crime of murder, not merely by fear, but by horror, by investing the crime itself with the colouring of dark and terrible imaginations.” ”

“ Light will be thrown upon the tragic circumstance alluded to in this poem when, after the death of Charles Lamb’s Sister, his biographer, Mr. Sergeant Talfourd, shall be at liberty to relate particulars which could not, at the time his Memoir was written, be given to the public. Mary Lamb was ten years older than her brother, and has survived him as long a time. Were I to give way to my own feelings, I should dwell not only on her genius and intellectual powers, but upon the delicacy and refinement of manner which she maintained inviolable under most trying circumstances. ”

“ Yet more, we wish that men by men despised,
And such as lift their foreheads overprized, 30
Should sometimes think, where’er they chance to spy
This child of Nature’s own humility,
What recompense is kept in store or left
For all that seem neglected or bereft ”

“ High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may, 150
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing; ”

“ It can never be, unless society treads back her steps towards those simplicities which have been banished by the undue influence of towns spreading and spreading in every direction, so that city-life with every generation takes more and more the lead of rural. Among the ancients, villages were reckoned the seats of barbarism. Refinement, for the most part false, increases the desire to [149] accumulate wealth; and while theories of political economy are boastfully pleading for the practice, inhumanity pervades all our dealings in buying and selling. ”

“ To praise great and good men has ever been deemed one of the worthiest employments of poetry, [76] but the objects of admiration vary so much with time and circumstances, and the noblest of mankind have been found, when intimately known, to be of characters so imperfect, that no eulogist can find a subject which he will venture upon with the animation necessary to create sympathy, unless he confines himself to a particular part or he takes something of a one-sided view of the person he is disposed to celebrate. ”

“ This is a melancholy truth, and affords a strong reason for the poetic mind being chiefly exercised in works of fiction: the poet can then follow wherever the spirit of admiration leads him, unchecked by such suggestions as will be too apt to cross his way if all that he is prompted to utter is to be tested by fact. Something in this spirit I have written in the note attached to the Sonnet on the King of Sweden ”

“ Why art thou silent? Is thy love a plant
Of such weak fibre that the treacherous air
Of absence withers what was once so fair? ”

“ Writing from Rydal on 11th August 1841, to his brother Christopher, Wordsworth said, “I send you with the last corrections an epitaph which I have just written for poor Owen Lloyd. His brother Edward forwarded for my perusal some verses which he had composed with a view to that object; but he expressed a wish that I would compose something myself. Not approving Edward’s lines altogether, though the sentiments were sufficiently appropriate, I sent him what I now forward to you, or rather the substance of it, for something has been added, and some change of expression introduced. ”

“ One solace yet remains for us who came 10
Into this world in days when story lacked
Severe research, that in our hearts we know
How, for exciting youth’s heroic flame,
Assent is power, belief the soul of fact. ”

“ Writing to Sir George Beaumont, on Christmas Day, 1804, Wordsworth said: [259] “We have lately built in our little rocky orchard a circular hut, lined with moss, like a wren’s nest, and coated on the outside with heath, that stands most charmingly, with several views from the different sides of it, of the Lake, the Valley, and the Church.... I will copy a dwarf inscription which I wrote for it” (i.e. the circular hut, in his Orchard-Garden) “the other day before the building was entirely finished, which indeed it is not yet.” ”

“ Small service is true service while it lasts:
Of humblest Friends, bright Creature! scorn not one! [9]
The Daisy, by the shadow that it casts,
Protects the lingering dew-drop from the Sun. ”

“ Trade, commerce, and manufactures, physical science, and mechanic arts, out of which so much wealth has arisen, have made our countrymen infinitely less sensible to movements of imagination and fancy than were our forefathers in their simple state of society. ”

“ Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.
This thought Wordsworth owed, consciously or unconsciously, to Plato. Though he tells us in the Fenwick note that he did not mean to inculcate the belief, there is no doubt that he clung to the notion of a life pre-existing the present, on grounds similar to those on which he believed in a life to come. ”

“ No longer steel their indurated hearts
To the mild influence of the finer arts; 60
Quick to the secret grotto they retire
To court majestic truth, or wake the golden lyre;
By generous Emulation taught to rise,
The seats of learning brave the distant skies.
Then noble Sandys, inspir’d with great design, 65
Rear’d Hawkshead’s happy roof, and call’d it mine ”

“ The Pet Lamb appeared in this Book almost immediately after its publication in England. It was the first poem of Wordsworth’s published in a book in America. It was also the first instance of the introduction of a poem of Wordsworth’s into a School Book.
C. M. St. John.
[480] The first American edition, and the first work by Wordsworth, printed in America. It looks as if the Poet found appreciative readers in America sooner than in England; the first edition of “Lyrical Ballads,” which had fallen dead in his own country in 1798, being published in Philadelphia in 1802. ”

“ How does the Meadow-flower its bloom unfold?
Because the lovely little flower is free 10
Down to its root, and, in that freedom, bold; ”

“ where the Moon along the sky
Sails with her happy destiny; [164] [89]
Oft is she hid from mortal eye
Or dimly seen,
But when the clouds asunder fly 5
How bright her mien! [165]
Far different we—a froward race, [166]
Thousands though rich in Fortune’s grace
With cherished sullenness of pace
Their way pursue, 10
Ingrates who wear a smileless face
The whole year through.
If kindred humours e’er would make [167]
My spirit droop for drooping’s sake,
From Fancy following in thy wake, 15
Bright ship of heaven!
A counter impulse let me take
And be forgiven. ”

“ The fact that the introduction of Wordsworth’s poetry into America is so easily authenticated, and that the history of it is so concise, is my apology for deviating from ordinary bibliographical rule in including among the regular editions certain numbers of America’s first Literary Journal, and two or three other volumes. ”

“ George, in Boston, for his edition of The Prelude (in which, if the reader, or critic, compares my original edition with his notes, he will see what Mr. George has done) ; and to Professor Dowden, Trinity College, Dublin, for his most admirable Aldine edition. For the latter—which will always hold a high place in Wordsworth literature—I placed everything asked from me at the disposal of Mr. Dowden. ”