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his creditors, and he being, as he observed, free to begin life again, with the advantage of being once more a bachelor. He was such a good-natured, free- hearted fellow, that every body liked him, even his creditors. His wife's relations made up the sum of five hundred pounds for him, and his brother offered to take him into his firm as partner; but O'Mooney preferred, he said, going to try, or rather to make, his fortune in England, as he did not doubt but he should by marriage, being, as he did not scruple to acknowledge, a personable, clever-looking man, and a great favourite with the sex.2

"My last wife I married for love, my next I expect will do the same by me, and of course the money must come on her side this time," said our hero, half jesting, half in earnest. His elder and wiser brother, the merchant, whom he still held in more than sufficient contempt, ventured to hint some slight objections to this scheme of Phelim's seeking fortune in England. He observed that so many had gone upon this plan already, that there was rather a prejudice in England against Irish adventurers.

This could not affect him any ways, Phelim replied, because he did not mean to appear in England as an Irishman at all.

"How then?"

"As an Englishman, since that is most agreeable."

"How can that be?"

"Who should hinder it?"

His brother, hesitatingly, said "Yourself."

"Myself !-�What part of myself? Is it my tongue?�You'll acknowledge, brother, that I do not speak with the brogue."

It was true that Phelim did not speak with any Irish brogue: his mother was an English woman, and he had lived much with English officers in Cork, and he had studied and imitated their manner of speaking so successfully, that no one, merely by his accent, could have guessed that he was an Irishman.

"Hey! brother, I say!" continued Phelim, in a triumphant English tone; "I never was taken for an Irishman in my life. Colonel Broadman told me the other day, I spoke English better than the English themselves; that he should take me for an Englishman, in any part of the known world, the moment I opened my lips. You must allow that not the smallest particle of brogue is discernible on my tongue."

His brother allowed that not the smallest particle of brogue was to be discerned upon Phelim's tongue, but feared that some Irish idiom might be perceived in his conversation. And then the name of O'Mooney!

"Oh, as to that, I need not trouble an act of parliament, or even a king's letter, just to change my name for a season; at the worst, I can travel and appear incognito."

"Always?"

"No: only just till I'm upon good terms with the lady�Mrs. Phelim O'Mooney, that is to be, God willing. Never fear, nor shake your head, brother; you men of business are out of this line, and not proper judges: I beg your pardon for saying so, but as you are my own brother, and nobody by, you'll excuse me."

His brother did excuse him, but continued silent for some minutes; he was

pondering upon the means of persuading Phelim to give up this scheme.

"I would lay you any wager, my dear Phelim," said he, "that you could not

continue four days in England incognito."

2. Women.

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"Done!" cried Phelim. "Done for a hundred pounds; done for a thousand pounds, and welcome."

"But if you lose, how will you pay?"

"Faith! that's the last thing I thought of, being sure of winning."

"Then you will not object to any mode of payment I shall propose."

"None: only remembering always, that I was bankrupt last week, and shall be little better till I'm married; but then I'll pay you honestly if I lose."

"No,- if you lose I must be paid before that time, my good sir," said his brother, laughing. "My bet is this:�I will lay you one hundred guineas that you do not remain four days in England incognito; be upon honour with me, and promise, that if you lose, you will, instead of laying down a hundred guineas, come back immediately, and settle quietly again to business."

The word business was always odious to our hero's proud ears; but he thought himself so secure of winning his wager, that he willingly bound himself in a penalty which he believed would never become due; and his generous brother, at parting, made the bet still more favourable, by allowing that Phelim should not be deemed the loser unless he was, in the course of the first four days after he touched English ground, detected eight times in being an Irishman.

"Eight times !" cried Phelim. "Good bye to a hundred guineas, brother, you may say."

"You may say," echoed his brother, and so they parted.

Mr. Phelim O'Mooney the next morning sailed from Cork harbour with a prosperous gale, and with a confidence in his own success which supplied the place of auspicious omens. He embarked at Cork, to go by long sea to London, and was driven into Deal, where Julius Cesar once landed before him, and with the same resolution to see and conquer.3 It was early in the morning; having been very sea-sick, he was impatient, as soon as he got into the inn, for his breakfast: he was shown into a room where three ladies were waiting to go by the stage; his air of easy confidence was the best possible introduction.

"Would any of the company choose eggs?" said the waiter.

"I never touch an egg for my share," said O'Mooney, carelessly; he knew that it was supposed to be an Irish custom to eat eggs at breakfast; and when the malicious waiter afterwards set a plate full of eggs in salt upon the table, our hero magnanimously abstained from them; he even laughed heartily at a story told by one of the ladies of an Hibernian at Buxton, who declared that "no English hen ever laid a fresh egg."

O'Mooney got through breakfast much to his own satisfaction, and to that of the ladies, whom he had taken a proper occasion to call the three graces,4 and whom he had informed that he was an old baronet of an English family, and that his name was Sir John Bull. The youngest of the graces civilly observed, "that whatever else he might he, she should never have taken him for an old baronet." The lady who made this speech was pretty, but O'Mooney had penetration enough to discover, in the course of the conversation, that she and her companions were far from being divinities; his three graces were a greengrocer's wife, a tallow chandler's widow, and a milliner. When he found that these ladies were likely to be his companions if he were to travel

3. The Roman expeditionary force that invaded how he "came, saw, and conquered." Britain in 55 B.C.E. landed in the southeast in the 4. A flowery compliment: in classical mythology vicinity of the modem-day port of Deal. A later vic-the three graces are sister goddesses who bestow tory in Asia Minor occasioned Caesar's boast about beauty and charm.

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in the coach, he changed his plan, and ordered a post-chaise and four.

O'Mooney was not in danger of making any vulgar Irish blunders in paying his bill at an inn. No landlord or waiter could have suspected him, especially as he always left them to settle the matter first, and then looked over the bill and money with a careless gentility, saying, "Very right," or, "Very well, sir"; wisely calculating, that it was better to lose a few shillings on the road, than to lose a hundred pounds by the risk of Hibernian miscalculation.

Whilst the chaise was getting ready he went to the custom-house to look after his baggage. He found a red-hot countryman of his own there, roaring about four and fourpence, and fighting the battle of his trunks, in which he was ready to make affidavit there was not, nor never had been, any thing contraband; and when the custom-house officer replied by pulling out of one of them a piece of Irish poplin, the Hibernian fell immediately upon the Union, which he swore was Disunion, as the custom-house officers managed it. Sir John Bull appeared to much advantage all this time, maintaining a dignified silence; from his quiet appearance and deportment, the custom-house officers took it for granted that he was an Englishman. He was in no hurry; he begged that gentleman's business might be settled first; he would wait the officer's leisure, and as he spoke he played so dexterously with half-a-guinea between his fingers, as to make it visible only where he wished. The custom-house officer was his humble servant immediately; but the Hibernian would have been his enemy, if he had not conciliated him by observing, "that even Englishmen must allow there was something very like a bull in professing to make a complete identification of the two kingdoms, whilst, at the same time, certain regulations continued in full force to divide the countries by art, even more than the British channel does by nature."

Sir John talked so plausibly, and, above all, so candidly and coolly on Irish and English politics, that the custom-house officer conversed with him for a quarter of an hour without guessing of what country he was, till in an unlucky moment Phelim's heart got the better of his head. Joining in the praises bestowed by all parties on the conduct of a distinguished patriot of his country, he, in the height of his enthusiasm, inadvertently called him the Speaker.

"The S-peaker!" said the officer. "Yes, the Speaker�our Speaker" cried Phelim, with exultation.5 He was not aware how he had betrayed himself, till the officer smiled and said�

"Sir, I really never should have found out that you were an Irishman but from the manner in which you named your countryman, who is as highly thought of by all parties in this country as in yours: your enthusiasm does honour to your heart."

"And to my head, I'm sure," said our hero, laughing with the best grace imaginable. "Well, I am glad you have found me out in this manner, though I lose the eighth part of a bet of a hundred guineas by it."

He explained the wager, and begged the custom-house officer to keep his secret, which he promised to do faithfully, and assured him, "that he should be happy to do any thing in his power to serve him." Whilst he was uttering these last words, there came in a snug, but soft-looking Englishman, who opining from the words "happy to do any thing in my power to serve you," that O'Mooney was a friend of the custom-house officer's, and encouraged by

5. John Foster, Baron Oriel, the last man to serve as speaker in the Irish House of Commons, before its abolition by the Act of Union in 1801.

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something affable and good-natured in our hero's countenance, crept up to him, and whispered a request�"Could you tell a body, sir, how to get out of the custom-house a very valuable box of Sevre china that has been laying in the custom-house three weeks, and which I was commissioned to get out if I could, and bring up to town for a lady."

As a lady was in the case, O'Mooney's gallantry instantly made his good- nature effective. The box of Sevre china was produced, and opened only as a matter of form, and only as a matter of curiosity its contents were examined�a beautiful set of Sevre china and a pendule, said to have belonged to M. Egalite!6 "These things must be intended," said Phelim, "for some lady of superior taste or fortune."

As Phelim was a proficient in the Socratic art of putting judicious interrogatories, he was soon happily master of the principal points it concerned him to know: he learnt that the lady was rich�a spinster�of full age�at her own disposal�living with a single female companion at Blackheath7�furnishing a house there in a superior style�had two carriages�her Christian name Mary�her surname Sharperson.

O'Mooney, by the blessing of God, it shall soon be, thought Phelim. He politely offered the Englishman a place in his chaise for himself and Sevre china, as it was for a lady, and would run great hazard in the stage, which besides was full. Mr. Queasy, for that was our soft Englishman's name, was astonished by our hero's condescension and affability, especially as he heard him called Sir John: he bowed sundry times as low as the fear of losing his wig would permit, and accepted the polite offer with many thanks for himself and the lady concerned.

Sir John Bull's chaise and four was soon ready and Queasy seated in the corner of it, and the Sevre china safely stowed between his knees. Captain Murray, a Scotch officer, was standing at the inn door, with his eyes intently fixed on the letters that were worked in nails on the top of Sir John's trunk; the letters were P. O'M. Our hero, whose eyes were at least as quick as the Scotchman's, was alarmed lest this should lead to a second detection. He called instantly, with his usual presence of mind, to the ostler, and desired him to uncord that trunk, as it was not to go with him; raising his voice loud enough for all the yard to hear, he added�"It is not mine at all; it belongs to my friend, Mr. O'Mooney: let it be sent after me, at leisure, by the waggon, as directed, to the care of Sir John Bull."

Our hero was now giving his invention a prodigious quantity of superfluous trouble; and upon this occasion, as upon most others, he was more in danger from excess than deficiency of ingenuity: he was like the man in the fairy tale, who was obliged to tie his legs lest he should outrun the object of which he was in pursuit. The Scotch officer, though his eyes were fixed on the letters

P. O'M., had none of the suspicions which Phelim was counteracting; he was only considering how he could ask for the third place in Sir John's chaise during the next stage, as he was in great haste to get to town upon particular business, and there were no other horses at the inn. When he heard that the heavy baggage was to go by the waggon, he took courage, and made his request. 6. Cousin to King Louis XVI and himself in line from the guillotine. The Duke's Sevre�expensive for the throne of France, Philippe, Duke of porcelain manufactured near Paris�and pendule, Orleans (1747�1793) assumed the surname Egal-a pendulum clock, appear to have come on the ite ("Equality") as testimony of his support for the market following his execution. Revolution. The name change did not save him 7. District of London.

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It was instantly granted by the good-natured Hibernian, who showed as much hospitality about his chaise as if it had been his house. Away they drove as fast as they could. Fresh dangers awaited him at the next inn. He left his hat upon the table in the hall whilst he went into the parlour, and when he returned, he heard some person inquiring what Irish gentleman was there. Our hero was terribly alarmed, for he saw that his hat was in the inquirer's hand, and he recollected that the name of Phelim O'Mooney was written in it. This the inquisitive gentleman did not see, for it was written in no very legible characters on the leather withinside of the front; but "F. Guest, hatter, Dame-street, Dublin," was a printed advertisement that could not be mistaken, and that was pasted within the crown. O'Mooney's presence of mind did not forsake him upon this emergency.

"My good sir," said he, turning to Queasy, who, without hearing one word of what was passing, was coming out of the parlour, with his own hat and gloves in his hand; "My good sir," continued he, loading him with parcels, "will you have the goodness to see these put into my carriage? I'll take care of your hat and gloves," added O'Mooney in a low voice. Queasy surrendered his hat and gloves instantly, unknowing wherefore; then squeezed forward with his load through the crowd, crying�"Waiter! hostler! pray, somebody put these into Sir John Bull's chaise."

Sir John Bull, equipped with Queasy's hat, marched deliberately through the defile, bowing with the air of at least an English county member8 to this side and to that, as way was made for him to his carriage. No one suspected that the hat did not belong to him; no one, indeed, thought of the hat, for all eyes were fixed upon the man. Seated in the carriage, he threw money to the waiter, hostler, and boots, and drew up the glass, bidding the postilions drive on. By this cool self-possession our hero effected his retreat with successful generalship, leaving his new Dublin beaver behind him, without regret, as bona waviata.9 Queasy, before whose eyes things passed continually without his seeing them, thanked Sir John for the care he had taken of his hat, drew on his gloves, and calculated aloud how long they should be going to the next stage. At the first town they passed through, O'Mooney bought a new hat, and Queasy deplored the unaccountable mistake by which Sir John's hat had been forgotten. No further mistakes happened upon the journey. The travellers rattled on, and neither 'stinted nor stayed'1 till they arrived at Blackheath, at Miss Sharperson's. Sir John sat Queasy down without having given him the least hint of his designs upon the lady; but as he helped him out with the Sevre china, he looked through the large opening double doors of the hall, and slightly said�"Upon my word, this seems to be a handsome house: it would be worth looking at, if the family were not at home."

"I am morally sure, Sir John," said the soft Queasy, "that Miss Sharperson would be happy to let you see the house to-night, and this minute, if she knew you were at the door, and who you were, and all your civility about me and the china.�Do, pray, walk in."

"Not for the world: a gentleman could not do such a thing without an invitation from the lady of the house herself."

8. One of the members of Parliament who repre-red-handed. It is applied here to the hero's sented the counties of England. "beaver," a type of hat made from beaver's fur. 9. Bona ivaviata is a Latin term applied in law to 1. I.e., by not stinting on money or food for the stolen goods that have been thrown away by their horses, they avoided any delay (stay). thief, who would rather lose them than be caught

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"Oh, if that's all, I'll step up myself to the young lady; I'm certain she'll be proud�"

"Mr. Queasy, by no means; I would not have the lady disturbed for the world at this unseasonable hour.�It is too late�quite too late."

"Not at all, begging pardon, Sir John," said Queasy, taking out his watch: "only just tea-time by me.�Not at all unseasonable for any body; besides, the message is of my own head:�all, you know, if not well taken�"

Up the great staircase he made bold to go on his mission, as he thought, in defiance of Sir John's better judgment. He returned in a few minutes with a face of self-complacent exultation, and Miss Sharperson's compliments, and begs Sir John Bull will walk up and rest himself with a dish of tea, and has her thanks to him for the china.

Now Queasy, who had the highest possible opinion of Sir John Bull and of Miss Sharperson, whom he thought the two people of the greatest consequence and affability, had formed the notion that they were made for each other, and that it must be a match if they could but meet. The meeting he had now happily contrived and effected; and he had done his part for his friend Sir John, with Miss Sharperson, by as many exaggerations as he could utter in five minutes, concerning his perdigious politeness and courage, his fine person and carriage, his ancient family, and vast connections and importance wherever he appeared on the road, at inns, and over all England. He had previously, during the journey, done his part for his friend Miss Sharperson with Sir John, by stating that "she had a large fortune left her by her mother, and was to have twice as much from her grandmother; that she had thousands upon thousands in the funds, and an estate of two thousand a year, called Rascally, in Scotland, besides plate and jewels without end."

Thus prepared, how could this lady and gentleman meet without falling desperately in love with each other!

Though a servant in handsome livery appeared ready to show Sir John up the great staircase, Mr. Queasy acted as a gentleman usher, or rather as showman. He nodded to Sir John as they passed across a long gallery and through an ante-chamber, threw open the doors of various apartments as he went along, crying�"Peep in! peep in! peep in here! peep in there!�Is not this spacious? Is not this elegant? Is not that grand? Did I say too much?" continued he, rubbing his hands with delight. "Did you ever see so magnificent and such highly-polished steel grates out of Lon'on?"

Sir John, conscious that the servant's eyes were upon him, smiled at this question, "looked superior down;" and though with reluctant complaisance he leaned his body to this side or to that, as Queasy pulled or swayed, yet he appeared totally regardless of the man's vulgar reflections. He had seen every thing as he passed, and was surprised at all he saw; but he evinced not the slightest symptom of astonishment. He was now ushered into a spacious, well lighted apartment: he entered with the easy, unembarrassed air of a man who was perfectly accustomed to such a home. His quick coup-d'oeil took in the whole at a single glance. Two magnificent candelabras stood on Egyptian tables2 at the farther end of the room, and the lights were reflected on all sides from mirrors of no common size. Nothing seemed worthy to attract our hero's attention but the lady of the house, whom he approached with an air of dis

2. Following the victory of the British Fleet against the French at the Battle of the Nile (1798), furnishings in an Egyptian style were the height of fashion.

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tinguished respect. She was reclining on a Turkish sofa, her companion seated beside her, tuning a harp. Miss Sharperson half rose to receive Sir John: he paid his compliments with an easy, yet respectful air. He was thanked for his civilities to the person who had been commissioned to bring the box of Sevre china from Deal.

"Vastly sorry it should have been so troublesome," Miss Sharperson said, in a voice fashionably unintelligible, and with a most becoming yet intimidating nonchalance of manner. Intimidating it might have been to any man but our hero; he, who had the happy talent of catching, wherever he went, the reigning manner of the place, replied to the lady in equal strains; and she, in her turn, seemed to look upon him more as her equal. Tea and coffee were served. Nothings were talked of quite easily by Sir John. He practised the art "not to admire," so as to give a justly high opinion of his taste, consequence, and knowledge of the world. Miss Sharperson, though her nonchalance was much diminished, continued to maintain a certain dignified reserve; whilst her companion, Miss Felicia Flat, condescended to ask Sir John, who had doubtless seen every fine house in England and on the continent, his opinion with respect to the furniture and finishing of the room, the placing of the Egyptian tables and the candelabras.

No mortal could have guessed by Sir John Bull's air, when he heard this question, that he had never seen a candelabra before in his life. He was so much, and yet seemingly so little upon his guard, he dealt so dexterously in generals, and evaded particulars so delicately, that he went through this dangerous conversation triumphantly. Careful not to protract his visit beyond the bounds of propriety, he soon rose to take leave, and he mingled "intrusion, regret, late hour, happiness, and honour," so charmingly in his parting compliment, as to leave the most favourable impression on the minds of both the ladies, and to procure for himself an invitation to see the house next morning.

The first day was now ended, and our hero had been detected but once. He went to rest this night well satisfied with himself, but much more occupied with the hopes of marrying the heiress of Rascally than of winning a paltry bet.

The next day he waited upon the ladies in high spirits. Neither of them was visible, but Mr. Queasy had orders to show him the house, which he did with much exultation, dwelling particularly in his praises on the beautiful high polish of the steel grates. Queasy boasted that it was he who had recommended the ironmonger who furnished the house in that line; and that his bill, as he was proud to state, amounted to many, many hundreds. Sir John, who did not attend to one word Queasy said, went to examine the map of the Rascally estate, which was unrolled, and he had leisure to count the number of lords' and ladies' visiting tickets3 which lay upon the chimney-piece. He saw names of the people of first quality and respectability: it was plain that Miss Sharperson must be a lady of high family as well as large fortune, else she would not be visited by persons of such distinction. Our hero's passion for her increased every moment. Her companion, Miss Flat, now appeared, and entered very freely into conversation with Sir John; and as he perceived that she was commissioned to sit in judgment upon him, he evaded all her leading questions with the skill of an Irish witness, but without giving any Hibernian answers. She was fairly at a fault. Miss Sharperson at length appeared, ele

3. The cards left by the people paying social calls on Miss Sharperson.

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gantly dressed; her person was genteel, and her face rather pretty. Sir John, at this instant, thought her beautiful, or seemed to think so. The ladies interchanged looks, and afterwards Sir John found a softness in his fair one's manner, a languishing tenderness in her eyes, in the tone of her voice, and at the same time a modest perplexity and reserve about her, which altogether persuaded him that he was quite right, and his brother quite wrong en fait d'amour.4 Miss Flat appeared now to have the most self-possession of the three,- and Miss Sharperson looked at her, from time to time, as if she asked leave to be in love. Sir John's visit lasted a full half hour before he was sensible of having been five minutes engaged in this delightful conversation.

Miss Sharperson's coach now came to the door: he handed her into it, and she gave him a parting look, which satisfied him all was yet safe in her heart. Miss Flat, as he handed her into the carriage, said, "Perhaps they should meet Sir John at Tunbridge,5 where they were going in a few days." She added some words as she seated herself, which he scarcely noticed at the time, but they recurred afterwards disagreeably to his memory. The words were, "I'm so glad we've a roomy coach, for of all things it annoys me to be squeedged in a carriage."

This word squeedged, as he had not been used to it in Ireland, sounded to him extremely vulgar, and gave him suspicions of the most painful nature. He had the precaution, before he left Blackheath, to go into several shops, and to inquire something more concerning his fair ladies. All he heard was much to their advantage; that is, much to the advantage of Miss Sharperson's fortune. All agreed that she was a rich Scotch heiress. A rich Scotch heiress, Sir John wisely considered, might have an humble companion who spoke bad English. He concluded that squeedged was Scotch, blamed himself for his suspicions, and was more in love with his mistress and with himself than ever. As he returned to town, he framed the outline of a triumphant letter to his brother on his approaching marriage. The bet was a matter, at present, totally beneath his consideration. However, we must do him the justice to say, that like a man of honour he resolved that, as soon as he had won the lady's heart, he would candidly tell her his circumstances, and then leave her the choice either to marry him or break her heart, as she pleased. Just as he had formed this generous resolution, at a sudden turn of the road he overtook Miss Sharper- son's coach: he bowed and looked in as he passed, when, to his astonishment, he saw, squeedged up in the corner by Miss Felicia, Mr. Queasy. He thought that this was a blunder in etiquette that would never have been made in Ireland. Perhaps his mistress was of the same opinion, for she hastily pulled down the blind as Sir John passed. A cold qualm came over the lover's heart. He lost no time in idle doubts and suspicions, but galloped on to town as fast as he could, and went immediately to call upon the Scotch officer with whom he had travelled, and whom he knew to be keen and prudent. He recollected the map of the Rascally estate, which he saw in Miss Sharperson's breakfast-room, and he remembered that the lands were said to lie in that part of Scotland from which Captain Murray came; from him he resolved to inquire into the state of the premises, before he should offer himself as tenant for life. Captain Murray assured him that there was no such place as Rascally in that part of Scotland; that he had never heard of any such person as Miss Sharperson,

4. In matters concerning love (French). 5. Tunbridge Wells, a fashionable spa town in southeast England.

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though he was acquainted with every family and every estate in the neighbourhood where she fabled hers to be. O'Mooney drew, from memory, the map of the Rascally estate. Captain Murray examined the boundaries, and assured him that his cousin the general's lands joined his own at the very spot which he described, and that unless two straight lines could enclose a space, the Rascally estate could not be found.

Sir John, naturally of a warm temper, proceeded, however, with prudence. The Scotch officer admired his sagacity in detecting this adventurer. Sir John waited at his hotel for Queasy, who had promised to call to let him know when the ladies would go to Tunbridge. Queasy came. Nothing could equal his astonishment and dismay when he was told the news.

"No such place as the Rascally estate! Then I'm an undone man! an undone man!" cried poor Queasy, bursting into tears: "but I'm certain it's impossible; and you'll find, Sir John, you've been misinformed. I would stake my life upon it, Miss Sharperson's a rich heiress, and has a rich grandmother. Why, she's five hundred pounds in my debt, and I know of her being thousands and thousands in the books of as good men as myself, to whom I've recommended her, which I wouldn't have done for my life if I had not known her to be solid. You'll find she'll prove a rich heiress, Sir John."

Sir John hoped so, but the proofs were not yet satisfactory. Queasy determined to inquire about her payments to certain creditors at Blackheath, and promised to give a decisive answer in the morning. O'Mooney saw that this man was too great a fool to be a knave; his perturbation was evidently the perturbation of a dupe, not of an accomplice: Queasy was made to "be an anvil, not a hammer."6 In the midst of his own disappointment, our good- natured Hibernian really pitied this poor currier.7

The next morning Sir John went early to Blackheath. All was confusion at Miss Sharperson's house; the steps covered with grates and furniture of all sorts; porters carrying out looking-glasses, Egyptian tables, and candelabras; the noise of workmen was heard in every apartment; and louder than all the rest, O'Mooney heard the curses that were denounced against his rich heiress� curses such as are bestowed on a swindler in the moment of detection by the tradesmen whom she has ruined.

Our hero, who was of a most happy temper, congratulated himself upon having, by his own wit and prudence, escaped making the practical bull of marrying a female swindler.

Now that Phelim's immediate hopes of marrying a rich heiress were over, his bet with his brother appeared to him of more consequence, and he rejoiced in the reflection that this was the third day he had spent in England, and that he had but once been detected.�The ides of March8 were come, but not passed!

"My lads," said he to the workmen, who were busy in carrying out the furniture from Miss Sharperson's house, "all hands are at work, I see, in saving what they can from the wreck of the Sharperson. She was as well-fitted out a vessel, and in as gallant trim, as any ship upon the face of the earth."

"Ship upon the face of the yearth\" repeated an English porter with a sneer;

6. I.e., Queasy has not acted but been acted upon. a soothsayer prophesies that Caesar will meet with 7. Someone who curries favor. danger on this date. 8. March 15. In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar 1.2,

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"ship upon the face of the water, you should say, master; but I take it you be's an Irishman."

O'Mooney had reason to be particularly vexed at being detected by this man, who spoke a miserable jargon, and who seemed not to have a very extensive range of ideas. He was one of those half-witted geniuses who catch at the shadow of an Irish bull. In fact, Phelim had merely made a lapsus linguae and had used an expression justifiable by the authority of the elegant and witty lord Chesterfield,9 who said�no, who wrote�that the English navy is the finest navy upon the face of the earthl But it was in vain for our hero to argue the point; he was detected�no matter how or by whom. But this was only his second detection, and three of his four days of probation were past.

He dined this day at Captain Murray's. In the room in which they dined there was a picture of the captain, painted by Romney. Sir John, who happened to be seated opposite to it, observed that it was a very fine picture; the more he looked at it, the more he liked it. His admiration was at last unluckily expressed: he said, "That's an incomparable, an inimitable picture; it is absolutely more like than the original."1

A keen Scotch lady in company smiled, and repeated, "More like than the original! Sir John, if I had not been told by my relative here that you were an Englishman, I should have set you doon, from that speech, for an Irishman."

This unexpected detection brought the colour, for a moment, into Sir John's face; but immediately recovering his presence of mind, he said, "That was, I acknowledge, an excellent Irish bull; but in the course of my travels I have heard as good English bulls as Irish."

To this Captain Murray politely acceded, and he produced some laughable instances in support of the assertion, which gave the conversation a new turn.

O'Mooney felt extremely obliged to the captain for this, especially as he saw, by his countenance, that he also had suspicions of the truth. The first moment he found himself alone with Murray, our hero said to him, "Murray, you are too good a fellow to impose upon, even in jest. Your keen countrywoman guessed the truth�I am an Irishman, but not a swindler. You shall hear why I conceal my country and name; only keep my secret till to-morrow night, or I shall lose a hundred guineas by my frankness."

O'Mooney then explained to him the nature of his bet. "This is only my third detection, and half of it voluntary, I might say, if I chose to higgle, which I scorn to do."

Captain Murray was so much pleased by this openness, that as he shook hands with O'Mooney, he said, "Give me leave to tell you, Sir, that even if you should lose your bet by this frank behaviour, you will have gained a better thing�a friend."

In the evening our hero went with his friend and a party of gentlemen to Maidenhead, near which place a battle was to be fought next day, between two famous pugilists, Bourke and Belcher.2 At the appointed time the combatants appeared upon the stage; the whole boxing corps and the gentlemen amateurs crowded to behold the spectacle. Phelim O'Mooney's heart beat for

9. The hero's lapsus linguae (Latin for slip of the 1. This bull was really made [Edgeworth's note]. tongue) has a precedent in the writings of Philip George Romney (1734�1802) painted society por- Dormer Stanhope, the fourth earl of Chesterfield traits and rural scenes. (1694�1773), whose posthumously published let-2. The reference is to actual historical figures of ters to his illegitimate son secured him a reputation the early 19th century�the bare-knuckle boxers as a wit and a schemer. Jem Belcher and Joe Bourke.

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THE IRISH INCOGNITO / 239

the Irish champion Bourke; but he kept a guard upon his tongue, and had even the forbearance not to bet upon his countryman's head. How many rounds were fought, and how many minutes the fight lasted, how many blows were put in on each side, or which was the game man of the two, we forbear to decide or relate, as all this has been settled in the newspapers of the day; where also it was remarked, that Bourke, who lost the battle, "was put into a post-chaise, and left standing half an hour, while another fight took place. This was very scandalous on the part of his friends," says the humane newspaper historian, "as the poor man might possibly be dying."

Our hero O'Mooney's heart again got the better of his head. Forgetful of his bet, forgetful of every thing but humanity, he made his way up to the chaise, where Bourke was left. "How are you, my gay fellow?" said he. "Can you see at all with the eye that's knocked out?"

The brutal populace, who overheard this question, set up a roar of laughter: "A bull! a bull! an Irish bull! Did you hear the question this Irish gentleman asked his countryman?"

O'Mooney was detected a fourth time, and this time he was not ashamed. There was one man in the crowd who did not join in the laugh: a poor Irishman, of the name of Terence McDermod. He had in former times gone out a grousing, near Cork, with our hero; and the moment he heard his voice, he sprang forward, and with uncouth but honest demonstrations of joy, exclaimed, "Ah, my dear master! my dear young master! Phelim O'Mooney, Esq.3 And I have found your honour alive again? By the blessing of God above, I'll never part you now till I die; and I'll go to the world's end to sarve yees."

O'Mooney wished him at the world's end this instant, yet could not prevail upon himself to check this affectionate follower of the O'Mooneys. He, however, put half a crown into his hand, and hinted that if he wished really to serve him, it must be at some other time. The poor fellow threw down the money, saying, he would never leave him. "Bid me do any thing, barring that. No, you shall never part me. Do what you plase with me, still I'll be close to your heart, like your own shadow: knock me down if you will, and wilcome, ten times a day, and I'll be up again like a ninepin: only let me sarve your honour; I'll ask no wages nor take none."

There was no withstanding all this; and whether our hero's good-nature deceived him we shall not determine, but he thought it most prudent, as he could not get rid of Terence, to take him into his service, to let him into his secret, to make him swear that he would never utter the name of Phelim O'Mooney during the remainder of this day. Terence heard the secret of the bet with joy, entered into the jest with all the readiness of an Irishman, and with equal joy and readiness swore by the hind leg of the holy lamb that he would never mention, even to his own dog, the name of Phelim O'Mooney, Esq., good or bad, till past twelve o'clock; and further, that he would, till the clock should strike that hour, call his master Sir John Bull, and nothing else, to all men, women, and children, upon the floor of God's creation.

Satisfied with the fulness of this oath, O'Mooney resolved to return to town with his man Terence McDermod. He, however, contrived, before he got there, to make a practical bull, by which he was detected a fifth time. He got into the coach which was driving from London instead of that which was driving to London, and he would have been carried rapidly to Oxford, had not his man

3. "Esquire"�designation given to men regarded as gentlemen.

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Terence, after they had proceeded a mile and a half on the wrong road, put his head down from the top of the coach, crying, as he looked in at the window, "Master, Sir John Bull, are you there? Do you know we're in the wrong box, going to Oxford?"

"Your master's an Irishman, dare to say, as well as yourself," said the coachman, as he let Sir John out. He walked back to Maidenhead, and took a chaise to town.

It was six o'clock when he got to London, and he went into a coffee-house to dine. He sat down beside a gentleman who was reading the newspaper. "Any news to-day, sir?"

The gentleman told him the news of the day, and then began to read aloud some paragraphs in a strong Hibernian accent. Our hero was sorry that he had met with another countryman; but he resolved to set a guard upon his lips, and he knew that his own accent could not betray him. The stranger read on till he came to a trial about a legacy which an old woman had left to her cats. O'Mooney exclaimed, "I hate cats almost as much as old women; and if I had been the English minister, I would have laid the dog-tax upon cats."4

"If you had been the Irish minister, you mean," said the stranger, smiling; "for I perceive now you are a countryman of my own." "How can you think so, sir?" said O'Mooney: "You have no reason to suppose so from my accent, I believe."

"None in life�quite the contrary; for you speak remarkably pure English� not the least note or half note of the brogue; but there's another sort of free- mason sign by which we Hibernians know one another and are known all over the globe. Whether to call it a confusion of expressions or of ideas, I can't tell. Now an Englishman, if he had been saying what you did, sir, just now, would have taken time to separate the dog and the tax, and he would have put the tax upon cats, and let the dogs go about their business." Our hero, with his usual good-humour, acknowledged himself to be fairly detected.

"Well, sir," said the stranger, "if I had not found you out before by the blunder, I should be sure now you were my countryman by your good-humour. An Irishman can take what's said to him, provided no affront's meant, with more good-humour than any man on earth."

"Ay, that he can," cried O' Mooney: "he lends himself, like the whale, to be tickled even by the fellow with the harpoon, till he finds what he is about, and then he pays away, and pitches the fellow, boat and all, to the devil. Ah, countryman! you would give me credit indeed for my good humour if you knew what danger you have put me in by detecting me for an Irishman. I have been found out six times, and if I blunder twice more before twelve o'clock this night, I shall lose a hundred guineas by it: but I will make sure of my bet; for I will go home straight this minute, lock myself up in my room, and not say a word to any mortal till the watchman cries 'past twelve o'clock,'�then the fast and long Lent of my tongue will be fairly over; and if you'll meet me, my dear friend, at the King's Arms, we will have a good supper and keep Easter for ever."

Phelim, pursuant to his resolution, returned to his hotel, and shut himself

up in his room, where he remained in perfect silence and consequent safety

till about nine o'clock. Suddenly he heard a great huzzaing in the street; he

looked out of the window, and saw that all the houses in the street were

illuminated. His landlady came bustling into his apartment, followed by wait

4. One of several new taxes introduced by Prime Minister Pitt to finance Britain's war against France.

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THE IRISH INCOGNITO / 241

ers with candles. His spirits instantly rose, though he did not clearly know the cause of the rejoicings. "I give you joy, ma'am. What are you all illuminating5 for?" said he to his landlady.

"Thank you, sir, with all my heart. I am not sure. It is either for a great victory or the peace. Bob�waiter�step out and inquire for the gentleman."

The gentleman preferred stepping out to inquire for himself. The illuminations were in honour of the peace.6 He totally forgot his bet, his silence, and his prudence, in his sympathy with the general joy. He walked rapidly from street to street, admiring the various elegant devices. A crowd was standing before the windows of a house that was illuminated with extraordinary splendour. He inquired whose it was, and was informed that it belonged to a contractor, who had made an immense fortune by the war.

"Then I'm sure these illuminations of his for the peace are none of the most sincere," said O'Mooney. The mob were of his opinion; and Phelim, who was now, alas ! worked up to the proper pitch for blundering, added, by way of pleasing his audience still more�"If this contractor had illuminated in character, it should have been with dark lanterns."7

"Should it? by Jasus! that would be an Irish illumination," cried some one. "Arrah, honey! you're an Irishman, whoever you are, and have spoke your mind in character."

Sir John Bull was vexed that the piece of wit which he had aimed at the contractor had recoiled upon himself. "It is always, as my countryman observed, by having too much wit that I blunder. The deuce take me if I sport a single bon mot more this night. This is only my seventh detection, I have an eighth blunder still to the good; and if I can but keep my wit to myself till I am out of purgatory, then I shall be in heaven, and may sing Io triumphe8 in spite of my brother."

Fortunately, Phelim had not made it any part of his bet that he should not speak to himself an Irish idiom, or that he should not think a bull. Resolved to be as obstinately silent as a monk of La Trappe,9 he once more shut himself up in his cell, and fell fast asleep�dreamed that fat bulls of Basan1 encompassed him round about�that he ran down a steep hill to escape them�that his foot slipped�he rolled to the bottom�felt the bull's horns in his side� heard the bull bellowing in his ears�wakened�and found Terence Mc

_

Dermod bellowing at his room door.

"Sir John Bull! Sir John Bull ! murder! murder! my dear master, Sir John Bull! murder, robbery, and reward! let me in! for the love of the Holy Virgin! they are all after you!"

"Who? are you drunk, Terence?" said Sir John, opening the door.

"No, but they are mad�all mad."

"Who?"

"The constable. They are all mad entirely, and the lord mayor, all along with your honour's making me swear I would not tell your name. Sure they are all coming armed in a body to put you in jail for a forgery, unless I run back and tell them the truth�will I?"

"First tell me the truth, blunderer!"

5. Decorating with lights as a sign of celebration. 8. Greek cry of triumph. 6. Probably the truce signed between Britain and 9. Alluding to the vows of silence taken by the France in October 1801, temporarily suspending monks of the French Abbey of La Trappe. hostilities after eight years of war. 1. A recollection of Psalms 22.12, where the 7. Lanterns equipped with slides that allow their Psalmist describes his anguish at being forsaken: light to be hidden. "strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round."

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"I'll make my affidavit I never blundered, plase your honour, but just went to the merchant's, as you ordered, with the draught, signed with the name I swore not to utter till past twelve. I presents the draught, and waits to be paid. 'Are you Mr. O'Mooney's servant?' says one of the clerks after a while. No, sir, not at all, sir,' said I; 'I'm Sir John Bull's, at your sarvice.' He puzzles and puzzles, and asks me did I bring the draught, and was that your writing at the bottom of it? I still said it was my master's writing, Sir John Bull's, and no other. They whispered from one up to t'other, and then said it was a forgery, as I overheard, and I must go before the mayor. With that, while the master, who was called down to be examined as to his opinion, was putting on his glasses to spell it out, I gives them, one and all, the slip, and whips out of the street door and home to give your honour notice, and have been breaking my heart at the door this half hour to make you hear�and now you have it all."

"I am in a worse dilemma now than when between the horns of the bull," thought Sir John: "I must now either tell my real name, avow myself an Irishman, and so lose my bet, or else go to gaol."

He preferred going to gaol. He resolved to pretend to be dumb, and he charged Terence not to betray him. The officers of justice came to take him up: Sir John resigned himself to them, making signs that he could not speak. He was carried before a magistrate. The merchant had never seen Mr. Phelim O'Mooney, but could swear to his handwriting and signature, having many of his letters and draughts. The draught in question was produced. Sir John Bull would neither acknowledge nor deny the signature, but in dumb show made signs of innocence. No art or persuasion could make him speak; he kept his fingers on his lips. One of the bailiffs offered to open Sir John's mouth. Sir John clenched his hand, in token that if they used violence he knew his remedy. To the magistrate he was all bows and respect: but the law, in spite of civility, must take its course.

Terence McDermod beat his breast, and called upon all the saints in the Irish calender when he saw the committal actually made out, and his dear master given over to the constables. Nothing but his own oath and his master's commanding eye, which was fixed upon him at this instant, could have made him forbear to utter, what he had never in his life been before so strongly tempted to tell�the truth.

Determined to win his wager, our hero suffered himself to be carried to a lock-up house, and persisted in keeping silence till the clock struck twelve! Then the charm was broken, and he spoke. He began talking to himself, and singing as loud as he possibly could. The next morning Terence, who was no longer bound by his oath to conceal Phelim's name, hastened to his master's correspondent in town, told the whole story, and O'Mooney was liberated. Having won his bet by his wit and steadiness, he had now the prudence to give up these adventuring schemes, to which he had so nearly become a dupe; he returned immediately to Ireland to his brother, and determined to settle quietly to business. His good brother paid him the hundred guineas most joyfully, declaring that he had never spent a hundred guineas better in his life than in recovering a brother. Phelim had now conquered his foolish dislike to trade: his brother took him into partnership, and Phelim O'Mooney never relapsed into Sir John Bull.

1802

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243

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

1770-1850

William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth in West Cumberland, just on the northern fringe of the English Lake District. When his mother died, the eight-yearold boy was sent to school at Hawkshead, near Esthwaite Lake, in the heart of that sparsely populated region that he and Coleridge were to transform into one of the poetic centers of England. William and his three brothers boarded in the cottage of Ann Tyson, who gave the boys simple comfort, ample affection, and freedom to roam the countryside at will. A vigorous, unruly, and sometimes moody boy, William spent his free days and occasionally "half the night" in the sports and rambles described in the first two books of The Prelude, "drinking in" (to use one of his favorite metaphors) the natural sights and sounds, and getting to know the cottagers, shepherds, and solitary wanderers who moved through his imagination into his later poetry. He also found time to read voraciously in the books owned by his young headmaster, William Taylor, who encouraged him in his inclination to poetry.

John Wordsworth, the poet's father, died suddenly when William was thirteen, leaving to his five children mainly the substantial sum owed him by Lord Lonsdale, whom he had served as attorney and as steward of the huge Lonsdale estate. This harsh nobleman had yet to pay the debt when he died in 1802. Wordsworth was nevertheless able in 1787 to enter St. John's College, Cambridge University, where four years later he took his degree without distinction.

During the summer vacation of his third year at Cambridge (1790), Wordsworth and his closest college friend, the Welshman Robert Jones, journeyed on foot through France and the Alps (described in The Prelude 6) at the time when the French were joyously celebrating the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. Upon completing his course at Cambridge, Wordsworth spent four months in London, set off on another walking tour with Robert Jones through Wales (the time of the memorable ascent of Mount Snowdon in The Prelude 14), and then went back alone to France to master the language and qualify as a traveling tutor.

During his year in France (November 1791 to December 1792), Wordsworth became a fervent supporter of the French Revolution�which seemed to him and many others to promise a "glorious renovation" of society�and he fell in love with Annette Vallon, the daughter of a French surgeon at Blois. The two planned to marry, despite their differences in religion and political inclinations (Annette belonged to an old Catholic family whose sympathies were Royalist). But almost immediately after their daughter, Caroline, was born, lack of money forced Wordsworth to return to England. The outbreak of war made it impossible for him to rejoin Annette and Caroline. Wordsworth's guilt over this abandonment, his divided loyalties between England and France, and his gradual disillusion with the course of the Revolution brought him�according to his account in The Prelude 10 and 11�to the verge of an emotional breakdown, when "sick, wearied out with contrarieties," he "yielded up moral questions in despair." His suffering, his near-collapse, and the successful effort, after his break with his past, to reestablish "a saving intercourse with my true self," are the experiences that underlie many of his greatest poems.

At this critical point, a friend died and left Wordsworth a sum of money just sufficient to enable him to live by his poetry. In 1795 he settled in a rent-free house at Racedown, Dorsetshire, with his beloved sister, Dorothy, who now began her long career as confidante, inspirer, and secretary. At that same time Wordsworth met Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Two years later he moved to Alfoxden House, Somersetshire, to be near Coleridge, who lived four miles away at Nether Stowey. Here he entered at the age of twenty-seven on the delayed springtime of his poetic career.

Even while he had been an undergraduate at Cambridge, Coleridge claimed that

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he had detected signs of genius in Wordsworth's rather conventional poem about his tour in the Alps, Descriptive Sketches, published in 1793. Now he hailed Wordsworth unreservedly as "the best poet of the age." The two men met almost daily, talked for hours about poetry, and wrote prolifically. So close was their association that we find the same phrases occurring in poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge, as well as in the remarkable journals that Dorothy kept at the time; the two poets collaborated in some writings and freely traded thoughts and passages for others; and Coleridge even undertook to complete a few poems that Wordsworth had left unfinished. This close partnership, along with the hospitality the two households offered to another young radical writer, John Thelwall, aroused the paranoia of people in the neighborhood. Already fearful of a military invasion by France, they became convinced that Words- worth and Coleridge were political plotters, not poets. The government sent spies to investigate, and the Wordsworths lost their lease.

Although brought to this abrupt end, that short period of collaboration resulted in one of the most important books of the era, Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems, published anonymously in 1798. This short volume opened with Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and included three other poems by Coleridge, some lyrics in which Words- worth celebrated the experience of nature, and a number of verse anecdotes drawn from the lives of the rural poor. (The verse forms and the subject matter of this last set of poems�which includes "Simon Lee," "We Are Seven," and "The Thorn"� make evident the debt, announced in the very title of Lyrical Ballads, that Wordsworth's and Coleridge's book owed to the folk ballads that were being transcribed and anthologized in the later eighteenth century by collectors such as Thomas Percy and Robert Burns.) The book closed with Wordsworth's great descriptive and meditative poem in blank verse, "Tintern Abbey." This poem inaugurated what modern critics call Wordsworth's "myth of nature": his presentation of the "growth" of his mind to maturity, a process unfolding through the interaction between the inner world of the mind and the shaping force of external Nature.

William Hazlitt said that when he heard Coleridge read some of the newly written poems of Lyrical Ballads aloud, "the sense of a new style and a new spirit in poetry came over me," with something of the effect "that arises from the turning up of the fresh soil, or of the first welcome breath of spring." The reviewers were less enthusiastic, warning that, because of their simple language and subject matter, poems such as "Simon Lee" risked "vulgarity" or silliness. Nevertheless Lyrical Ballads sold out in two years, and Wordsworth published under his own name a new edition, dated 1800, to which he added a second volume of poems. In his famous Preface to this edition, planned in close consultation with Coleridge, Wordsworth outlined a critical program that provided a retroactive rationale for the "experiments" the poems represented.

Late in 1799 William and Dorothy moved back permanently to their native lakes, settling at Grasmere in the little house later named Dove Cottage. Coleridge, following them, rented at Keswick, thirteen miles away. In 1802 Wordsworth finally came into his father's inheritance and, after an amicable settlement with Annette Vallon, married Mary Hutchinson, whom he had known since childhood. His life after that time had many sorrows: the drowning in 1805 of his favorite brother, John, a sea captain; the death in 1812 of two of his and Mary's five children; a growing rift with Coleridge, culminating in a bitter quarrel (1810) from which they were not completely reconciled for almost two decades; and, from the 1830s on, Dorothy's physical and mental illness. Over these years Wordsworth became, nonetheless, increasingly prosperous and famous. He also displayed a political and religious conservatism that disappointed readers who, like Hazlitt, had interpreted his early work as the expression of a "levelling Muse" that promoted democratic change. In 1813a government sinecure, the position of stamp distributor (that is, revenue collector) for Westmorland, was bestowed on him�concrete evidence of his recognition as a national poet and of the alteration in the government's perception of his politics. Gradually, Wordsworth's residences, as he moved into more and more comfortable quarters, became standard stops for sightseers touring the Lakes. By 1843 he was poet laureate of Great

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Britain. He died in 1850 at the age of eighty. Only then did his executors publish his masterpiece, The Prelude, the autobiographical poem that he had written in two parts in 1799, expanded to its full length in 1805, and then continued to revise almost to the last decade of his long life.

Most of Wordsworth's greatest poetry had been written by 1807, when he published Poems, in Two Volumes; and after The Excursion (1814) and the first collected edition of his poems (1815), although he continued to write prolifically, his powers appeared to decline. The causes of that decline have been much debated. One seems to be inherent in the very nature of his writing. Wordsworth is above all the poet of the remembrance of things past or, as he put it, of "emotion recollected in tranquillity." Some object or event in the present triggers a sudden renewal of feelings he had experienced in youth; the result is a poem exhibiting the discrepancy between what Wordsworth called "two consciousnesses": himself as he is now and himself as he once was. But the memory of one's early emotional experience is not an inexhaustible resource for poetry, as Wordsworth recognized. He said in The Prelude 12, while describing the recurrence of "spots of time" from his memories of childhood:

The days gone by Beturn upon me almost from the dawn Of life: the hiding places of Man's power Open; I would approach them, but they close. I see by glimpses now; when age comes on, May scarcely see at all.

The past that Wordsworth recollected was one of moments of intense experience, and of emotional turmoil that is ordered, in the calmer present, into a hard-won equilibrium. As time went on, however, he gained what, in the "Ode to Duty" (composed in 1804), he longed for, "a repose which ever is the same"�but at the expense of the agony and excitation that, under the calm surface, empower his best and most characteristic poems.

Occasionally in his middle and later life a jolting experience would revive the intensity of Wordsworth's remembered emotion, and also his earlier poetic strength. The moving sonnet "Surprised by Joy," for example, was written in his forties at the abrupt realization that time was beginning to diminish his grief at the death some years earlier of his little daughter Catherine. And when Wordsworth was sixty-five years old, the sudden report of the death of James Hogg called up the memory of other poets whom Wordsworth had loved and outlived; the result was his "Extempore Effusion," in which he returns to the simple quatrains of the early Lyrical Ballads and recovers the elegiac voice that had mourned Lucy, thirty-five years before.

FROM LYRICAL BALLADS

Simon Lee1

The Old Huntsman

WITH AN INCIDENT IN WHICH HE WAS CONCERNED

In the sweet shire of Cardigan,2 Not far from pleasant Ivor-hall,

1. This old man had been huntsman to the [Wordsworth's note, 1843]. Wordsworth and Squires of Alfoxden. .. . I have, after an interval of Dorothy had lived at Alfoxden House, Somer45 years, the image of the old man as fresh before setshire, in 1797-98. my eyes as if I had seen him yesterday. The expres-2. Wordsworth relocates the incident from Somersion when the hounds were out, "I dearly love their setshire to Cardiganshire in Wales. voices," was word for word from his own lips

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24 6 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

An old man dwells, a little man,-� 'Tis said he once was tall.

Full five-and-thirty years he lived A running huntsman3 merry; And still the centre of his cheek Is red as a ripe cherry.

No man like him the horn could sound,

And hill and valley rang with glee When Echo bandied, round and round, The halloo of Simon Lee. In those proud days, he little cared For husbandry or tillage;

To blither tasks did Simon rouse The sleepers of the village.

He all the country could outrun, Could leave both man and horse behind; And often, ere the chase was done,

He reeled, and was stone-blind.0 totally blind And still there's something in the world At which his heart rejoices; For when the chiming hounds are out, He dearly loves their voices!

But, oh the heavy change!4�bereft Of health, strength, friends, and kindred, see! Old Simon to the world is left In liveried5 poverty. His Master's dead,�and no one now

Dwells in the Hall of Ivor; Men, dogs, and horses, all are dead; He is the sole survivor.

And he is lean and he is sick; His body, dwindled and awry,

Rests upon ankles swoln and thick; His legs are thin and dry. One prop he has, and only one, His wife, an aged woman, Lives with him, near the waterfall,

Upon the village Common.

Beside their moss-grown hut of clay, Not twenty paces from the door, A scrap of land they have, but they Are poorest of the poor.

This scrap of land he from the heath Enclosed when he was stronger;

3. Manager of the hunt and the person in charge change, now thou art gone." of the hounds. 5. Livery was the uniform worn by the male ser4. Milton's "Lycidas," line 37: "But O the heavy vants of a household.

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But what to them avails the land Which he can till no longer?

Oft, working by her Husband's side,

50 Ruth does what Simon cannot do; For she, with scanty cause for pride, Is Stouter0 of the two. stronger, sturdier And, though you with your utmost skill From labour could not wean them,

55 'Tis very, very little�all That they can do between them.

Few months of life has he in store As he to you will tell, For still, the more he works, the more

60 Do his weak ankles swell. My gentle Reader, I perceive How patiently you've waited, And now I fear that you expect Some tale will be related.

65 O Reader! had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring, O gentle Reader! you would find A tale in every thing. What more I have to say is short,

70 And you must kindly take it: It is no tale; but, should you think, Perhaps a tale you'll make it.

One summer-day I chanced to see This old Man doing all he could

75 To unearth the root of an old tree, A stump of rotten wood. The mattock tottered in his hand; So vain was his endeavour, That at the root of the old tree

so He might have worked for ever.

"You're overtasked, good Simon Lee, Give me your tool," to him I said; And at the word right gladly he Received my proffered aid.

85 I struck, and with a single blow The tangled root I severed, At which the poor old Man so long And vainly had endeavoured.

The tears into his eyes were brought,

90 And thanks and praises seemed to run So fast out of his heart, I thought They never would have done. �I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds

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24 8 / WILLIA M WORDSWORT H 95With coldness still returning; Alas! the gratitude of men Hath oftener left me mourning 1798 1798

We Are Seven1

A simple Child, That lightly draws its breath, And feels its life in every limb, What should it know of death?

5 I met a little cottage Girl: She was eight years old, she said; Her hair was thick with many a curl That clustered round her head.

She had a rustic, woodland air,

10 And she was wildly clad: Her eyes were fair, and very fair; �Her beauty made me glad.

"Sisters and brothers, little Maid, How many may you be?" 15 "How many? Seven in all," she said, And wondering looked at me.

"And where are they? I pray you tell." She answered, "Seven are we; And two of us at Conway2 dwell,

20 And two are gone to sea.

I

"Two of us in the church-yard lie, My sister and my brother; And, in the church-yard cottage, I Dwell near them with my mother."

25 "You say that two at Conway dwell, And two are gone to sea, Yet ye are seven! I pray you tell, Sweet Maid, how this may be."

Then did the little Maid reply,

30 "Seven boys and girls are we; Two of us in the church-yard lie, Beneath the church-yard tree."

1. Written at Alfoxden in the spring of 1798. . . . walking to and fro," he composed the last stanza The little girl who is the heroine I met within the first, beginning with the last line, and that Cole- area of Goodrich Castle [in the Wye Valley north ridge contributed the first stanza. of Tintern Abbey] in the year 1793 [Wordsworth's 2. A seaport town in north Wales. note, 1843]. Wordsworth also tells us that, "while

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W E AR E SEVE N / 24 9 "You run about, my little Maid, Your limbs they are alive; 35 If two are in the church-yard laid, Then ye are only five." "Their graves are green, they may be seen," The little Maid replied, "Twelve steps or more from my mother's door, 40 And they are side by side. "My stockings there I often knit, My kerchief there I hem; And there upon the ground I sit, And sing a song to them. 45 "And often after sun-set, Sir, When it is light and fair, I take my little porringer,3 And eat my supper there. "The first that died was sister Jane; 50 In bed she moaning lay, Till God released her of her pain; And then she went away. "So in the church-yard she was laid; And, when the grass was dry, 55 Together round her grave we played, My brother John and I. "And when the ground was white with snow, And I could run and slide, My brother John was forced to go, 60 And he lies by her side." "How many are you, then," said I, "If they two are in heaven?" Quick was the little Maid's reply, "O Master! we are seven." 65 "But they are dead; those two are dead! Their spirits are in heaven!" 'Twas throwing words away; for still The little Maid would have her will, And said, "Nay, we are seven!" 1798 1798

3. Bowl for porridge.

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25 0 / WILLIA M WORDSWORT H Lines Written in Early Spring I heard a thousand blended notes, While in a grove I sate reclined, In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts Bring sad thoughts to the mind. 5 To her fair works did Nature link The human soul that through me ran; And much it grieved my heart to think What man has made of man. 10Through primrose tufts, in that green bower, The periwinkle1 trailed its wreaths, And 'tis my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes. 15The birds around me hopped and played, Their thoughts I cannot measure:� But the least motion which they made, It seemed a thrill of pleasure. 20The budding twigs spread out their fan, To catch the breezy air; And I must think, do all I can, That there was pleasure there. If this belief from heaven be sent, If such be Nature's holy plan,2 Have I not reason to lament What man has made of man? 1798 1798

Expostulation and Reply1

"Why, William, on that old grey stone, Thus for the length of half a day, Why, William, sit you thus alone, And dream your time away?

5 "Where are your books?�that light bequeathed To Beings else forlorn and blind!

1. A trailing evergreen plant with small blue flow-usual device of overstating parts of a whole truth. ers (U.S. myrtle). In the 1798 Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads, 2. The version of these two lines in the Lyrical Wordsworth said that the pieces originated in a Ballads of 1798 reads: "If I these thoughts may not conversation "with a friend who was somewhat prevent, / If such be of my creed the plan." unreasonably attached to modern books of moral 1. This and the following companion poem have philosophy." In 1843 he noted that the idea of often been attacked�and defended�as Words-learning when the mind is in a state of "wise pasworth's own statement about the comparative mer-siveness" made this poem a favorite of the Quakits of nature and of books. But they are a dialogue ers, who rejected religious ritual for informal and between two friends who rally one another by the spontaneous worship.

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THE TABLES TURNED / 251

Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed From dead men to their kind.

"You look round on your Mother Earth,

10 As if she for no purpose bore you; As if you were her first-born birth, And none had lived before you!"

One morning thus, by Esthwaite lake, When life was sweet, I knew not why, is To me my good friend Matthew spake, And thus I made reply.

"The eye�it cannot choose but see; We cannot bid the ear be still; Our bodies feel, where'er they be,

20 Against or with our will.

"Nor less I deem that there are Powers Which of themselves our minds impress; That we can feed this mind of ours In a wise passiveness.

25 "Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum Of things for ever speaking, That nothing of itself will come, But we must still be seeking?

"�Then ask not wherefore, here, alone,

30 Conversing2 as I may, I sit upon this old grey stone, And dream my time away."

Spring 1798 1798

The Tables Turned

An Evening Scene on the Same Subject

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books; Or surely you'll grow double:0 double over Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks; Why all this toil and trouble?

5 The sun, above the mountain's head, A freshening lustre mellow Through all the long green fields has spread, His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife: 10 Come, hear the woodland linnet,0 small finch

2. In the old sense of "communing" (with the "things for ever speaking").

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25 2 / WILLIA M WORDSWORT H How sweet his music! on my life, There's more of wisdom in it. 15And hark! how blithe the throstle0 sings! He, too, is no mean preacher: Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your Teacher. song thrush 20She has a world of ready wealth, Our minds and hearts to bless� Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health, Truth breathed by cheerfulness. One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can. 25 Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:� We murder to dissect. 30Enough of Science and of Art; Close up those barren leaves;0Come forth, and bring with you a heart That watches and receives. pages 1798 1798 The Thorn1 i "There is a Thorn2�it looks so old, In truth, you'd find it hard to say

1. Arose out of my observing, on the ridge of Quantock Hill [in Somersetshire], on a stormy day, a thorn which I had often past, in calm and bright weather, without noticing it. I said to myself, "Cannot I by some invention do as much to make this Thorn permanently an impressive object as the storm has made it to my eyes at this moment?" I began the poem accordingly, and composed it with great rapidity [Wordsworth's note, 1843]. In the prefatory Advertisement to the 1798 Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth wrote, "The poem of the Thorn .. . is not supposed to be spoken in the author's own person: the character of the loquacious narrator will sufficiently shew itself in the course of the story." In the editions of 1800-05 he elaborated in a separate note that reads, in part: "The character which I have here introduced speaking is sufficiently common. The Reader will perhaps have a general notion of it, if he has ever known a man, a Captain of a small trading vessel, for example, who, being past the middle age of life, had retired upon an annuity or small independent income to some village or country town of which he was not a native. . . . Such men, having little to do, become credulous and talkative from indolence; and from the same cause . . . they are prone to superstition. On which account it appeared to me proper to select a character like this to exhibit some of the general laws by which superstition acts upon the mind. Superstitious men are almost always men of slow faculties and deep feelings: their minds are not loose but adhesive; they have a reasonable share of imagination, by which word I mean the faculty which produces impressive effects out of simple elements. .. . It was my wish in this poem to show the manner in which such men cleave to the same ideas; and to follow the turns of passion .. . by which their conversation is swayed. . . . There is a numerous class of readers who imagine that the same words cannot be repeated without tautology: this is a great error. . . . Words, a Poet's words more particularly, ought to be weighed in the balance of feeling and not measured by the space they occupy upon paper."

2. Hawthorn, a thorny shrub or small tree.

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THE THORN / 253

How it could ever have been young,

It looks so old and grey. Not higher than a two years' child It stands erect, this aged Thorn; No leaves it has, no prickly points; It is a mass of knotted joints, A wretched thing forlorn.

It stands erect, and like a stone With lichens is it overgrown.

2

"Like rock or stone, it is o'ergrown, With lichens to the very top, And hung with heavy tufts of moss,

A melancholy crop: Up from the earth these mosses creep, And this poor Thorn they clasp it round So close, you'd say that they are bent With plain and manifest intent

To drag it to the ground; And all have joined in one endeavour To bury this poor Thorn for ever.

3 "High on a mountain's highest ridge, Where oft the stormy winter gale

Cuts like a scythe, while through the clouds It sweeps from vale to vale; Not five yards from the mountain path, This Thorn you on your left espy; And to the left, three yards beyond, You see a little muddy pond Of water�never dry Though but of compass small, and bare To thirsty suns and parching air.

4 "And, close beside this aged Thorn, There is a fresh and lovely sight, A beauteous heap, a hill of moss, Just half a foot in height. All lovely colours there you see, All colours that were ever seen;

And mossy network too is there, As if by hand of lady fair The work had woven been; And cups, the darlings of the eye, So deep is their vermilion dye.

5 "Ah me! what lovely tints are there Of olive green and scarlet bright, In spikes, in branches, and in stars, Green, red, and pearly white! This heap of earth o'ergrown with moss,

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25 4 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

50 Which close beside the Thorn you see, So fresh in all its beauteous dyes, Is like an infant's grave in size, As like as like can be: But never, never any where,

55 An infant's grave was half so fair.

6

"Now would you see this aged Thorn, This pond, and beauteous hill of moss, You must take care and choose your time The mountain when to cross.

60 For oft there sits between the heap So like an infant's grave in size, And that same pond of which I spoke, A Woman in a scarlet cloak, And to herself she cries,

65 'Oh misery! oh misery! Oh woe is me! oh misery!'

7 "At all times of the day and night This wretched Woman thither goes; And she is known to every star,

70 And every wind that blows; And there, beside the Thorn, she sits When the blue daylight's in the skies, And when the whirlwind's on the hill, Or frosty air is keen and still,

75 And to herself she cries, 'Oh misery! oh misery! Oh woe is me! oh misery!' "

8

"Now wherefore, thus, by day and night, In rain, in tempest, and in snow,

so Thus to the dreary mountain-top Does this poor Woman go? And why sits she beside the Thorn When the blue daylight's in the sky Or when the whirlwind's on the hill,

85 Or frosty air is keen and still, And wherefore does she cry?�O wherefore? wherefore? tell me why Does she repeat that doleful cry?"

9 "I cannot tell; I wish I could;

90 For the true reason no one knows: But would you gladly view the spot, The spot to which she goes; The hillock like an infant's grave, The pond�and Thorn, so old and grey;

95 Pass by her door�'tis seldom shut�

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THE THORN / 255

And, if you see her in her hut� Then to the spot away! I never heard of such as dare Approach the spot when she is there."

10 100 "But wherefore to the mountain-top Can this unhappy Woman go, Whatever star is in the skies, Whatever wind may blow?" "Full twenty years are past and gone 105 Since she (her name is Martha Ray)3 Gave with a maiden's true good-will Her company to Stephen Hill; And she was blithe and gay, While friends and kindred all approved no Of him whom tenderly she loved.

11 "And they had fixed the wedding day, The morning that must wed them both; But Stephen to another Maid Had sworn another oath; 115 And, with this other Maid, to church Unthinking Stephen went� Poor Martha! on that woeful day A pang of pitiless dismay Into her soul was sent; 120 A fire was kindled in her breast, Which might not burn itself to rest.

12 "They say, full six months after this, While yet the summer leaves were green, She to the mountain-top would go,

125 And there was often seen. What could she seek?�or wish to hide? Her state to any eye was plain; She was with child,0 and she was mad; pregnant Yet often was she sober sad

130 From her exceeding pain. O guilty Father�would that death Had saved him from that breach of faith!

"Sad case for such a brain to hold Communion with a stirring child! 135 Sad case, as you may think, for one Who had a brain so wild!

3. Wordsworth gives the woman the name of the driven to the deed by "love's madness." One of the victim at the center of one of the 18th century's illegitimate children whom this Martha Ray bore most famous murder trials. Martha Ray, mistress to the earl of Sandwich was Wordsworth's and to a nobleman, was murdered in 1779 by a rejected Coleridge's friend Basil Montagu. suitor, a clergyman who claimed he had been

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25 6 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Last Christmas-eve we talked of this, And grey-haired Wilfred of the glen Held that the unborn infant wrought

uo About its mother's heart, and brought Her senses back again: And, when at last her time drew near, Her looks were calm, her senses clear.

14 "More know I not, I wish I did,

145 And it should all be told to you; For what became of this poor child No mortal ever knew; Nay�if a child to her was born No earthly tongue could ever tell;

150 And if 'twas born alive or dead, Far less could this with proof be said; But some remember well, That Martha Ray about this time Would up the mountain often climb.

'5

155 "And all that winter, when at night The wind blew from the mountain-peak, Twas worth your while, though in the dark, The churchyard path to seek: For many a time and oft were heard

160 Cries coming from the mountain head: Some plainly living voices were; And others, I've heard many swear, Were voices of the dead: I cannot think, whate'er they say,

165 They had to do with Martha Ray.

16

"But that she goes to this old Thorn, The Thorn which I described to you, And there sits in a scarlet cloak, I will be sworn is true.

170 For one day with my telescope, To view the ocean wide and bright, When to this country first I came, Ere I had heard of Martha's name, I climbed the mountain's height:�

175 A storm came on, and I could see No object higher than my knee.

17 " 'Twas mist and rain, and storm and rain: No screen, no fence could I discover; And then the wind! in sooth, it was

180 A wind full ten times over. I looked around, I thought I saw A jutting crag,�and off I ran,

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TH E THOR N / 25 7 185Head-foremost, through the driving rain, The shelter of the crag to gain; And, as I am a man, Instead of jutting crag, I found A Woman seated on the ground. 18 190195"I did not speak�I saw her face; Her face!�it was enough for me; I turned about and heard her cry, 'Oh misery! oh misery!' And there she sits, until the moon Through half the clear blue sky will go; And, when the little breezes make The waters of the pond to shake, As all the country know, She shudders, and you hear her cry, 'Oh misery! oh misery!' " 19 200"But what's the Thorn? and what the pond? And what the hill of moss to her? 205And what the creeping breeze that comes The little pond to stir?" "I cannot tell; but some will say She hanged her baby on the tree; Some say she drowned it in the pond, Which is a little step beyond: But all and each agree, The little Babe was buried there, Beneath that hill of moss so fair. 20 210 "I've heard, the moss is spotted red With drops of that poor infant's blood; But kill a new-born infant thus, I do not think she could! 215220Some say, if to the pond you go, And fix on it a steady view, The shadow of a babe you trace, A baby and a baby's face, And that it looks at you; Whene'er you look on it, 'tis plain The baby looks at you again. 21 "And some had sworn an oath that she Should be to public justice brought; And for the little infant's bones 225With spades they would have sought. But instantly the hill of moss Before their eyes began to stir! And, for full fifty yards around, The grass�it shook upon the ground!

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25 8 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Yet all do still aver 230 The little Babe lies buried there, Beneath that hill of moss so fair.

22

"I cannot tell how this may be, But plain it is the Thorn is bound With heavy tufts of moss that strive

235 To drag it to the ground; And this I know, full many a time, When she was on the mountain high, By day, and in the silent night, When all the stars shone clear and bright,

240 That I have heard her cry, 'Oh misery! oh misery! Oh woe is me! oh misery!' "

Mar.�Apr. 1798 1798

Lines'

Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798

Five years have past; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! and again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a soft inland murmur.2�Once again

5 Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, That on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky. The day is come when I again repose

IO Here, under this dark sycamore, and view These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts, Which at this season, with their unripe fruits, Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves 'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see

15 These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms, Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!

1. No poem of mine was composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember than this. I began it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye, and concluded it just as I was entering Bristol in the evening, after a ramble of 4 or 5 days, with my sister. Not a line of it was altered, and not any part of it written down till I reached Bristol [Wordsworth's note, 1843]. The poem was printed as the last item in Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth had first visited the Wye valley and the ruins of Tintern Abbey, in Monmouthshire, while on a solitary walking tour in August 1793, when he was twenty-three years old. (See "Tintern

Abbey, Tourism, and Romantic Landscape" at Norton Literature Online.) The puzzling difference between the present landscape and the remembered "picture of the mind" (line 61) gives rise to an intricately organized meditation, in which the poet reviews his past, evaluates the present, and (through his sister as intermediary) anticipates the future; he ends by rounding back quietly on the scene that had been his point of departure.

2. The river is not affected by the tides a few miles above Tintern [Wordsworth's note, 1798 ff.]. Until 1845 the text had "sweet" for "soft," meaning fresh, not salty.

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TINTER N ABBE Y / 25 9 With some uncertain notice, as might seem 20 Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire The Hermit sits alone. These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man's eye: 25 But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind, 30 With tranquil restoration:�feelings too Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered, acts 35 Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen0 of the mystery, burden In which the heavy and the weary weight 40 Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened:�that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on,� Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood 45 Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. If this 50 Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft� In darkness and amid the many shapes Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart� 55 How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee! And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought, With many recognitions dim and faint, 60 And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again: While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food 65 For future years. And so I dare to hope, Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first

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26 0 / WILLIA M WORDSWORT H I came among these hills; when like a roe� deer I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, 70 Wherever nature led: more like a man Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, And their glad animal movements all gone by) 75 To me was all in all.�I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me so An appetite; a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye.�That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, 85 And all its dizzy raptures.3 Not for this Faint0 I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts lose heart Have followed; for such loss, I would believe, Abundant recompense. For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour 90 Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy 95 Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: ioo A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold 105 From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear,�both what they half create,4 And what perceive; well pleased to recognise In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, no The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being.

3. Lines 66ff. contain Wordsworth's famed description of the three stages of his growing up, defined in terms of his evolving relations to the natural scene: the young boy's purely physical responsiveness (lines 73�74); the postadolescent's aching, dizzy, and equivocal passions�a love that is more like dread (lines 67�72, 75�85: this was his state of mind on the occasion of his first visit); his present state (lines 85ff.), in which for the first time he adds thought to sense.

4. This line has a close resemblance to an admirable line of Young, the exact expression of which I cannot recollect [Wordsworth's note, 1798 ff.]. Edward Young in Night Thoughts (1744) says that the human senses "half create the wondrous world they see."

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TINTERN ABBEY / 26 1

Nor perchance, If I were not thus taught, should I the more Suffer my genial spirits5 to decay: For thou art with me here upon the banks

us Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,6 My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read My former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while

120 May I behold in thee what I was once, My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make, Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead

125 From joy to joy: for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,7 Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,

130 Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon

135 Shine on thee in thy solitary walk; And let the misty mountain-winds be free To blow against thee: and, in after years, When these wild ecstasies shall be matured Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind 140 Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, Thy memory be as a dwelling-place

For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then, If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, Should be thy portion," with what healing thoughts inheritance, dowry

145 Of tender joy wilt thou remember me, And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance� If I should be where I no more can hear Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams Of past existence8�wilt thou then forget

iso That on the banks of this delightful stream We stood together; and that I, so long A worshipper of Nature, hither came Unwearied in that service; rather say With warmer love�oh! with far deeper zeal

155 Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget, That after many wanderings, many years Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,

5. Creative powers. ("Genial" is here the adjectival tongues" and with "dangers compassed round" form of the noun genius.) (lines 26-27). 6. His sister, Dorothy. 8. I.e., reminders of his own "past existence" five 7. In the opening of Paradise Lost 7, Milton years earlier (see lines 116�19). describes himself as fallen on "evil days" and "evil

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26 2 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

And this green pastoral landscape, were to me

More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!

July 1798 1798

Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802) To the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, published jointly with Coleridge in 1798, Wordsworth prefixed an "Advertisement" asserting that the majority of the poems were "to be considered as experiments" to determine "how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure." In the second, two-volume edition of 1800, Wordsworth, aided by frequent conversations with Coleridge, expanded the Advertisement into a preface that justified the poems not as experiments, but as exemplifying the principles of all good poetry. The Preface was enlarged for the third edition of Lyrical Ballads, published two years later. This last version of 1802 is reprinted here.

Although some of its ideas had antecedents in the later eighteenth century, the Preface as a whole deserves its reputation as a revolutionary manifesto about the nature of poetry. Like many radical statements, however, it claims to go back to the implicit principles that governed the great poetry of the past but have been perverted in recent practice. Most discussions of the Preface, following the lead of Cole- ridge in chapters 14 and 1 7 of his Biographia Literaria, have focused on Wordsworth's assertions about the valid language of poetry, on which he bases his attack on the "poetic diction" of eighteenth-century poets. As Coleridge pointed out, Wordsworth's argument about this issue is far from clear. However, Wordsworth's questioning of the underlying premises of neoclassical poetry went even further. His Preface implicitly denies the traditional assumption that the poetic genres constitute a hierarchy, from epic and tragedy at the top down through comedy, satire, pastoral, to the short lyric at the lowest reaches of the poetic scale; he also rejects the traditional principle of "decorum," which required the poet to arrange matters so that the poem's subject (especially the social class of its protagonists) and its level of diction conformed to the status of the literary kind on the poetic scale.

When Wordsworth asserted in the Preface that he deliberately chose to represent "incidents and situations from common life," he translated his democratic sympathies into critical terms, justifying his use of peasants, children, outcasts, criminals, and madwomen as serious subjects of poetic and even tragic concern. He also undertook to write in "a selection of language really used by men," on the grounds that there can be no "essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition." In making this claim Wordsworth attacked the neoclassical principle that required the language, in many kinds of poems, to be elevated over everyday speech by a special, more refined and dignified diction and by artful figures of speech. Wordsworth's views about the valid language of poetry are based on the new premise that "all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings"�spontaneous, that is, at the moment of composition, even though the process is influenced by prior thought and acquired poetic skill.

Wordsworth's assertions about the materials and diction of poetry have been greatly influential in expanding the range of serious literature to include the common people and ordinary things and events, as well as in justifying a poetry of sincerity rather than of artifice, expressed in the ordinary language of its time. But in the long view other aspects of his Preface have been no less significant in establishing its importance, not only as a turning point in English criticism but also as a central document in modern culture, Wordsworth feared that a new urban, industrial society's mass media and mass culture (glimpsed in the Preface when he refers derisively to contemporary Gothic novels and German melodramas) were threatening to blunt the human

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PREFACE TO LYRICAL BALLADS / 263

mind's "discriminatory powers" and to "reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor." He attributed to imaginative literature the primary role in keeping the human beings who live in such societies emotionally alive and morally sensitive. Literature, that is, could keep humans essentially human.

From Preface to Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems

(1802)

[THE SUBJECT AND LANGUAGE OF POETRY]

The first volume of these poems has already been submitted to general perusal. It was published, as an experiment, which, I hoped, might be of some use to ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a poet may rationally endeavour to impart.

I had formed no very inaccurate estimate of the probable effect of those poems: I flattered myself that they who should be pleased with them would read them with more than common pleasure: and, on the other hand, I was well aware, that by those who should dislike them they would be read with more than common dislike. The result has differed from my expectation in this only, that I have pleased a greater number than I ventured to hope I should please.

For the sake of variety, and from a consciousness of my own weakness, I was induced to request the assistance of a friend, who furnished me with the poems of the Ancient Mariner, the Foster-Mother's Tale, the Nightingale, and the poem entitled Love. I should not, however, have requested this assistance, had I not believed that the poems of my friend1 would in a great measure have the same tendency as my own, and that, though there would be found a difference, there would be found no discordance in the colours of our style; as our opinions on the subject of poetry do almost entirely coincide.

Several of my friends are anxious for the success of these poems from a belief, that, if the views with which they were composed were indeed realized, a class of poetry would be produced, well adapted to interest mankind permanently, and not unimportant in the multiplicity, and in the quality of its moral relations: and on this account they have advised me to prefix a systematic defence of the theory upon which the poems were written. But I was unwilling to undertake the task, because I knew that on this occasion the reader would look coldly upon my arguments, since I might be suspected of having been principally influenced by the selfish and foolish hope of reasoning him into an approbation of these particular poems: and I was still more unwilling to undertake the task, because, adequately to display my opinions, and fully to enforce my arguments, would require a space wholly disproportionate to the nature of a preface. For to treat the subject with the clearness and coherence of which I believe it susceptible, it would be necessary to give a full account of the present state of the public taste in this country, and to determine how far this taste is healthy or depraved; which, again, could not be determined, without pointing out, in what manner language and the human mind act and re-act on each other, and without retracing the revolutions, not of literature alone,

1. The "friend" of course is Coleridge.

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26 4 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

but likewise of society itself. I have therefore altogether declined to enter regularly upon this defence; yet I am sensible, that there would be some impropriety in abruptly obtruding upon the public, without a few words of introduction, poems so materially different from those upon which general approbation is at present bestowed.

It is supposed, that by the act of writing in verse an author makes a formal engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of association; that he not only thus apprizes the reader that certain classes of ideas and expressions will be found in his book, but that others will be carefully excluded. This exponent or symbol held forth by metrical language must in different eras of literature have excited very different expectations: for example, in the age of Catullus, Terence, and Lucretius and that of Statius or Claudian,2 and in our own country, in the age of Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher, and that of Donne and Cowley, or Dryden, or Pope. I will not take upon me to determine the exact import of the promise which by the act of writing in verse an author, in the present day, makes to his reader; but I am certain, it will appear to many persons that I have not fulfilled the terms of an engagement thus voluntarily contracted. They who have been accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will, no doubt, frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness: they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to inquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title. I hope therefore the reader will not censure me, if I attempt to state what I have proposed to myself to perform; and also (as far as the limits of a preface will permit) to explain some of the chief reasons which have determined me in the choice of my purpose: that at least he may be spared any unpleasant feeling of disappointment, and that I myself may be protected from the most dishonorable accusation which can be brought against an author, namely, that of an indolence which prevents him from endeavouring to ascertain what is his duty, or, when this duty is ascertained, prevents him from performing it.

The principal object, then, which I proposed to myself in these poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men; and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement. Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings; and, from the necessary character of rural occupations, are more easily comprehended; and are more durable; and lastly, because in that con

2. Wordsworth's implied contrast is between the and the elaborate artifice of the last two Roman naturalness and simplicity of the first three Roman poets (Statius wrote in the 1 st and Claudian in the poets (who wrote in the last two centuries b.c.e.) 4th century c.e.).

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dition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature. The language, too, of these men is adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the influence of social vanity they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions. Accordingly, such a language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for it by poets, who think that they are conferring honour upon themselves and their art, in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, in order to furnish food for fickle tastes, and fickle appetites, of their own creation.3

I cannot, however, be insensible of the present outcry against the triviality and meanness both of thought and language, which some of my contemporaries have occasionally introduced into their metrical compositions; and I acknowledge, that this defect, where it exists, is more dishonorable to the writer's own character than false refinement or arbitrary innovation, though I should contend at the same time that it is far less pernicious in the sum of its consequences. From such verses the poems in these volumes will be found distinguished at least by one mark of difference, that each of them has a worthy purpose. Not that I mean to say, that I always began to write with a distinct purpose formally conceived; but I believe that my habits of meditation have so formed my feelings, as that my descriptions of such objects as strongly excite those feelings, will be found to carry along with them a purpose. If in this opinion I am mistaken, I can have little right to the name of a poet. For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: but though this be true, poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply. For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings; and, as by contemplating the relation of these general representatives to each other we discover what is really important to men, so, by the repetition and continuance of this act, our feelings will be connected with important subjects, till at length, if we be originally possessed of much sensibility, such habits of mind will be produced, that, by obeying blindly and mechanically the impulses of those habits, we shall describe objects, and utter sentiments, of such a nature and in such connection with each other, that the understanding of the being to whom we address ourselves, if he be in a healthful state of association, must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, and his affections ameliorated.

I have said that each of these poems has a purpose. I have also informed my reader what this purpose will be found principally to be: namely, to illustrate the manner in which our feelings and ideas are associated in a state of excitement. But, speaking in language somewhat more appropriate, it is to follow the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated by the great and

3. It is worth while here to observe that the affecting parts of Chaucer are almost always expressed in language pure and universally intelligible even to this day [Wordsworth's note].

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26 6 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

simple affections of our nature. This object I have endeavored in these short essays to attain by various means; by tracing the maternal passion through many of its more subtile4 windings, as in the poems of the Idiot Boy and the Mad Mother; by accompanying the last struggles of a human being, at the approach of death, cleaving in solitude to life and society, as in the poem of the Forsaken Indian; by shewing, as in the stanzas entitled We Are Seven, the perplexity and obscurity which in childhood attend our notion of death, or rather our utter inability to admit that notion; or by displaying the strength of fraternal, or to speak more philosophically, of moral attachment when early associated with the great and beautiful objects of nature, as in The Brothers; or, as in the Incident of Simon Lee, by placing my reader in the way of receiving from ordinary moral sensations another and more salutary impression than we are accustomed to receive from them. It has also been part of my general purpose to attempt to sketch characters under the influence of less impassioned feelings, as in the Two April Mornings, The Fountain, The Old Man Travelling, The Two Thieves, &c., characters of which the elements are simple, belonging rather to nature than to manners,5 such as exist now, and will probably always exist, and which from their constitution may be distinctly and profitably contemplated. I will not abuse the indulgence of my reader by dwelling longer upon this subject; but it is proper that I should mention one other circumstance which distinguishes these poems from the popular poetry of the day; it is this, that the feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling. My meaning will be rendered perfectly intelligible by referring my reader to the poems entitled Poor Susan and the Childless Father, particularly to the last stanza of the latter poem.

I will not suffer a sense of false modesty to prevent me from asserting, that I point my reader's attention to this mark of distinction, far less for the sake of these particular poems than from the general importance of the subject. The subject is indeed important! For the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross6 and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know, that one being is elevated above another, in proportion as he possesses this capability. It has therefore appeared to me, that to endeavour to produce or enlarge this capability is one of the best services in which, at any period, a writer can be engaged; but this service, excellent at all times, is especially so at the present day. For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies.7 To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves. The invaluable works of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespeare and Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies,8 and deluges of idle and extrava

4. Subtle. 8. Wordsworth had in mind the "Gothic" terror 5. Social custom. novels by writers such as Ann Radcliffe and Mat6. Coarse. thew Gregory Lewis and the sentimental melo7. This was the period of the wars against France, drama, then immensely popular in England, of of industrial urbanization, and of the rapid prolif-August von Kotzebue and his German contempoeration in England of daily newspapers. raries.

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PREFACE TO LYRICAL BALLADS / 267

gant stories in verse.�When I think upon this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation, I am almost ashamed to have spoken of the feeble effort with which I have endeavoured to counteract it; and, reflecting upon the magnitude of the general evil, I should be oppressed with no dishonorable melancholy, had I not a deep impression of certain inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind, and likewise of certain powers in the great and permanent objects that act upon it which are equally inherent and indestructible; and did I not further add to this impression a belief, that the time is approaching when the evil will be systematically opposed, by men of greater powers, and with far more distinguished success.

Having dwelt thus long on the subjects and aim of these poems, I shall request the reader's permission to apprize him of a few circumstances relating to their style, in order, among other reasons, that I may not be censured for not having performed what I never attempted. The reader will find that personifications of abstract ideas9 rarely occur in these volumes; and, I hope, are utterly rejected as an ordinary device to elevate the style, and raise it above prose. I have proposed to myself to imitate, and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men; and assuredly such personifications do not make any natural or regular part of that language. They are, indeed, a figure of speech occasionally prompted by passion, and I have made use of them as such; but I have endeavoured utterly to reject them as a mechanical device of style, or as a family language which writers in metre seem to lay claim to by prescription. I have wished to keep my reader in the company of flesh and blood, persuaded that by so doing I shall interest him. I am, however, well aware that others who pursue a different track may interest him likewise; I do not interfere with their claim, I only wish to prefer a different claim of my own. There will also be found in these volumes little of what is usually called poetic diction;1 I have taken as much pains to avoid it as others ordinarily take to produce it; this I have done for the reason already alleged, to bring my language near to the language of men, and further, because the pleasure which I have proposed to myself to impart is of a kind very different from that which is supposed by many persons to be the proper object of poetry. I do not know how, without being culpably particular, I can give my reader a more exact notion of the style in which I wished these poems to be written than by informing him that I have at all times endeavoured to look steadily at my subject, consequently, I hope that there is in these poems little falsehood of description, and that my ideas are expressed in language fitted to their respective importance. Something I must have gained by this practice, as it is friendly to one property of all good poetry, namely, good sense; but it has necessarily cut me off from a large portion of phrases and figures of speech which from father to son have long been regarded as the common inheritance of poets. I have also thought it expedient to restrict myself still further, having abstained from the use of many expressions, in themselves proper and beautiful, but which have been foolishly repeated by bad poets, till such feelings of disgust are connected with them as it is scarcely possible by any art of association to overpower.

If in a poem there should be found a series of lines, or even a single line,

9. This practice was common in 18th-century 1. In the sense of words, phrases, and figures of poetry. Samuel Johnson, for instance, in The Van-speech not commonly used in conversation or ity of Human Wishes (1749), has "Observation . . . prose that are regarded as especially appropriate to surveying] mankind" and "Vengeance listening] poetry. to the fool's request" (lines 1�2, 14).

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268 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

in which the language, though naturally arranged and according to the strict laws of metre, does not differ from that of prose, there is a numerous class of critics, who, when they stumble upon these prosaisms as they call them, imagine that they have made a notable discovery, and exult over the poet as over a man ignorant of his own profession. Now these men would establish a canon of criticism which the reader will conclude he must utterly reject, if he wishes to be pleased with these volumes. And it would be a most easy task to prove to him, that not only the language of a large portion of everygood poem, even of the most elevated character, must necessarily, except with reference to the metre, in no respect differ from that of good prose, but likewise that some of the most interesting parts of the best poems will be found to be strictly the language of prose, when prose is well written. The truth of this assertion might be demonstrated by innumerable passages from almost all the poetical writings, even of Milton himself. I have not space for much quotation; but, to illustrate the subject in a general manner, I will here adduce a short composition of Gray, who was at the head of those who by their reasonings have attempted to widen the space of separation betwixt prose and metrical composition, and was more than any other man curiously elaborate in the structure of his own poetic diction.2

In vain to me the smiling mornings shine,

And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire:

The birds in vain their amorous descant join,

Or cheerful fields resume their green attire:

These ears, alas! for other notes repine;

A different object do these eyes require;

My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;

And in my breast the imperfect joys expire;

Yet Morning smiles the busy race to cheer,

And new-born pleasure brings to happier men;

The fields to all their wonted tribute bear;

To warm their little loves the birds complain.

I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear

And weep the more because I weep in vain.

It will easily be perceived that the only part of this sonnet which is of any value is the lines printed in italics: it is equally obvious, that, except in the rhyme, and in the use of the single word "fruitless" for fruitlessly, which is so far a defect, the language of these lines does in no respect differ from that of prose.

By the foregoing quotation I have shewn that the language of prose may yet be well adapted to poetry; and I have previously asserted that a large portion of the language of every good poem can in no respect differ from that of good prose. I will go further. I do not doubt that it may be safely affirmed, that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition. We are fond of tracing the resemblance between poetry and painting, and, accordingly, we call them sisters: but where shall we find bonds of connection sufficiently strict to typify the affinity betwixt metrical and prose composition? They both speak by and to the same organs; the

2. Thomas Gray (author in 1751 of the "Elegy age is never the language of poetry." The poem that Written in a Country Churchyard") had written, in follows is Gray's "Sonnet on the Death of Richard

a letter to Richard West, that "the language of the West."

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PREFACE TO LYRICAL BALLADS / 269

bodies in which both of them are clothed may be said to be of the same substance, their affections are kindred and almost identical, not necessarily differing even in degree; poetry3 sheds no tears "such as Angels weep,"4 but natural and human tears; she can boast of no celestial ichor5 that distinguishes her vital juices from those of prose; the same human blood circulates through the veins of them both.

& >* $

["WHAT IS A POET?"]

Taking up the subject, then, upon general grounds, I ask what is meant by the word "poet"? What is a poet? To whom does he address himself? And what language is to be expected from him? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them. To these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by real events, yet (especially in those parts of the general sympathy which are pleasing and delightful) do more nearly resemble the passions produced by real events, than any thing which, from the motions of their own minds merely, other men are accustomed to feel in themselves; whence, and from practice, he has acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing what he thinks and feels, and especially those thoughts and feelings which, by his own choice, or from the structure of his own mind, arise in him without immediate external excitement.

But, whatever portion of this faculty we may suppose even the greatest poet to possess, there cannot be a doubt but that the language which it will suggest to him, must, in liveliness and truth, fall far short of that which is uttered by men in real life, under the actual pressure of those passions, certain shadows of which the poet thus produces, or feels to be produced, in himself. However exalted a notion we would wish to cherish of the character of a poet, it is obvious, that, while he describes and imitates passions, his situation is altogether slavish and mechanical, compared with the freedom and power of real and substantial action and suffering. So that it will be the wish of the poet to bring his feelings near to those of the persons whose feelings he describes, nay, for short spaces of time perhaps, to let himself slip into an entire delusion, and even confound and identify his own feelings with theirs; modifying only the language which is thus suggested to him, by a consideration that he describes for a particular purpose, that of giving pleasure. Here, then, he will

3. I here use the word "poetry" (though against my antithesis; because lines and passages of metre so own judgment) as opposed to the word "prose," naturally occur in writing prose, that it would be

and synonymous with metrical composition. But scarcely possible to avoid them, even were it desir

much confusion has been introduced into criticism able [Wordsworth's note].

by this contradistinction of poetry and prose, 4. Milton's Paradise Lost 1.620.

instead of the more philosophical one of poetry and 5. In Greek mythology the fluid in the veins of the

matter of fact, or science. The only strict antithesis gods.

to prose is metre; nor is this, in truth, a strict

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270 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

apply the principle on which I have so much insisted, namely, that of selection; on this he will depend for removing what would otherwise be painful or disgusting in the passion; he will feel that there is no necessity to trick out6 or to elevate nature: and, the more industriously he applies this principle, the deeper will be his faith that no words, which his fancy or imagination can suggest, will be to be compared with those which are the emanations of reality and truth.

But it may be said by those who do not object to the general spirit of these remarks, that, as it is impossible for the poet to produce upon all occasions language as exquisitely fitted for the passion as that which the real passion itself suggests, it is proper that he should consider himself as in the situation of a translator, who deems himself justified when he substitutes excellences of another kind for those which are unattainable by him; and endeavours occasionally to surpass his original, in order to make some amends for the general inferiority to which he feels that he must submit. But this would be to encourage idleness and unmanly despair. Further, it is the language of men who speak of what they do not understand; who talk of poetry as a matter of amusement and idle pleasure; who will converse with us as gravely about a taste for poetry, as they express it, as if it were a thing as indifferent as a taste for rope-dancing, or Frontiniac7 or sherry. Aristotle, I have been told, hath said, that poetry is the most philosophic of all writing;8 it is so: its object is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative; not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion; truth which is its own testimony, which gives strength and divinity to the tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from the same tribunal. Poetry is the image of man and nature. The obstacles which stand in the way of the fidelity of the biographer and historian, and of their consequent utility, are incalculably greater than those which are to be encountered by the poet who has an adequate notion of the dignity of his art. The poet writes under one restriction only, namely, that of the necessity of giving immediate pleasure to a human being possessed of that information which may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer or a natural philosopher, but as a man. Except this one restriction, there is no object standing between the poet and the image of things; between this, and the biographer and historian there are a thousand.

Nor let this necessity of producing immediate pleasure be considered as a degradation of the poet's art. It is far otherwise. It is an acknowledgment of the beauty of the universe, an acknowledgment the more sincere because it is not formal, but indirect; it is a task light and easy to him who looks at the world in the spirit of love: further, it is a homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves.9 We have no sympathy but what is propagated by pleasure: I would not be misunderstood; but wherever we sympathize with pain it will be found that the sympathy is produced and carried on by subtle combinations with pleasure. We have no knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but what

6. Dress up. singulars" (Poetics 1451b). 7. A sweet wine made from muscat grapes. 9. A bold echo of the wrords of St. Paul, that in 8. Aristotle in fact said that "poetry is more phil-God "we live, and move, and have our being" (Acts osophic than history, since its statements are of the 17.28).

nature of universals, whereas those of history are

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PREFACE TO LYRICAL BALLADS / 271

has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone. The man of science, the chemist and mathematician, whatever difficulties and disgusts they may have had to struggle with, know and feel this. However painful may be the objects with which the anatomist's knowledge is connected, he feels that his knowledge is pleasure; and where he has no pleasure he has no knowledge. What then does the poet? He considers man and the objects that surround him as acting and re-acting upon each other, so as to produce an infinite complexity of pain and pleasure; he considers man in his own nature and in his ordinary life as contemplating this with a certain quantity of immediate knowledge, with certain convictions, intuitions, and deductions which by habit become of the nature of intuitions; he considers him as looking upon this complex scene of ideas and sensations, and finding every where objects that immediately excite in him sympathies which, from the necessities of his nature, are accompanied by an overbalance of enjoyment.

To this knowledge which all men carry about with them, and to these sympathies in which without any other discipline than that of our daily life we are fitted to take delight, the poet principally directs his attention. He considers man and nature as essentially adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting qualities of nature. And thus the poet, prompted by this feeling of pleasure which accompanies him through the whole course of his studies, converses with general nature with affections akin to those, which, through labour and length of time, the man of science has raised up in himself, by conversing with those particular parts of nature which are the objects of his studies. The knowledge both of the poet and the man of science is pleasure; but the knowledge of the one cleaves to us as a necessary part of our existence, our natural and unalienable inheritance; the other is a personal and individual acquisition, slow to come to us, and by no habitual and direct sympathy connecting us with our fellow-beings. The man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude: the poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science. Emphatically may it be said of the poet, as Shakespeare hath said of man, "that he looks before and after."1 He is the rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs, in spite of things silently gone out of mind and things violently destroyed, the poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time. The objects of the poet's thoughts are every where; though the eyes and senses of man are, it is true, his favorite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings. Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge�it is as immortal as the heart of man. If the labours of men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the poet will sleep then no more than at present, but he will be ready to follow the steps of the man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the

1. Cf. Shakespeare's Hamlet 4.4.9.27.

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272 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

objects of the science itself. The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, or mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.2 If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man.�It is not, then, to be supposed that any one, who holds that sublime notion of poetry which I have attempted to convey, will break in upon the sanctity and truth of his pictures by transitory and accidental ornaments, and endeavour to excite admiration of himself by arts, the necessity of which must manifestly depend upon the assumed meanness of his subject.

What I have thus far said applies to poetry in general; but especially to those parts of composition where the poet speaks through the mouth of his characters; and upon this point it appears to have such weight that I will conclude, there are few persons, of good sense, who would not allow that the dramatic parts of composition are defective, in proportion as they deviate from the real language of nature, and are coloured by a diction of the poet's own, either peculiar to him as an individual poet, or belonging simply to poets in general, to a body of men who, from the circumstance of their compositions being in metre, it is expected will employ a particular language.

It is not, then, in the dramatic parts of composition that we look for this distinction of language; but still it may be proper and necessary where the poet speaks to us in his own person and character. To this I answer by referring my reader to the description which I have before given of a poet. Among the qualities which I have enumerated as principally conducing to form a poet, is implied nothing differing in kind from other men, but only in degree. The sum of what I have there said is, that the poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater promptness to think and feel without immediate external excitement, and a greater power in expressing such thoughts and feelings as are produced in him in that manner. But these passions and thoughts and feelings are the general passions and thoughts and feelings of men. And with what are they connected? Undoubtedly with our moral sentiments and animal sensations, and with the causes which excite these; with the operations of the elements and the appearances of the visible universe; with storm and sunshine, with the revolutions3 of the seasons, with cold and heat, with loss of friends and kindred, with injuries and resentments, gratitude and hope, with fear and sorrow. These, and the like, are the sensations and objects which the poet describes, as they are the sensations of other men, and the objects which interest them. The poet thinks and feels in the spirit of the passions of men. How, then, can his language differ in any material degree from that of all other men who feel vividly and see clearly? It might be proved that it is impossible. But supposing that this were not the case, the poet might then be allowed to use a peculiar language, when expressing his feelings for his own gratification, or that of men like himself. But poets do not write for poets alone, but for

2. Wordsworth is at least right in anticipating the Joanna Baillie's "Address to a Steamvessel." poetry of the machine. His sonnet "Steamboats, 3. Recurrence.

Viaducts, and Railways" is an early instance, as is

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PREFACE TO LYRICAL BALLADS / 273

men. Unless therefore we are advocates for that admiration which depends upon ignorance, and that pleasure which arises from hearing what we do not understand, the poet must descend from this supposed height, and, in order to excite rational sympathy, he must express himself as other men express themselves. * * *

["EMOTION RECOLLECTED IN TRANQUILLITY"]

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is carried on; but the emotion, of whatever kind and in whatever degree, from various causes is qualified by various pleasures, so that in describing any passions whatsoever, which are voluntarily described, the mind will upon the whole be in a state of enjoyment. Now, if nature be thus cautious in preserving in a state of enjoyment a being thus employed, the poet ought to profit by the lesson thus held forth to him, and ought especially to take care, that whatever passions he communicates to his reader, those passions, if his reader's mind be sound and vigorous, should always be accompanied with an overbalance of pleasure. Now the music of harmonious metrical language, the sense of difficulty overcome, and the blind association of pleasure which has been previously received from works of rhyme or metre of the same or similar construction, an indistinct perception perpetually renewed of language closely resembling that of real life, and yet, in the circumstance of metre, differing from it so widely, all these imperceptibly make up a complex feeling of delight, which is of the most important use in tempering the painful feeling which will always be found intermingled with powerful descriptions of the deeper passions. This effect is always produced in pathetic and impassioned poetry; while, in lighter compositions, the ease and gracefulness with which the poet manages his numbers are themselves confessedly a principal source of the gratification of the reader. I might perhaps include all which it is necessary to say upon this subject by affirming, what few persons will deny, that, of two descriptions, either of passions, manners, or characters, each of them equally well executed, the one in prose and the other in verse, the verse will be read a hundred times where the prose is read once. * * *

I know that nothing would have so effectually contributed to further the end which I have in view, as to have shewn of what kind the pleasure is, and how the pleasure is produced, which is confessedly produced by metrical composition essentially different from that which I have here endeavoured to recommend: for the reader will say that he has been pleased by such composition; and what can I do more for him? The power of any art is limited; and he will suspect, that, if I propose to furnish him with new friends, it is only upon condition of his abandoning his old friends. Besides, as I have said, the reader is himself conscious of the pleasure which he has received from such composition, composition to which he has peculiarly attached the endearing name of poetry; and all men feel an habitual gratitude, and something of an honorable bigotry for the objects which have long continued to please them: we

.

274 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

not only wish to be pleased, but to be pleased in that particular way in which we have been accustomed to be pleased. There is a host of arguments in these feelings; and I should be the less able to combat them successfully, as I am willing to allow, that, in order entirely to enjoy the poetry which I am recommending, it would be necessary to give up much of what is ordinarily enjoyed. But, would my limits have permitted me to point out how this pleasure is produced, I might have removed many obstacles, and assisted my reader in perceiving that the powers of language are not so limited as he may suppose; and that it is possible that poetry may give other enjoyments, of a purer, more lasting, and more exquisite nature. This part of my subject I have not altogether neglected; but it has been less my present aim to prove, that the interest excited by some other kinds of poetry is less vivid, and less worthy of the nobler powers of the mind, than to offer reasons for presuming, that, if the object which I have proposed to myself were adequately attained, a species of poetry would be produced, which is genuine poetry; in its nature well adapted to interest mankind permanently, and likewise important in the multiplicity and quality of its moral relations.

From what has been said, and from a perusal of the poems, the reader will be able clearly to perceive the object which I have proposed to myself: he will determine how far 1 have attained this object; and, what is a much more important question, whether it be worth attaining; and upon the decision of these two questions will rest my claim to the approbation of the public.

1800, 1802

Strange fits of passion have I known1

Strange fits of passion have I known:

And I will dare to tell,

But in the Lover's ear alone,

What once to me befel.

5 When she I loved looked every day

Fresh as a rose in June,

I to her cottage bent my way,

Beneath an evening moon.

Upon the moon I fixed my eye,

10 All over the wide lea;

With quickening pace my horse drew nigh

Those paths so dear to me.

And now we reached the orchard-plot;

And, as we climbed the hill,

is The sinking moon to Lucy's cot

Came near, and nearer still.

1. This and the four following pieces are often worth and his sister were in Germany and home- grouped by editors as the "Lucy poems," even sick. There has been diligent speculation about the

though "A slumber did my spirit seal" does not identity of Lucy, but it remains speculation. The

identify' the "she" who is the subject of that poem. one certainty is that she is not the gir! of Words-

All but the last were written in 1799, while Words-worth's "Lucy Gray."

.

THRE E YEARS SHE GRE W / 27 5 20In one of those sweet dreams I slept, Kind Nature's gentlest boon! And all the while my eyes I kept On the descending moon. My horse moved on; hoof after hoof He raised, and never stopped: When down behind the cottage roof, At once, the bright moon dropped. 25 What fond and wayward thoughts will slide Into a Lover's head! "O mercy!" to myself I cried, "If Lucy should be dead!"2 1799 1800

She dwelt among the untrodden ways1

She dwelt among the untrodden ways

Beside the springs of Dove,2

A Maid whom there were none to praise

And very few to love: 5 A violet by a mossy stone

Half hidden from the eye!

�Fair as a star, when only one

Is shining in the sky. She lived unknown, and few could know

10 When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and, oh,

The difference to me! 1799 1800

Three years she grew

Three years she grew in sun and shower,

Then Nature said, "A lovelier flower

On earth was never sown;

This Child I to myself will take; 5 She shall be mine, and I will make

A Lady of my own.1

2. An additional stanza in an earlier manuscript to this volume. version demonstrates how a poem can be improved 2. There are several rivers by this name in

by omission of a passage that is, in itself, excellent England, including one in the Lake District.

poetry: "I told her this: her laughter light / Is ring-1. I.e., Lucy was three years old when Nature

ing in my ears; / And when I think upon that night made this promise; line 37 makes clear that Lucy

/ My eyes are dim with tears." had reached the maturity foretold in the sixth

1. For the author's revisions while composing this stanza when she died. poem, see "Poems in Process," in the appendices

.

27 6 / WILLIA M WORDSWORT H 10"Myself will to my darling be Both law and impulse: and with me The Girl, in rock and plain, In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, Shall feel an overseeing power To kindle or restrain. 1520"She shall be sportive as the fawn That wild with glee across the lawn Or up the mountain springs; And hers shall be the breathing balm, And hers the silence and the calm Of mute insensate things. "The floating clouds their state shall lend To her; for her the willow bend; Nor shall she fail to see Even in the motions of the Storm Grace that shall mould the Maiden's form By silent sympathy. 253035 "The stars of midnight shall be dear To her; and she shall lean her ear In many a secret place Where rivulets dance their wayward round, And beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pass into her face. "And vital feelings of delight Shall rear her form to stately height, Her virgin bosom swell; Such thoughts to Lucy I will give While she and I together live Here in this happy dell." 40Thus Nature spake�the work was done� How soon my Lucy's race was run! She died, and left to me This heath, this calm, and quiet scene; The memory of what has been, And never more will be. 1799 1800 A slumber did my spirit seal A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears: She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years. 5 No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees;

.

LUCY GRAY / 277

Rolled round in earth's diurnal0 course, daily

With rocks, and stones, and trees. 1799 1800

I travelled among unknown men I travelled among unknown men, In lands beyond the sea; Nor, England! did I know till then What love I bore to thee. 5 Tis past, that melancholy dream! Nor will I quit thy shore A second time; for still I seem To love thee more and more. 10Among thy mountains did I feel The joy of my desire; And she I cherished turned her wheel Beside an English fire. isThy mornings showed, thy nights concealed The bowers where Lucy played; And thine too is the last green field That Lucy's eyes surveyed. ca. 1801 1807

Lucy Gray1

Or, Solitude

Oft I had heard of Lucy Gray:

And, when I crossed the wild,

I chanced to see at break of day

The solitary child. 5 No mate, no comrade Lucy knew;

She dwelt on a wide moor,

�The sweetest thing that ever grew

Beside a human door! You yet may spy the fawn at play,

10 The hare upon the green;

1. Written in 1799 while Wordsworth was in Ger-Crabbe's matter-of-fact style of treating subjects of many, and founded on a true account of a young the same kind" [Wordsworth's note, 1843], George

girl who drowned when she lost her way in a snow-Crabbe (1765-1832) won fame in the late 18th

storm. "The body however was found in the canal. century for his long poem The Village. Cf. Words-

The way in which the incident was treated and the worth's discussion, in the Preface to Lyrical Bal

spiritualizing of the character might furnish hints lads, of how he had aimed in those poems to throw

for contrasting the imaginative influences which I over ordinary things "a certain colouring of imag

have endeavored to throw over common life with ination" (p. 264).

.

278 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

But the sweet face of Lucy Gray

Will never more be seen. "To-night will be a stormy night�

You to the town must go;

15 And take a lantern, Child, to light

Your mother through the snow." "That, Father! will I gladly do:

'Tis scarcely afternoon�

The minster�-clock has just struck two, church

20 And yonder is the moon!" At this the Father raised his hook,

And snapped a faggot-band2

He plied his work;�and Lucy took

The lantern in her hand. 25 Not blither is the mountain roe:� deer

With many a wanton stroke

Her feet disperse the powdery snow,

That rises up like smoke. The storm came on before its time:

30 She wandered up and down;

And many a hill did Lucy climb:

But never reached the town. The wretched parents all that night

Went shouting far and wide;

35 But there was neither sound nor sight

To serve them for a guide. At day-break on a hill they stood

That overlooked the moor;

And thence they saw the bridge of wood,

40 A furlong3 from their door. They wept�and, turning homeward, cried,

"In heaven we all shall meet;"

�When in the snow the mother spied

The print of Lucy's feet. 45 Then downwards from the steep hill's edge

They tracked the footmarks small;

And through the broken hawthorn hedge,

And by the long stone-wall; And then an open field they crossed:

50 The marks were still the same;

2. Cord binding a bundle of sticks to be used for 3. One eighth of a mile. fuel.

.

NUTTIN G / 27 9 They tracked them on, nor ever lost; And to the bridge they came. 55They followed from the snowy bank Those footmarks, one by one, Into the middle of the plank; And further there were none! 60-�Yet some maintain that to this day She is a living child; That you may see sweet Lucy Gray Upon the lonesome wild. O'er rough and smooth she trips along, And never looks behind; And sings a solitary song That whistles in the wind. 1799 1800

Nutting1

It seems a day

(I speak of one from many singled out)

One of those heavenly days that cannot die;

When, in the eagerness of boyish hope,

5 I left our cottage-threshold, sallying forth With a huge wallet0 o'er my shoulder slung, bag, knapsack A nutting-crook in hand; and turned my steps

Tow'rd some far-distant wood, a Figure quaint,

Tricked out in proud disguise of cast-off weeds0 clothes 10 Which for that service had been husbanded,

By exhortation of my frugal Dame2�

Motley accoutrement, of power to smile

At thorns, and brakes, and brambles,�and, in truth,

More ragged than need was! O'er pathless rocks,

15 Through beds of matted fern, and tangled thickets,

Forcing my way, I came to one dear nook

Unvisited, where not a broken bough

Drooped with its withered leaves, ungracious sign

Of devastation; but the hazels rose

20 Tall and erect, with tempting clusters hung,

A virgin scene!�A little while I stood,

Breathing with such suppression of the heart

As joy delights in; and, with wise restraint

Voluptuous, fearless of a rival, eyed

25 The banquet;�or beneath the trees I sate

I. Wordsworth said in 1843 that these lines, writ-in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, 1800. ten in Germany in 1798, were "intended as part of 2. Ann Tyson, with whom Wordsworth lodged

a poem on my own life [T7ze Prelude], but struck while at Hawkshead grammar school.

out as not being wanted there." He published them

.

28 0 / WILLIA M WORDSWORT H 3035404550Among the flowers, and with the flowers I played; A temper known to those, who, after long And weary expectation, have been blest With sudden happiness beyond all hope. Perhaps it was a bower beneath whose leaves The violets of five seasons re-appear And fade, unseen by any human eye; Where fairy water-breaks3 do murmur on For ever; and I saw the sparkling foam, And�with my cheek on one of those green stones That, fleeced with moss, under the shady trees, Lay round me, scattered like a flock of sheep� I heard the murmur and the murmuring sound, In that sweet mood when pleasure loves to pay Tribute to ease; and, of its joy secure, The heart luxuriates with indifferent things, Wasting its kindliness on stocks4 and stones, And on the vacant air. Then up I rose, And dragged to earth both branch and bough, with crash And merciless ravage: and the shady nook Of hazels, and the green and mossy bower, Deformed and sullied, patiently gave up Their quiet being: and, unless I now Confound my present feelings with the past, Ere from the mutilated bower I turned 55Exulting, rich beyond the wealth of kings, I felt a sense of pain when I beheld The silent trees, and saw the intruding sky.� Then, dearest Maiden,5 move along these shades In gentleness of heart; with gentle hand Touch�for there is a spirit in the woods. 1798 1800

The Ruined Cottage1

First Part

'Twas summer and the sun was mounted high.

Along the south the uplands feebly glared

3. Places where the flow of a stream is broken by The text reprinted here is from "MS. D," dated rocks. 1799, as transcribed by James Butler in the Cornell

4. Tree stumps. ("Stocks and stones" is a conven-Wordsworth volume, "The Ruined Cottage" and tional expression for "inanimate things.") "The Pedlar" (1979).

5. In a manuscript passage originally intended to Concerning the principal narrator, introduced in lead up to "Nutting," the maiden is called Lucy. line 33, Wordsworth said in 1843, "had I been born 1. Wordsworth wrote The Ruined Cottage in in a class which would have deprived me of what 1797�98, then revised it several times before he is called a liberal education, it is not unlikely that finally published an expanded version of the story being strong in body; I should have taken to a way as book I of The Excursion, in 1814. The Ruined of life such as that in which my Pedlar passed the Cottage was not published as an independent poem greater part of his days. . . . [T]he character I have until 1949, when it appeared in the fifth volume represented in his person is chiefly an idea of what of The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, I fancied my own character might have become in edited by Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbi-his circumstances."

shire, who printed a version known as "MS. B."

.

THE RUINED COTTAGE / 281

Through a pale steam, and all the northern downs

In clearer air ascending shewed far off

Their surfaces with shadows dappled o'er

Of deep embattled clouds: far as the sight

Could reach those many shadows lay in spots

Determined and unmoved, with steady beams

Of clear and pleasant sunshine interposed;

Pleasant to him who on the soft cool moss

Extends his careless limbs beside the root

Of some huge oak whose aged branches make

A twilight of their own, a dewy shade

Where the wren warbles while the dreaming man,

Half-conscious of that soothing melody, With side-long eye looks out upon the scene,

By those impending branches made more soft,

More soft and distant. Other lot was mine.

Across a bare wide Common I had toiled

With languid feet which by the slipp'ry ground

Were baffled still, and when I stretched myself

On the brown earth my limbs from very heat

Could find no rest nor my weak arm disperse

The insect host which gathered round my face

And joined their murmurs to the tedious noise

Of seeds of bursting gorse that crackled round.

I rose and turned towards a group of trees

Which midway in that level stood alone,

And thither come at length, beneath a shade

Of clustering elms that sprang from the same root

I found a ruined house, four naked walls

That stared upon each other. I looked round

And near the door I saw an aged Man,

Alone, and stretched upon the cottage bench;

An iron-pointed staff lay at his side.

With instantaneous joy I recognized

That pride of nature and of lowly life,

The venerable Armytage, a friend

As dear to me as is the setting sun.

Two days before We had been fellow-travellers. I knew

That he was in this neighbourhood and now

Delighted found him here in the cool shade.

He lay, his pack of rustic merchandize

Pillowing his head�I guess he had no thought

Of his way-wandering life. His eyes were shut;

The shadows of the breezy elms above

Dappled his face. With thirsty heat oppress'd

At length I hailed him, glad to see his hat

Bedewed with water-drops, as if the brim Had newly scoop'd a running stream. He rose

And pointing to a sun-flower bade me climb

The [ ]2 wall where that same gaudy flower

2. The brackets here and in later lines mark blank spaces left unfilled in the manuscript.

.

282 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Looked out upon the road. It was a plot

55 Of garden-ground, now wild, its matted weeds

Marked with the steps of those whom as they pass'd,

The goose-berry trees that shot in long lank slips,

Or currants hanging from their leafless stems

In scanty strings, had tempted to o'erleap

60 The broken wall. Within that cheerless spot, Where two tall hedgerows of thick willow boughs

Joined in a damp cold nook, I found a well

Half-choked [with willow flowers and weeds.]3

I slaked my thirst and to the shady bench

65 Returned, and while I stood unbonneted

To catch the motion of the cooler air

The old Man said, "I see around me here

Things which you cannot see: we die, my Friend,

Nor we alone, but that which each man loved

70 And prized in his peculiar nook of earth

Dies with him or is changed, and very soon

Even of the good is no memorial left.

The Poets in their elegies and songs

Lamenting the departed call the groves,

75 They call upon the hills and streams to mourn,

And senseless"' rocks, nor idly; for they speak

In these their invocations with a voice

Obedient to the strong creative power

Of human passion. Sympathies there are

so More tranquil, yet perhaps of kindred birth,

That steal upon the meditative mind

And grow with thought. Beside yon spring I stood

And eyed its waters till we seemed to feel

One sadness, they and I. For them a bond

85 Of brotherhood is broken: time has been

When every day the touch of human hand

Disturbed their stillness, and they ministered

To human comfort. When I stooped to drink,

A spider's web hung to the water's edge,

90 And on the wet and slimy foot-stone lay

The useless fragment of a wooden bowl;

It moved my very heart. The day has been

When I could never pass this road but she

Who lived within these walls, when I appeared,

95 A daughter's welcome gave me, and I loved her

As my own child. O Sir! the good die first,

And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust

Burn to the socket. Many a passenger0 passerby, traveler Has blessed poor Margaret for her gentle looks

IOO When she upheld the cool refreshment drawn

From that forsaken spring, and no one came

But he was welcome, no one went away

But that it seemed she loved him. She is dead,

3. Wordsworth penciled the bracketed phrase into 4. Incapable of sensation or perception. a gap left in the manuscript.

.

THE RUINED COTTAGE / 283

The worm is on her cheek, and this poor hut,

105 Stripp'd of its outward garb of household flowers,

Of rose and sweet-briar, offers to the wind

A cold bare wall whose earthy top is tricked

With weeds and the rank spear-grass. She is dead,

And nettles rot and adders sun themselves

no Where we have sate together while she nurs'd

Her infant at her breast. The unshod Colt,

The wandring heifer and the Potter's ass,

Find shelter now within the chimney-wall

Where I have seen her evening hearth-stone blaze

us And through the window spread upon the road

Its chearful light.�You will forgive me, Sir,

But often on this cottage do I muse

As on a picture, till my wiser mind

Sinks, yielding to the foolishness of grief.

120 She had a husband, an industrious man,

Sober and steady; I have heard her say

That he was up and busy at his loom

In summer ere the mower's scythe had swept

The dewy grass, and in the early spring

125 Ere the last star had vanished. They who pass'd

At evening, from behind the garden-fence

Might hear his busy spade, which he would ply

After his daily work till the day-light

Was gone and every leaf and flower were lost

130 In the dark hedges. So they pass'd their days

In peace and comfort, and two pretty babes

Were their best hope next to the God in Heaven.

�You may remember, now some ten years gone,

Two blighting seasons when the fields were left

135 With half a harvest.5 It pleased heaven to add

A worse affliction in the plague of war:

A happy land was stricken to the heart;

'Twas a sad time of sorrow and distress:

A wanderer among the cottages,

140 I with my pack of winter raiment saw

The hardships of that season: many rich

Sunk down as in a dream among the poor,

And of the poor did many cease to be, And their place knew them not. Meanwhile, abridg'd0 deprived

145 Of daily comforts, gladly reconciled

To numerous self-denials, Margaret

Went struggling on through those calamitous years

With chearful hope: but ere the second autumn

A fever seized her husband. In disease

150 He lingered long, and when his strength returned

He found the little he had stored to meet

The hour of accident or crippling age

5. As James Butler points out in his introduction, wrote The Ruined Cottage, when a bad harvest was Wordsworth is purposely distancing his story in followed by one of the worst winters on record.

time. The "two blighting seasons" in fact occurred Much of the seed grain was destroyed in the

in 1794-95, only a few years before Wordsworth ground, and the price of wheat nearly doubled.

.

284 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Was all consumed. As I have said, 'twas now

A time of trouble; shoals of artisans

155 Were from their daily labour turned away

To hang for bread on parish charity,6

They and their wives and children�happier far

Could they have lived as do the little birds

That peck along the hedges or the kite

i6o That makes her dwelling in the mountain rocks.

Ill fared it now with Robert, he who dwelt

In this poor cottage; at his door he stood

And whistled many a snatch of merry tunes

That had no mirth in them, or with his knife

165 Carved uncouth figures on the heads of sticks,

Then idly sought about through every nook

Of house or garden any casual task

Of use or ornament, and with a strange,

Amusing but uneasy novelty

170 He blended where he might the various tasks

Of summer, autumn, winter, and of spring.

But this endured not; his good-humour soon

Became a weight in which no pleasure was,

And poverty brought on a petted0 mood ill-tempered

175 And a sore temper: day by day he drooped,

And he would leave his home, and to the town

Without an errand would he turn his steps

Or wander here and there among the fields.

One while he would speak lightly of his babes

180 And with a cruel tongue: at other times

He played with them wild freaks of merriment:

And 'twas a piteous thing to see the looks

Of the poor innocent children. 'Every smile,'

Said Margaret to me here beneath these trees,

185 'Made my heart bleed,' " At this the old Man paus'd

And looking up to those enormous elms

He said, " 'Tis now the hour of deepest noon,

At this still season of repose and peace,

This hour when all things which are not at rest

190 Are chearful, while this multitude of flies

Fills all the air with happy melody,

Why should a tear be in an old man's eye?

Why should we thus with an untoward mind

And in the weakness of humanity

195 From natural wisdom turn our hearts away,

To natural comfort shut our eyes and ears,

And feeding on disquiet thus disturb

The calm of Nature with our restless thoughts?"

END OF THE FIRST PART

6. The so-called able-bodied poor were entitled to receive from the parish in which they were settled the food, the clothing, and sometimes the cash that would help them over a crisis.

.

THE RUINED COTTAGE / 285

Second Part

He spake with somewhat of a solemn tone:

200 But when he ended there was in his face

Such easy chearfulness, a look so mild

That for a little time it stole away

All recollection, and that simple tale

Passed from my mind like a forgotten sound.

205 A while on trivial things we held discourse,

To me soon tasteless. In my own despite

I thought of that poor woman as of one

Whom I had known and loved. He had rehearsed

Her homely tale with such familiar power,

210 With such a[n active]7 countenance, an eye

So busy, that the things of which he spake

Seemed present, and, attention now relaxed,

There was a heartfelt dullness in my veins.

I rose, and turning from that breezy shade

2i5 Went out into the open air and stood

To drink the comfort of the warmer sun.

Long time I had not stayed ere, looking round

Upon that tranquil ruin, I returned

And begged of the old man that for my sake

220 He would resume his story. He replied,

"It were a wantonness0 and would demand reckless ill-doing

Severe reproof, if we were men whose hearts

Could hold vain dalliance with the misery

Even of the dead, contented thence to draw

225 A momentary pleasure never marked

By reason, barren of all future good.

But we have known that there is often found

In mournful thoughts, and always might be found,

A power to virtue friendly; were't not so,

230 I am a dreamer among men, indeed

An idle dreamer. 'Tis a common tale,

By moving accidents8 uncharactered,

A tale of silent suffering, hardly clothed

In bodily form, and to the grosser sense

235 But ill adapted, scarcely palpable

To him who does not think. But at your bidding

I will proceed.

While thus it fared with them

To whom this cottage till that hapless year

Had been a blessed home, it was my chance

240 To travel in a country far remote,

And glad I was when, halting by yon gate

That leads from the green lane, again I saw

These lofty elm-trees. Long I did not rest:

7. Wordsworth penciled the bracketed phrase into Of moving accidents by flood and field, / Of hair- a gap left in the manuscript. breadth 'scapes" (Shakespeare, Othello 1.3.133�

8. Othello speaks "of most disastrous chances, / 35).

.

286 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

With many pleasant thoughts I cheer'd my way

245 O'er the flat common. At the door arrived,

I knocked, and when I entered with the hope

Of usual greeting, Margaret looked at me

A little while, then turned her head away

Speechless, and sitting down upon a chair

250 Wept bitterly. I wist not what to do Or how to speak to her. Poor wretch! at last

She rose from off her seat�and then, oh Sir!

I cannot tell how she pronounced my name:

With fervent love, and with a face of grief

255 Unutterably helpless, and a look That seem'd to cling upon me, she enquir'd

If I had seen her husband. As she spake

A strange surprize and fear came to my heart,

Nor had I power to answer ere she told

260 That he had disappeared�just two months gone.

He left his house; two wretched days had passed,

And on the third by the first break of light,

Within her casement full in view she saw

A purse of gold.9 'I trembled at the sight,'

265 Said Margaret, 'for I knew it was his hand

That placed it there, and on that very day

By one, a stranger, from my husband sent,

The tidings came that he had joined a troop

Of soldiers going to a distant land.

270 He left me thus�Poor Man! he had not heart

To take a farewell of me, and he feared

That I should follow with my babes, and sink

Beneath the misery of a soldier's life.'

This tale did Margaret tell with many tears:

275 And when she ended I had little power

To give her comfort, and was glad to take

Such words of hope from her own mouth as serv'd

To cheer us both: but long we had not talked

Ere we built up a pile of better thoughts,

280 And with a brighter eye she looked around

As if she had been shedding tears of joy.

We parted. It was then the early spring;

I left her busy with her garden tools;

And well remember, o'er that fence she looked,

285 And while I paced along the foot-way path

Called out, and sent a blessing after me

With tender chearfulness and with a voice

That seemed the very sound of happy thoughts. I roved o'er many a hill and many a dale

290 With this my weary load, in heat and cold,

Through many a wood, and many an open ground,

In sunshine or in shade, in wet or fair,

9. The "bounty" that her husband had been paid about .1 in 1757 to more than .16 in 1796 (J- R- for enlisting in the militia. The shortage of volun-Western, English Militia in the Eighteenth Cen

teers and England's sharply rising military needs tury, 1965).

had in some counties forced the bounty up from

.

THE RUINED COTTAGE / 287

Now blithe, now drooping, as it might befal,

My best companions now the driving winds

295 And now the 'trotting brooks'1 and whispering trees

And now the music of my own sad steps,

With many a short-lived thought that pass'd between

And disappeared. I came this way again

Towards the wane of summer, when the wheat

BOO Was yellow, and the soft and bladed grass Sprang up afresh and o'er the hay-field spread

Its tender green. When I had reached the door

I found that she was absent. In the shade

Where now we sit I waited her return.

305 Her cottage in its outward look appeared

As chearful as before; in any shew

Of neatness little changed, but that I thought

The honeysuckle crowded round the door

And from the wall hung down in heavier wreathes,

310 And knots of worthless stone-crop2 started out

Along the window's edge, and grew like weeds

Against the lower panes. I turned aside

And stroll'd into her garden.�It was chang'd:

The unprofitable bindweed spread his bells

315 From side to side and with unwieldy wreaths

Had dragg'd the rose from its sustaining wall

And bent it down to earth; the border-tufts�

Daisy and thrift and lowly camomile

And thyme�had straggled out into the paths

320 Which they were used� to deck. Ere this an hour accustomed Was wasted. Back I turned my restless steps,

And as I walked before the door it chanced

A stranger passed, and guessing whom I sought

He said that she was used to ramble far.

325 The sun was sinking in the west, and now

I sate with sad impatience. From within

Her solitary infant cried aloud.

The spot though fair seemed very desolate,

The longer I remained more desolate.

330 And, looking round, I saw the corner-stones,

Till then unmark'd, on either side the door

With dull red stains discoloured and stuck o'er

With tufts and hairs of wool, as if the sheep

That feed upon the commons3 thither came

335 Familiarly and found a couching-place Even at her threshold.�The house-clock struck eight;

I turned and saw her distant a few steps.

Her face was pale and thin, her figure too

Was chang'd. As she unlocked the door she said,

340 'It grieves me you have waited here so long,

But in good truth I've wandered much of late

1. From Robert Burns ("To William Simpson," and rocks. line 87). 3. Land belonging to the local community as a

2. A plant with yellow flowers that grows on walls whole.

.

288 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

And sometimes, to my shame I speak, have need

Of my best prayers to bring me back again.'

While on the board she spread our evening meal

345 She told me she had lost her elder child,

That he for months had been a serving-boy

Apprenticed by the parish. 'I perceive

You look at me, and you have cause. Today

I have been travelling far, and many days

350 About the fields I wander, knowing this

Only, that what I seek I cannot find.

And so I waste my time: for I am changed;

And to myself,' said she, 'have done much wrong,

And to this helpless infant. I have slept

355 Weeping, and weeping I have waked; my tears

Have flow'd as if my body were not such

As others are, and I could never die.

But I am now in mind and in my heart

More easy, and I hope,' said she, 'that heaven

360 Will give me patience to endure the things Which I behold at home.' It would have grieved

Your very heart to see her. Sir, 1 feel

The story linger in my heart. I fear

'Tis long and tedious, but my spirit clings

365 To that poor woman: so familiarly Do I perceive her manner, and her look

And presence, and so deeply do I feel

Her goodness, that not seldom in my walks

A momentary trance comes over me;

370 And to myself I seem to muse on one

By sorrow laid asleep or borne away,

A human being destined to awake

To human life, or something very near

To human life, when he shall come again

375 For whom she suffered. Sir, it would have griev'd

Your very soul to see her: evermore

Her eye-lids droop'd, her eyes were downward cast;

And when she at her table gave me food

She did not look at me. Her voice was low,

380 Her body was subdued. In every act Pertaining to her house-affairs appeared

The careless stillness which a thinking mind

Gives to an idle matter�still she sighed,

But yet no motion of the breast was seen,

385 No heaving of the heart. While by the fire

We sate together, sighs came on my ear;

I knew not how, and hardly whence they came.

I took my staff, and when I kissed her babe

The tears stood in her eyes. I left her then

390 With the best hope and comfort I could give;

She thanked me for my will, but for my hope

It seemed she did not thank me. I returned

And took my rounds along this road again

.

THE RUINED COTTAGE / 289

Ere on its sunny bank the primrose flower

395 Had chronicled the earliest day of spring.

I found her sad and drooping; she had learn'd

No tidings of her husband: if he lived

She knew not that he lived; if he were dead

She knew not he was dead. She seemed the same

400 In person [or]4 appearance, but her house

Bespoke a sleepy hand of negligence;

The floor was neither dry nor neat, the hearth Was comfortless [ ], The windows too were dim, and her few books,

405 Which, one upon the other, heretofore

Had been piled up against the corner-panes

In seemly order, now with straggling leaves

Lay scattered here and there, open or shut

As they had chanced to fall. Her infant babe

410 Had from its mother caught the trick of grief

And sighed among its playthings. Once again

I turned towards the garden-gate and saw

More plainly still that poverty and grief

Were now come nearer to her: the earth was hard,

415 With weeds defaced and knots of withered grass;

No ridges there appeared of clear black mould,

No winter greenness; of her herbs and flowers

It seemed the better part were gnawed away

Or trampled on the earth; a chain of straw

420 Which had been twisted round the tender stem

Of a young apple-tree lay at its root;

The bark was nibbled round by truant sheep.

Margaret stood near, her infant in her arms,

And seeing that my eye was on the tree

425 She said, 'I fear it will be dead and gone Ere Robert come again.' Towards the house

Together we returned, and she inquired

If I had any hope. But for her Babe

And for her little friendless Boy, she said,

430 She had no wish to live, that she must die

Of sorrow. Yet I saw the idle loom

Still in its place. His Sunday garments hung

Upon the self-same nail, his very staff

Stood undisturbed behind the door. And when

435 I passed this way beaten by Autumn winds

She told me that her little babe was dead

And she was left alone. That very time,

I yet remember, through the miry lane

She walked with me a mile, when the bare trees

440 Trickled with foggy damps, and in such sort

That any heart had ached to hear her begg'd

That wheresoe'er I went I still would ask

For him whom she had lost. We parted then,

Our final parting, for from that time forth

4. The word or was erased here; later manuscripts read "and."

.

290 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

445 Did many seasons pass ere I returned

Into this tract again.

Five tedious years

She lingered in unquiet widowhood,

A wife and widow. Needs must it have been

A sore heart-wasting. I have heard, my friend,

450 That in that broken arbour she would sit

The idle length of half a sabbath day�

There, where you see the toadstool's lazy head�

And when a dog passed by she still would quit

The shade and look abroad. On this old Bench

455 For hours she sate, and evermore her eye

Was busy in the distance, shaping things

Which made her heart beat quick. Seest thou that path?

(The green-sward now has broken its grey line)

There to and fro she paced through many a day

460 Of the warm summer, from a belt of flax

That girt her waist spinning the long-drawn thread

With backward steps.�Yet ever as there passed

A man whose garments shewed the Soldier's red,

Or crippled Mendicant in Sailor's garb,

465 The little child who sate to turn the wheel

Ceased from his toil, and she with faltering voice,

Expecting still to learn her husband's fate,

Made many a fond inquiry; and when they

Whose presence gave no comfort were gone by,

470 Her heart was still more sad. And by yon gate

Which bars the traveller's road she often stood

And when a stranger horseman came, the latch

Would lift, and in his face look wistfully,

Most happy if from aught discovered there

475 Of tender feeling she might dare repeat

The same sad question. Meanwhile her poor hut

Sunk to decay, for he was gone whose hand

At the first nippings of October frost

Closed up each chink and with fresh bands of straw

480 Chequered the green-grown thatch. And so she lived

Through the long winter, reckless and alone,

Till this reft house by frost, and thaw, and rain

Was sapped; and when she slept the nightly damps

Did chill her breast, and in the stormy day

485 Her tattered clothes were ruffled by the wind

Even at the side of her own fire. Yet still

She loved this wretched spot, nor would for worlds

Have parted hence; and still that length of road

And this rude bench one torturing hope endeared,

490 Fast rooted at her heart, and here, my friend,

In sickness she remained, and here she died,

Last human tenant of these ruined walls."

The old Man ceased: he saw that I was mov'd;

From that low Bench, rising instinctively,

495 I turned aside in weakness, nor had power

To thank him for the tale which he had told.

.

THE RUINED COTTAGE / 291

I stood, and leaning o'er the garden-gate

Reviewed that Woman's suff'rings, and it seemed

To comfort me while with a brother's love

500 I blessed her in the impotence of grief. At length [towards] the [Cottage I returned]5

Fondly, and traced with milder interest

That secret spirit of humanity

Which, 'mid the calm oblivious tendencies

505 Of nature, 'mid her plants, her weeds, and flowers,

And silent overgrowings, still survived.

The old man, seeing this, resumed and said,

"My Friend, enough to sorrow have you given,

The purposes of wisdom ask no more;

510 Be wise and chearful, and no longer read

The forms of things with an unworthy eye.

She sleeps in the calm earth, and peace is here.

I well remember that those very plumes,

Those weeds, and the high spear-grass on that wall,

515 By mist and silent rain-drops silver'd o'er,

As once I passed did to my heart convey

So still an image of tranquillity,

So calm and still, and looked so beautiful

Amid the uneasy thoughts which filled my mind,

520 That what we feel of sorrow and despair From ruin and from change, and all the grief

The passing shews of being leave behind,

Appeared an idle dream that could not live

Where meditation was. I turned away

525 And walked along my road in happiness." He ceased. By this the sun declining shot

A slant and mellow radiance which began

To fall upon us where beneath the trees

We sate on that low bench, and now we felt,

530 Admonished thus, the sweet hour coming on.

A linnet warbled from those lofty elms,

A thrush sang loud, and other melodies,

At distance heard, peopled the milder air.

The old man rose and hoisted up his load.

535 Together casting then a farewell look Upon those silent walls, we left the shade

And ere the stars were visible attained

A rustic inn, our evening resting-place.

THE END

1797�ca. 1799 1949

5. The words inside the brackets were added in MS. E.

.

292 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Michael1

A Pastoral Poem

If from the public way you turn your steps

Up the tumultuous brook of Green-head Ghyll,2

You will suppose that with an upright path

Your feet must struggle; in such bold ascent

5 The pastoral mountains front you, face to face.

But, courage! for around that boisterous brook

The mountains have all opened out themselves,

And made a hidden valley of their own.

No habitation can be seen; but they

10 Who journey thither find themselves alone

With a few sheep, with rocks and stones, and kites" haivks

That overhead are sailing in the sky.

It is in truth an utter solitude;

Nor should I have made mention of this Dell

15 But for one object which you might pass by,

Might see and notice not. Beside the brook

Appears a straggling heap of unhewn stones!

And to that simple object appertains

A story�unenriched with strange events,

20 Yet not unfit, I deem, for the fireside,

Or for the summer shade. It was the first

Of those domestic tales that spake to me

Of Shepherds, dwellers in the valleys, men