“I reckon there is just two thousand dollars there—it is yours,” he

said, bluntly. “I guess you’ll make a pretty straight bargain with that

man that wants to sell out.”

Paul sat speechless with surprise at finding his affairs thus known to

the strange man before him. Apollos arose, went to the window, and began

to whistle, then added in a husky voice,

“I reckon old Howell wont object any longer; so you can—can

marry—Linda!” and with another vociferous whistle, he again sat down.

By this time Paul, somewhat recovered from his first amazement, said, as

he handed back the pocket-book,

“But, my dear sir, I cannot accept of your bounty I may never be able to

repay you—”

“Put up the money, I say, put it up—it is yours,” interrupted Apollos;

“I—I—overheard your talk with Linda, this afternoon—so you see I know

all about you.”

“But why this interest for a stranger, Mr. Dalrymple—how can I ever

repay—”

“Be kind to her—to Linda—that’s all the pay I want!” hastily

interposed Apollos. “And you see, Paul, if you want any further help to

get along, I conclude you are bound to come to me.”

Again Paul attempted to be heard.

“At least suffer me to explain my affairs to you, that you may know

better the man upon whom your kindness has so liberally fallen.”

“I reckon I know you; you’re an honest, good lad—and—and Linda loves

you—you need not say a word.”

And, indeed, had Paul been gifted with the eloquence of an Adams or a

Webster, Apollos would not have listened to him, for no sooner did he

see the money safe in the pocket of the young man, than he coolly arose,

put on his hat, and taking his violin, walked out of the house; so Paul

had no alternative than to do the same, yet leaving upon the table an

acknowledgment of his gratitude, written with a pencil on the back of an

old letter.

The next week three topics of interest were going the rounds of the

village, and arousing the curiosity and wonder of its inhabitants.

The first was, that the son of Leonard Davis had become the sole

proprietor of one of the largest printing offices in the city of New

York—who would have thought it!

The second item was, that Apollos Dalrymple had offered his fine farm

for sale—what could it mean?

The third and most wonderful was, that the said Apollos commenced

building the identical narrow stone-house on the top of the hill—was

the man bewitched, or going to be married!

In the course of the summer Paul again solicited the hand of Linda,

which was no longer refused him—

“For money has a power above

The stars, and fate, to manage love.”

But Apollos refused to be present at the happy event which his noble

kindness had so materially assisted to bring about; and little did

either of them surmise the generous devotion which had called it forth.

As soon as his solitary dwelling was completed, Apollos, taking with him

a few goods and chattels, removed thereto. And there he still abides

with peace in his heart, and “good-will to all men.”

He admits no visiters—yet is his bounty never the less; for, like some

forest rill, which has its source hidden among the rocks, yet whose

presence revivifies and fertilizes all around it, so do the streams of

his bounty, flowing silently and unobtrusively, gladden and refresh the

hearts of the weary and destitute. He never goes out, except on the

Sabbath, upon whose sacred services he is a constant attendant, and may

always be seen in his suit of homespun gray, standing erect near the

choir, and beating time with his long, bony hand, to the music of the

psalms.

Upon the calm summer evenings, the notes of his violin are borne on the

gentle breeze to the ears of the villagers, and as the plough-boy hies

him to his task, with the early up-rising of the lark, he hears the

morning hymn of the forest choristers, accompanied in their notes of

praise by the music of _Apollos’ violin_.

* * * * *

[Illustration: Painted by Compte Calix

THE SISTERS.

Engraved by T. B. Welch expressly for Graham’s Magazine]

* * * * *

IMPULSE AND PRINCIPLE.

BY ALFRED B. STREET.

Two youths approached a torrent in their path;

One soft and fair, one eagle-eyed and strong;

Thoughtful the last, the first all mirth and song.

They saw two bridges o’er the torrent’s wrath;

One a rough tree-trunk from a rugged ledge,

Rugged to reach, uneven to the tread;

The other at their feet, all broadly spread

With flowers and mosses plumped from edge to edge.

On the green platform sprang the first like light,

Still loud in song, but in his midway flight

The green bridge broke, and down to death he fell.

The other, meanwhile, clambered painfully

The steep, and, nerving strong, crossed safe the tree.

Thus in Temptation’s hour, Impulse and Principle.

* * * * *

WORDSWORTH.

The death of this eminent poet, after an honorable and useful life,

prolonged to eighty years, will doubtless provoke a new conflict of

opinions regarding the nature and influence of his great and peculiar

mind. The universal feeling among all lovers of what is deep, and

delicate, and genuine in poetry, must be—

“That there has passed away a glory from the earth;”

and not until literature receives an original impulse from a nature

equally profound and powerful, will it be called upon to mourn such a

departure “from the sunshine into the Silent Land.” His death was worthy

of an earthly career consecrated by devout and beautiful meditations to

a life beyond life—his soul, so long the serene guest of his mortal

frame, meekly withdrawing itself at the end to a world not unfamiliar to

his raised vision here.

We confess, at the outset, to an admiration for Wordsworth’s genius

bordering on veneration, but we trust that we can speak of it without

substituting hyperbole for analysis, without burying the essential facts

of his mental constitution under a load of panegyric. It appears to us

that these facts alone convict his depreciating critics of malice or

ignorance; that the kind of criticism to which he was originally

subjected, and which even now occasionally reappears with something of

the sting of its old flippancy, is essentially superficial and

untenable, failing to cover the ground it pretends to occupy, and

disguising nonsense under a garb of shrewdness and discrimination. The

opinion of a man of ability on subjects which he understands, and on

objects he really discerns, is entitled to respect, and we do not deny

that Jeffrey’s opinions on many important matters are sound and

valuable; but, in relation to Wordsworth, whom he perversely

misunderstood, he appears presumptuously incompetent and undiscerning

throughout his much vaunted criticisms; in every case missing the

peculiarities which constituted Wordsworth’s originality, and satirizing

himself in almost every sarcasm he launched at the poet. The usual

defense set up for such a critic is, that he judges by the rules of

common sense; but every poet who deserves the name is to be judged by

the common sense of the creative imagination, not by the common sense of

the practical understanding; and thus judged, thus removed from the

jurisdiction of the mere police of letters, we imagine that Wordsworth

will readily assume his place as the greatest of English poets since

Milton.

In claiming for him a position in that line of English poets which

contains no other names than those of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, and

Milton, we imply that he is not only great as an individual writer, but

that he is the head and founder of a new school of poets; that he is the

point from which the future historian of English letters will consider

the poetry of the age; that he introduced into English literature new

elements, whose inspiration has not yet spent itself, but continues to

influence almost every poet of the day; that

“Thither, as to their fountain, other stars

Repairing, in their golden urns draw light.”

This fact can be chronologically proved. In the “Lines on Revisiting

Tintern Abbey,” written as far back as 1798, and in which we have the

key-note of Wordsworth’s whole system of viewing nature and man, we

perceive not only a new element of thought added to English poetry, but

an element which appears afterward in Shelley and Byron—modified, of

course, by their individuality—and still appears, with decreasing

force, in Tennyson and Browning. Plato and Lord Bacon are not more

decidedly originators of new scientific methods than Wordsworth is the

originator of a new poetical method. Even if we dislike him, and neglect

his poetry, we cannot emancipate ourselves from his influence, as long

as we are thrilled by the most magnificent and etherial passages in

Shelley and Byron. We may be offended at the man, but we cannot escape

from his method, unless our reading of the poets stops with Goldsmith

and Cowper.

The vital poems of Wordsworth—those which are really inspired with his

spirit and life, and not mere accretions attached to his works—form a

complete whole, pervaded by one living soul, and, amid all their variety

of subject, related to one leading idea—the marriage of the soul of man

to the external universe, whose “spousal hymn” the poet chants. They

constitute together the spiritual body of his mind, exhibiting it as it

grew into beautiful and melodious form through thirty years of intense

contemplation. To a person who has studied his works with sufficient

care to obtain a conception of the author’s personality, every little

lyric is alive with his spirit, and is organically connected with the

long narrative and didactive poems. This body of verse is, we think, a

new creation in literature, differing from others not only in degree but

in kind—an organism, having its own interior laws, growing from one

central principle, and differing from Spenser and Milton as a swan does

from an eagle, or a rose from a lily.

We need hardly say that the central power and principle of this organic

body of verse is Wordsworth himself. He is at its heart and

circumference, and through all its veins and arteries, as the vivifying

and organizing force—coloring every thing with his peculiar

individuality, representing man and nature through the medium of his own

original and originating genius, and creating, as it were, a new world

of forms and beings, idealized from hints given by the actual

appearances of things. This world is not so various as that of

Shakspeare or Scott, nor so supernatural as that of Milton, but it is

still Wordsworth’s world, a world conceived by himself, and in which he

lived and moved and had his being. A true criticism of his works,

therefore, would be a biography of his mind, exhibiting the vital

processes of its growth, and indicating the necessary connection between

its gradual interior development and the imaginative forms in which it

was expressed. This we cannot pretend to do, having neither the insight

nor the materials for such a task, and we shall be content with

attempting a faint outline of his mental character, with especial

reference to those qualities which dwelt near the heart of his being,

and which seem to have been woven into the texture of his mind at birth.

Wordsworth was born in April, 1770, of parents sufficiently rich to give

him the advantages of the usual school and collegiate education of

English youth. He early manifested a love for study, but it may be

inferred that his studies were such as mostly ministered to the

imagination, from the fact that he displayed, from his earliest years, a

passion for poetry, and never seems to have had a thought of choosing a

profession. At the university of Cambridge he appears to have studied

the classics with the divining eye and assimilating mind of a poet, and

if he did not attain the first position as a classical scholar, he

certainly drank in beyond all his fellows the spirit of the great

writers of Greece and Rome. In a mind so observing, studious,

thoughtful, imaginative and steadfast as his, whose power consisted more

in concentration of view than rapidity of movement, the images of

classical poetry must have been firmly held and lovingly contemplated;

and to his collegiate culture we doubtless owe the exquisite poems of

Dion and Laodamia, the grand interpretative, uplifting mythological

passage in The Excursion, and the general felicity of his classical

allusions and images throughout his works. He probably wrote much as

well as meditated deeply at college, but very few of his juvenile pieces

have been preserved, and those which are seem little more than exercises

in expression. On leaving college he appears to have formed the

determination of educating his poetical faculty by a communion with the

forms of nature, as others study law and theology. He resided for some

time in the west of England, and at about the age of twenty, made the

tour of France, Italy, Switzerland and Germany, traveling, like our

friend Bayard Taylor, mostly on foot, diving into forests, lingering by

lakes, penetrating into the cottages of Italian peasants and rude German

boors, and alternating the whole by a residence in the great European

cities. This seems to have occupied nearly two years of his life; its

immediate, but not its only result, was the publication of his

“Descriptive Sketches in Verse,” indicating accurate observation rather

than shaping imagination, and undistinguished by any marked

peculiarities of thought or diction. We next hear of him at Bristol, the

companion of Coleridge and Southey, and discussing with those eager and

daring spirits the essential falsehood of current poetry as a

representation of nature. The sensible conclusion of all three was

this—that the worn-out epithets and images then in vogue among the

rhymers, were meaningless; that poetry was to be sought in nature and

man; and that the language of poetry was not a tinsel rhetoric, but an

impassioned utterance of thoughts and emotions awakened by a direct

contact of the mind with the objects it described. Of these

propositions, the last was one of primary importance, and in a mind so

grave, deep and contemplative as Wordsworth’s, with an instinctive

ambition to be one of “Nature’s Privy Council,” and dive into the

secrets of those visible forms which had ever thrilled his soul with a

vague and aching rapture, the mere critical opinion passed into a motive

and an inspiration.

“The Lyrical Ballads,” published in 1798, and to which Southey and

Coleridge contributed, were the first poems which indicated Wordsworth’s

peculiar powers and passions, and gave the first hints of his poetical

philosophy, and the first startling shock to the tastes of the day. They

were mostly written at Allfoxden, near the Bristol Channel, in one of

the deepest solitudes in England, amid woods, glens, streams, and hills.

Here Wordsworth had retired with his sister; and Coleridge was only five

miles distant at Stowey. Cottle relates some amusing anecdotes of the

ignorance of the country people, in regard to them, and to poets and

lovers of the picturesque generally. Southey, Coleridge and his wife,

Lamb, and the two Wedgewoods, visited Wordsworth in his retirement, and

the whole company used to wander about the woods, and by the sea, to the

great wonder of all the honest people they met. As they were often out

at night, it was supposed they led a dissolute life; and it is said that

there are respectable people in Bristol who believe now that Mrs.

Coleridge and Miss Wordsworth were disreputable women, from a

remembrance of the scandalous tattle circulating then. Cottle asserts

that Wordsworth was driven from the place by the suspicions which his

habits provoked, being refused a continuance of his lease of the

Allfoxden house by the ignoramus who had the letting of it, on the

ground that he was a criminal in the disguise of an idler. One of the

villagers said, “that he had seen him wander about at night _and look

rather strangely at the moon_! And then he roamed over the hills like a

partridge.” Another testified “he had heard him mutter, as he walked, in

some outlandish brogue, that nobody could understand.” This last, we

suppose, is the rustic version of the poet’s own statement—

“He murmurs near the running brooks

A music sweeter than their own.”

Others, however, took a different view of his habits, as little

flattering to his morals as the other view to his sense. One wiseacre

remarked confidently, “I know what he is. We have all met him tramping

away toward the sea. Would any man in his senses take all that trouble

to look at a parcel of water? I think he carries on a snug business in

the smuggling line, and, in these journeys, is on the lookout for some

_wet_ cargo.” Another, carrying out this bright idea, added, “I know he

has got a private still in his cellar; for I once passed his house at a

little better than a hundred yards distance, and I could smell the

spirits as plain as an ashen faggot at Christmas.” But the charge which

probably had the most weight in those times was the last. “I know,” said

one, “that he is surely a desperd French Jacobin; for he is so silent

and dark that no one ever heard him say one word about politics.” The

result of all these various rumors and scandals was the removal of

Wordsworth from the village. It is curious that, with such an experience

of English country-people, Wordsworth should never have looked at them

dramatically, and represented them as vulgar and prejudiced human beings

as well as immortal souls. It proves that humor did not enter at all

into the constitution of his nature; that man interested him more than

men; and that his spiritual affections, connecting humanity constantly

with its divine origin, shed over the simplest villager a light and

atmosphere not of earth.

While the ludicrous tattle to which we have referred was sounding all

around him, he was meditating Peter Bell and the Lyrical Ballads, in the

depths of the Allfoxden woods, and consecrating the rustics who were

scandalizing him. The great Poet of the Poor, who has made the peasant a

grander object of contemplation than the peer, and who saw through

vulgar externals and humble occupations to the inmost soul of the man,

had sufficient provocations to be the satirist of those he idealized.

In these Lyrical Ballads, and in the poems written at the same period of

their publication, we perceive both the greatness and the limitations of

Wordsworth, the vital and the mechanical elements in his poetry. As far

as his theory of poetic diction was unimaginative, as far as its

application was willful, it became a mere matter of the understanding,

productive of little else than shocks to taste and the poetic sense, and

indicating the perversity of a powerful intellect, pushing preconceived

theories to the violation of ideal laws, rather than the rapt

inspiration of the bard, flooding common words and objects with new life

and divine meanings. It is useless to say that the passages to which we

object would not provoke a smile if read in the spirit of the author.

They are ludicrous in themselves, and would have made the author himself

laugh had he possessed a moderate sense of the humorous. But the gravest

objection against them is, that they do not harmonize with the poems in

which they appear—are not vitally connected with them, but stand as

excrescences plastered _on_ them—and instantly suggest the theorizer

expressing his scorn of an opposite vice of expression, by deliberately

substituting for affected elegance a simplicity just as full of

affectation. Wordsworth’s true simplicity, the simplicity which was the

natural vehicle of his grand and solemn thoughts, the simplicity which

came from writing close to the truth of things, and making the word rise

out of the idea conceived like Venus from the sea, cannot be too much

commended; but in respect to his false simplicity, his simplicity for

the sake of being simple, we can only say that it has given some point

to the sarcasm, “that Chaucer writes like a child, but Wordsworth

childishly.” These objectionable passages, however, are very few; they

stand apart from his works and apart from what was essential in him; and

they are to be pardoned, as we pardon the occasional caprices of other

great poets.

Another objection to the Lyrical Ballads, and to Wordsworth’s poems

generally, is an objection which relates to his noblest creations. He

never appears to have thoroughly realized that other men were not

Wordsworths, and accordingly he not infrequently violates the law of

expression—which we take to be the expression of a man to others, not

the expression of a man to himself. He speaks, as it were, too much to

his own ear, and having associated certain words with subtle thoughts

and moods peculiar to himself, he does not seem aware that the words may

not of themselves convey his meaning to minds differently constituted,

and accustomed to take the expressions at their lexicon value. In this

he differs from Coleridge, whose words and music have more instantaneous

power in evoking the mood addressed, and thread with more force and

certainty all the mental labyrinths of other minds, and act with a

tingling and inevitable touch on the finest nerves of spiritual

perception. The Ancient Mariner and Christobel almost create the moods

in which they are to be read, and surprise the reader with a revelation

of the strange and preternatural elements lying far back in his own

consciousness. Wordsworth has much of this wondrous wizard power, but it

operates with less direct energy, and is not felt in all its witchery

until we have thought into his mind, become enveloped in its atmosphere,

and been initiated into the “suggestive sorcery” of his language. Then,

it appears to us, he is even more satisfying than Coleridge, moving, as

he does, in the transcendental region of thought with a calmer and more

assured step, and giving evidence of having steadily gazed on those

spiritual realities which Coleridge seems to have casually seen by

flashes of lightning. His language consequently is more temperate, as

befits a man observing objects familiar to his mind by frequent

contemplation; but, to common readers, it would be more effective if it

had the suddenness and startling energy coming from the first bright

vision of supernatural objects. As it is, however, his style proves that

his mind had grown up to those heights of contemplation to which the

mind of Coleridge only occasionally darted, under the winged impulses of

imagination; and therefore Wordsworth gives more serene and permanent

delight, more “sober certainty of waking bliss,” than Coleridge, however

much the latter may excel in instantaneousness of effect.

The originality of the Lyrical Ballads consisted not so much in an

accurate observation of nature as in an absolute communion with her, and

interpretation of the spirit of her forms. They combine in a remarkable

degree ecstasy with reflection, and are marvelously refined both in

their perception of the life of nature and the subtle workings of human

affections. Those elusive emotions which flit dimly before ordinary

imaginations and then instantly disappear, Wordsworth arrests and

embodies; and the remotest shades of feeling and thought, which play on

the vanishing edges of conception, he connects with familiar objects,

and brings home to our common contemplations. In the sphere of the

affections he is confessedly great. The still, simple, searching pathos

of “We are Seven,” the mysterious, tragic interest gathered around “The

Thorn,” and the evanescent touch of an elusive mood in “The Anecdote for

Fathers,” indicate a vision into the finest elements of emotion. The

poems entitled, “Expostulation and Reply,” “The Tables Turned,” “Lines

Written in Early Spring,” “To My Sister,” and several others, referring

to this period of 1798, evince many of the peculiar qualities of his

philosophy, and combine depth of insight with a most exquisite

simplicity of phrase. The following extracts contain hints of his whole

system of thought, expressing that belief in the life of nature, and the

mode by which that life is communicated to the mind, which reappear,

variously modified, throughout his writings:

Nor less I deem that there are Powers

Which of themselves our minds impress;

That we can feel this mind of ours

_Is a wise passiveness_.

——

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!

He, too, is no mean preacher:

Come forth into the light of things,

Let nature be your teacher.

She 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._

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

Our meddling intellect

Misshapes the beauteous forms of things—

We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;

Close up those barren leaves;

Come forth and bring with you a heart

_That watches and receives_.

——

I heard a thousand blended notes,

While in a grove I sat reclined,

In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts

Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

——

Through primrose tufts in that sweet bower,

The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;

_And ’tis my faith that every flower_

_Enjoys the air it breathes_.

——

There is a blessing in the air

Which seems a sense of joy to yield

To the bare trees, and mountains bare,

And grass in the green field.

——

One moment now may give us more

Than years of toiling reason:

Our minds shall drink at every pore

The spirit of the season.

_Some silent laws our hearts will wake,_

_Which they shall long obey:_

We for the year to come may take

Our temper from to-day.

But the most remarkable poem written at this period of Wordsworth’s

life, is that on Tintern Abbey, “Lines Composed on Revisiting the Banks

of the Wye.” We have here that spiritualization of nature, that

mysterious sense of the Being pervading the whole universe of matter and

mind, that feeling of the vital connection between all the various forms

and kinds of creation, and that marriage of the soul of man with the

visible universe, which constitute the depth and the charm of

Wordsworth’s “divine philosophy.” After describing the landscape which

he now revisits, he proceeds to develop the influence it has exerted on

his spirit:

These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me,

As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:

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

With tranquil restoration; feelings, too,

Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,

As have no slight and trivial influence

On that best portion of a good man’s life,

His little nameless, unremembered acts

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 burthen of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight

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_

_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._

He then proceeds to describe the passionate fascination which nature

exerted over his youth, and the change which had come over him by a

deeper and more thoughtful communion with her spirit. When we consider

that Wordsworth, at this time, was only twenty-eight, and that even the

motions described in the first part of our extract had no existence in

contemporary poetry, we can form some idea of his giant leap in advance

of his age, as indicated by the unspeakable beauty and novelty of the

concluding portion. Our readers will notice that although the style

becomes almost transfigured by the intense and brooding imagination

which permeates it, the diction is still as simple as prose:

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 colors and their forms, were then to me

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,

And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this

Faint I, nor mourn, nor murmur; other gifts

Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,

Abundant recompense. For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

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

Of elevated thoughts; _a sense sublime_

_Of something still 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;

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All living 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

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye and ear—both what they half create

And what perceive; well pleased to recognize

In nature and the language of the sense,

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the muse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.

It is this “sense sublime of something still more deeply interfused,”

that gives to a well-known passage in the concluding portion of the poem

its particular significance:

Nature never did betray

The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege,

Through all the years of this our life, to lead

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,

Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,

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.

In Wordsworth’s use of the word nature, it must always be borne in mind

that he means, to use his own phrase,

The Original of human art,

_Heaven-prompted_ Nature.

This poem enables us to understand the process by which so peculiar a

nature as Wordsworth’s grew up into its spiritual stature. It was by

placing his mind in direct contact with natural objects, passively

receiving their impressions in the still hours of contemplation, and

bringing his own soul into such sweet relations to the soul of nature as

to “see into the life of things;” or, as he expresses it, in another

connection, “his soul had _sight_” of those spiritual realities, of

which visible forms and hues are but the embodiment and symbolical

language. Nature to him was therefore always _alive_, spiritually as

well as visibly _existing_; and he felt the correspondence between his

own life and her life, from perceiving that one spirit penetrated both.

Not only did he perceive this, but he mastered the secret alphabet by

which man converses with nature, and to his soul she spoke an audible

language. Indeed, his mind’s ear was even more acute than his mind’s

eye; and no poet has excelled him in the subtle perception of the most

remote relations of tone. Often, when he is on the peaks of spiritual

contemplation, he hears voices when he cannot see shapes, and mutters

mystically of his whereabouts in words which suggest rather than embody

meaning. He grew in spiritual strength and height by assimilating the

life of nature, as bodies grow by assimilating her grosser elements; and

this process was little disturbed by communion with other minds, either

through books or society. He took nothing at second-hand; and his nature

is therefore not the nature of Homer, or Dante, or Shakspeare, or

Milton, or Scott, but essentially the nature of Wordsworth, the nature

which he saw with his own eyes, and shaped with his own imagination. His

humanity sprung from this insight, for not until he became impressed

with the spirit of nature, and divined its perfect adaptation to nourish

and elevate the human mind, did he perceive the worth and dignity of

man. Then simple humanity assumed in his mind a mysterious grandeur, and

humble life was spiritualized by his consecrating and affectionate

imagination. He might then say, with something of a proud content,

The moving accident is not my trade;

To freeze the blood I have no ready arts;

’Tis my delight alone in summer shade,

To pipe a simple song for thinking hearts.

The passages in which this thoughtful humanity and far-sighted spiritual

vision appear in beautiful union, are too numerous for quotation, or

even for reference. We will give but two, and extract them as hints of

his spiritual biography and the growth of his mind:

Love he had found in huts where poor men lie;

His daily teachers had been woods and rills,

_The silence that is in the starry sky,_

_The sleep that is among the lonely hills._

—-

But who is He with modest looks,

And clad in homely russet brown?

He murmurs near the running brooks

A music sweeter than their own.

He is retired as noontide dew,

Or fountain in a noonday grove;

And you must love him, ’ere to you

He will seem worthy of your love.

The outward shows of sky and earth,

Of hill and valley, he had viewed;

And impulses of deeper birth

_Had come_ to him in solitude.

In common things that round us lie

Some random truths he can impart—

The harvest of a quiet eye

That sleeps and broods on his own heart.

We shall give but one more extract; illustrative of the moral wisdom

which the poetic recluse had drank in from Nature, and incorporated with

his own character. It was written at the age of twenty-five:

If thou be one whose heart the holy forms

Of young imagination have kept pure,

Stranger! henceforth be warned; and know that pride,

Howe’er disguised in its own majesty,

Is littleness; that he who feels contempt

For any living thing, hath faculties

Which he has never used; that thought with him

Is in its infancy. The man whose eye

Is ever on himself doth look on one,

The least of Nature’s works, one who might move

The wise man to that scorn which wisdom holds

Unlawful, ever. O be wiser, Thou!

Instructed that true knowledge leads to love;

True dignity abides with him alone

Who, in the silent hour of inward thought,

Can still suspect, and still revere himself,

In lowliness of heart.

We have dwelt thus long on Wordsworth’s first characteristic

publication, because it expresses so well the nature of his own mind,

and because it gave an original impulse to poetical literature. These

Lyrical Ballads were published in the summer of 1798, and though they

attracted no general attention corresponding to their original merit,

they exercised great influence upon all the young minds who were

afterward to influence the age. In September, 1798, in company with

Coleridge, he visited Germany, and on his return he settled at Grasmere,

in Westmoreland; a spot so well known to all readers of his poetry, and

where he continued to reside for fifteen years. In 1803 he married a

Miss Mary Hutchinson, of Penrith. Neither was wealthy, their joint

income being but £100 a year. Of his wife we know little, except that

she was of small stature and gentle manners, and was loved by her

husband with that still, deep devotion characteristic of his affections.

He refers to her, in a poem written in his old age, as

She who dwells with me, whom I have loved

With such communion, that no place on earth

Can ever be a solitude to me.

Between 1803 and 1807, when a second volume of Lyrical Ballads was

published, he wrote many of the most beautiful and sublime poems in his

whole works. To this period belong “The Memorials of a Tour in

Scotland,” (1803,) containing “The Solitary Reaper,” “The Highland

Girl,” “Ellen Irwin,” “Rob Roy’s Grave,” and other exquisite and glowing

impersonations—his grand sonnets dedicated to “National Independence

and Liberty”—“The Horn of Egremont Castle,” “Heart-Leap Well,”

“Character of a Happy Warrior,” “A Poet’s Epitaph,” “Vandracour and

Julia,” the “Ode to Duty,” and, above all, the sublime “Ode on the

Intimations of Immortality from the Recollections of Childhood,” which

appears not to have been struck off at one beat, but to have been

composed at various periods between the years 1803 and 1806.

There are no events, in the common acceptation of the term, in

Wordsworth’s life after the period of his marriage, except the

publication of his various works, and the pertinacious war waged against

them by the influential critics. Though his means were at first limited,

he soon, through the friendship of the Earl of Lonsdale, received the

appointment of Distributor of Stamps for the counties of Westmoreland

and Cumberland, a sinecure office, the duties of which were done by

clerks, but which seems to have given him an income sufficient for his

wants. In 1809 he published a prose work on the “Convention of Cintra,”

which, though designed as a popular appeal in favor of the oppressed

Spaniards, was little read at the time, and is now forgotten. Southey,

whose mind was on fire with sympathy for the Spanish cause, says of this

pamphlet, in a letter to Scott—“Wordsworth’s pamphlet will fail of

producing any general effect, because the sentences are long and

involved; and his friend, De Quincey, who corrected the press, has

rendered them more obscure by an unsound system of punctuation. This

fault will outweigh all its merits. The public never can like any thing

which they feel it difficult to understand. . . . I impute Wordsworth’s

want of perspicuity to two causes—his admiration of Milton’s prose, and

his habit of dictating instead of writing: if he were his own scribe his

eye would tell him where to stop.”

But the great work to which Wordsworth was devoting the best years of

his life, was his long philosophical poem of “The Recluse,” designed to

give an account of the growth of his own mind, and to develop all the

peculiarities, poetical, ethical and religious, of his system of

thought. A large portion of this remains unpublished, but the second

part was issued in quarto, in 1814, under the title of “The Excursion,”

and was immediately lighted upon by all the wit-snappers and critics of

the old school, and mercilessly “probed, vexed and criticised.” Jeffrey,

who began his celebrated review of it in the Edinburgh with the

sentence, “This will never do,” was successful in ridiculing some of its

weak points, but made the mistake of stigmatizing its sublimest passages

as “unintelligible ravings.” The choice of a pedler as the hero of a

philosophical poem, though it was based on facts coming within the

author’s knowledge, was a violation of ideal laws, because it had not

sufficient general truth to justify the selection. A pedler may be a

poet, moralist and metaphysician, but such examples are for biography

rather than poetry, and indicate singularity more than originality in

the poet who chooses them. Allowing for this error, substracting some

puerile lines, and protesting against the tendency to diffusion in the

style, “The Excursion” still remains as a noble work, rich in

description, in narrative, in sentiment, fancy and imagination, and

replete with some of the highest and rarest attributes of poetry. To one

who has been an attentive reader of it, grand and inspiring passages

crowd into the memory at the mere mention of its title. It is, more

perhaps than any other of Wordsworth’s works, enveloped in the

atmosphere of his soul, and vital with his individual life; and in all

sympathetic minds, in all minds formed to feel its solemn thoughts and

holy raptures, it feeds

“A calm, a beautiful, and silent fire.”

“The Excursion” was followed, in 1815, by the “White Doe of Rylstone,” a

narrative poem, which Jeffrey said deserved the distinction of being the

worst poem ever printed in a quarto volume, and which appears to us one

of the very best. We do not believe the “White Doe” is much read, and

its exceeding beauty, subtle grace, and profound significance, are not

perceived in a hasty perusal. It is instinct with the most refined and

ethereal imagination, and could have risen from the depths of no mind in

which moral beauty had not been organized into moral character. Its

tenderness, tempered by “thoughts whose sternness makes them sweet,”

pierces into the very core of the heart. The purpose of the poem is to

exhibit suffering as a purifier of character, and the ministry of

sympathies,

“Aloft ascending, and descending quite

Even unto inferior kinds,”

in allaying suffering; and this is done by a story sufficiently

interesting of itself to engage the attention, apart from its indwelling

soul of holiness. In the representation of the Nortons we have the best

specimens of Wordsworth’s power of characterization, a power in which he

is generally deficient, but which he here exhibits with almost dramatic

force and objectiveness.

“Peter Bell” and “The Wagoner,” which appeared in 1819, were executed in

a spirit very different from that which animates the “White Doe.” They

were originally written to illustrate a system, and seem to have been

published, at this period, to furnish the enemies of Wordsworth some

plausible excuse for attacking his growing reputation. “Peter Bell” was

conceived and composed as far back as 1798, and though it exhibits much

power and refinement of imagination, the treatment of the story is

essentially ludicrous. But still it contains passages of description

which are eminently Wordsworthian, and which the most accomplished of

Wordsworth’s defamers never equaled. With what depth, delicacy,

sweetness and simplicity are the following verses, for instance,

conceived and expressed:

He roved among the vales and streams,

In the green wood and hollow dell;

They were his dwellings night and day,—

But nature ne’er could find the way

Into the heart of Peter Bell.

In vain, through every changeful year,

Did Nature lead him as before;

_A primrose by the river’s brim_

_A yellow primrose was to him,_

_And it was nothing more._

——

At noon, when by the forest’s edge

He lay beneath the branches high,

The soft blue sky did never melt

Into his heart; _he never felt_

_The witchery of the soft blue sky._

On a fair prospect some have looked

And felt, as I have heard them say,

_As if the moving time had been_

_A thing as steadfast as the scene_

_On which they gazed themselves away._

——

There was a hardness in his cheek,

There was a hardness in his eye,

As if the man had fixed his face,

In many a solitary place,

Against the wind and open sky.

“The Wagoner,” is altogether unworthy of Wordsworth’s genius. It is an

attempt of a poet without humor to be gay and jocular, and very dismal

gayety it is. But even this poem is not to be dismissed without a

reference to its one exquisite passage—that in which he describes the

obligation upon him to write it:

Nor is it I who play the part,

But a _shy spirit_ in my heart,

That comes and goes—will sometimes leap

From hiding-places ten year’s deep;

Or haunts me with familiar face,

Returning, like a ghost unlaid,

Until the debt I owe be paid.

The next volume of Wordsworth was a series of sonnets, under the general

title of “The River Duddon,” published in 1820, and singularly pure in

style and fresh in conception. This was followed, in 1821, by “Itinerary

Sonnets,” chronicling a journey to the Continent; “Ecclesiastical

Sonnets,” in 1822, celebrating events and characters in the history of

the English church; and “Yarrow Revisited, and other Poems,” in 1834. In

old age he still preserved his young love for nature, and lost none of

his power of interpreting her teachings. In a poem entitled “Devotional

Incitements,” written at the age of sixty-two, and distinguished for the

delicate keenness of its insight, no less than its lyric rapture, it

will be perceived that natural objects were still visible and audible to

his heart and imagination. “Where,” he exclaims,

Where will they stop, those breathing powers,

The _spirits_ of the new-born flowers?

They wander with the breeze, they wind

Where’er the streams a passage find;

Up from their native ground they rise

_In mute aërial harmonies;_

From humble violet—modest thyme—

Exhaled, the _essential odors_ climb,

As if no space below the sky

Their subtle flight could satisfy:

Heaven will not tax our thoughts with pride—

If like ambition be _their_ guide.

Roused by the kindliest of May-showers,

The spirit quickener of the flowers,

That with moist virtue softly cleaves

The buds, and freshens the young leaves,

The birds pour forth their souls in notes

Of rapture from a thousand throats—

Here checked by too impetuous haste,

While there the music runs to waste,

With bounty more and more enlarged

Till the whole air is overcharged.

Give ear, O man, to their appeal,

And thirst for no inferior zeal,

Thou, who canst _think_ as well as _feel_.

——

Alas! the sanctities combined

By art to unsensualize the mind,

Decay and languish; or, as creeds

And humors change, are spurned like weeds:

And priests are from their altars thrust;

Temples are leveled with the dust;

_And solemn rites and awful forms_

_Founder amid fanatic storms,_

Yet evermore, through years renewed

In undisturbed vicissitude,

Of seasons balancing their flight

On the swift wings of day and night,

_Kind Nature keeps a heavenly door_

_Wide open for the scattered Poor,_

_Where flower-breathed incense to the skies_

_Is wafted in mute harmonies;_

_And ground fresh cloven by the plough_

_Is fragrant with a humbler vow;_

_Where birds and brooks from leafy dells_

_Chime forth unwearied canticles,_

_And vapors magnify and spread_

_The glory of the sun’s bright head_—

Still constant in her worship, still

Conforming to the eternal Will,

Whether men sow or reap the fields

Divine monition Nature yields,

That not by bread alone we live,

Or what a hand of flesh can give;

That every day should leave some part

Free for a sabbath of the heart.

On the death of Southey, Wordsworth was appointed Poet Laureate. The

latter years of his life were passed in undisturbed serenity, and he

appears to have retained his faculties to the last. His old age, like

his youth and mature manhood, illustrated the truth of his poetic

teachings, and proves that poetry had taught him the true theory of

life. One cannot contemplate him during the last ten years of his

existence, without being forcibly impressed with his own doctrine

regarding the lover of nature:

Thy thoughts and feelings shall not die,

Nor leave thee when old age is nigh

A melancholy slave;

_But an old age serene and bright,_

_And lovely as a Lapland night,_

_Shall lead thee to thy grave._

The predominating characteristic of Wordsworth’s poetry is

thoughtfulness, a thoughtfulness in which every faculty of his mind and

every disposition of his heart meet and mingle; and the result is an

atmosphere of thought, giving a softening charm to all the objects it

surrounds and permeates. This atmosphere is sometimes sparklingly clear,

as if the airs and dews and sunshine of a May morning had found a home

in his imagination; but, in his philosophical poems, where he penetrates

into a region of thought above the ken of ordinary mortals, this

atmosphere is touched by an ideal radiance which slightly obscures as

well as consecrates the objects seen through it, and occasionally it

thickens into mystical obscurity. No person can thoroughly enjoy

Wordsworth who does not feel the subtle spirit of this atmosphere of

thought, as it communicates an air of freshness and originality even to

the commonplaces of his thinking, and apparels his loftier conceptions

in celestial light—

“The gleam,

The light that never was on sea or land,

The consecration and the poet’s dream.”

The first and grandest exercise, therefore, of his imagination is the

creation of this harmonizing atmosphere, enveloping as it does the world

of his creation with that peculiar light and air, indescribable but

unmistakable, which enable us at once to recognize and to class a poem

by Wordsworth. We do not hesitate to say that, in its peculiarity, there

is nothing identical with it in literature—that it constitutes an

absolutely new kind of poetry, in the Platonic sense of the word kind.

An imagination which thus fuse all the faculties and emotions into one

individuality, so that all the vital products of that individuality are

characterized by unity of effect, is an imagination of the highest

_kind_. The next question to be considered is the variety which this

unity includes; for Shakspeare himself, the most comprehensively

creative of human beings, never goes beyond the unity of his

individuality, his multifarious variety always answering to the breadth

of his personality. He is like the banyan tree in the marvelous

fertility of his creativeness, and the province of humanity he covers;

but the fertility all comes from one root and trunk, and indicates

simply the greatness of the _kind_, as compared with other _kinds_ of

trees. The variety in the operation of Wordsworth’s imagination we will

consider first in its emotional, and second in its intellectual,

manifestation—of course, using these words as terms of distinction, not

of division, because when we employ the word imagination we desire to

imply a fusion of the whole nature of the man into one living power. In

the emotional operation of Wordsworth’s imagination we discern his

Sentiment. No term has been more misused than this, its common

acceptation being a weak affectionateness; and, at best, it is

considered as an instinct of the sensibility, as a simple, indivisible

element of humanity. The truth is that sentiment is a complex thing, the

issue of sensibility and imagination; and without imagination sentiment

is impossible. We often meet excellent and intelligent people, whose

affections are warm, whose judgments are accurate, and whose lives are

irreproachable, but who lack in their religion, morality and affections

an elusive something which is felt to be the grace of character. The

solution of the problem is found in their want of sentiment—in their

want of that attribute by which past scenes and events, and absent

faces, and remote spiritual realities, affect the mind like objects

which are visibly present. Now, without this Sentiment no man can be a

poet, either in feeling or faculty; and Wordsworth has it in a

transcendent degree. In him it is revealed, not only in his idealizing

whatever in nature or life had passed into his memory, but in his

religious feeling and in his creative art. Scenes which he had viewed

years before, he tells us, still

_Flash_ upon that _inward eye_,

Which is the bliss of solitude.

Thus Sentiment is that operation of imagination which recalls, in a more

vivid light, things absent from the bodily eye, and makes them act upon

the will with more force and inspiration than they originally exerted in

their first passionate or thoughtful perception; and from its power of

extracting the essence and heightening the beauty of what has passed

away from the senses and passed into memory, it gives the impulse which

sends the creative imagination far beyond the boundaries of actual life

into the regions of the ideal, to see what is most beautiful here

—Imaged there

In happier beauty; more pellucid streams,

An ampler ether, a diviner air,

And fields invested with purpureal gleams,

Climes, which the sun, who sheds the brightest day

Earth knows, _is all unworthy_ to survey.

It is needless to adduce passages to prove the depth and delicacy of

Wordsworth’s sentiment, sanctifying as it does natural objects and the

humblest life, and lending to his religious faith a mysterious,

ineffable beauty and holiness. In our view of the quality it must

necessarily be the limitation of a poet’s creativeness, for the

imagination cannot represent or create objects to which it does not tend

by a sentiment; and Wordsworth, while he has a sentiment for visible

nature, a religious sentiment, a sentiment of humanity, is still

confined to the serious side of things, and has no sentiment of humor.

If he had humor as a sentiment, he, dowered as he is with imagination,

would have it as a creative faculty, for humor is the intellectual

imagination inspired by the sentiment of mirth.

Let us now survey the power and scope of Wordsworth’s imagination,

considered in its intellectual manifestation. Here nothing bounds its

activity but its sentiments. It is descriptive, pictorial, reflective,

shaping, creative, and ecstatic; it can body forth abstract ideas in

sensible imagery; it can organize, as in “The White Doe,” a whole poem

round one central idea; it can make audible in the melody of words,

shades of feeling and thought which elude the grasp of imagery; it can

fuse and diffuse itself at pleasure, animating, coloring, vitalizing

every thing it touches. In description it approaches near absolute

perfection, giving not only the scene as it lies upon the clear mirror

of the perceptive imagination, but representing it in its life and

motion as well as form. The following, from “The Night Piece,” is one

out of a multitude of instances:

He looks up—the clouds are split

Asunder—and above his head he sees

The clear Moon, and the glory of the heavens.

There, in a black blue vault she sails along,

Followed by multitudes of stars, that, small

And sharp, and bright, along the dark abyss

Drive as she drives.

In the description of the appearance of the White Doe, we have not only

form, hue and motion, but the feeling of wonder that the fair creature

excites, and the rhythm which musically expresses the supernatural

character of the visitant—all embodied in one vivid picture:

The only voice that you can hear

Is the river murmuring near.

—When soft!—the dusky trees between,

And down the path through the open green,

Where is no living thing to be seen;

And through yon gateway, where is found,

Beneath the arch with ivy bound,

Free entrance to the church-yard ground—

_Comes gliding in with lovely gleam,_

_Comes gliding in serene and slow,_

_Soft and silent as a dream,_

_A solitary Doe!_

White she is as lily of June,

And beauteous as the silver moon

When out of sight the clouds are driven

And she is left alone in heaven;

Or like a ship, some gentle day,

In sunshine sailing far away,

A glittering ship that hath the plain

Or ocean for her own domain.

In the following we have a mental description, so subtle and so sweet as

to make “the sense of satisfaction ache” with its felicity:

And she has smiles to earth unknown,

Smiles that, with motion of their own,

Do spread and sink and rise;

That come and go, with endless play,

And ever as they pass away,

_Are hidden in her eyes._

This is from the little poem to “Louisa.” It is curious that Wordsworth,

in the octavo edition of his works, published when he was seventy-seven

years old, omits this stanza. It was so refined that he had probably

lost the power to perceive its delicate beauty, and dismissed it as

meaningless.

In describing nature as connected with, and embodied in, human thoughts

and sentiments, Wordsworth’s descriptive power rises with the complexity

of the theme. Thus, in the poem of Ruth, we have an example of the

perversion of her energizing power:

The wind, the tempest roaring high,

The tumult of a tropic sky,

Might well be dangerous food

For him, a youth to whom was given

So much of earth—so much of heaven,

And such impetuous blood.

Whatever in those climes he found

Irregular in sight or sound,

Did to his mind impart

A kindred impulse, seemed allied

To his own powers, and justified

The workings of his heart.

Nor less, to feed voluptuous thought,

The beauteous forms of nature wrought,

Fair trees and gorgeous flowers;

The breezes their own languor lent;

_The stars had feelings_, which they sent

Into those favored bowers.

In another poem, we have an opposite and purer representation of

nature’s vital work, in an ideal impersonation which has nothing like it

in the language:

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;

She shall be mine, and I will make

A lady of my own.

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._

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.

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._

But the most common exercise of Wordsworth’s imagination is what we may

call its meditative action—its still, calm, searching insight into

spiritual truth, and into the spirit of nature. In these, analysis and

reflection become imaginative, and the “more than reasoning mind” of the

poet overleaps the boundaries of positive knowledge, and, steadying

itself on the vanishing points of human intelligence, scans the “life of

things.” In the poems in which meditation predominates, there is a

beautiful union of tender feeling with austere principles, and this

austerity prevents his tenderness from ever becoming morbid. As his

meditative poems more especially relate to practice, and contain his

theory of life, they grow upon a studious reader’s mind with each new

perusal. In them the Christian virtues and graces are represented in

something of their celestial beauty and power, and the poet’s “vision

and faculty divine” are tasked to the utmost in giving them vivid and

melodious expression. He is not, in this meditative mood, a mere

moralizing dreamer, a vague and puerile rhapsodist, as some have

maliciously asserted, but a true poetic philosopher, whose wisdom is

alive with the throbs of holy passion, and

Beauty—a living Presence of the earth—

Surpassing the most fair ideal Forms

Which craft of delicate spirits hath composed

From earth’s materials—waits upon his steps;

Pitches her tents before him as he moves,

An hourly neighbor.

But though these poems are essentially meditative in spirit, they are

continually verging on two forms of the highest poetic expression,

abstract imagination and ecstasy; and the clear, serene, intense vision

which is their ordinary characteristic, is the appropriate mood out of

which such forms of imagination naturally proceed. Let us first give a

specimen of the creativeness of his imagination in its calmly

contemplative mood, and we will select one of his many hundred sonnets.

Tranquillity! the sovereign aim wert thou

In heathen schools of philosophic lore;

Heart-stricken by stern destiny of yore

The Tragic Muse thee served with thoughtful vow;

And what of hope Elysium could allow

Was fondly seized by Sculpture to restore

Peace to the Mourner. _But when He who wore_

_The crown of thorns around his bleeding brow_

_Warmed our sad being with celestial light,_

Then Arts, which still had drawn a softening grace

From shadowy fountains of the Infinite,

Communed with that Idea face to face:

And move around it now as planets run,

Each in its orbit round the central sun.

We will not stop to comment on the wealth of thought contained in this

sonnet, or the lingering suggestiveness of that wonderful line—

“Warmed our _sad_ being with celestial light,”

but proceed to give another example, fragrant with the deepest spirit of

meditation:

More sweet than odors caught by him who sails

Near spicy shores of Araby the blest,

A thousand times more exquisitely sweet,

The freight of holy feeling which we meet

In thoughtful moments, wafted by the gales

From fields where good men walk, and bowers wherein they rest.

The following sonnet may be commended to warriors and statesmen, as

containing a wisdom as practical in its application as it is lofty in

its conception:

I grieved for Bonaparté with a vain

And an unthinking grief! The tenderest mood

Of that man’s mind—what can it be? What food

Fed his first hopes? What knowledge could _he_ gain?

’Tis not in battles that from youth we train

The Governor who must be wise and good,

And temper with the sternness of the brain

Thoughts motherly and meek as womanhood.

Wisdom doth live with children round her knees;

Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk

Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk

Of the mind’s business; these are the degrees

By which true sway doth mount; this is the stalk

True Power doth grow on; and her rights are these.

We will now extract a magnificent example of abstract imagination,

growing out of the meditative imagination, and penetrated by it. It is

the “Thought of a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland;” the “two

voices” are England and Switzerland.

Two Voices are there; one is of the sea,

One of the mountains; each a mighty Voice:

In both from age to age thou didst rejoice,

They were thy chosen music; Liberty!

There came a Tyrant, and with holy glee

Thou fought’st against him; but hast vainly striven:

Thou, from thy Alpine holds at length art driven,

Where not a torrent murmurs, heard by thee.

Of one deep bliss thine ear hath been bereft:

Then cleave, O cleave to that which still is left;

For, high-souled Maid, what sorrow would it be

That mountain Floods should thunder as before,

And Ocean bellow from his rocky shore,

And neither awful Voice be heard by thee!

Of the ecstatic movement of Wordsworth’s imagination, we might extract

numberless instances, rushing up, as it does, from the level of his

meditations, throughout his poetry. Take the following, from the “Ode to

Duty”:

Stern Law-giver! yet thou dost wear

The Godhead’s most benignant grace;

Nor know we any thing so fair

As is the smile upon thy face;

_Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,_

_And fragrance in thy footing treads;_

_Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;_

_And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong._

In a descriptive poem called “The Gipsies,” there is a very striking

instance of rapture immediately succeeding calmness:

The weary sun betook himself to rest;

Then issued Vesper from the fulgent west,

_Outshining like a visible God_

_The glorious path in which he trod._

Again, observe how the imagination kindles and melts into rapturous

idealization, and impetuously deifies the object of its sentiment, in

the following short reference to the death of Coleridge:

Nor has the rolling year twice measured,

From sign to sign, its steadfast course,

Since every mortal power of Coleridge

Was frozen at its marvelous source;

_The ’rapt One of the godlike forehead,_

_The heaven-eyed creature._

In the sonnet which we now extract we have a specimen of that still

ecstasy, so calm and so intense, in which Wordsworth stands almost alone

among modern poets:

A fairer face of evening cannot be;

The holy time is quiet as a nun

Breathless with adoration; the broad sun

Is sinking down in its tranquillity;

The gentleness of heaven broods o’er the sea:

Listen! the mighty being is awake,

And doth with his eternal motion make

A sound like thunder—everlastingly.

Dear child! dear girl! that walkest with me here,

If thou appear’st untouched by solemn thought,

Thy nature is not therefore less divine:

Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year;

And worship’st at the temple’s inner shrine,

God being with thee when we know it not.

It is, however, in the sublime “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality

from the Recollections of Childhood,” that we best perceive the power of

Wordsworth’s imagination in all the various modes of its

expression—descriptive, analytic, meditative, interpretative, abstract

and ecstatic; and in this ode each of these modes helps the other; the

grand choral harmonies of the rapturous upward movement seeming to be

born out of the intense contemplation, that hovers dizzily over the

outmost bounds of human conception, to scrutinize, in the dim dawn of

consciousness,

—those first affections,

Those shadowy recollections,

Which be they what they may,

Are yet the fountain light of all our day,

Are yet a master light of all our seeing.

It is from these that we have ecstasy almost as a logical conclusion;

for

_Hence_ in a season of calm weather,

Though inland far we be,

_Our souls have sight of that immortal sea_

_Which brought us hither,_

_Can in a moment travel thither,_

_And see the children sport upon the shore,_

_And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore._

We have no space to particularize the felicity of Wordsworth’s muse in

dealing with the affections, or the depth and power of his pathos.

Before leaving the subject of his genius, however, we cannot withhold a

reference to his “Ode on the Power of Sound,” which appears to be little

known even to readers of the poet, though in the thronging abundance of

its ideas and images, in the exquisite variety of its music, and in the

soul of imagination which animates it throughout, it yields the palm to

no ode in the language.

Wordsworth is most assuredly not a popular poet in the sense in which

Moore and Byron are popular; and he probably never will be so among

those readers who do not distinguish between being passionate and being

impassioned, and who prefer the strength of convulsion to the strength

of repose; readers who will attend only to what stirs and startles the

sensibility, who read poetry not for its nourishing but its inflaming

qualities, and who look upon poetic fire as properly consuming the mind

it animates. Wordsworth is not for them, except they go to him as a

spiritual physician, in search of “balm for hurt minds.” Placed in a

period of time when great passions in the heart generated monstrous

paradoxes in the brain, he clung to those simple but essential elements

of human nature on which true power and true elevation must rest; and,

while all around him sounded the whine of sentimentality and the hiss of

Satanic pride, his mission, like that of his own beautiful blue

streamlet, the Duddon, was “to heal and cleanse, not madden and

pollute.” His rich and radiant imagination cast its consecrating and

protecting light on all those dear immunities of humanity, which others

were seeking to discard for the delusions of haughty error, or the

fancies of ripe sensations. Accordingly, though many other poets of the

time have a fiercer or fonder charm for young and unrestrained minds, he

alone grows upon and grows into the intellect, and “hangs upon the

beatings of the heart,” as the soul advances in age and reflection; for

there is a rich substance of spiritual thought in his poetry to meet the

wants of actual life—consolations for sorrow, help for infirmity,

sympathy for bereavement, a holy gleam of awful splendor to irradiate

the dark fear of death; a poetry, indeed, which purifies as well as

pleases, and penetrates into the vitalities of our being as wisdom no

less than loveliness:

“Filling the soul with sentiments august—

The beautiful, the brave, the holy and the just.”

P.

* * * * *

BRIDGET KEREVAN.

BY ENNA DUVAL.

I will tell you, scholar, I have heard a grave divine say that

God has two dwellings, one in heaven, and the other in a meek

and thankful heart; which Almighty God grant to me and to my

honest scholar. Isaak Walton.

“How did you find them all at home, Bridget?”

“Hearty, ma’am, thank ye;” and the girl moved busily about the room.

She was my chambermaid, and although she had only lived with me a little

while, I felt very much attached to her, for she was so kind,

industrious and honest. Soon after she came to us I was seized with a

painful illness, and during it, she nursed me with the tenderness of a

sister; often, when the spasms of acute pain would shake my feeble body,

I had seen large tears standing in her full, round eye.

As she assisted me in undressing, I observed that she was not in her

usual spirits, and when she handed me my dressing-gown, I saw that her

hands trembled. But she patiently went through every little duty,

although I could well see that she was suffering from some hidden

trouble. When I sat down to my reading, she left me to prepare for me

some tea—for, dear reader, I am a true old maid, and love my cup of

tea, as well as I love my existence almost.

Presently she re-entered, and rolling a little teapoy beside my chair,

she placed on it the waiter, and poured out my tea. Just then I heard

the heavy breathing of my dear Aunt Mary, who was asleep in the

adjoining room.

“Close the door of Aunt Mary’s room, my good Bridget,” I said; “and

while I drink my tea and eat this nice piece of toast you have made me,

come and tell me something about Ireland.”

I knew this would please her; for often had she talked to me at night,

when I would be undressing, about the glens and vales of beautiful,

song-famed Coleraine; and the fairies, with their round rings in the

grass. She had never seen a fairy her own self, but “Elsie the child”

her sister had, and the “_little body_,” as she called the fairy, had

pinched the poor “_wean_ Elsie.”

Then again on Sunday, or holyday nights, she would tell me how, when a

child, she had wished to be a nun, and that she would go out in the

dark, pitch night, and kneel on the ground in the middle of their

garden, and ask the good Virgin and the Saints to pray for her—for

Bridget has always been a religious girl.

Then she had actually heard the Benshee cry. It came wailing around the

house when her father died; and she had heard it a week before his

death, when he was hale and hearty. She had heard it at night-fall one

evening when she was crossing the glen below their cottage, as she was

coming from Coleraine, where she had been spending the day with her

grandmother. It commenced “low and mournful like” in the bushes beside

her, and then ranged around the hills, swelling out louder and louder,

until it ceased behind the cottage. As she would dwell on this, my fancy

would picture to me the enthusiastic, imaginative Irish girl, standing

with lips apart, listening to this mournful wailing night-wind, which

her after troubles shaped into the sad poetical Benshee; and if I had

had the skill of an artist, I would have made a lovely sketch, I am

sure; for so plainly did her descriptions bring before me her figure and

the surrounding landscape, lightened with the warm hue of the lingering

twilight so peculiar to Ireland.

Bridget sat down on the rug beside me, and when we went to bed that

night, good reader, it was later than unsuspecting Aunt Mary imagined;

but I had heard all Bridget’s troubles, had soothed and comforted her,

had read her lover’s last letter to her—for she had a lover—what girl

has not?—and sent her to bed with a heart considerably lighter than

when, with aching head but patient fingers, she had prepared my nice

night meal.

Bridget’s father, Dermot Kerevan, was a Scotchman by birth, but of Irish

parentage. His father had settled in Glasgow, and there did Dermot spend

his early years, and obtain thriftiness and steadiness, qualities not

often found in an Irishman. Dermot was early apprenticed to a gardener,

and when he was out of his term of service, his master recommended him

to an Irish gentleman, who wanted a gardener for his place, “The

Forest,” at Coleraine. There Dermot came, and it was not long before he

brought home to his pretty gardener’s-cottage, the beauty of Coleraine,

Grace Mullen, who he had persuaded to be his “_bonnie wife_,” as he

called her. They must have been very happy—for sweeter domestic

pictures I have never heard described, either in tale or poem, than my

good Bridget would sketch in her little stories of their home, during

her father’s life. But this blessed happiness could not last for ever.

One fine spring day poor Dermot was brought home from the garden, up at

“the great house,” on a litter, nearly dead. He had fallen from a high

tree while lopping off a branch. He lingered only a few hours, leaving

the lonely widow with her “four childer,” to battle with life alone.

Bridget was the eldest, and she was only twelve. Then there was Grace,

and Elsie, and little Jinny, the baby, all to be cared for. Bridget was

sent to her uncle’s at Glasgow town, and the grandmother of Grace

Kerevan gave the shelter of her poor roof to the rest of them. Widow

Kerevan opened a little shop in her grandmother’s front room, and did

“bits of work for the people all around Coleraine,” as Bridget expressed

it.

A year after the kind, loving father’s death, home came Bridget from

Glasgow town. Her uncle, the rich distiller, was enraged at her, for she

had told his wife she had rather starve in Ireland than go to the

meeting-house all day Sunday, and sit straight up at her sewing and

knitting the rest of the week. Poor girl! the strict, rigid habits of

her uncle’s thrifty Scotch wife had driven her almost frantic. She, who

had roamed at will, over hill and glen, and had never been bound down to

any duty. The domestic affairs of her own home had always been soon

dispensed with, and she had spent most of her time in rambling through

the forest, or by the stream-side, or playing with Gracey, Elsie, and

the baby, chasing their shadows on the grassy hill-side; then how could

she bear the strait-laced notions and rules of her notable Scotch aunt?

Not at all, and she told her so; and they sent her home to the

starvation her aunt had often taunted her with, holding it in

perspective, when she would be rebellious.

The mother, grandmother, and children crowded around her. Grace Kerevan

held her child, from whom she had been so long parted, close to her

bosom, and sobbed with joy.

“And so,” said the old grandmother, “the ‘Scotch _quean_,’ as poor

Dermot used to say, told ye we starved here? Never mind, darlint, ye

shall always have a p’raty, even if we all do without.”

Poor Bridget worked early and late, for the farmers’ wives, but she only

made a “small thrifle,” as she said, and sometimes they were so poor

that they had scarcely a potato apiece in the house.

“And did you ever wish yourself back in Glasgow town, Bridget?” I

inquired.

“Niver, ma’am,” was the girl’s energetic answer; and I do not believe

she ever did, for the genial light of home-love shone in her poor, Irish

home, for which her little affectionate heart had pined, under the

wealthier but cold roof of her uncle.

“Thin I came to Ameriky.”

“But, Bridget, how came you to think of America?”

“Och, the girls all around talked about Ameriky, and my aunt’s cousin’s

husband’s sister writ home a letter about her making such a power of

money. Well, I talked to mother about it, but she cried, and so did

grandmother, and they asked me where I’d get the four pound to pay my

passage with. That kept me quiet a bit, for I’d niver seen so big a heap

of money. But one day, when I was shaking up grandmother’s bed, I felt a

great big lump in it, that was sewed up in the straw, and I dragged it

out, and it was an old stocking with money tied in it. I ran screamin’

with joy to mother. But och, how she cried and grandmother scolded. Then

I cried, too, and grandmother came and hugged me, and told me to give

over cryin’, that there was the money if I wanted it. She said she’d hid

it away in the bed, years agone, to keep off the dark day. Then I cried,

‘Grandmother, let me go ’till Ameriky, and I will send ye so much gold

that’ll keep the dark day away forever.’

“Then mother said, ‘Let the girl go, for sure she’s had light given her,

and she knows better than us.’”

“Did you not feel a little sorry, Bridget, when they gave up at last?” I

asked.

“No, ma’am, not a bit,” she continued; “and I hurried around and got

ready. The girl that had writ the letters home about Ameriky, sent out a

ticket to her sister to come on the vessel that was just going; but

she—Rosy McLanahan it was—was very sick, and couldn’t go; and so

mother bought her ticket for me. But, och, when mother bid me good bye,

and kissed me, and left me on the vessel, then I cried. I didn’t cry a

bit when I bid grandmother and the childer good bye at the house, but it

was when I saw mother going down the side of the vessel, and get into

the tumbling little boat, that I cried. I felt so lonely like, just as I

did when father was buried; and I watched the little boat, and her red

cloak, until she got ashore. Then there she stood, and shook her

handkerchief until it growed too dark to see her. Och, Miss Enna, but

then I cried—all to myself though—for I was ashamed the people should

see me, and I went off to my little bed and cried all night; for I

thought I was furder away from them than father was, for he was in

heaven, and I was out on wide wather. Then I thought of what father used

to tell me about God bein’ with us always, and I tried to stop my cryin’

by prayin’.”

“How old were you then, Bridget?”

“Not quite fifteen, ma’am.”

“Were you not glad when you saw America, my poor child?”

“Indade and indade I was, for I’d been so sick all the way, and when the

vessel came up the river to Philadelphia, I cried with joy. But when the

vessel anchored, and people came from shore, and I heerd them a greetin’

one another, my heart fell like a great lump of lead, for I’d nobody in

this wild, new country to greet me. Then I cried again, but it was with

the heart-ache. I sat there all alone, when one of the women, who had

been very kind to me on the passage, came up to me, and she brought with

her a man, who, she said, used to know my mother when she was a slip of

a girl in Coleraine, and if I would go home with him, he would try to

find me a place. I bundled up my clothes, which were only a few pieces,

and went with him. This was on a Saturday night like, Miss Enna, and on

Monday they took me to a place.”

“Was it a nice place, Bridget?”

“Yes, ma’am; but ’twas a plain, hard-working family; they kept only me,

and they had a lot of childer and a whole parcel of apprentice boys; but

Mrs. Hill—that was her name—was kind to me, and worked with me when

she could, and took good care of my money, which she put all away, and I

didn’t spend a bit. She giv’ me some of her old dresses and an old hood,

so I saved up all my money for four months. Then I writ my first letter

to mother, and sent her the sixteen dollars.”

“Oh, Bridget!” I exclaimed, “why did you not write before?”

The girl laughed quietly, and replied,

“I wanted to send a big bit of money when I writ home; and I know’d the

neighbors would stare, and grandmother would open her eyes, and mother

would be so proud of her Bridget sendin’ home three pound and over. Then

came a letter from them at home, and it made me cry so. They were all

well, and had got my money; but mother tried to scold a bit bekase I

hadn’t writ before, but she was so plased to hear I was doin’ well, that

she didn’t scold much. Then I worked on, but I felt lonely like, and

kept thinkin’ how nice ’twould be to have Gracey with me. So I saved up

twenty dollars, and sent it to Ireland; and soon Gracey came to me.

Mother couldn’t come, I know’d, for grandmother was so old as to stay in

bed all the time. I’d been a year in Ameriky when Gracey came over; then

after awhile I sent for Elsie, for the times were still harder in

Ireland, and mother had bad work to get on with her poor old sick granny

to nurse. Elsie seemed so little when she came, that I didn’t know what

to do with her; but Mrs. Hill, the kind soul, said she might come and

live with me; that she could play with the childer, and rock the cradle,

and go errands, and she would give her her clothes the first year; then,

if she was smart, she would give her a half dollar a week—for Mr. Hill

was richer now. I took great pleasure in Elsie, she was good and minded

me; but Gracey was headstrong like, and would have her own way. She gave

me a dale of trouble, and many’s the night I’ve laid awake and thought

about her. She liked to taze me, and make me believe she was worse than

she was.

“At last Mr. Hill and his wife made up their minds to buy a large farm

clear up in the country, a great many miles off from Philadelphia, and

Elsie and me went with them. This did Gracey good, and she was a better

girl ever afterward, for when she was left alone in Philadelphia, she

saw how cross she’d been to me, and this made her sorry; and she went to

church rigilar, and attended to her duties, and used to go and talk to

my good old priest, Father Shane, for he writ about it to me,

unbeknownst to her—och, but I was glad thin.

“After I’d been in the country—on the farm, I mane—a letter came from

mother, telling us of poor grandmother’s death, and the letter had all

tears over it, which made Elsie and me cry, for we know’d they were poor

mother’s tears. In this same letter she said she wished we could send

her a ticket to come to Ameriky with; that if she could only see her

Bridget once more before she died, she would be happy. This was

spring-time, so I takes up Elsie’s money and mine, and goes off to

Philadelphia to buy a ticket for mother and show Gracey mother’s letter.

Gracey had no money to give me, for she was always extravagant; and no

wonder, for she was pretty, like mother, and liked a bit of finery

better than plain folks like myself. She cried about it, but I comforted

her, and told her niver mind, I’d enough; but I couldn’t buy myself a

dress—that I didn’t let her know though for fear she’d fret.

“So I bought the ticket, and got Father Shane to write a letter for me.

I was going to stay in Philadelphia a week—so Mrs. Hill said I might;

but the day after I bought the ticket, a wagon came all the way from the

farm to tell me Elsie was dying—that she had sickened the day I left,

and had the measles. Then again, Miss Enna, I was in trouble, for Elsie

was so good, and she looked like father. Och, I cried all the way out to

Mrs. Hill’s. Sure enough, when I got there my poor baby was near gone. I

nursed her night and day, poor child, but ’twas no use, God took my

_wean_ away from me.

“The night she died she opened her eyes and know’d me for the first

time. I thought she was getting well, though the doctor said she

couldn’t.

“‘Bridget,’ siz she, ‘we’d a nice play down in the glen, hadn’t we!’

“I couldn’t answer, my heart was so full, for I saw she thought she was

home in Coleraine.

“‘Bridget!’ she called, and held out her little hands to me. I took her

in my arms, cryin’ all the time.

“‘Let’s go into the cottage,’ siz she, ‘for father and grandmother have

been callin’ us a good many times. It’s dark out here, Bridget, and

cold—hold me, Bridget, dear, for I can’t see.’

“Then she called ‘mother!’ and tryin’ to put her little arms around my

neek, said she wanted to go to sleep, and told me to sing to her. I

hugged her close up to me, and after a few words about the long grass

under the hill by the cottage, where she and Jinny used to roll over

playin’, she drew a long breath, and as I kissed her, she died. Och, but

that was the darkest night I iver spent, Miss Enna. I was all alone, for

Mrs. Hill had gone to sleep, tellin’ me I must call her if Elsie was

worse. There I sat all night holdin’ my dead darlint close to my bosom,

too heart-struck to cry. But when in the morning Mrs. Hill tried to take

her from me, they say I screamed and held on to her like a mad person.

“I niver saw Elsie afterward, Miss Enna,” said the poor girl, with tears

streaming down her cheeks, “for when they buried her in the cold earth,

I was raving sick, and they said I would die too. Part of the time I

know’d them, and part of the time I was crazy, but when I’d my sinses, I

prayed God would just keep me alive to see my mother. He heard my

prayer,” she continued, crossing herself devoutly, “and before mother

came I was well again, though my heart was full of sorrow for Elsie.

“When I sent for mother, I told her not to come till fall, for I thought

by that time I’d lay by a trifle of money to take a room in Philadelphia

and buy some furniture. All summer I worked hard, and Mrs. Hill, the

good soul, give me as much money in the fall as if Elsie had been

workin’ too. She know’d what I wanted with it, and she give me some old

chairs, and a bed, too. I was sorry to leave her, for her and her

husband was kind to us always; but I know’d mother would feel lonely

like in town without me. So I packed up all my things, and came in Mr.

Hill’s market-wagon to town.

“Father Shane had writ to me that the vessel was expected in a week or

so—and I came to town just in time to rent a nice room for mother. I’d

enough of money to pay a month’s rint ahead, and to buy some wood. Then

I bought a carpet and a nice bedstead, and a table, and a good, warm

stove—oh, yes, and a _cushioned form_, or sofy, as the people call it

here, that looked like the one we had at home in Coleraine. Gracey give

me a little trifle, which was a grate dale for her, seein’ it had been

summer-time, and she had to have a new bonnet, bein’ in town.

“The night before mother came, Gracey ran round from her place to see

mother’s room, and how proud I felt, as we stood in the middle of it,

and looked around at all the things—we felt so rich.

“‘Now, if we only had a bureau,’ said Gracey, ‘to put under that little

glass of mine.’

“Gracey had always finer notions than me. I’d niver thought a bit of a

bureau, for I know’d mother had a chist which would hold Jinny’s clothes

and hers—all they had, poor things. Father Shane came to see me that

night, too, and brought a big, black, wood cross to hang over the

mantlepiece, and a string of beads for Jinny. Och, but we felt very

happy, only every little bit, poor Elsie would come to my mind, and I’d

think of how merry she’d been if she’d been livin’; and grate tears

would roll down in spite of me. Father Shane spoke very pretty about

her, and made me feel better, and after he and Gracey went away, I sat

down by the stove, and there I sat all night, for I didn’t want to

rumple the bed I’d made up for mother, for the sheets looked so white

and smooth.

“The next afternoon the vessel came up the river, but it was ten o’clock

at night before mother got off. There I stood on the wharf, talkin’ to

her, that was on the ould vessel, all the evenin’. When she first see’d

me, she cried,

“‘Och, and it’s my Bridget, God bless her!’

“She was so glad, she’d have tumbled overboard, but for one of the

sailors who caught her. We both cried and laughed, and some laughed at

us; but the good sailor who had caught ahold of her when she was

fallin’, told her to cheer up, that she’d soon be on shore with her

Bridget. He helped her down the side of the vessel, and when she hugged

me and we both cried, I saw him wipe his eyes. He shook hands with us

both, and asked where we lived, and said he’d come to see us.

“But, och, didn’t mother stare when she see’d her nice room. Then she

throw’d her apron over her head and cried like a baby. Jinny had grow’d

so tall I didn’t know her. I was glad she was tall, for I’d hated to see

her, for fear she’d make me cry about Elsie, bein’ little like her; but

she was near as tall as Gracey, and right pretty.

“Mother examined all the room, and kissed me, and hugged me, and then,

when Gracey came, she looked very proud—for Gracey was so fine lookin’.

Gracey staid all night, and we made her and Jinny a bed on the floor

with the cushions of the _form_, for mother said she’d sleep with her

Bridget. We talked nearly all night, and we all cried about Elsie, and I

told ’em a great many pretty stories about her.

“‘Yes, mother,’ said Gracey, ‘Elsie, the darlin’, was always a blessin’

to Bridget, but I was a trouble.’

“I made her hush, and told her she wasn’t as bad as she pretended to be,

and then after a bit we all went to sleep. But after I’d been asleep

awhile I wakened, and there was mother lanin’ over me cryin’ and kissin’

me; I didn’t ope my eyes, but laid so still; for oh, Miss Enna, it was

so nice to have my own mother beside me, and then I was afraid I was

dramin’.”

“Well, Bridget,” I said, as the girl wiped her eyes, “how did you

support your little family?”

“Very azy, ma’am,” she replied, “for we all took care of ourselves. Mrs.

Hill came in and asked Jinny to go and live with her. Then I got a nice

place at poor Mrs. Kenyon’s mother’s. You know’d Mrs. Kenyon, Miss Enna,

’twas she who died?”

Indeed I did know her, for Mary Kenyon had been one of my dearest

friends, and only a few short months before the grave had closed over

her—the beautiful and the good.

“Well,” continued Bridget, “after a bit I got mother two nice

first-floor rooms, at the corner of the street where she lived; and in

the front one she opened a little store, which kept her nicely.”

But now came the romance—the love-story of good, innocent Bridget’s

life. Her lover was the good, kind-hearted sailor who had been so

interested in them when widow Kerevan landed. He came to see them as he

had promised, and though Bridget and the widow thought that Gracey’s

pretty curls and bright eyes brought him so often “_o’ evenin’s_,” they

soon found out it was the good Bridget he was after.