1831. The Poems of 1831 were limited to The Primrose of the Rock, and Yarrow Revisited, and other Poems, composed during a tour in Scotland, and on the English Border, in the Autumn of 1831. THE PRIMROSE OF THE ROCK. Comp. 1831. Pub. 1835. [Written at Rydal Mount. The Rock stands on the right hand a little way leading up the middle road from Rydal to Grasmere. We have been in the habit of calling it the glow-worm rock from the number of glow-worms we have often seen hanging on it as described. The tuft of primrose has, I fear, been washed away by the heavy rains.] A ROCK there is whose homely front The passing traveller slights; Yet there the glow-worms hang their lamps, Like stars, at various heights: And one coy Primrose to that Rock The vernal breeze invites. What hideous warfare hath been waged, Since first I spied that Primrose-tuft A lasting link in Nature's chain From highest heaven let down! * In Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal the following occurs :April 24, 1802.—“We walked in the evening to Rydal. Coleridge and I lingered behind. We all stood to look at Glow-worm Rock-a primrose that grew there, and just looked out on the road from its own sheltered bower." The Primrose had disappeared when the Fenwick note was dictated, and the Glow-worms have almost deserted the district; but the Rock is unmistakable, and is one of the most interesting of the spots connected with Wordsworth in the Lake District.-ED. THE PRIMROSE OF THE ROCK. The flowers, still faithful to the stems, Their fellowship renew: The stems are faithful to the root, That worketh out of view; And to the rock the root adheres In every fibre true. Close clings to earth the living rock, So blooms this lonely Plant, nor dreads Here closed the meditative strain; I sang-Let myriads of bright flowers, Than tremblings that reprove Our vernal tendencies to hope, Is God's redeeming love; That love which changed-for wan disease, For sorrow that had bent O'er hopeless dust, for withered age Their moral element, And turned the thistles of a curse To types beneficent. 267 Sin-blighted though we are, we too, Our threescore years and ten. To humbleness of heart descends And makes each soul a separate heaven, YARROW REVISITED, AND OTHER POEMS, COMPOSED (TWO EXCEPTED) DURING A TOUR IN SCOTLAND, AND ON THE ENGLISH BORDER, IN THE AUTUMN OF 1831. [In the autumn of 1831, my daughter and I set off from Rydal to visit Sir Walter Scott before his departure for Italy. This journey had been delayed by an inflammation in my eyes till we found that the time appointed for his leaving home would be too near for him to receive us without considerable inconvenience. Nevertheless we proceeded and reached Abbotsford on Monday. I was then scarcely able to lift up my eyes to the light. How sadly changed did I find him from the man I had seen so healthy, gay, and hopeful, a few years before, when he said at the inn at Paterdale, in my presence, his daughter Anne also being there, with Mr Lockhart, my own wife and daughter, and Mr Quillinan,-"I mean to live till I am eighty, and shall write as long as I live." But to return to Abbotsford: the inmates and guests we found there were Sir Walter, Major Scott, Anne Scott, and Mr and Mrs Lockhart, Mr Liddell, his Lady and Brother, and Mr Allan the painter, and Mr Laidlow, a very old friend of Sir Walter's. One of Burns's sons, an officer in the Indian service, YARROW REVISITED. 269 had left the house a day or two before, and had kindly expressed his regret that he could not wait my arrival, a regret that I may truly say was mutual. In the evening, Mr and Mrs Liddell sang, and Mrs Lockhart chanted old ballads to her harp; and Mr Allan, hanging over the back of a chair, told and acted odd stories in a humorous way. With this exhibition and his daughter's singing, Sir Walter was much amused, as indeed were we all as far as circumstances would allow. But what is most worthy of mention is the admirable demeanour of Major Scott during the following evening when the Liddells were gone and only ourselves and Mr Allan were present. He had much to suffer from the sight of his father's infirmities and from the great change that was about to take place at the residence he had built, and where he had long lived in so much prosperity and happiness. But what struck me most was the patient kindness with which he supported himself under the many fretful expressions that his sister Anne addressed to him or uttered in his hearing. She, poor thing, as mistress of that house, had been subject, after her mother's death, to a heavier load of care and responsibility and greater sacrifices of time than one of such a constitution of body and mind was able to bear. Of this, Dora and I were made so sensible, that, as soon as we had crossed the Tweed on our departure, we gave vent at the same moment to our apprehensions that her brain would fail and she would go out of her mind, or that she would sink under the trials she had passed and those which awaited her. On Tuesday morning Sir Walter Scott accompanied us and most of the party to Newark Castle on the Yarrow. When we alighted from the carriages he walked pretty stoutly, and had great pleasure in revisiting those his favourite haunts. Of that excursion the verses "Yarrow Revisited" are a memorial. Notwithstanding the romance that pervades Sir Walter's works and attaches to many of his habits, there is too much pressure of fact for these verses to harmonise as much as I could wish with other poems. On our return in the afternoon we had to cross the Tweed directly opposite Abbotsford. The wheels of our carriage grated upon the pebbles in the bed of the stream that there flows somewhat rapidly; a rich but sad light of rather a purple than a golden hue was spread over the Eildon Hills at that moment; and, thinking it probable that it might be the last time Sir Walter would cross the stream, I was not a little moved, and expressed some of my feelings in the Sonnet beginning— "A trouble, not of clouds, or weeping rain." At noon on Thursday we left Abbotsford, and in the morning of that day Sir Walter and I had a serious conversation tête-a-tête, when he spoke with gratitude of the happy life which upon the whole he had led. He had written in my daughter's Album, before he came into the breakfast-room that morning, a few stanzas addressed to her, and, while putting the book into her hand, in his own study, standing by his desk, he said to her in my presence-"I should not have done anything of this kind but for your father's sake: they are probably the last verses I shall ever write." They show how much his mind was impaired, not by the strain of thought but by the execution, some of the lines being imperfect, and one stanza wanting corresponding rhymes: one letter, the initial S, had been omitted in the spelling of his own name. In this interview also it was that, upon my expressing a hope of his health being benefited by the climate of the country to which he was going, and by the interest he would take in the classic remembrances of Italy, he made use of the quotation from "Yarrow unvisited" as recorded by me in the "Musings of Aquapendente" six years afterwards. Mr Lockhart has mentioned in his life of him what I heard from several quarters while abroad, both at Rome and elsewhere, that little seemed to interest him but what he could collect or hear of the fugitive Stuarts and their adherents who had followed them into exile. Both the "Yarrow revisited" and the "Sonnet" were sent him before his departure from England. Some further particulars of the conversations which occurred during this visit I should have set down had they not been already accurately recorded by Mr Lockhart. I first became acquainted with this great and amiable man--Sir Walter Scott-in the year 1803, when my sister and I, making a tour in Scotland, were hospitably received by him in Lasswade upon the banks of the Esk, where he was then living. We saw a good deal of him in the course of the following week; the particulars are given in my sister's Journal of that tour.] ΤΟ SAMUEL ROGERS, Esq. AS A TESTIMONY OF FRIENDSHIP, AND ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF ARE AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED. RYDAL MOUNT, Dec. 11, 1834. I. [The following Stanzas are a memorial of a day passed with Sir Walter Scott, and other Friends visiting the Banks of the Yarrow under his guidance, immediately before his departure from Abbotsford, for Naples. The title Yarrow Revisited will stand in no need of explanation, for Readers acquainted with the Author's previous poems suggested by that celebrated Stream.] THE gallant Youth, who may have gained, Or seeks, a "winsome Marrow," Was but an Infant in the lap When first I looked on Yarrow; |