TO THE UTILITARIANS.

O sad it is, in sight of foreign shores,
Daily to think on old familiar doors,

Hearths loved in childhood, and ancestral floors;
Or, tossed about along a waste of foam,

To ruminate on that delightful home

Which with the dear Betrothed was to come;

Or came and was and is, yet meets the eye
Never but in the world of memory;

Or in a dream recalled, whose smoothest range
Is crossed by knowledge, or by dread, of change,
And if not so, whose perfect joy makes sleep
A thing too bright for breathing man to keep.
Hail to the virtues which that perilous life
Extracts from Nature's elemental strife;
And welcome glory won in battles fought
As bravely as the foe was keenly sought.
But to each gallant Captain and his crew

A less imperious sympathy is due,

Such as my verse now yields, while moonbeams play

On the mute sea in this unruffled bay;

Such as will promptly flow from every breast,

Where good men, disappointed in the quest

Of wealth and power and honours, long for rest;
Or, having known the splendours of success,
Sigh for the obscurities of happiness.

331

TO THE UTILITARIANS.

The following fragment occurs in a letter to Henry Crabbe Robinson, dated 5th May 1833. It has not been previously published.

AVAUNT this economic rage!

What would it bring ?-an iron age,
Where Fact with heartless search explored
Shall be Imagination's Lord,

332 ADIEU, RYDALIAN LAURELS! THAT HAVE GROWN.

And sway with absolute controul
The god-like Functions of the Soul.
Not thus can knowledge elevate
Our Nature from her fallen state.
With sober Reason Faith unites
To vindicate the ideal rights
Of human-kind-the tone agreeing
Of objects with internal seeing,
Of effort with the end of Being.

Wordsworth added, in the letter to Robinson, "Is the above intelligible? I fear not! I know, however, my own meaning, and that's enough for Manuscripts."-ED.

POEMS,

COMPOSED OR SUGGESTED DURING A TOUR, IN THE SUMMER OF 1833.

[My companions were H. C. Robinson and my son John.]

Having been prevented by the lateness of the season, in 1831, from visiting Staffa and Iona, the author made these the principal objects of a short tour in the summer of 1833, of which the following series of poems is a Memorial. The course pursued was down the Cumberland river Derwent, and to Whitehaven; thence (by the Isle of Man, where a few days were passed) up the Frith of Clyde to Greenock, then to Oban, Staffa, Iona; and back towards England by Loch Awe, Inverary, Loch Goil-head, Greenock, and through parts of Renfrewshire, Ayrshire, and Dumfries-shire to Carlisle, and thence up the river Eden, and homewards by Ullswater.

I.

ADIEU, Rydalian Laurels that have grown

And spread as if ye knew that days might come
When ye would shelter in a happy home,

On this fair Mount, a Poet of your own,

One who ne'er ventured for a Delphic crown

333

WHY SHOULD THE ENTHUSIAST.

To sue the God; but, haunting your green shade 1
All seasons through, is humbly pleased to braid 2
Ground-flowers, beneath your guardianship, self-sown.*
Farewell no Minstrels now with harp new-strung
For summer wandering quit their household bowers;
Yet not for this wants Poesy a tongue

To cheer the Itinerant on whom she pours
Her spirit, while he crosses lonely moors,
Or musing sits forsaken halls among.

II.

WHY should the Enthusiast, journeying through this Isle, Repine as if his hour were come too late?

Not unprotected in her mouldering state,

Antiquity salutes him with a smile,

'Mid fruitful fields that ring with jocund toil,

And pleasure-grounds where Taste, refined Co-mate
Of Truth and Beauty, strives to imitate,

Far as she may, primeval Nature's style.

Fair Land by Time's parental love made free,
By Social Order's watchful arms embraced;

With unexampled union meet in thee,
For eye and mind, the present and the past;
With golden prospect for futurity,

If that be reverenced which ought to last.3

1

One who to win your emblematic crown
Aspires not, but frequenting your green shade
Who dares not sue the God for your bright crown
Of deathless leaves, but haunting your green shade
delights fresh wreaths to braid.

MS.

MS.

MS.

2

3 1845.

If what is rightly reverenced may last.

1835.

* The yellow flowering poppy and the wild geranium. See the Poem

Poor Robin, March 1840.-ED.

III.

THEY called Thee MERRY ENGLAND, in old time;

A happy people won for thee that name
With envy heard in many a distant clime;

And, spite of change, for me thou keep'st the same
Endearing title, a responsive chime

To the heart's fond belief; though some there are
Whose sterner judgments deem that word a snare
For inattentive Fancy, like the lime

Which foolish birds are caught with. Can, I ask,
This face of rural beauty be a mask

For discontent, and poverty, and crime;

These spreading towns a cloak for lawless will?
Forbid it, Heaven!-and MERRY ENGLAND still
Shall be thy rightful name, in prose and rhyme !

IV.

TO THE RIVER GRETA, NEAR KESWICK.
GRETA, what fearful listening! when huge stones
Rumble along thy bed, block after block :
Or, whirling with reiterated shock,

Combat, while darkness aggravates the groans:
But if thou (like Cocytus from the moans*

1 1837.

May

1835.

Many years ago, when I was at Greta Bridge, in Yorkshire, the hostess of the inn, proud of her skill in etymology, said, that "the name of the river was taken from the bridge, the form of which, as every one must notice, exactly resembled a great A." Dr Whitaker has derived it from the word of common occurrence in the north of England, "to greet ;" signifying to lament aloud, mostly with weeping: a conjecture rendered more probable from the stony and rocky channel of both the Cumberland and Yorkshire rivers. The Cumberland Greta, though it does not, among the country people, take up that name till within three miles of its dis

TO THE RIVER GRETA, NEAR KESWICK.

Heard on his rueful margin *) thence wert named
The Mourner, thy true nature was defamed,
And the habitual murmur that atones

For thy worst rage, forgotten. Oft as Spring
Decks, on thy sinuous banks, her thousand thrones,
Seats of glad instinct and love's carolling,
The concert, for the happy, then may vie
With liveliest peals of birth-day harmony:
To a grieved heart, the notes are benisons.

Compare The Prelude, Book I. (see Vol. III., p. 139)—
"Was it for this

That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved
To blend his murmurs with my nurse's song,
And, from his alder shades and rocky falls,

And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice
That flowed along my dreams?

Make ceaseless music that composed my thoughts
To more than infant softness."

335

-ED.

appearance in the river Derwent, may be considered as having its source in the mountain cove of Wythburn, and flowing through Thirlmere, the beautiful features of which lake are known only to those who, travelling between Grasmere and Keswick, have quitted the main road in the vale of Wythburn, and, crossing over to the opposite side of the lake, have proceeded with it on the right hand.

The channel of the Greta, immediately above Keswick, has, for the purposes of building, been in a great measure cleared of the immense stones which, by their concussion in high floods, produced the loud and awful noises described in the sonnet.

"The scenery upon this river," says Mr Southey in his Colloquies, "where it passes under the woody side of Latrigg, is of the finest and most rememberable kind :

:

'ambiguo lapsu refluitque fluitque, Occurrensque sibi venturas aspicit undas.’’

-W. W., 1835.

* The Cocytus was a tributary of the Acheron, in Epirus, but was supposed to have some connection with the underworld, doubtless, as Wordsworth puts it,

"from the moans

Heard on his rueful margin."

Compare Homer, Od. X., 513, and Virgil, Aen. VI., 295.-ED.