And to the grove that holds it. She beguiles
By intermingled work of house and field
The summer’s day, and winter’s; with success 710
Not equal, but sufficient to maintain,
Even at the worst, a smooth stream of content,
Until the expected hour at which her Mate
From the far-distant quarry’s vault returns;
And by his converse crowns a silent day
With evening cheerfulness. In powers of mind,
In scale of culture, few among my flock
Hold lower rank than this sequestered pair:
But true humility descends from heaven;
And that best gift of heaven hath fallen on them; 720
Abundant recompense for every want.
—Stoop from your height, ye proud, and copy these!
Who, in their noiseless dwelling-place, can hear
The voice of wisdom whispering scripture texts
For the mind’s government, or temper’s peace;
And recommending for their mutual need,
Forgiveness, patience, hope, and charity!”
“Much was I pleased,” the grey-haired Wanderer said,
“When to those shining fields our notice first
You turned; and yet more pleased have from your lips 730
Gathered this fair report of them who dwell
In that retirement; whither, by such course
Of evil hap and good as oft awaits
A tired way-faring man, once ‘I’ was brought
While traversing alone yon mountain pass.
Dark on my road the autumnal evening fell,
And night succeeded with unusual gloom,
So hazardous that feet and hands became
Guides better than mine eyes—until a light
High in the gloom appeared, too high, methought, 740
For human habitation; but I longed
To reach it, destitute of other hope.
I looked with steadiness as sailors look
On the north star, or watch-tower’s distant lamp,
And saw the light—now fixed—and shifting now—
Not like a dancing meteor, but in line
Of never-varying motion, to and fro.
It is no night-fire of the naked hills,
Thought I—some friendly covert must be near.
With this persuasion thitherward my steps 750
I turn, and reach at last the guiding light;
Joy to myself! but to the heart of her
Who there was standing on the open hill,
(The same kind Matron whom your tongue hath praised)
Alarm and disappointment! The alarm
Ceased, when she learned through what mishap I came,
And by what help had gained those distant fields.
Drawn from her cottage, on that aery height,
Bearing a lantern in her hand she stood,
Or paced the ground—to guide her Husband home, 760
By that unwearied signal, kenned afar;
An anxious duty! which the lofty site,
Traversed but by a few irregular paths,
Imposes, whensoe’er untoward chance
Detains him after his accustomed hour
Till night lies black upon the ground. ‘But come,
Come,’ said the Matron, ‘to our poor abode;
Those dark rocks hide it!’ Entering, I beheld
A blazing fire—beside a cleanly hearth
Sate down; and to her office, with leave asked, 770
The Dame returned.
Or ere that glowing pile
Of mountain turf required the builder’s hand
Its wasted splendour to repair, the door
Opened, and she re-entered with glad looks,
Her Helpmate following. Hospitable fare,
Frank conversation, made the evening’s treat:
Need a bewildered traveller wish for more?
But more was given; I studied as we sate
By the bright fire, the good Man’s form, and face
Not less than beautiful; an open brow 780
Of undisturbed humanity; a cheek
Suffused with something of a feminine hue;
Eyes beaming courtesy and mild regard;
But, in the quicker turns of the discourse,
Expression slowly varying, that evinced
A tardy apprehension. From a fount
Lost, thought I, in the obscurities of time,
But honoured once, those features and that mien
May have descended, though I see them here.
In such a man, so gentle and subdued, 790
Withal so graceful in his gentleness,
A race illustrious for heroic deeds,
Humbled, but not degraded, may expire.
This pleasing fancy (cherished and upheld
By sundry recollections of such fall
From high to low, ascent from low to high,
As books record, and even the careless mind
Cannot but notice among men and things)
Went with me to the place of my repose.
Roused by the crowing cock at dawn of day, 800
I yet had risen too late to interchange
A morning salutation with my Host,
Gone forth already to the far-off seat
Of his day’s work. ‘Three dark mid-winter months
‘Pass,’ said the Matron ‘and I never see,
‘Save when the sabbath brings its kind release,
‘My Helpmate’s face by light of day. He quits
‘His door in darkness, nor till dusk returns.
‘And, through Heaven’s blessing, thus we gain the bread
‘For which we pray; and for the wants provide 810
‘Of sickness, accident, and helpless age.
‘Companions have I many; many friends,
‘Dependants, comforters—my wheel, my fire,
‘All day the house-clock ticking in mine ear,
‘The cackling hen, the tender chicken brood,
‘And the wild birds that gather round my porch.
‘This honest sheep-dog’s countenance I read;
‘With him can talk; nor blush to waste a word
‘On creatures less intelligent and shrewd.
‘And if the blustering wind that drives the clouds 820
‘Care not for me, he lingers round my door,
‘And makes me pastime when our tempers suit;—
‘But, above all, my thoughts are my support,
‘My comfort:—would that they were oftener fixed
‘On what, for guidance in the way that leads
‘To heaven, I know, by my Redeemer taught.’
The Matron ended—nor could I forbear
To exclaim—’O happy! yielding to the law
Of these privations, richer in the main!—
While thankless thousands are opprest and clogged 830
By ease and leisure; by the very wealth
And pride of opportunity made poor;
While tens of thousands falter in their path,
And sink, through utter want of cheering light;
For you the hours of labour do not flag;
For you each evening hath its shining star,
And every sabbath-day its golden sun.’“
“Yes!” said the Solitary with a smile
That seemed to break from an expanding heart,
“The untutored bird may found, and so construct, 840
And with such soft materials line, her nest
Fixed in the centre of a prickly brake,
That the thorns wound her not; they only guard,
Powers not unjustly likened to those gifts
Of happy instinct which the woodland bird
Shares with her species, nature’s grace sometimes
Upon the individual doth confer,
Among her higher creatures born and trained
&n
bsp; To use of reason. And, I own that, tired
Of the ostentatious world—a swelling stage 850
With empty actions and vain passions stuffed,
And from the private struggles of mankind
Hoping far less than I could wish to hope,
Far less than once I trusted and believed—
I love to hear of those, who, not contending
Nor summoned to contend for virtue’s prize,
Miss not the humbler good at which they aim,
Blest with a kindly faculty to blunt
The edge of adverse circumstance, and turn
Into their contraries the petty plagues 860
And hindrances with which they stand beset.
In early youth, among my native hills,
I knew a Scottish Peasant who possessed
A few small crofts of stone-encumbered ground;
Masses of every shape and size, that lay
Scattered about under the mouldering walls
Of a rough precipice; and some, apart,
In quarters unobnoxious to such chance,
As if the moon had showered them down in spite.
But he repined not. Though the plough was scared 870
By these obstructions, ‘round the shady stones
‘A fertilising moisture,’ said the Swain,
‘Gathers, and is preserved; and feeding dews
‘And damps, through all the droughty summer day
‘From out their substance issuing, maintain
‘Herbage that never fails; no grass springs up
‘So green, so fresh, so plentiful, as mine!’
But thinly sown these natures; rare, at least,
The mutual aptitude of seed and soil
That yields such kindly product. He, whose bed 880
Perhaps yon loose sods cover, the poor Pensioner
Brought yesterday from our sequestered dell
Here to lie down in lasting quiet, he,
If living now, could otherwise report
Of rustic loneliness: that grey-haired Orphan—
So call him, for humanity to him
No parent was—feelingly could have told,
In life, in death, what solitude can breed
Of selfishness, and cruelty, and vice;
Or, if it breed not, hath not power to cure. 890
—But your compliance, Sir! with our request
My words too long have hindered.”
Undeterred,
Perhaps incited rather, by these shocks,
In no ungracious opposition, given
To the confiding spirit of his own
Experienced faith, the reverend Pastor said,
Around him looking; “Where shall I begin?
Who shall be first selected from my flock
Gathered together in their peaceful fold?”
He paused—and having lifted up his eyes 900
To the pure heaven, he cast them down again
Upon the earth beneath his feet; and spake:—
“To a mysteriously-united pair
This place is consecrate; to Death and Life,
And to the best affections that proceed
From their conjunction; consecrate to faith
In him who bled for man upon the cross;
Hallowed to revelation; and no less
To reason’s mandates: and the hopes divine
Of pure imagination;—above all, 910
To charity, and love, that have provided,
Within these precincts, a capacious bed
And receptacle, open to the good
And evil, to the just and the unjust;
In which they find an equal resting-place:
Even as the multitude of kindred brooks
And streams, whose murmur fills this hollow vale,
Whether their course be turbulent or smooth,
Their waters clear or sullied, all are lost
Within the bosom of yon crystal Lake, 920
And end their journey in the same repose!
And blest are they who sleep; and we that know,
While in a spot like this we breathe and walk,
That all beneath us by the wings are covered
Of motherly humanity, outspread
And gathering all within their tender shade,
Though loth and slow to come! A battlefield,
In stillness left when slaughter is no more,
With this compared, makes a strange spectacle!
A dismal prospect yields the wild shore strewn 930
With wrecks, and trod by feet of young and old
Wandering about in miserable search
Of friends or kindred, whom the angry sea
Restores not to their prayer! Ah! who would think
That all the scattered subjects which compose
Earth’s melancholy vision through the space
Of all her climes—these wretched, these depraved,
To virtue lost, insensible of peace,
From the delights of charity cut off,
To pity dead, the oppressor and the opprest; 940
Tyrants who utter the destroying word,
And slaves who will consent to be destroyed—
Were of one species with the sheltered few,
Who, with a dutiful and tender hand,
Lodged, in a dear appropriated spot,
This file of infants; some that never breathed
The vital air; others, which, though allowed
That privilege, did yet expire too soon,
Or with too brief a warning, to admit
Administration of the holy rite 950
That lovingly consigns the babe to the arms
Of Jesus, and his everlasting care.
These that in trembling hope are laid apart;
And the besprinkled nursling, unrequired
Till he begins to smile upon the breast
That feeds him; and the tottering little-one
Taken from air and sunshine when the rose
Of infancy first blooms upon his cheek;
The thinking, thoughtless, school-boy; the bold youth
Of soul impetuous, and the bashful maid 960
Smitten while all the promises of life
Are opening round her; those of middle age,
Cast down while confident in strength they stand,
Like pillars fixed more firmly, as might seem,
And more secure, by very weight of all
That, for support, rests on them; the decayed
And burthensome; and lastly, that poor few
Whose light of reason is with age extinct;
The hopeful and the hopeless, first and last,
The earliest summoned and the longest spared— 970
Are here deposited, with tribute paid
Various, but unto each some tribute paid;
As if, amid these peaceful hills and groves,
Society were touched with kind concern,
And gentle ‘Nature grieved, that one should die;’
Or, if the change demanded no regret,
Observed the liberating stroke—and blessed.
And whence that tribute? wherefore these regards?
Not from the naked ‘Heart’ alone of Man
(Though claiming high distinction upon earth 980
As the sole spring and fountain-head of tears,
His own peculiar utterance for distress
Or gladness)—No,” the philosophic Priest
Continued, “‘tis not in the vital seat
Of feeling to produce them, without aid
From the pure soul, the soul sublime and pure;
With her two faculties of eye and ear,
The one by which a creature, whom his sins
Have rendered prone, can upward look to heaven;
The other that empowers him to perceive 990
The voice of Deity, on height and plain,
Whispering those truths in stillness, whic
h the WORD,
To the four quarters of the winds, proclaims.
Not without such assistance could the use
Of these benign observances prevail:
Thus are they born, thus fostered, thus maintained;
And by the care prospective of our wise
Forefathers, who, to guard against the shocks
The fluctuation and decay of things,
Embodied and established these high truths 1000
In solemn institutions:—men convinced
That life is love and immortality,
The being one, and one the element.
There lies the channel, and original bed,
From the beginning, hollowed out and scooped
For Man’s affections—else betrayed and lost
And swallowed up ‘mid deserts infinite!
This is the genuine course, the aim, and end
Of prescient reason; all conclusions else
Are abject, vain, presumptuous, and perverse. 1010
The faith partaking of those holy times,
Life, I repeat, is energy of love
Divine or human; exercised in pain,
In strife, and tribulation; and ordained,
If so approved and sanctified, to pass,
Through shades and silent rest, to endless joy.”
NOTES
646 ‘Or rather, as we stand on holy earth,
And have the dead around us.’
Leo. You, Sir, could help me to the history
Of half these graves?
Priest.For eight-score winters past,
With what I’ve witnessed, and with what I’ve heard
Perhaps I might; . . . . .
By turning o’er these hillocks one by one,
We two could travel, Sir, through a strange round;
Yet all in the broad highway of the world.
‘See the Brothers’.
975 ‘And suffering Nature grieved that one should die.’
“Southey’s Retrospect.”
978 ‘And whence that tribute? wherefore these regards?’
The sentiments and opinions here uttered are in unison with
those expressed in the following Essay upon Epitaphs, which was
furnished by me for Mr. Coleridge’s periodical work, “The Friend”;
and as they are dictated by a spirit congenial to that which
pervades this and the two succeeding books, the sympathising
reader will not be displeased to see the Essay here annexed.
ESSAY UPON EPITAPHS
IT needs scarcely be said, that an Epitaph presupposes a Monument,
upon which it is to be engraven. Almost all Nations have wished
that certain external signs should point out the places where
their dead are interred. Among savage tribes unacquainted with
letters this has mostly been done either by rude stones placed
near the graves, or by mounds of earth raised over them. This
Delphi Complete Works of William Wordsworth Page 241