No More Learning

"GRASMERE, Nov. 4.

"MY DEAR WRANGHAM,--I am indeed much pleased that Mrs. Wrangham and
yourself have been gratified by these breathings of simple nature. You
mention Butler, Montagu's friend; not Tom Butler, but the conveyancer:
when I was in town in spring, he happened to see the volumes lying on
Montagu's mantelpiece, and to glance his eye upon the very poem of
'The Daffodils. ' 'Aye,' says he, 'a fine morsel this for the
Reviewers. ' When this was told me (for I was not present) I observed
that there were 'two lines' in that little poem which, if thoroughly
felt, would annihilate nine-tenths of the reviews of the kingdom, as
they would find no readers. The lines I alluded to were these:

'They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude. '"

These two lines were composed by Mrs. Wordsworth. In 1877 the daffodils
were still growing in abundance on the shore of Ullswater, below
Gowbarrow Park.

Compare the last four lines of James Montgomery's poem, 'The Little
Cloud':

'Bliss in possession will not last:
Remembered joys are never past:
At once the fountain, stream, and sea,
They were--they are--they yet shall be. '

Ed.


[Footnote A: It was 'The Reverie of Poor Susan'. --Ed.
]


[Footnote B: This is an error in the original printed text. Evidently a
year before the above-mentioned publication in 1815: one of 1810-1815.
text Ed. ]





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THE AFFLICTION OF MARGARET--[A]


Composed 1804. --Published 1807


[Written at Town-end, Grasmere. This was taken from the case of a poor
widow who lived in the town of Penrith. Her sorrow was well known to
Mrs. Wordsworth, to my sister, and, I believe, to the whole town. She
kept a shop, and when she saw a stranger passing by, she was in the
habit of going out into the street to enquire of him after her
son. --I. F. ]

Included by Wordsworth among his "Poems founded on the Affections. "--Ed.




I Where art thou, my beloved Son,
Where art thou, worse to me than dead?
Oh find me, prosperous or undone!
Or, if the grave be now thy bed,
Why am I ignorant of the same 5
That I may rest; and neither blame
Nor sorrow may attend thy name?