Nor deem that localised Romance Plays false with our affections; Unsanctifies our tears—made sport For fanciful dejections: Ah, no! the visions of the past Sustain the heart in feeling Life as she is—our changeful Life, With friends and kindred dealing. Bear witness, Ye, whose thoughts that day In Yarrow’s groves were centred; Who through the silent portal arch Of mouldering Newark enter’d; And clomb the winding stair that once Too timidly was mounted By the ‘last Minstrel,’ (not the last!) Ere he his Tale recounted. Flow on for ever, Yarrow Stream! Fulfil thy pensive duty, Well pleased that future Bards should chant For simple hearts thy beauty; To dream-light dear while yet unseen, Dear to the common sunshine, And dearer still, as now I feel, To memory’s shadowy moonshine! ON THE DEPARTURE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT FROM ABBOTSFORD FOR NAPLES. A trouble, not of clouds, or weeping rain, Nor of the setting sun’s pathetic light Engendered, hangs o’er Eildon’s triple height: Spirits of Power, assembled there, complain For kindred Power departing from their sight; While Tweed, best pleased in chanting a blithe strain, Saddens his voice again, and yet again. Lift up your hearts, ye Mourners! for the might Of the whole world’s good wishes with him goes; Blessings and prayers in nobler retinue Than sceptered king or laurelled conqueror knows, Follow this wondrous Potentate. Be true, Ye winds of ocean, and the midland sea, Wafting your Charge to soft Parthenope! THE TROSSACHS. [Compare with this Sonnet the poem composed about thirty years earlier on nearly the same spot of ground, ‘What! you are stepping westward?’ (See p. 221.) This earlier poem, one of the most truly ethereal and ideal Wordsworth ever wrote, is filled with the overflowing spirit of life and hope. In every line of it we feel the exulting pulse of the ‘traveller through the world that lay Before him on his endless way.’ The later one is stilled down to perfect autumnal quiet. There is in it the chastened pensiveness of one to whom all things now ‘do take a sober colouring from an eye That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality.’ But the sadness has at the heart of it peaceful hope. This is Wordsworth’s own comment:—‘As recorded in my sister’s Journal, I had first seen the Trossachs in her and Coleridge’s company. The sentiment that runs through this sonnet was natural to the season in which I again visited this beautiful spot; but this and some other sonnets that follow were coloured by the remembrance of my recent visit to Sir Walter Scott, and the melancholy errand on which he was going.’]