University of Virginia Library


388

XVIII. ULSWATER.

September 5, 1895.
Pensive Ulswater, thanks! Thy face once more
I see. Hail, English Lakeland's duskiest Child,
Duskiest, for, closeliest here around thee piled
Her mountains fling their shades from shore to shore.
Again thine Aira Force's ‘gentle roar’
I hear breeze-borne o'er heathery waste and wild;
Again I see, delightedly beguiled,
Those daffodils thy Wordsworth sang of yore.
The waves beside them ‘they out-did in glee’
That day. This hour perchance from yonder sky
Their Poet sees them—she beside him, she
Who gazed with him through tears on Yarrow's bowers—
Ah surely nothing bright and fair once ours,
If wholly pure, can ever wholly die!
 

See Wordsworth's lines, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud,’ etc.

Wordsworth's sister.