Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

The clouds of wintry yesterday are gone;
The blue of Heaven is pale with light to-day;
Bright shines the morn as ever morning shone
In southern vallies, in the month of May.

Green meadows bask beneath me; all around
Are mountains brow'd with diadems of snow;
And Rotha dances with a silvery sound,
At play with sunbeams, to the lake below.

Fair scene and sunny sabbath! why this tear?
Alas, it is not Rydal Vale I see,
Nor Rotha's spring-tide music that I hear,
Nor Fairfield's crown of snow that shines for me.

263

Granada's circled plain is at my feet;
Her mountains their eternal snows reveal;
And myrtled Darro flashes down to greet
And mingle yonder with the soft Xenil.

And lo! the magic palace of the Moor,
The red Alhambra haunted by Romance;
And Dora, spell-bound by delight as pure
As ever trembled in a woman's glance.

Hark to the nightingales! they throng their lays;
Not one, but hundreds hail the poet's child.
O what a day was that! Of Sabbath days
The most divine that ever hope beguiled.

264

Strange contrast to the sound of Sabbath bells,
That woodland music heard in Moslem halls!
Yet to her heart of holier things it tells,
And dearer harmonies of prayer recalls.

And where was Dora after one short year,
When flowers exhaled the May's delicious breath?
Not yet, not yet, on her untimely bier,
But living, conscious, in the arms of Death.

O flowers of Rydal, could ye bloom again!
The last her mortal eyes were doom'd to see
Were roses clustering at her lattice pane,
The blossoms from her brother's funeral tree.

Ere three-score suns and ten, from May-day morn,
Had risen and set on Rydal's laurell'd height,
The radiant spirit which of Heaven was born,—
For us too precious, wing'd to Heaven her flight.

265

When thrice the folds in Grasmere Vale had yean'd,
And April daisies bloom'd upon her grave,
A life broke down that would on hers have lean'd;
And sire to daughter, dust to dust, we gave.

In these loved haunts, where all things have a voice
That echoes to the bard's inspiring tongue,
Where woods and waters in his strain rejoice,
“And not a mountain lifts its head unsung,”

Of Him the Tarns and Meres are eloquent;
The running waters are his chroniclers;
The eternal mountains are his monument.—
A few frail hearts and one green mound are hers.

Rydal, Sunday, February 2nd, 1851.

Windermere.

The Alpine range called Sierra Nevada, overlooking the City and Vega (plain) of Granada.

The Darro rises from the hill of myrtles, near Huetar, and approaches Granada under the Monte Sacro. The walks on both sides of this swift arrowy river are delicious. The Darro flows into the Xenil (pronounced Heneel with the h strongly aspirated—some write it Genil) below the Carrera, one of the Alamedas or public walks of Granada. The Xenil rises in the glaciers of the Sierra Nevada, and discharges itself, far away, at Ecija, into the Guadalquiver.

This is no extravagance: the groves on the banks of the Darro and Xenil are peopled with nightingales, and the effect of their choirs of harmony in May is indescribable.

That fatal illness began before Christmas, 1846, hardly six months after our return from Spain. In April, 1847, all hope was over, and she knew it! She expired on Friday, the 9th of July.

The rose-tree that climbs up the front wall of Rydal Mount to the windows of the room where she breathed her last, was planted there in memorial of her brother Thomas's death, and is called Thomas's tree.

Mr. Wordsworth died in April, 1850, not quite three years after the loss of his beloved daughter, and was buried by her side in Grasmere churchyard.