[241] Poems founded on the Affections.

This rock was about a mile beyond Wythburn Chapel, to which they used to accompany my uncle, in going to Keswick from Grasmere, and where they would meet him when he returned.  This led him to read much of ’The Waggoner’ to me.  It seems a very favourite poem of his, and he read me splendid descriptions from it.  He said his object in it had not been understood.  It was a play of the fancy on a domestic incident and lowly character:  he wished by the opening descriptive lines to put his reader into the state of mind in which he wished it to be read.  If he failed in doing that, he wished him to lay it down.  He pointed out, with the same view, the glowing lines on the state of exultation in which Ben and his companions are under the influence of liquor.  Then he read the sickening languor of the morning walk, contrasted with the glorious uprising of Nature, and the songs of the birds.  Here he has added about six most exquisite lines.

We walked out on the turf terrace, on the Loughrigg side of Rydal Water.  Most exquisitely did the lake and opposite bank look.  Thence he led me home under Loughrigg, through lovely spots I had never seen before.  His conversation was on critical subjects, arising out of his attempts to alter his poems.  He said he considered ‘The White Doe’ as, in conception, the highest work he had ever produced.  The mere physical action was all unsuccessful; but the true action of the poem was spiritual—­the subduing of the will, and all inferior passions, to the perfect purifying and spiritualising of the intellectual nature; while the Doe, by connection with Emily, is raised as it were from its mere animal nature into something mysterious and saint-like.  He said he should devote much labour to perfecting the execution of it in the mere business parts, in which, from anxiety ‘to get on’ with the more important parts, he was sensible that imperfections had crept in, which gave the style a feebleness of character.

He talked of Milton, and observed how he sometimes indulged himself, in the ‘Paradise Lost,’ in lines which, if not in time, you could hardly call verse, instancing,

    ‘And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old;’

and then noticed the sweet-flowing lines which followed, and with regard to which he had no doubt the unmusical line before had been inserted.

‘Paradise Regained’ he thought the most perfect in execution of anything written by Milton; that and the ‘Merchant of Venice,’ in language, he thought were almost faultless:  with the exception of some little straining in some of the speeches about the caskets, he said, they were perfect, the genuine English expressions of the ideas of their own great minds.  Thomson he spoke of as a real poet, though it appeared less in his ‘Seasons’ than in his other poems.  He had wanted some judicious adviser to correct his taste; but every person he had to deal with only served to injure it.  He had,