S

THE LINES ON TIN

IN

TERN ABBEY

N 1793 Wordsworth, then in his twenty-third year, spent part of the summer in the Isle of Wight. On his homeward journey he walked over Salisbury Plain, where Carlyle and Emerson were to have a notable talk years later, made his way alone through the noble landscape of Somerset which is a charming prelude to the steep hills of Devonshire, crossed the Severn, and saw Tintern Abbey for the first time. Five years later he revisited the country about the Abbey, and so vivid and urgent was the impression it made upon him that he began at once to compose the

"Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" and finished the poem as he was entering Bristol, with his sister, at sunset, four or five days later. It was the poet's habit to compose out of doors and to complete a poem before putting it on paper. He was often overheard reciting his lines as he walked across the terraces and hills about Grasmere and Windermere; "booing," his rural neighbors used to call it.

The Abbey, the key to the landscape which inspired the "Lines," characterized by one of his biographers as the "consecrated formulary of the Wordsworthian faith," is strikingly beautiful in its structure and surroundings. Furness Abbey, within two hours of Grasmere and Ambleside in these latter days, is far more extensive, Fountains Abbey suggests

a richer and more varied habit of life, Dryburgh enfolds the grave of Scott with a peace born of its old arches. set in verdure and shade; but Tintern has a poetic charm due to its seclusion, the detachment of its ruined. grandeur from modern association, the wild loveliness of the Wye which flows past it in a half-circle, the hill which rises beyond it, and the Severn which runs to the sea beyond the sight but within the vision. In the romantic beauty which secures great effects on a small scale and, in one of the most densely populated countries, keeps an air of that sacred privacy between God and nature in which poetry has its unfailing spring, Tintern Abbey is unique. Despoiled in detail, its beauty seems more complete and impressive than that of many a perfect church. The nobility

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of its naked structure, the ascending symmetry of its aspiring lines, the sense of native strength and indestructible solidity which it conveys, conspire to open the imagination to the poetry of its devastated majesty and its buried history.

To Wordsworth it made the double appeal of natural beauty and of religious association, and it was characteristic of him to describe with almost unrivaled power of suggestion the neighboring landscape as it lay before the eye:

"These hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, little lines

Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms,

Green to the very door; and wreaths of

smoke

Sent up, in silence, from among the

trees!"

When the "Lines" were written, he was twenty-eight years old, and on the threshold of the wonderful twelve or fifteen years in which the deeps of his spirit were broken up and his rigid and stubborn nature was subdued to the finest sensitive-" ness, and his uncertain voice attuned to the purest music. After a winter in Germany in which "Lucy Gray," the lines on Nutting," "Ruth," and other lyrical poems as simple as Nature and as instinct with life were written, the poet returned to the Lake Country to create its unique tradition, to illustrate with impressive dignity the life that is one with Nature, and to write his name on the roll of the English poets next after those of Shakespeare and Milton.

The "Lines" appeared first in that modest little volume of "Lyrical