And something of the same power of
clinging attachment is shown in the sonnet where the poet is stung
with the thought that "even for the least division of an hour" he
has taken pleasure in the life around him, without the accustomed
tacit reference to one who has passed away. There is a brighter
touch of constancy in that other sonnet where, after letting his
fancy play over a glad imaginary past, he turns to his wife, ashamed
that even in so vague a vision he could have shaped for himself a
solitary joy.
Let _her_ be comprehended in the frame
Of these Illusions, or they please no more.
In later years the two sonnets on his wife's picture set on that
love the consecration of faithful age; and there are those who can
recall his look as he gazed on the picture and tried to recognize in
that aged face the Beloved who to him was ever young and fair,--a
look as of one dwelling in life-long affections with the
unquestioning single-heartedness of a child.
And here it might have been thought that as his experience ended his
power of description would have ended too. But it was not so. Under
the powerful stimulus of the sixth _AEneid_--allusions to which
pervade _Laodamia_ [5] throughout--with unusual labour, and by a
strenuous effort of the imagination, Wordsworth was enabled to
depict his own love _in excelsis_, to imagine what aspect it might
have worn, if it had been its destiny to deny itself at some heroic
call, and to confront with nobleness an extreme emergency, and to be
victor (as Plato has it) in an Olympian contest of the soul.
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