"Day's mutable
distinctions" pass away; all in the landscape that suggests our own
age or our own handiwork is gone; we look on the sight seen by our
remote ancestors, and the visible present is generalized into an
immeasureable past.
The sonnet on the Duddon beginning "What aspect bore the Man who
roved or fled First of his tribe to this dark dell," carries back
the mind along the same track, with the added thought of Nature's
permanent gentleness amid the "hideous usages" of primeval man,--
through all which the stream's voice was innocent, and its flow
benign. "A weight of awe not easy to be borne" fell on the poet, also,
as he looked on the earliest memorials which these remote ancestors
have left us. The _Sonnet on a Stone Circle_ which opens with these
words is conceived in a strain of emotion never more needed than now,--
when Abury itself owes its preservation to the munificence of a
private individual,--when stone-circle or round-tower, camp or dolmen,
are destroyed to save a few shillings, and occupation-roads are
mended with the immemorial altars of an unknown God. "Speak,
Giant-mother! Tell it to the Morn!"--how strongly does the heart
re-echo the solemn invocation which calls on those abiding witnesses
to speak once of what they knew long ago!
The mention of these ancient worships may lead us to ask in what
manner Wordsworth was affected "by the Nature-deities of Greece and
Rome"--impersonations which have preserved through so many ages so
strange a charm.
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