whatever may be the changes that come over his joy in natural

beauty.

191.

more habitual] If the glory of Nature has faded, yet, with advancing years, communion with her has become a habit and is less liable to distraction or sudden emotion.

192, 193. The early influence of streams upon Wordsworth is shewn in Prelude, 1, 269–81, where he attributes some part of his love of Nature to the voice of the Derwent, familiar to him from his earliest childhood.

199. Another race] The meaning seems to be that sunset is not merely a thing of splendour and beauty: it becomes associated with thoughts of life and death, and the close of each day is, as it were, the close of a life, a race completed and crowned with a special reward to the individual soul which, identifying itself with Nature, receives daily fresh impressions and encouragement. Cf. the last stanza of Composed upon an evening of extraordinary splendour and beauty, pp. 65, 66 above.

THOUGHT OF A BRITON ON THE SUBJUGATION OF SWITZERLAND.

Composed at Coleorton, Leices., in 1807, 'while pacing to and fro between the Hall of Coleorton, then rebuilding, and the principal Farm-house of the Estate, in which we lived for nine or ten months.' Published 1807. Classified among Poems dedicated to Independence and Liberty (No. XII).

1-4. The sea and the mountains are the most formidable barrier to invading tyrants, and islands and hilly countries are therefore the strongholds of liberty.

5. There came a Tyrant] In 1798 Switzerland had been invaded by French troops, under the pretext of a war of liberation: the old federal system of government had been overthrown, and the Helvetic republic had been established under

French protection and upon the French model. The contest between the federalist and democratic parties and the unsettled state of the constitution of the republic made the new state of things unworkable, and Napoleon, then first consul, played upon the rival factions to secure the subjection of Switzerland to France. In 1802, after the withdrawal of the French army of occupation, civil war arose, and the federalists, under Aloys Reding, the landamman or chief magistrate of the republic, obtained some temporary success. A second invasion under Ney put an end to the disturbance and ensured French supremacy; and, by the act of mediation (1803), which granted Switzerland the shadow of independence and a new federal constitution, Napoleon practically disarmed her and made her powerless to offer any effective opposition to his plans. Wordsworth in 1820 visited the memorial to Aloys Reding near the lake of Thun and wrote the stanzas which form No. XIII of his Memorials of a Tour on the Continent. The original invasion in 1798 had given occasion to Coleridge's France: an ode, one of the finest of his poems.

12. Mountain floods] The mountain streams of Switzerland had exercised their fascination upon Wordsworth during his tour with Robert Jones in 1790. See Descriptive Sketches (1793), 161, 162:

where Via Mala's chasms confine

The indignant waters of the infant Rhine.

In 1824 the remembrance of the Via Mala came to him at the Devil's bridge in Cardiganshire:

Or come the incessant shocks

From that young Stream, that smites the throbbing rocks Of Viamala? There I seem to stand,

As in life's morn; permitted to behold,

From the dread chasm, woods climbing above woods,

In pomp that fades not; everlasting snows;

And skies that ne'er relinquish their repose;

Such power possess the family of floods
Over the minds of Poets, young or old!

T. W.

ΙΟ

SONG AT THE FEAST OF BROUGHAM CASTLE.

Composed at Coleorton, 1807, in circumstances similar to those described in the introductory note to the preceding poem. Published in the Poems of that year. Classified among Poems of the Imagination (No. xxv). The story on which it is founded attracted Wordsworth for reasons which are amply explained in the four final stanzas. After the death of John, thirteenth baron Clifford and ninth baron of Westmorland, the Clifford of Shakespeare, 3 Hen. VI, at Ferrybridge in 1461, his young son Henry, a child of some six years old, was hidden by his mother, to escape the vengeance of the house of York, among shepherds in Cumberland. Here and at Londesborough in Yorkshire he lived in seclusion until, at the accession of Henry VII, he was restored to his father's honours. He fought at Flodden in 1513 and died in 1523: his son was created earl of Cumberland in 1525. The 'shepherd lord' spent much of his later life at Barden tower near Bolton priory, where he is said to have studied astrology: this is commemorated by Wordsworth in The White Doe of Rylstone, 1, 264-307.

Brougham castle, of which the ruins remain, stands two miles S.E. of Penrith on the right bank of the Eamont, the river which has its source in Ullswater, near its junction with the Lowther. It was probably founded by Robert Vipont (de Veteriponte) in the reign of Henry II and came into the possession of the Cliffords by the marriage of his grand-daughter Isabel to Roger Clifford in the second quarter of the thirteenth century.

The Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle is Wordsworth's masterpiece in a type of poetry, founded on romantic legend, which he seldom attempted. The exaltation and enthusiasm of the song itself have a dramatic character of their own, which is emphasised by the contrast of the concluding stanzas, written in the reflective spirit habitual to Wordsworth.

27. The line is adapted from sir John Beaumont's Bosworth Field, 1629, 1. 100, where an angel says to Henry VII, 'the

Avenger,' 'The Earth assists thee with the cry of blood.' Sir John Beaumont of Gracedieu, Leicestershire (1582-1628), was the brother of Francis Beaumont the dramatist and the ancestor of sir George Howland Beaumont, in whose grounds at Coleorton this poem was composed. Cf. Wordsworth's inscription on a stone near a tree at Coleorton, ll. 17, 18:

The haunt of him who sang how spear and shield

In civil conflict met on Bosworth-field.

Bosworth is some eight or nine miles south of Coleorton.

34. strong-abodes] The peles or fortified houses common in the north of England, consisting of a tower or house round a courtyard, originally with an outer walled or palisaded enclosure.

36. Skipton] The castle of Skipton-in-Craven, which passed into the hands of the Cliffords, early in the fourteenth century. It was much added to by the Shepherd lord's son, the first earl of Cumberland, whose tomb is in Skipton church. The portion which he built is still inhabited and is one of the best remaining examples of a house of the reign of Henry VIII.

40. Pendragon] The ruins of this small castle stand close to the hamlet of Castlethwaite, four miles south of Kirkby Stephen, Westmorland, in the upper valley of the Eden.

44. Brough] Brough-under-Stainmore lies at the western foot of the fells which separate the valley of the Eden from that of the Tees. The castle, of which the ruins remain, has a history similar to that of Brougham. It stands at the meeting of the Augill and Swindale becks, a mile and a half above the confluence of the Swindale and Eden.

46. she] Appleby castle, standing on a hill at the south end of the town, round which the Eden curves in a semi-circle. This castle, like Brougham and Brough, came to the Cliffords from the Viponts.

56. This is not strictly accurate. The Shepherd lord was born about 1455, six years before his father's death.

73. Carrock's side] Carrock fell is a hill on the north-western border of the Lake country between Keswick and

Carlisle. It rises above Mosedale (1. 89), down which flows the Caldew, a tributary of the Eden.

90. Blencathara] Otherwise called Saddleback, a mountain south of Carrock fell, between it and Keswick. The Glenderamackin (1. 92) rises in Saddleback and, flowing past Threlkeld, enters Derwentwater at Keswick.

95. Sir Lancelot Threlkeld] This knight, who became the step-father of the 'Shepherd lord,' is said to have boasted 'that he possessed three noble houses-one for pleasure, Crosby in Westmorland, where he had a park well stocked with deer; one for profit and warmth, Yanwath, near Penrith; and one, Threlkeld, well stocked with tenants to go with him to the wars (Murray's Handbook to the English Lakes, p. 80). Threlkeld hall and the tale of the Shepherd lord are referred to in The Waggoner, IV, 42 sqq.

122, 123.

Bowscale tarn, in which a small stream tributary to the Caldew takes its rise, is at the foot of Bowscale fell, one of the northern outlying summits of the Saddleback range. Wordsworth notes: 'It is imagined by the people of the country that there are two immortal Fish, inhabitants of this Tarn, which lies in the mountains not far from Threlkeld.'

134. Among the heavens] 'There is a tradition current in the village of Threlkeld and its neighbourhood, his principal retreat, that in the course of his shepherd-life he had acquired great astronomical knowledge' (Wordsworth). See also introductory note with reference to his astrological studies.

137.

words of might] Incantations. Cf. Scott, The Lay

of the Last Minstrel, II, st. xiii:

The words that cleft Eildon hills in three,

And bridled the Tweed with a curb of stone.

140-64. These lines are cited by Coleridge (Biog. Literaria, ed. Ashe, pp. 200, 201) among examples of Wordsworth's use of a diction unmistakably his own. The bard's impassioned prophecy of war heightens the effect of the elegiac stanzas at the end of the poem, in which Wordsworth embodies a contrast congenial to the true lover and disciple of Nature.