1820 -- AUTHOR'S VOYAGE DOWN THE RHINE (THIRTY YEARS AGO)

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by williamwordsworth

by williamwordsworth

The confidence of Youth our only Art,

And Hope gay Pilot of the bold design,

We saw the living Landscapes of the Rhine,

Reach after reach, salute us and depart;

Slow sink the Spires,--and up again they start!

But who shall count the Towers as they recline

O'er the dark steeps, or in the horizon line

Striding, with shattered crests, the eye athwart?

More touching still, more perfect was the pleasure,

When hurrying forward till the slack'ning stream

Spread like a spacious Mere, we there could measure

A smooth free course along the watery gleam,

Think calmly on the past, and mark at leisure

Features which else had vanished like a dream.

This sonnet was published in the first edition of the Memorials of this Tour (1822), but was struck out of the next edition, and never republished. Its rejection by Wordsworth is curious.

It refers to the pedestrian tour which the Poet took, with his friend Jones, in 1790, which he afterwards recorded in full in his Descriptive Sketches.

Dorothy Wordsworth, in her Journal of the Tour in 1820, refers to it thus:--"Our journey through the narrower and most romantic passages of the Vale of the Rhine was connected with times long past, when my brother and his Friend (it was thirty years ago) floated down the stream in their little Bark. Often did my fancy place them with a freight of happiness in the centre of some bending reach, overlooked by tower or castle, or (when expectation would be most eager) at the turning of a promontory, which had concealed from their view some delicious winding which we had left behind; but no more of my own feelings, a record of his will be more interesting."

She then quotes the sonnet, beginning

The confidence of Youth our only Art.

There are also numerous allusions in Mrs. Wordsworth's Journal to this early tour; e.g. under date August 13. "We left Meyringen;soon reached a sort of Hotel, which Wm. pointed out to us with great interest, as being the only spot where he and his friend Jones were ill-used, during the course of their adventurous journey--a wild looking building, a little removed from the road, where the vale of Hasliends." Again, in describing the sunset from the woody hill Colline deGibet, overlooking the two lakes of Brienz and Thun, at Interlaken," with the loveliest of green vallies between us and Jungfrau," "Surely William must have had this Paradise in his thoughts when he began his Descriptive Sketches--

Were there, below, a spot of holy ground,

By Pain and her sad family unfound, etc.

But no habitation was there among these rocky knolls, and tiny pastures. One fragment, something like a ruined convent, lurked under a steep, woody-fringed crag. What a Refuge for a pious Sisterhood!"Compare also the note to Stanzas composed in the Simplon Pass, vol.vi. p. 359.--ED.