166 IN WORDSWORTH'S COUNTRY. 



by a certain phase of nature, the nature of those 

 sombre, quiet, green, far-reaching mountain solitudes. 

 There is a shepherd quality about him ; he loves the 

 flocks, the heights, the tarn, the tender herbage, the 

 sheltered dell, the fold, with a kind of poetized shep- 

 herd instinct. Lambs and sheep and their haunts, 

 and those who tend them, recur perpetually in his 

 poems. How well his verse harmonizes with those 

 high, green, and gray solitudes, where the silence is 

 only broken by the bleat of lambs or sheep, or just 

 stirred by the voice of distant water-falls ! Simple, 

 elemental, yet profoundly tender and human, he had 



"the primal sympathy 

 Which, having been, must ever be." 



He brooded upon nature, but it was nature mirrored 

 in his own heart. In his poem of " The Brothers," 

 he says of his hero, who had gone to sea : 



"Hehadbeenrear'd 



Among the mountains, and he in his heart 

 Was half a shepherd on the stormy seas. 

 Oft in the piping shrouds had Leonard heard 

 The tones of water falls, and inland sounds 

 Of caves and trees ; " 



and leaning over the vessel's side and gazing into 

 the " broad green wave and sparkling foam," he 



" Saw mountains, saw the forms of sheep that grazed 

 On verdant hills." 



This was what his own heart told him ; every expe- 

 rience or sentiment called those beloved images to 

 his own mind. 



