152 WILLIAM BARTRAM 



of use and advantage, when introduced into his own country, but more 

 particularly music and poetry: with these views he privately left the 

 Nation, went to Mobile, and there entered into the service of the trad- 

 ing company to the Chactaws, as a white man ; his easy, communicative, 

 active and familiar disposition and manners, being agreeable to that 

 people, procured him access every where, and favored his subtilty and 

 artifice. 12 



It is this youth, 



With hues of genius on his cheek 

 In finest tones . . . could speak (stanza vi), 

 who 



Among the Indians . . . had fought. 



And with him many tales he brought 



Of pleasure and of fear; 



Such tales as told to any maid 



By such a Youth, in the green shade 



Were perilous to hear (stanza viii) . 



The tales that Wordsworth's " youth from Georgia's shore " 

 tells Ruth do prove " perilous " to hear. Bartram's young 

 mustee, too, pressed " to give out some of his new songs," com- 

 plied with such success that " a young Chactaw slave girl in the 

 circle . . . soon . . . discovered very affecting sensations of afflic- 

 tion and distress of mind " (p. 507) . The girl, like Ruth, is an 

 orphan. The general effect of the " doleful moral songs or ele- 

 gies " of the Indians, says Bartram, is " quick and sensible . . . 

 on their passions . . . ; a stranger is for a moment lost to him- 

 self as it were, or his mind, associated with the person imme- 

 diately affected, is in danger of revealing his own distress un- 

 awares " (p. 508) . The story of " Ruth " may, of course, have 

 been suggested to Wordsworth, as he said, "by an account I 

 had of a wanderer in Somersetshire";^^ it may have been 

 founded on fact, as De Quincey declared: " Wordsworth him- 

 self told me, in general terms, that the case which suggested the 

 poem was that of an American lady, whose husband forsook 

 her at the very place of embarkation from England; under cir- 

 cumstances and under expectations, upon her part, very much 



^^ P. 506. Quoted by Prof. Lane Cooper in The Athenaeum, April 22, 1905, 

 p. 499. 



^' Fenwidc note, Poems, II, 104. 



