156 WILLIAM BARTRAM 



" How pleasant," then he said, " it were 



A fisher or a hunter there. 



In sunshine or in shade 



To wander with an easy mind; 



And build a household fire, and find 



A home in every glade! 



Professor Knight refers to a passage in Bartram which is the 

 source of Wordsworth's "green savannahs," "endless lake" 

 and " crowds of islands ": 



North and south almost endless green plains and meadows, embellished 

 with islets and projecting promontories of high dark forests, where the 

 pyramidal Magnolia grandiflora . . . conspicuously towers.^° 



But, as Professor Lowes has remarked, " the savannahs and the 

 lakes of stanza 12 are everywhere" in Bartram,^^ and, further- 

 more, both of these stanzas were " unmistakably suggested " by 

 Bartram.^^ For Wordsworth's youth, life as a fisher or a hunter 

 wandering "with an easy mind" in Bartram' s far-off country 

 is as much of an ideal as for Coleridge's youth in Osorio who 

 sang a " doleful song about green fields " and visualized " How 

 sweet it were on lake or wild savannah to hunt for food . . . 

 And wander up and down at Liberty." 



The enticing pictures that the youth goes on to paint to Ruth 

 include her being his " helpmate in the woods " and her running, 



A sylvan huntress at my side. 



And drive the flying deer! (stanza xvi) 



The source of these lines is not included in Prof. Knight's notes, 

 nor has any other scholar suggested it, yet Bartram' s descrip- 

 tions of deer-hunting are so memorable that they could hardly 

 have failed to flash upon Wordsworth's mind as he wrote this 

 poem — so permeated with Bartram — and thought of what 

 Ruth's life might be in the strange land of which he had read 

 in Bartram. There is the hunting scene in the Alachua savanna, 



a level, green plain . . . encircled with high, sloping hills, covered with 

 waving forests and fragrant Orange groves. . . . The towering Mag- 

 nolia grandiflora and transcendent Palm, stand conspicuous amongst 

 them. . . . Herds of sprightly deer . . . appearing happy and contented 



'"Travels, p. I4l; Poems, II, 108. '''Xanadu, p. 455. ''Ibid., p. 513. 



