fits of strength, and with a body of water that varied every moment.  Sometimes the stream shot into the bason in one continued current; sometimes it was interrupted almost in the midst of its fall, and was blown towards part of the waterfall at no great distance from our feet like the heaviest thunder shower.  In such a situation you have at every moment a feeling of the presence of the sky.  Large fleecy clouds drove over our heads above the rush of the water, and the sky appeared of a blue more than usually brilliant.  The rocks on each side, which, joining with the side of this cave, formed the vista of the brook, were chequered with three diminutive waterfalls, or rather courses of water.  Each of these was a miniature of all that summer and winter can produce of delicate beauty.  The rock in the centre of the falls, where the water was most abundant, a deep black, the adjoining parts yellow, white, purple, and dove colour, covered with water—­plants of the most vivid green, and hung with streaming icicles, that in some places seem to conceal the verdure of the plants and the violet and yellow variegation of the rocks; and in some places render the colours more brilliant.  I cannot express to you the enchanting effect produced by this Arabian scene of colour as the wind blew aside the great waterfall behind which we stood, and alternately hid and revealed each of these fairy cataracts in irregular succession, or displayed them with various gradations of distinctness as the intervening spray was thickened or dispersed.  What a scene too in summer!  In the luxury of our imagination we could not help feeding upon the pleasure which this cave, in the heat of a July noon, would spread through a frame exquisitely sensible.  That huge rock on the right, the bank winding round on the left with all its living foliage, and the breeze stealing up the valley, and bedewing the cavern with the freshest imaginable spray.  And then the murmur of the water, the quiet, the seclusion, and a long summer day.”

Ed.

FOOTNOTE ON THE TEXT: 

[Footnote A:  This is a fragment of ‘The Recluse’, ll. 152-167; but it was originally published in the ‘Memoirs of Wordsworth’ by his nephew (1851).—­Ed.]

* * * * *

ELLEN IRWIN; OR, THE BRAES OF KIRTLE [A]

Composed 1800.—­Published 1800

[It may be worth while to observe that as there are Scotch Poems on this subject in simple ballad strain, I thought it would be both presumptuous and superfluous to attempt treating it in the same way; and, accordingly, I chose a construction of stanza quite new in our language; in fact, the same as that of Buerger’s ‘Leonora’, except that the first and third lines do not, in my stanzas, rhyme.  At the outset I threw out a classical image to prepare the reader for the style in which I meant to treat the story, and so to preclude all comparison.—­I.F.]