United States or Saint Kitts and Nevis ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
There is a masculine and imposing medium between youthful vigour and decay, in which the leading features of the former man may be distinctly traced; as in Wordsworth's beautiful description of the old knight of Rylstone, and Sir Walter Scott's fine portraiture of Archibald Bell-the-Cat: and I think the analogy holds good in classical remains.
And all the time, for more than fifty years, Wordsworth steadily wrote, but it is not too much to say that all his best work was done in the twenty years between 1798 and 1818. Besides The Prelude, of which we have already spoken, Wordsworth's other long poems are The Excursion and The White Doe of Rylstone.
In the early part of the year 1899 a settler named Hardy, residing at Glenowlan, in the Rylstone district of New South Wales, about 150 miles from Sydney, lost numbers of his lambs during the lambing season. Naturally enough, dingoes were suspected, but none were seen.
Theodora stepped out into the gallery, where Johnnie was often to be found curled up in the end window, poring over and singing to himself the "White Doe of Rylstone", which he had found among his uncle's books. She led him in, exhorting him not to be shy, and to speak out boldly in answer to Aunt Nesbit; but perhaps this only frightened him more.
Had I been a rich man, my productions, like this Epistle, the Tragedy of the Borderers, &c., would most likely have been confined to manuscript." An interesting passage from an unpublished letter of Miss Wordsworth's, on the White Doe of Rylstone, confirms this statement: "My brother was very much pleased with your frankness in telling us that you did not perfectly like his poem.
Within the house were disposed his simple treasures: the ancestral almery, on which the names of unknown Wordsworths may be deciphered still; Sir George Beaumont's pictures of "The White Doe of Rylstone" and "The Thorn," and the cuckoo clock which brought vernal thoughts to cheer the sleepless bed of age, and which sounded its noonday summons when his spirit fled.
Once he had come to her rescue, when she was only nine or ten years old, and her schoolboy cousins were teasing her, and at every Twelfth-day party since she and he had come together as by right. There was something irresistible in her great soft plaintive brown eyes, though she was scarcely pretty otherwise, and we used to call her the White Doe of Rylstone.
Consider the lilies. All over our rural watercourses, at midsummer, float these cups of snow. They are Nature's symbols of coolness. They suggest to us the white garments of their Oriental worshippers. They come with the white roses and prepare the way for the white lilies of the garden. The white doe of Rylstone and Andrew Marvell's fawn might fitly bathe amid their beauties.
The White Doe is a story of the days of Queen Elizabeth, of the days when England was still in the midst of religious struggle. There was a rebellion in Yorkshire, in which the old lord of Rylstone fought vainly if gallantly for the Old Religion, and he and his sons died the death of rebels. Of all the family only the gentle Emily remained "doomed to be the last leaf on a blasted tree."
and again in the 'White Doe' of Rylstone, with the added teaching, that anguish of our own "Is tempered and allayed by sympathies Aloft ascending, and descending deep, Even to the inferior kinds;"
Word Of The Day