XII. ROSLYN CHAPEL 233

conceived, the misery of unaided poverty.¹ But I had been made to think of it; and in the deaths of the creatures whom I had seen joyful, the sense of deep pity, not sorrow for myself, but for them, began to mingle with all the thoughts, which, founded on the Homeric, Æschylean, and Shakespearian tragedy, had now begun to modify the untried faith of childhood. The blue of the mountains became deep to me with the purple of mourning,-the clouds that gather round the setting sun,² not subdued, but raised in awe as the harmonies of a Miserere,-and all the strength and framework of my mind, lurid, like the vaults of Roslyn,³ when weird fire gleamed on its pillars, foliage-bound, and far in the depth of twilight, “blazed every rose-carved buttress fair.”⁴

¹ [The MS. has an additional passage here:-

“... poverty; while my own disposition, modestly sanguine and cheerful, and till I was fifteen capable of the most acute phases of pleasure, was still, however lowered by moroseness or the vexation of work which I disliked, in the main industrious and happy. But ...”]

² [Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality:-

“The clouds that gather round the setting sun

Do take a sober colouring from an eye

That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality.”]

³ [The Plate opposite is made not from the drawing in possession of Mr. Wedderburn (as promised at Vol. I. p. 129), but from another of the same subject, which was found to give a better result.]

⁴ [Lay of the Last Minstrel, canto vi. 23: see Vol. XIX. p. 261 n.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]