I recognised at once that the poem was fraught with a pathos as
magnificent as anything in the whole range of classic literature--and
also that this pathos had that touch of stableness in sorrow which we
associate, and rightly associate, with the classics. Miserably bad
scholar as I was, and am, I knew enough to see that the Dorsetshire
schoolmaster and village parson had dared to challenge the deified
Virgil himself. The depth of feeling in the lines--
An' took her wi' air-reachen arm
To my zide at Woak Hill
is not exceeded even by those which tell how ?neas filled his arms with
the empty air when he stretched them to enfold the dead Creusa.
Upon the last two stanzas in "Woak Hill" I may as truly be said to have
lived for a month as Charles Lamb lived upon "Rose Aylmer."
An' that's why folk thought, for a season,
My mind were a-wandren
Wi' sorrow, when I wer so sorely
A-tried at Woak Hill.
But no; that my Mary mid never
Behold herzelf slighted,
I wanted to think that I guided
My guide from Woak Hill.
Equally potent was the spell cast by what is hardly less great a poem
than "Woak Hill," the enchanting "Evenen, an' Maids out at Door.
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