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There is no need to prolong the narration. As healthy infancy is the same for all, so the old age of all good men brings philosopher and peasant once more together, to meet with the same thoughts the inevitable hour. Whatever the well-fought fight may have been, rest is the same for all.
Retirement then might hourly look Upon a soothing scene; Age steal to his allotted nook Contented and serene; With heart as calm as lakes that sleep, In frosty moonlight glistening, Or mountain torrents, where they creep Along a channel smooth and deep, To their own far-off murmurs listening.
What touch has given to these lines their impress of an unfathomable peace? For there speaks from them a tranquillity which seems to overcome our souls; which makes us feel in the midst of toil and pa.s.sion that we are disquieting ourselves in vain; that we are travelling to a region where these things shall not be; that "so shall immoderate fear leave us, and inordinate love shall die."
Wordsworth's last days were absolutely tranquil. A cold caught on a Sunday afternoon walk brought on a pleurisy. He lay for some weeks in a state of pa.s.sive weakness; and at last Mrs. Wordsworth said to him, "William, you are going to Dora." "He made no reply at the time, and the words seem to have pa.s.sed unheeded; indeed, it was not certain that they had been even heard. More than twenty-four hours afterwards one of his nieces came into his room, and was drawing aside the curtain of his chamber, and then, as if awakening from a quiet sleep, he said, 'Is that Dora?'"
On Tuesday, April 23, 1850, as his favourite cuckoo-clock struck the hour of noon, his spirit pa.s.sed away. His body was buried, as he had wished, in Grasmere churchyard. Around him the dalesmen of Grasmere lie beneath the shade of sycamore and yew; and Rotha's murmur mourns the pausing of that "music sweeter than her own." And surely of him, if of any one, we may think as of a man who was so in accord with Nature, so at one with the very soul of things, that there can be no Mansion of the Universe which shall not be to him a home, no Governor who will not accept him among His servants, and satisfy him with love and peace.
