WORDSWORTH "BOOING HIS POTTERY."
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
Sin,—The scornful pity felt by a gardener for Darwin, who, as be toiled not neither did he spin, was thought to figure among the idle rich (Spectator, October 29th), reminds me of an anecdote which I have somewhere come across about the similarly unproductive Wordsworth. An old labourer near Rydal, who had often seen the poet, had been struck by his odd way of spouting his verses out-of-doors. When he was thus "booing his pottery" he seemed to the peasant to be quite daft ; but his malady was intermittent, for actually he could sometimes say "Good-morrow, John," just like any one else ! This may be supplemented by one of the Words- worthiana which came to me on good authority. Some thirty years ago an aged lady who in her girlhood had known the poet told me that he once showed her a daisy besprinkled with dew and applied to it the lines which I quote from memory :— " Small service is true service while it lasts ;
Of friends, however humble, scorn not one; The daisy by the shadow that it casts Protects the lingering dewdrop from the sun."
I rather gathered that the stanza was composed on the spot ; but it is possible that it had been written before, and was drawn from the poet by the object-illustration. The incident seems to me worth mentioning. It awakened a special interest in a grandson of Wordsworth, who told me that it was almost, if not quite, the only one of his great kinsmen's poems the occasion of which had been unknown to him.— Penryn, Bournemouth.
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