Ossian Collection > Aspects of poetry

376 'THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE: [xiI.
place, one which gathers up and concentrates all the
undefined spirit and sentiment which lie spread around
it. She both glorifies the scenery by her presence, and
herself seems to be a natural growth of the scenery, so
that it finds in her its most appropriate utterance. This
power of imagination to divine and project the very
corporeal image, which suits and expresses the spirit of
a scene, Wordsworth has many times shown. Notably,
for instance, do those ghostly shapes, which might meet
at noontide under the dark dome of the fraternal yews
of Borrowdale, embody the feeling awakened when one
stands there. But never perhaps has he shown this
embodying power of imagination more felicitously, than
when he made the White Doe the ideal exponent of
the scenery, the memories, and the sympathies which
cluster around Bolton Priory.
One more thing I would notice. While change, de-
struction, and death overtake everything else in the poem,
they do not touch this sylvan creature. So entirely has
the poet's imagination transfigured her, that she is no
longer a mere thing of flesh, but has become an image of
the mind, and taken to herself the permanence of an ideal
existence. This is expressed in the concluding lines.
And so the poem has no definite end, but passes off,
as it were, into the illimitable. It rises out of the per-
turbations of time and transitory things, and, passing
- upward itself, takes our thoughts with it, to calm places
and eternal sunshine.