"Earth lost from out its meagre store
A bright and precious stone;
Heaven could not be so rich before,
But it has richer grown."
"Sept. 19, 1853. I am surprised to find the verse which I picked up
somewhere and have always admired--
"'Oh, reader, had you in your mind
Such stores as silent thought can bring,
Oh, gentle reader, you would find
A tale in everything'--
belonging to Wordsworth and to one of Wordsworth's simple, I am almost
ready to say _silly_, poems. I am in doubt what to think of Wordsworth.
I should be ashamed of some of his poems if I had written them myself,
and yet there are points of great beauty, and lines which once in the
mind will not leave it.
"Oct. 31, 1853. People have to learn sometimes not only how much the
heart, but how much the head, can bear. My letter came from Cambridge
[the Harvard Observatory], and I had some work to do over. It was a
wearyful job, but by dint of shutting myself up all day I did manage to
get through with it. The good of my travelling showed itself then, when
I was too tired to read, to listen, or to talk; for the beautiful
scenery of the West was with me in the evening, instead of the tedious
columns of logarithms. It is a blessed thing that these pictures keep in
the mind and come out at the needful hour. I did not call them, but they
seemed to come forth as a regulator for my tired brain, as if they had
been set sentinel-like to watch a proper time to appear.
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