WOMEN THE WORLD OVER

Press, Volume LXXI, Issue 21656, 14 December 1935, Page 3

WOMEN THE WORLD OVER

(BFICIAU.T WSITTSS FOR THE PRESS.)

IBy ATALANTA.]

I suspect it will be news to many readers that there has been a mass of conjecture and research on the identity of that mysterious “Lucy,” the flower-like girl of Wordsworth’s tender little poem of remembrance. The lines have pointed for three generations or more the power of translucent simplicity in creating a lasting literary impression. The metre, the words are childlike;'the emotion would seem too real for a mere waft of fancy. “The untrodden ways of Dove” has been a line confused by many later readers with Dove Cottage, the modest early home of Wordsworth in his own Lake Country. Loose thinking of even a later date has vaguely linked Lucy with a daughter who passed before Wordsworth. Those who have described the romantic haunts of the family have always dwelt on the EiMnt testimonies of Grasmere Churchyard. There Wordsworth and his devoted wife Mary are buried, and beside them lies that pearl of sisterly devotion, Dorothy, who was her brother’s lifelong companion, his marriage with Mary Hutchinson bejng but an enlarging interlude in these family relations. Undoubtedly, also, Grasmere Churchyard did receive Wordsworth’s beloved daughter, Dora, before he laid down his life of multifold honours. On her tomb, it is said, is lavished a tender ostentation absent from the simple stone which marks her parents’ subsequent resting place. But that memorial was reared to “Dora Quillinan,” for she did not die in youth, but in mature matronhood as the wife of Edward Quillinan, himself a poet of passing repute. The outland name of Rotha Quillinan, which is also preserved on this green plot within the sacred precincts of Grasmere, does not designate a granddaughter of Wordsworth; Edward Quillinan was a widower with one child, when he married again, and both were taken to the warm heart of Dora’s family during long peaceful years of life in this dreamy bourne of Lakeland. When illness fell at last on the octogenarian' Laureate, he was prepared‘for the great change by Mary’s remembered saying,—“ William, I think you are going to Dora.” “Who Was Lucy?” It was the famous Biblical scholar, Dr. Rendel Harris, who asked this question in the “Spectator” some months ago. He appears to have s found Solomon’s Song little more puzzling than this English mystery of not a full century and a half ago. Wordsworth was reputed to share with Matthew Arnold a rarely developed secretiveness which was prefigured by a poet greater than either when Shakespeare “unlocked his heart with a sonnet key.” It was only the secretiveness of a legitimate reserve In this case, for Wordsworth withheld no confidence from the trusting woman he married. Theirs, indeed, was acquaintance that preceded love, they had been playmates in Penrith during earliest schooldays. Dr. Rendel Harris, it appears, has satisfied himself that if >Lucy ever existed, it was in a very early and almost unrecorded sojourn of the young poet in Wales, before even the fierce experiences of his stay in Paris during the outbreak of the Reign of Terror. “The • untrodden ways of Dove,” if so, had no possible connexion with the historic cottage at Grasmere, but signified the vicinity of the River Dyfi or Dovey, and the episode, if episode there ever had been, was staged in the romantic Vale of Clwyd. A ruined farmhouse st ill in evidence there has been suggested as; Lucy’s probable home and a poetic license would well excuse the lengthening of the young poet’s possible stay there from a little over two years to the three mentioned in the verses. No reference can .be found in parish registers which might throw light on the matter, but it appears certain that young William and a friend, Robert Jones, were there sometime in 1791. And there.

\ it appears, baffled curiosity must leave the Lucy legend. ‘‘Phantom Crown” Contrast could scarcely go farther than in turning from this gossamer idyll of poetic dream to a dark historic tragedy of last century reviewed in the clearer light of to-day. “Atalanta” has not met previously with Mrs Bertita Harding, but whether as annalist or novelist, she has adumbrated a fadeless picture of a shadow-empire never -to take solid shape on earth. When the brave and handsome young Hapsburg prince Maximilian and his lovely Belgian bride, Carlota, sailed away under the auspices of the second French Empire under Napoleon 111., it was to found a new Mexico where the ill-fated Montezuma had met his Waterloo more than three centuries before. These young royalties carried stainless ambitions with them on what proved little more than a lurid honeymoon soon to fade into thunderous night. Cortes brought Mexico chains and servitude. Maximilian and his young consort brought a Constitution freer than almost any then in Europe, and the personal earnest of “sweeter manners', purer laws” than anything south of the North American boundary at that date. But they brought their brittle dominion no soldiers and no money. Hardly had they touched Mexican soil when trouble came hot on their track. Franz Josef of Austria, Maximilian’s brother, was defeated at Sadowa by Prussia, and had little thought to spare for the young Emperor’s perilous case. And the orientation of Paris had changed. Napoleon had felt his own Imperial throne tremble, the more after his marriage with the beautiful but non-royal Eugenie de Montijo. But the decisive factor, it is now stated, was the steady hardening of the young Monroe doctrine in the United States. They wanted no Latin American Empire on their border. The whole or main blame was laid at the time on Napoleon’s cynical change of front and Eugenie’s lack of sympathy, but the fact emerges that one bubble Empire could not guarantee another. Most remember still the flight of Carlota to Europe, her frenzied appeals to Napoleon and her sudden loss of reason when denied. Franz Josef cannot well be acquitted, but even he. could not foresee the grim, swift ending of that bright dream when Maximilian was arraigned, though crimeless, and shot by his fierce rebels even as the Russian Czar was later to die at Ekaterinburg. Carlota lived out a long life with scarce one glimmer of memory till release came in the middle years of the Great War. It is a story that might well take its place amid the ageless Greek tragedies of the prime.