tream
Upon a prospect without bound._

"Some mounds near the tower are thought to have been used as butts
for archers; and there are traces of a strong wall, running from
the tower to the edge of a deep glen, whence a ditch runs to
another ravine. This was once a pond, used by the Nortons for
detaining the red deer within the township of Rylstone, which they
asserted was not within the forest of Skipton, and consequently
that the Cliffords had no right to hunt therein. The Cliffords
eventually became lords of all the Norton lands here."

* * * * *

In January 1816, Wordsworth wrote thus to his friend Archdeacon
Wrangham.

"Of _The White Doe_ I have little to say, but that I hope it will
be acceptable to the intelligent, for whom alone it is written. It
starts from a high point of imagination, and comes round, through
various wanderings of that faculty, to a still higher--nothing
less than the apotheosis of the animal who gives the first of the
two titles to the poem. And as the poem thus begins and ends with
pure and lofty imagination, every motive and impetus that actuates
the persons introduced is from the same source; a kindred spirit
pervades, and is intended to harmonise, the whole. Throughout
objects (the banner, for instance) derive their influence, not
from properties inherent in them, not from what they _are_
actually in themselves, but from such as are _bestowed_ upon them
by the minds of those who are conversant with, or affected by,
these objects. Thus the poetry, if there be any in the work,
proceeds, as it ought to do, from the _soul of man_, communicating
its creative energies to the images of the external world."

The following is from a letter to Southey in the same year:--"Do you
know who reviewed _The White Doe_ in the 'Quarterly'? After having
asserted that Mr. W. uses his words without any regard to their sense,
the writer says that on no other principle can he explain that Emily is
_always_ called 'the consecrated Emily.' Now, the name Emily occurs just
fifteen times in the poem; and out of these fifteen, the epithet is
attached to it _once_, and that for the express purpose of recalling the
scene in which she had been consecrated by her brother's solemn
adjuration, that she would fulfil her destiny, and become a soul,

"'By force of sorrows high
Uplifted to the purest sky
Of undisturbed