The shorter Wordsworth pieces he had read at grammar school. “My heart leaps up,” “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” and “Behold her, single in the field,” he had known for years; but Margaret read him the sonnets and made him commit “The world is too much with us” to memory. Her voice trembled and grew low with passion when she read it.
He knew all the songs in Shakespeare’s plays, but the two that moved him most were: “O mistress mine, where are you roaming?” which blew a far horn in his heart, and the great song from Cymbeline: “Fear no more the heat o’the sun.” He had tried to read all the sonnets, and failed, because their woven density was too much for his experience, but he had read, and forgotten, perhaps half of them, and remembered a few which burned up from the page, strangely, immediately, like lamps for him.
Those that he knew were: “When, in the chronicle of wasted time,” “To me, fair friend, you never can be old,” “Let me not to the marriage of true minds,” “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,” “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” “From you have I been absent in the spring,” and “That time of year thou mayest in me behold,” the greatest of all, which Margaret brought him to, and which shot through him with such electric ecstasy when he came to “Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” that he could hardly hold his course unbroken through the rest of it.
He read all the plays save Timon, Titus Andronicus, Coriolanus, and King John, but the only play that held his interest from first to last was King Lear. With most of the famous declamatory passages he had been familiar, for years, by Gant’s recitation, and now they wearied him. And all the wordy pinwheels of the clowns, which Margaret laughed at dutifully, and exhibited as specimens of the master’s swingeing wit, he felt vaguely were very dull. He never had any confidence in Shakespeare’s humor—his Touchstones were not only windy fools, but dull ones.
“For my part I had rather bear with you than bear you; yet I should bear no cross if I did bear you, for I think you have no money in your purse.”
