Thomas Carlyle: Wordsworth and the Raisins

 

 

Carlyle and Wordsworth were dining in company somewhere in London, while Wordsworth was a lion there. "Dinner was large, luminous, sumptuous; I sat a long way from Wordsworth; dessert, I think, had come in, and certainly there reigned in all quarters a cackle as of Babel (only politer, perhaps), which far up in Wordsworth's quarter (who was leftward on my side of the table) seemed to have taken a sententious, rather louder, logical and quasi-scientific turn, heartily unimportant to gods and men, so far as I could judge of it and of the other babble reigning. I looked upwards, leftwards, the coast being luckily for a moment clear ; there, far off, beautifully screened in the shadow of his vertical green circle (which was on the further side of him, sat Wordsworth, silent, slowly but steadily gnawing some portion of what I conceived to be raisins, with his eye and attention placidly fixed on these and these alone. The sight of whom and of his rock-like indifference to the babble, quasi-scientific and other, with attention turned on the small practical alone, was comfortable and amusing to me, who felt like him, but could not eat raisins."