NPPF Commentary Line 172, P. 154-156 Part 2

[Vincent A. Maeder]

Mr. Kinbote's little black book has some interesting notes contained in
it.  Among them, "the inscriptions on the trees in Wordsmith's famous
avenue . . ."  This brings to mind another study of death from a great
poet, sounding close to Wordsmith; Wordsworth.  Here is an interesting
bit of trivia that Mr. Kinbote might have had in mind as he rambled
through this part of the commentary: 

"In a poem written during the fall of 1811, Wordsworth provided an
inscription to be engraved on a cenotaph that Sir George Beaumont raised
a year later in Reynolds's honor at the end of an avenue of trees on his
country estate at Coleorton. It is an interesting act of ventriloquism
in which the poet resuscitates Reynolds's memory and reputation
precisely by invoking the natural cycle of generation that Blake would
deny the painter: 

	Ye Lime-trees, ranged before this hallowed Urn, 
	Shoot forth with lively power at Spring's return;
	And be not slow a stately growth to rear 
	Of pillars, branching off from year to year, 
	Till they have learned to frame a darksome aisle; - 
	That may recall to mind that awful Pile 
	Where Reynolds, 'mid our country's noblest dead
	In the last sanctity of fame is laid.
	- There, though by right the excelling Painter sleep 
	Where Death and Glory a joint sabbath keep, 
	Yet not the less his Spirit would hold dear
	Self-hidden praise, and Friendship's private tear:
	Hence, on my patrimonial grounds, have I 
	Raised this frail memorial to his memory;
	From youth a zealous follower of the Art 
	That he professed; attached to him in heart; 
	Admiring, loving, and with grief and pride 
	Feeling what England lost when Reynolds died.37 

Wordsworth's Beaumont will shed the "private tear" that George III could
drop only in Blake's unconventional ear. The lime-tree aisle points to
the darkened interior of St. Paul's, where the painter's body had been
interred, but the ambition of the poem is to transplant the spirit of an
absent friend to the patrimonial grounds of his disciple, a connoisseur
and amateur painter. Reynolds, the quintessentially urban artist, the
painter who told Charles James Fox that "the human face was his
landscape," 38 has been inscribed within the grounds of Beaumont's
ancestral estate, claimed not just by "England" but by a particularly
powerful rural vision of that country's greatness.   
http://www.bostonathenaeum.org/reynolds.html