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Title: Memoirs of William Wordsworth
Author: George S. Phillips
Release date: December 2, 2023 [eBook #72281]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Partridge & Oakley, 1852
Credits: Emmanuel Ackerman, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MEMOIRS OF WILLIAM WORDSWORTH ***
[Illustration: W. WORDSWORTH.]
MEMOIRS
OF
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
[Illustration: RYDAL MOUNT]
LONDON,
PARTRIDGE & OAKEY.
MEMOIRS
OF
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH,
COMPILED FROM AUTHENTIC SOURCES;
WITH
NUMEROUS QUOTATIONS FROM HIS POEMS,
ILLUSTRATIVE OF HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER.
BY JANUARY SEARLE,
AUTHOR OF “LIFE, CHARACTER, AND GENIUS OF EBENEZER ELLIOTT,”
“LEAVES FROM SHERWOOD FOREST,” ETC.
LONDON:
PARTRIDGE & OAKEY, PATERNOSTER ROW.
MDCCCLII.
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.
William Wordsworth is the father of a new school of Poetry, and his name
marks an era in the literature of England, which is full of deep
interest to the philosophical inquirer. He began his career with
profound convictions respecting the nature and functions of poetry; its
dignity as an art, and the immense capabilities it afforded for the
utterance of sublime and ennobling truths, and for the furtherance of
human liberty and happiness. He saw, too, that the old Harp of the Bards
was profaned by the touch of uninspired, and even frivolous hands; and
he determined, if possible, to rescue it from their keeping, and restore
it once again to its divine uses, and ancient melody. To accomplish
this grand object, he devoted all his faculties and culture, and was so
deeply impressed with the idea that this was his especial mission upon
earth, that he retired amongst the mountains and lakes of
Westmoreland--a solemn and lonely man--holding converse with the
Invisible through the Visible forms of Nature, and thus fitting himself
for the priestly office to which he aspired. And in all the years of his
noviciate--through all the time when, by universal acclamation, he stood
crowned with the sacred laurels of the Bard--and his mission was
accredited by all men--he never for a moment flagged in his purpose, or
stooped to the garlands of fame,--but gathering his prophet’s mantle
around him, he pursued his undeviating course, alike regardless of
applause, condemnation, and persecution. He had looked well into his own
heart, before he set out on his perilous enterprise; had measured well
his own strength of purpose, and capability of performance; knew, in
short, what he had to do, and did it.
To appreciate fully, however, the historical position of William
Wordsworth, and the value of his labours, it will be necessary to take
a retrospective view of the literature which preceded him, or at least
to state its leading characteristics. The grand old era of Shakspeare
and his cotemporaries had long since passed away, and the noble music of
Milton’s song had ceased to thrill the hearts and souls of men. The
brilliant, half-inspired writers in the reign of Queen Anne, who came to
represent the national mind at the close of our Augustan epoch, had
formed a school of Poetry in England,--at once witty and sententious,
profound and hollow; without heart or genius; and with nothing but
talent and culture to recommend it. Pope, who may be considered the head
of this school, set the seal of his intellect upon the cotemporary and
subsequent literature of that era. He had rivals whom he stung to
silence, and covered with contempt by his satires, and imitators whom he
fondled and despised. Pope and his compeers were, however, kings and
priests of song, compared with the herd of twangsters who succeeded
them. The fancy and wit, the philosophy and refinement of Pope, were
sunk and lost in the barrel-grinding of these imitators of his style;
and Poetry was stripped of its subjective attributes, and lived only as
a mechanical form.--This at all events is true of the writers
professedly of the Pope school; and the few exceptions, for upwards of
fifty years after his death, owe what little fame they possess to their
own little originality.
In all the departments of literature, the same lifelessness and
uniformity were manifest. The deadest materialism prevailed both in
science and philosophy, and the national soul seemed paralyzed beneath
the weight of a dire, unknown, unseen incubus of death. In the
meanwhile, however, there were influences at work both in England and
Europe, which were silently preparing the way for a revolution in the
thoughts and opinions of men. The spiritual element awoke in Germany and
France, and like a mighty, but half-blind god, began to react upon the
materialism of the age. Then, for the first time since the close
of the Commonwealth, did the pulse of England begin, also, to beat
with the music of life and health. The importations of German
sentimentality--mawkish and imbecile as they often were--touched the
right chords in the English heart, and roused it to consciousness. Men
saw that there was new life struggling under this ghastly utterance, and
began to lose their faith in the dead formalism, which they had so long
hugged in their idolatry. Their minds were gradually turned to the old
grandees of Elizabeth’s reign: to Shakspeare and rare Ben Jonson, and to
Spenser, Beaumont and Fletcher, until, at last, the reactionary currents
had fairly set in, which were to cleanse the national mind of its
disease, and restore it to health. Add to this, that the higher minds of
England were already immersed in those metaphysical speculations which,
whilst they confirmed the increasing spiritual tendency, gave
earnestness to their aim and character. And when, at last, after Rouseau
and Voltaire--the two poles of the great revolutionary idea of
Europe--had flung their works into the cauldron of this vast, seething,
reactionary fermentation--the wonderous phenomenon, which we call the
French Revolution, burst upon the world--the reaction was complete, and
a new epoch dawned upon man--the epoch, viz., of progress and
humanity--which will never close until its mission is sealed with the
liberty and happiness of mankind.
Such, then, is a slight sketch of the characteristics of the age into
which Wordsworth was born. He came in time to catch the full surges of
its influence, and his spirit was one of the few destined to aid the
onward tide of events, and mould their flowing forms into a fixed and
plastic beauty. Not, however, by any active mingling with the affairs of
men, for this was clearly no part of his vocation, but by silent
watching and contemplative thought, and the faithful exercise of his
poetic faculties. The political arena was open to more daring, and less
costly men, who could do their temporary work and disappear without
farther loss to the nation: but the poet had a greater and more enduring
work to accomplish; he was to become the architect of a new literature
and the singer of a new gospel of life to the world. The growing
earnestness of his age demanded a voice to speak for it--many voices,
indeed, each in its proper province of feeling and of thought. And in no
province was this voice more loudly called for than in that of poetry,
for death reigned in all the courts of the poetic temple, and every
priest was a corpse which the muse had stuck about with flowers, that
she might conceal even from herself the sorrowful fact of her desertion
and utter misery.[A] Wordsworth came to tear away the mask, and spurn
the dead from her temple.
The great object of Wordsworth’s life was to win men back, by his poetic
example, to an admiration and love of the natural in all its aspects. To
him nature is not only divine and glorious as a whole, but equally so in
all her parts. In the meanest worm that crawls, in the tinyest flower
and the rankest weed; in the summer foliage, and in the brown skeleton
leaves of autumn; in the lonely mountain, and the silent stream--he
recognizes the spirit of beauty, and she passes through _his_ spirit
into song, and becomes at once a poem, and a grand moral gospel. All
things in heaven and earth are consecrated existences to him, no matter
how profanely and lowly they may rank with common observers.
And this view of Nature he carries into the presence of man. It is not
kings and the mighty ones in the dream-play of Life whom he thinks to
be the only worthy subjects for poetry. If these people come in his way,
he is Catholic enough to admit them through his imagination, into the
immortality which awaits his books. But he does not _seek_ them. He
thinks they have already had their full share of poetic honour, and
perhaps more than their due share; that so much dwelling upon such
people, with their unrealities and false glares of splendour, has
diseased the holy faculty of the poet, and turned his visions into
morbid night-mares. It seems in short to be his opinion, that the higher
we advance in the social scale, the further we are off from the sanities
and truths of human life. He consequently looks for these in ruder and
humbler ranks: in the dwellings of the poor, in the hearts of the
peasantry, and the intuitions of uncorrupted childhood. He delights to
sing of the commonest things, and is ever happy in his delineations of
the hopes and fears, the loves, inquietudes, and disappointments of
rustic existence. He has the minute anatomical power of Crabbe, combined
with a still higher physiological and creative faculty, by which he not
only lays bare the hidden meaning and laws of natural objects, but
transforms the objects themselves into new beauty and significance. The
grey light of morning breaking over the hill tops of his chosen
retreat--the hot sunshine burning in white molten silver upon the bosom
of his enchanted lakes--the lonely fisherman upon their shores--look
truer and more affecting objects, as we gaze upon them, through the
medium of his musical sorcery of words. His picture of the poor
wandering leech gatherer, over the deep black pools of the wild moor,
with the profound moral which he has attached to it, is an instance of
his skill as a painter, and of his divine insight as a man of genius.
“The Idiot Boy,” is another specimen of his consummate ability to render
the most inert and painful nature alive and glorious by the spiritual
appliances of his art. This boy, detached from the poet’s mind, is a
gloomy and sorrowful spectacle; but when _he_ enters the shattered
temple in which the Idiot dwells, and unites him, by the magic of his
presence, to the great universal temple of Nature, he is no longer a
gloomy insanity, but a poetically created existence. We see that this
Idiot also has a soul; a subject soul certainly, and bound to what we
might call hard conditions of capability and action, but a soul
nevertheless: vital with its own vagarious life, and rejoicing in it.
Wordsworth’s revelations of the inner workings of this Idiot’s mind--of
the dark moon glimmerings which break impulsively through the ruins of
his intellect, and make him wild with joy or ghastly with terror--are
unsurpassable achievements.
And yet Wordsworth is abused for his tameness and want of inspiration!
Dead asses and idiots, Peter Bells and Waggoners, it is said, are not
elevated facts enough for poetry! The foolish objectors do not
understand how all poetry is based upon facts, and how the most obscure
things become purified and poetic, when they are raised by imagination,
and placed in new connections of thought. It is the province of the Poet
to elevate the homely, and to beautify the mean. To him, indeed, nothing
is mean, nothing worthless. What God has made, he, the exponent of God,
shall love and honour.
It is our acknowledged want of sympathy with the common, which induced
Wordsworth to devote his life and attention to the awakening of it. He
knew that whatever is touched by genius is converted into gold, and
stamped thenceforth as sacred, by the impress of its image. The Betty
Foys of human existence, although they, too, are “encompassed by
eternity,” and destined to the same futurity as the Queens Elizabeth and
Mary, have never, before Wordsworth’s time, had a poetic priest high
enough to make them religious by his love and fidelity to them. It
required immense faith and majesty of mind to hazard the experiment; so
plebeian are all Betsies that wear red cloaks and black bonnets, instead
of ermines and crowns. Wordsworth, however, did not care for names and
orders, but saw and worshipped humanity alone. He has dared, therefore,
to say and to maintain, through a long and honourable life, that
Elizabeth Foy was as much of a man as Elizabeth Queen. He has linked
together the throne and the cottage through all their manifold
gradations. He has, of course, had his full share of abuse for this
heroic and triumphant effort; but the good old Skiddaw-granite-rock of a
man was not to be moved by abuse, but continued to sing and preach in
his solitude, with the solemnity and witchery of a Memnon statue.
It should be remembered, also, that Wordsworth purposely avoids the
florid style in the architecture of his verse. His ideal model is the
plain severity of the Saxon temple, in which the grand and the simple
were united.--He _aims_ at clear and unmistakeable utterance. His chaste
simplicity is the work of _an artist_, and by no means the necessity of
a limited intellect. If this fact were borne in mind by his detractors,
it is not unlikely that they would be less furious when they speak of
him. For an author should always be read, measured, and judged by his
own standard, and not by ours.--Nothing can be more absurd than the
subjection of a poet to any critical canon or authority. Knowing his
position as an expounder of the hidden truths of the universe--as an
oracle of the Infinite, and a revealer of the beauty and mystery of
nature and human life--he stands in our presence like the Hebrew
_law-giver_, covered with the golden glory and lightning of the Highest,
whom he has _seen_ upon the summits of Sinai. Henceforth we are to
accept his law, not he ours.
It is useless to question and criticise in our foolish manner the new
bard of God, whoever he may be, or under what circumstances soever he
may appear among us. _He_ does not live by questionings and logical
inductions, but by faith and inspiration. Entranced in the miracle of
his own existence, with all these vast orbs of immensity pressing upon
his brain, and the silent creatures of the fair earth stealing like
noiseless musical shadows into the temple of his soul, he has no time to
consult the critics whether this or that mode of reproducing them is the
orthodox one. He will speak in any way he can; and if the old grey-beard
world _will_ be startled or shocked at his speech, he has no other
answer for it but this: “My utterance is the birth-cry of my thoughts.”
Every new poet--every genius indeed that is divine--is a notification to
us that the world of things is about to be classified anew, and to
assume a deeper meaning. And certainly one would think that so great an
announcement might gladden the hearts of men, instead of making them
savage and ferocious at it. For of all men the poet is highest and
noblest. He is the awful Seer, who unveils the spirit of Nature and
looks with solemn and unscathed eyes upon her naked loveliness and
terror. The Beloved of God, he is admitted into the very presence of
the Invisible, and reports, in such wild and strange words as he can
find, the sights he has beheld there. He is the renovator of man and
Nature. He lifts the human soul upon his daring wings, and carries it
into light and immortality. In his words we behold the re-creation of
the universe. We see Orion, like the starry skeleton of a mighty giant,
go forth into the solitudes of unfathomable space; we witness the
planting of the solar stars, and hear the everlasting roar of the vast
sun, as it wheels, seething from God’s hands, upon its fiery axis; and
these unspeakable sights are heightened in their magnificence and
terrific grandeur by the poet, who holds us fast to their symbolical
meaning, and chains them to the being of God, as the expressions in
appearance of His thoughts and will.
By virtue, therefore, of his mission, the poet is Antinomian. He is
master of all law, and no critic can trammel him. Let him try that, and
the poet, like the war-horse who snuffs the far-off battle, will say to
the little man--“Ha! ha!”
It is necessary that we here make a few extracts from Wordsworth’s
defence, if we may call it so, of his manner of writing, in order that
the reader may be prepared for a right appreciation of his poetry. In
speaking of his poems as a whole, he says:--
“The principal object proposed was to choose incidents and situations
from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as
was possible, in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the
same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination,
whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual
aspect; and further, and above all, to make these incidents and
situations interesting, by tracing in them, truly though not
ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature; chiefly as far as
regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.
Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in that condition,
the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can
attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak in plainer
and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our
elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and,
consequently, may be more accurately contemplated and more forcibly
communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from these
feelings, and from the necessary character of rural occupations, are
more easily comprehended and are more durable; and lastly, because in
that condition, the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful
and permanent forms of Nature. The language, too, of these men has been
adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from
all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust), because such men
hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of
language is _originally_ derived; and, because, from their rank in
society, and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being
less under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings
and notions in simple and unelaborated expression. Accordingly, such a
language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a
more permanent, and a far more philosophical language, than that which
is frequently substituted for it by poets, who think that they are
conferring honour upon themselves and their art in proportion as they
separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in
arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, in order to furnish food
for fickle tastes, and fickle appetites, of their own creation.”
It will be seen from this extract, that Wordsworth has no sympathy with
the inflammations of Literature. His mission is with the ordinary, the
beauty and philosophy of which he has devoted his life to expound. He
has flung a charm over existences which Nature did not seem before him
to love as her children; and we honour him for the great work which he
has accomplished.
MEMOIR OF
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.
William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth, in Cumberland, on the 7th of
April, 1770. His father, John Wordsworth, was an attorney, and law-agent
to Sir James Lowther, who was afterwards raised to the peerage, and
created Earl of Lonsdale. His mother’s name was Anne Cookson, only
daughter of William Cookson, a mercer of Penrith, and of “Dorothy, born
at Crackenthorpe, of the ancient family of that name, who, from the time
of Edward the Third, had lived in Newbiggen Hall, Westmorland.”[B] His
grandfather was the first of the name of Wordsworth who came into
Westmorland, where he purchased the small estate of Stockbridge. His
ancestors had lived at Peniston, in Yorkshire, probably before the time
of the Norman Conquest. “Their names,” says Wordsworth, in his
_Autobiographic Memoranda_, “appear on different occasions in all the
transactions, personal and public, connected with that parish; and I
possess, through the kindness of Colonel Beaumont, an almery made in
1525, at the expense of a William Wordsworth, as is expressed in a Latin
inscription carved upon it, which carries the pedigree of the family
back four generations from himself.”
The poet was second son of his father, and spent most of his early days
at Cockermouth. He was subsequently removed to Hawkshead grammar school.
And here, properly speaking, his true history begins. In the “Prelude,”
a poem but lately published, we have a full account of his boyish ways,
and experiences, and a complete record of the development of his mind.
This poem is, therefore, doubly valuable, both as a psychological and
literary performance. True it is that, like all Wordsworth’s poems, on
their first appearance, it has been exceedingly well abused, and that
too by men who have eyes to see, and understandings wherewith to
understand; which is singular; but the poem is not the less a great
vestibule, or outer porch to a great poetic temple for all that. In
reading it, I seem to be walking up through the long dim avenues of
eternity with the young soul of the poet, and listening to its half
remembered ideas of the unspeakable glory from which it has come--itself
radiant with immortal lustres--and bursting out, ever and anon, in an
ecstacy of rapturous wonder at the mystic and beautiful revelations of
Time--the grand and everflowing pageantry of nature,--its woods,
mountains, streams, and heavenly hosts of stars. For it is certain that
this, or something like this, is the impression one receives, whilst
following the poet, in the manifold disclosures which he makes of his
own spiritual and mental development: he will not let go the glory of
his birth, but cleaves to it, as to the title of some grand heritage,
which he shall one day possess. And it is this, and its kindred
spiritual ideas, which give the mystic tinge and colouring to all
Wordsworth’s higher poetry, as if it had been baptised in an element
altogether alien to sensuous experience, and to the common world of man.
It was a long time, however, before Wordsworth could understand
Nature,--before he could make out what she would be at, in dodging him
in his ordinary paths, and haunting him in his solitary hours. True, he
was always very fond of the beautiful and terrible Mother; loved her
storm-wrath, and wind-wrath; her golden and voluptuous sunshine; her
rivers and brooklets; her mountains, lakes, dells, and the flowery
bespanglement of her green and rustling kirtle. But this was all. He did
not know that this love was merely initial,--the basework of a deeper
passion--the basement of a divine wisdom. And although he was always a
wayward and lonely boy, yet he _was_ a boy, and his roots did not strike
up precociously, and burst him into a man at once; but took time to
grow; so that the boy was father to the man. Neither would Nature allow
him to brood too intently over her wonders and loveliness, but took him
gently captive, in a sort of side-winds, or brief revelations of
herself, in his rambles and hunting sports; for he was made of too good
stuff to be spoilt by any over-doings--and she was jealous of her
favourite.
It was very fortunate for Wordsworth that his early life was cast in the
midst of such magnificent scenery, as that of Cumberland, for it acted
powerfully upon his mind, and helped to mould his character, and
develope his genius. School did very little for him, nor College, nor
even books, until a comparatively late period of his life. But both
nature and poetry had always a great and transcendent charm for him. As
a boy, at Cockermouth he obtained the rudiments of learning from the
Rev. W. Gillbanks; and his father, who was a man of vigorous character,
and considerable culture and scholarship, initiated him into the
pantheon of poetry, by repeating to him the finest passages of
Shakspeare, Milton, and Spenser, which the boy subsequently committed to
memory. But he was frequently refractory in his conduct, and peevish in
his temper. His mother, whom he loved much, and who died before he was
eight years of age, had at times terrible misgivings about her darling
son, on these accounts, although I find no record to justify her in her
forebodings. He was certainly a wild little fellow, full of animal
spirits, which never flagged, with a little of the dare-devil in him:
but this is natural enough in a healthy boy. Wordsworth, in alluding to
his mother’s dread of the “evil chance” of his life, gives us an
anecdote, with the intention of justifying her, which seems to me very
comical in such connection.
“I remember going once,” he says, “into the attics of my grandfather’s
house at Penrith, upon some indignity having been put upon me, with an
intention of destroying myself with one of the foils which I knew was
kept there. I took the foil in my hand, but my heart failed me.
“Upon another occasion, while I was at the same house, along with my
eldest brother, Richard, we were whipping tops together in the large
drawing-room, on which the carpet was only laid down upon particular
occasions.--The walls were humg round with family pictures, and I said
to my elder brother: ‘Dare you strike your whip through that old lady’s
petticoat?’ ‘No,’ he replied, ‘I won’t.’ ‘Then,’ said I, ‘here
goes!’--and I struck my lash through her hooped petticoat; for which,
no doubt, I was properly punished, although I have forgotten it. But,
possibly from some want of judgment in punishments inflicted, I was
perverse and obstinate in defying chastisement, and rather proud of it
than otherwise.”
Perhaps the real truth of Mrs. Wordsworth’s anxiety is, after all, to be
found in the fact that she had anticipated an extraordinary career for
her son. There does not appear, however, to have been much ground for
the supposition that the “evil chance” would prevail; and considering
the wise teaching of this dear mother, and the apt though erratic nature
of her son, I think there was good reason for a more cheering augury of
his fate. Speaking of his mother’s mode of education, in the “Prelude,”
he says, that it was founded upon
“a virtual faith, that He
Who fills the mothers breast with innocent milk,
Doth also for our nobler part provide,
Under His great correction and control,
As innocent instincts, and as innocent food.
* * * * *
This was her creed, and therefore she was pure
From anxious fear of error, or mishap,
And evil, overweeningly so called,
Was not puffed up by false, unnatural hopes,
Nor selfish, with unnecessary care;
Nor with impatience for the season asked
More than its timely produce; rather loved
The hours for what they are, than from regard
Glanced on their promises in restless pride.
Such was she--not for faculties more strong
Than others have, but from the times, perhaps,
And spot in which she lived, and thro’ a grace
Of modest meekness, simple-mindedness,
A heart that found benignity and hope,
Being itself benign.”
That there are evidences of this healthful and pious faith, this holy
and beneficent teaching, in Wordsworth’s writings, every one acquainted
with them will admit; and the passage just quoted is more than
ordinarily interesting on this account, as an illustration of the force
of early training. His mother’s love haunts him in later years, although
he is altogether silent about his father, and only speaks of his mother
twice in all his poems. The hearth-stone, and its gods, seem to have
been too sacred with him for parade. When he appears before the vicar,
with a trembling, earnest company of boys about his own age, to say the
catechism, at Easter, as the custom was, the mother watches him with
beating heart; and here is the second tribute of affection to her
beloved memory:
“How fluttered then thy anxious heart for me,
Beloved mother! Thou whose happy hand
Had bound the flowers I wore, with faithful tie;
Sweet flowers, at whose inaudible command,
Her countenance, phantom like, doth reappear;
Oh! lost too early for the frequent tear,
And ill-requited by this heart-felt sigh.”
With such a mother as this, it is no wonder that Wordsworth--in spite of
his occasional devilry--was a happy and joyous boy. He looks back,
indeed, in after life, upon the home and scenes of his childhood, as
upon some enchanted region. He has no withering recollections of poverty
or distress; all is sunshine and delight. The sweet, melodious, and
romantic Derwent is the syren of these dreams, and it sings with
wondrous music in his verse. All his memories are associated with the
fine scenery of his birth-place--are fused into it--and become, at last
the real foundation of his life: and here is a description of his native
scenery, which I find ready made to my hand:
“The whole district may be said to stand single in the world, and to
have in the peculiar character of its beauty no parallel elsewhere. It
is in the concentration of every variety of loveliness into a compass
which in extent does not greatly tax the powers of the pedestrian, that
it fairly defies rivalry, and affords the richest pabulum to the
poetical faculty. There, every form of mountain, rock, lake, stream,
wood, and plain, from the conformation of the country, is crowded with
the most prodigal abundance into a few square miles. Coleridge
characterises it as a ‘cabinet of beauties.’ ‘Each thing,’ says he, ‘is
beautiful in itself; and the very passage from one lake, mountain, or
valley to another, is itself a beautiful thing again.’ Wordsworth, in
his own ‘Description of the Country of the Lakes,’ dwells with the zest
and minuteness of idolatry upon every feature of that treasury of
landscape. The idea he gives of the locality is very perfect and
graphic. If the tourist were seated on a cloud midway between Great
Gavel and Scafell, and only a few yards above their highest elevation,
he would look down to the westward on no fewer than nine different
valleys, diverging away from that point, like spokes from the nave of a
wheel, towards the vast rim formed by the sands of the Irish Sea. These
vales--Langdale, Coniston, Duddon, Eskdale, Wastdale, Ennerdale,
Buttermere, Borrowdale, and Keswick--are of every variety of character;
some with, and some without lakes; some richly fertile, and some awfully
desolate. Shifting from the cloud, if the tourist were to fly a few
miles eastward, to the ridge of old Helvellyn, he would find the wheel
completed by the vales of Wytheburn, Ulswater, Haweswater, Grasmere,
Rydal, and Ambleside, which bring the eye round again to Winandermere,
in the vale of Langdale, from which it set out. From the sea or plain
country all round the circumference of this fairy-land, along the
gradually-swelling uplands, to the mighty mountains that group
themselves in the centre, the infinite varieties of view may be
imagined--varieties made still more luxuriant by the different position
of each valley towards the rising or setting sun. Thus a spectator in
the vale of Winandermere will in summer see its golden orb going down
over the mountains, while the spectator in Keswick will at the same
moment mark it diffusing its glories over the low grounds. In this
delicious land, dyed in a splendour of ever-shifting colours, the old
customs and manners of England still lingered in the youth of
Wordsworth, and took a firm hold of his heart, modifying all his habits
and opinions. Though a deluge of strangers had begun to set in towards
this retreat, and even the spirit of the factory threatened to invade
it, still the dalesmen were impressed with that character of steadiness,
repose, and rustic dignity, which has always possessed irresistible
charms for the poet. Their cottages, which, from the numerous irregular
additions made to them, seemed rather to have grown than to have been
built, were covered over with lichens and mosses, and blended insensibly
into the landscape, as if they were not human creations, but constituent
parts of its own loveliness. In this old English Eden, all his schoolboy
days, Wordsworth wandered restlessly, drawn hither and thither by his
irresistible passion for nature, and receiving into his soul those
remarkable photographs which were afterwards to delight his countrymen.
There can be no doubt that the charms of this lake scenery added still
more strength to the poet’s peculiar tendencies, and developed a
conservative sentiment, which, though temporarily overcome, afterwards
reared itself up in haughtier majesty than before. The poet was
naturally led to indulge much in out-of-door wanderings and pastimes,
such as skating, of which he has left a picture unapproachable in its
vividness and precision.”
In such scenery then, and with such occupations, did the boy spend his
time, until it became necessary to send him to a higher school than
Cockermouth afforded. He was accordingly dispatched to Hawkshead Grammar
School, near the lake of Esthwaite, where he was not crammed with
overmuch learning. He speaks of these larger school days with
enthusiasm, in his “Prelude;”--not, however, because the little Latin
and mathematics which he learned were so tasteful to his mind; but
because his leisure hours and holidays were rendered sweeter by the
restraints of the school, and gave a greater zest to his field-sports,
and the secular books which he loved. He mentions his amusements--such
as birds’ nesting, in the warm moist mornings of Spring,--springing
woodcocks, in the brown and mellow days of Autumn,--bathing in the
Derwent, that “tempting playmate” of his, into which, even when five
years old, he would plunge again and again, “making one long bathing of
a Summer’s day,”--rowing, on sunny half-holidays with his boisterous
schoolmates, on the great “plain of Windermere,”--or skating, by day and
night, upon the frozen bosom of Esthwaite. His beloved books, too, at
this time, find a record in his verse. They are Fielding--that mighty
creator, so full of the “_play-impulse_,” like an old god who makes
worlds, and amuses himself with the story of their various fortunes;
Cervantes, who laughed Christendom out of its chivalry, because chivalry
was dead as an institution, and had become laughable; Le Sage, with his
Shaksperian knowledge of life, and his inimitable artistic power; and
Swift, with his sharp wit, learning, and satire, glittering amid
continents of mud. “Gulliver’s Travels,” and the “Tale of a Tub,” were
the things which stuck to him fastest, however, of all the works of
these writers.
In the meanwhile the poet was awakening within him, and the poetic
pabulum was becoming, every day, more and more necessary to his
existence. His fine receptive spirit stored up all the forms and
influences of nature; revivified them, and reproduced them by its power.
The strong individuality, which marks his poetry, manifested itself at
this early period; for he loved solitude better than his playmates;
although he loved them too, and speaks of them with affection; but the
dells, mountains, and lakes, were his most beloved companions.--Often
would he lie down upon the grass or the heather, and wait for the gentle
voices which had so frequently whispered the secrets of nature in his
ears, and by their inspiration had enabled him to catch a glimpse of the
divine glory behind the veil of things; or looking upwards into the blue
unfathomable depths of heaven, he has asked questions which those depths
could not answer, and has thus tasted of the sorrow which makes life
holy. His own mind had begun to react upon Nature, and to make her more
beautiful or terrible, according to his mood. He began to feel the
_auxiliar light_, which comes from the soul, and diffuses its glory over
all things, making the common noble, and investing the grandest forms of
the material world, with the still grander attributes of imagination.
He hints at the process of all this; at the “plastic power” and the
creative power,--the outer and the inner modus of his culture. “A
plastic power,” he says--
“Abode with me; a forming hand, at times
Rebellious, acting in a devious mood;
A local spirit of his own, at war
With general tendency; but for the most
Subservient strictly to external things
With which it communed. An auxiliar light
Came from my mind, which on the setting sun
Bestowed new splendour; the melodious birds,
The fluttering breezes, fountains that run on
Murmuring so sweetly in themselves, obeyed
A like dominion; and the midnight storm
Grew darker in the presence of my eye.”
And all this was much better than school-learning--although school
learning is not to be despised. But Wordsworth, as before remarked,
learned very little at school, although he took honours in the great
Alma Mater, out of doors. And it is singular that nearly every one who
has made a figure, and left a mark in the world’s page, has been equally
unindebted to school for his success. Genius hates to be put in harness,
and yet without discipline of some sort or other, there can be no
stability of character--no steady aim, purpose, or achievement. Nature
always takes care to exaggerate the natural tendency of her favourites,
that the balance may be restored by discipline, and that the work which
she requires of the peculiar faculties may be done. And to this
discipline genius itself must, in the end, submit, or fail in the high
purpose of its existence. We can afford that it should be a little
erratic, and wild in its ways, especially in youth; that it should even
like the song of the birds better than the concords of grammar. But it
must learn grammar after all, and many other things beside, if it is
really to do any great work in the world. And this was the case with
Wordsworth, who alternated his book studies with those of Nature. For
although he acquired nothing more than the mechanical forms of learning
at Hawkshead--and these were limited to Latin and mathematics--yet the
discipline was good for his health, and the acquirements themselves were
not to be despised. In the meanwhile, he had written verses too
remarkable to be passed over without notice, although the poet himself
says, “they are but a tame imitation of Pope’s versification, and a
little in his style.” They were written upon the completion of the
second centenary of the foundation of the Hawkshead grammar school (in
1585, by Archbishop Sandys,) as a school exercise, when Wordsworth was
only fourteen years old; and as the poetry is not included in his works,
although Dr. Wordsworth has preserved it in the autobiographical
memoranda of his “Memoir,” lately published, I will make a quotation
from it, that the reader may see how the genius of Wordsworth first
adapted itself to the laws and formulary of poetic art. It is
_Education_ that speaks in the following lines.
“There have I lov’d to skim the tender age,
The golden precepts of the classic page;
To lead the mind to those Elysian plains
Where, thron’d in gold, immortal Science reigns;
Fair to the view is sacred Truth display’d,
In all the majesty of light arrayed,
To teach, on rapid wings, the curious soul,
To roam from earth to heaven, from pole to pole;
From thence to search the mystic cause of things,
And follow Nature to her secret springs;
Nor less to guide the fluctuating youth,
Firm in the sacred paths of moral truth.
To regulate the mind’s disordered frame,
And quench the passions kindling into flame;
The glimmering fires of virtue to enlarge,
And purge from vice’s dross my tender charge.
Oft have I said, the paths of fame pursue,
And all that virtue dictates, dare to do.
Go to the world--peruse the book of man,
And learn from thence thy own defects to scan;
Severely honest, break no plighted trust--
But coldly rest not here--be more than just!
Join to the rigour of the sires of Rome
The gentler manners of the private dome;
When virtue weeps in agony of woe,
Teach from the heart the tender tears to flow;
If Pleasure’s soothing song thy soul entice,
Or all the gaudy pomp of splendid vice,
Arise superior to the syren’s power,
The wretch, the chort-liv’d vision of an hour.
Soon fades her cheek, her blushing beauties fly,
As fades the chequer’d bow that paints the sky.”
Now, it must be acknowledged, that this writing, imitative as it is, is
very remarkable as the production of a boy of fourteen; and that it
displays an uncommon degree of artistic skill in its construction, with
much command of language, and a moral culture one does not often meet
with in boys. This, however, was not Wordsworth’s first attempt at
composition. “It may be, perhaps, as well to mention,” says the poet,
in his brief autobiographical notes, appended to the Memoir, “that the
first verses I wrote, were a task imposed by my master; the subject ‘The
Summer Vacation;’ and of _my own accord_ I added others upon ‘Return to
School.’ These exercises, however,” he continues, “put it into my head
to compose verses from the impulse of my own mind; and I wrote, while
yet a schoolboy, a long poem running upon my own adventures, and the
scenery of the country in which I was brought up. The only part of that
poem which has been preserved is the conclusion of it, which stands at
the beginning of my collected poems. It commences ‘Dear native
regions.’” This poem was the archetype of the “Prelude,” and was a good
preparatory discipline to the structure of that nobly musical poem.
In 1786, in anticipation of leaving school, he wrote some sweet verses,
in which he speaks, with a sad fondness, of the old region round about
Hawkshead, and vows, with a lover’s heart, never to forget its beauty,
but to turn towards it wherever he may be, as to the shrine of his
idolatry.
“Thus from the precincts of the west
The sun, while sinking down to rest,
Though his departing radiance fail
To illuminate the hollow vale,
A lingering lustre fondly throws
On the dear mountain-tops where first he rose.”
The muse had now fairly possessed him, and he was destined to have a
triumphant career as the high priest of song. Among his earliest sonnets
is the following, which is the last quotation I shall give from these
boyish effusions.
“Calm is all nature as a resting wheel:
The kine are couched upon the dewy grass;
The horse alone, seen dimly as I pass,
Is cropping audibly his later meal:
Dark is the ground; a slumber seems to steal
O’er vale and mountain and the starless sky.
Now in this blank of things a harmony,
Home-felt and home-created, comes to heal
That grief for which the senses will supply
Fresh food, for only then while memory
Is hushed am I at rest. My friends! restrain
Those busy cares that would allay my pain;
Oh, leave me to myself, nor let me feel
The officious touch that makes me droop again!”
His school-days at Hawkshead were now drawing to a close, but before we
leave this part of his life, this genial seed-time from which he
subsequently reaped so glorious a harvest, it will be well to add a few
more particulars respecting the locality of Hawkshead, and the general
discipline of its old Elizabethan grammar school, as a sort of
supplement to the previous history. And, first of all, a word about
Esthwaite. [C] “Esthwaite, though a lovely scene in its summer garniture
of woods, has no features of permanent grandeur to rely on. A wet or
gloomy day, even in summer, reduces it to little more than a wildish
pond, surrounded by miniature hills; and the sole circumstances which
restore the sense of a romantic region, and an Alpine character, are the
knowledge (but not the sense) of endless sylvan scenery, stretching for
twenty miles to the sea-side, and the towering groups of Langdale and
Grasmere fells, which look over the little pasture barrier of Esthwaite,
from distances of eight, ten, and fourteen miles.”
“Esthwaite, therefore, being no object for itself, and the sublime head
of Coniston being accessible by a road which evades Hawkshead, few
tourists ever trouble the repose of this little village town....
Wordsworth, therefore, enjoyed this labyrinth of valleys in a perfection
that no one can have experienced since the opening of the present
century. The whole was one paradise of virgin beauty; and even the rare
works of man, all over the land, were hoar with the grey tints of an
antique picturesque; nothing was new, nothing was raw and uncicatrized.
Hawkshead, in particular, though tamely seated in itself and its
immediate purlieus, has a most fortunate and central locality, as
regards the best (at least the most interesting) scene for a pedestrian
rambler. The gorgeous scenery of Borrowdale, the austere sublimities of
Wastdalehead, of Langdalehead, or Mardale,--these are too oppressive in
their colossal proportions, and their utter solitudes, for encouraging a
perfectly human interest. Now, taking Hawkshead as a centre, with a
radius of about eight miles, we might describe a little circular tract
which embosoms a perfect net-work of little valleys--separate wards or
cells, as it were, of one large valley, walled in by the great primary
mountains of the region. Grasmere, Easdale, Little Langdale,
Tilberthwaite, Yewdale, Elterwater, Loughrigg Tarn, Skelwith, and many
other little quiet nooks, lie within a single division of this
labyrinthine district. All these are within one summer afternoon’s
ramble. And amongst these, for the years of his boyhood, lay the daily
excursions of Wordsworth.
“I do not conceive that Wordsworth could have been an amiable boy; he
was austere and unsocial, I have reason to think, in his habits; not
generous; and above all, not self-denying.... Meantime, we are not to
suppose that Wordsworth, the boy, expressly sought for solitary scenes
of nature amongst woods and mountains, with a direct conscious
anticipation of imaginative pleasure, or loving them with a pure,
disinterested love, on their own separate account. These are feelings
beyond boyish nature, or, at all events, beyond boyish nature trained
amidst the necessities of social intercourse. Wordsworth, like his
companions, haunted the hills and the vales for the sake of angling,
snaring birds, swimming, and sometimes of hunting, according to the
Westmorland fashion, on foot: for riding to the chace is often quite
impossible, from the precipitous nature of the ground. It was in the
course of these pursuits, by an indirect effect growing gradually upon
him, that Wordsworth became a passionate lover of Nature, at the time
when the growth of his intellectual faculties made it possible that he
should combine those thoughtful passions with the experience of the eye
and ear.”
De Quincey then continues to relate, as an illustration of the sudden,
silent manner in which Nature makes herself felt by the observer, even
when he is paying no attention to her operations, but is occupied with
nearer and more secondary matters--how he and Wordsworth were walking
one midnight, during the Peninsular war, from Grasmere to Dunmail Raise,
to meet the mail, in order that they might obtain the newspaper
Coleridge was in the habit of sending them, and thus learn the earliest
intelligence of the state of affairs on the Continent. “At intervals,
Wordsworth had stretched himself at length on the high road, applying
his ear to the ground, so as to catch any sound of wheels that might be
going along at a distance. Once, when he was slowly rising from this
effort, his eye caught a bright star that was glittering between the
brow of Seat Sandal and the mighty Helvellyn. He gazed upon it for a
minute or so; and then, upon turning away to descend into Grasmere, he
made the following explanation:--‘I have remarked, from my earliest
days, that if, under any circumstances, the attention is perfectly
braced up to a steady act of observation, or of steady expectation,
then, if this intense condition of vigilance should suddenly relax, at
that moment any beautiful, any impressive visual object, or collection
of objects, falling upon the eye, is carried to the heart with a power
not known under other circumstances. Just now my ear was placed upon the
stretch, in order to catch any sound of wheels that might come down upon
the lake of Wythburn, from the Keswick road; at the very instant when I
raised my head from the ground, in final abandonment of hope for this
night, at the very instant when the organs of attention were all at once
relaxing from their tension, the bright star hanging in the air above
those outlines of massy blackness fell suddenly upon my eye, and
penetrated my capacity of apprehension, with a pathos and a sense of the
Infinite, that would not have arrested me under other circumstances.’”
And it was precisely in this manner, according to De Quincy, and indeed
according to the known laws by which Nature educates the faculties of
the poet, that Wordsworth was educated in his boyhood. All this hunting,
fishing, and rambling, were but the means by which Nature allured him to
the woods and waters, that she might silently impress him with her
manifold forms and influences. There are evidences, however, of
something like _communion_ with Nature in the early poems of Wordsworth,
even before he left Hawkshead; and his solitary wanderings, his roamings
round the lake of Esthwaite--five miles before breakfast--were not
without a purpose, and could not have been undertaken unless an
unquenchable, though perhaps not a fully developed love, had possessed
his heart, for natural scenery, and the mystic lore which it teaches.
His own confession, that though Nature was at first a dumb perplexing
riddle to him, and merely affected him by her beauty and grandeur,--I
say his own confession, that in spite of this, he subsequently felt the
coming of the “_auxiliar light_” from his own soul, which penetrated her
forms, and made them instinct with sublime intelligence--will illustrate
the idea with sufficient force and clearness.
Enough, however, has been said upon this subject, for it is impossible
to trace in any direct manner, the subtle and delicate influences of
Nature upon the human mind, or to determine even, in the instance of
Wordsworth, the precise time when he first sought “the woods and
mountains, with a direct conscious anticipation of imaginative
pleasure.” We will leave all this, therefore, and direct the reader to
the “Prelude,” as the best exposition of the poet’s mental development
at this early period. A few words respecting the government of the
Hawkshead grammar school, as an influence affecting the character of the
poet, and we will then follow him to Cambridge.
“Taking into consideration the peculiar tastes of the person,” says De
Quincy, “and the peculiar advantages of the place, I conceive that no
pupil of a public school can ever have passed a more luxurious boyhood
than Wordsworth. The school discipline was not, I believe, very strict;
the mode of living out of school very much resembled that of Eton for
Oppidans,--less elegant perhaps, and less costly in its provisions for
accommodation, but not less comfortable; and in that part of the
arrangement which was chiefly Etonian, even more so; for in both places
the boys, instead of being gathered into one fold, and at night into one
or two huge dormitories, were distributed amongst motherly old “dames,”
technically so called at Eton, but not at Hawkshead.” In the latter
place, agreeably to the inferior scale of the whole establishment, the
houses were smaller and more college like, consequently more like
private households; and the old lady of the _menage_ was more constantly
amongst them, providing with maternal tenderness, and with a
professional pride, for the comfort of her young flock, and protecting
the weak from oppression. The humble cares to which those poor matrons
dedicated themselves, may be collected from several allusions scattered
through the poems of Wordsworth; that entitled “Nutting” for instance,
in which his early Spinosistic feeling is introduced of a mysterious
power diffused through the solitudes of woods, a presence that was
disturbed by the intrusion of careless and noisy outrage, and which is
brought into a strong relief by the previous homely picture of the old
housewife equipping her young charge with beggar’s weeds in order to
prepare him for a struggle with thorns and brambles. Indeed not only the
moderate rank of the boys, and the peculiar kind of relation assumed by
these matrons, equally suggested this humble class of motherly
attentions, but the whole spirit of the place and neighbourhood was
favourable to an old English homeliness of domestic and personal
economy.”
It will thus be seen that Wordsworth was early inducted into those
thriftful and economical habits which marked his character through life,
and enabled him during his young days to bear the temporary loss of his
paternal fortune without much inconvenience. And the above facts are
worthy to be remembered, not only as illustrating much for us in the
history of Wordsworth, but as another instance of the power of a wise
and early training.
The poet thus alludes to the cottages of the “Danes:”--
“Ye lowly cottages wherein we dwelt
A ministration of your own was yours;
Can I forget you, being, as you were,
So beautiful among the pleasant fields
In which ye stood? or can I here forget
The plain and seemly countenance, with which
Ye dealt out your plain comforts? Yet had ye
Delights and exultations of your own.
Eager, and never weary, we pursued
Our home-amusements, by the warm peat-fire,
At evening; when, with pencil and smooth slate,
In square divisions parcelled out, and all
With crosses and with cyphers scribbled o’er,
We schemed and puzzled, head opposed to head,
In strife too humble to be named in verse;
Or round the naked table, snow white deal,
Cherry or maple, sate in close array,
And to the combat, loo or whist,[D] led on
A thick-ribbed army; not, as in the world,
Neglected, or ungratefully thrown by,
Even for the very service they had wrought,
But husbanded thro’ many a long campaign.
Uncouth assemblage was it, where no fear
Had changed their functions; some plebeian cards
Which fate, beyond the promise of their birth,
Had dignified, and called to represent
The persons of departed potentates.
Oh, with what echos on the board they fell!
Ironic diamonds,--clubs, hearts, diamonds, spades,--
A congregation piteously akin!
Cheap matter offered they for boyish wit,
Those sooty knaves, precipitated down,
With scoffs and taunts, like Vulcan out of heaven:
The paramount ace, a moon in her eclipse,
Queens gleaming thro’ their splendour’s last decay,
And monarchs surly at the wrongs sustained
By royal-visages. Meanwhile, abroad
Incessant rain was falling, or the frost
Raged bitterly, with keen and silent work;
And, interrupting oft that eager game,
From under Esthwaits’ splitting scenes of ice
The pent up air, struggling to free itself,
Gave out, to meadow grounds and hills, a loud
Protracted yelling; like the noise of wolves,
Howling, in troops, along the Bothnic main.”
And, then, as a specimen of the out-door sports, and exercises of his
youth, whilst dwelling with his good old dame, he says:
“And in the frosty season, when the sun
Was set, and visible for many a mile
The cottage windows blazed thro’ twilight gloom,
I heeded not their summons; happy time
It was, indeed, for all of us--for me,
It was a time of rapture! Clear and loud,
The village clock struck six--I wheeled about,
Proud and exulting, like an untired horse,
That cares not for his home. All shod with steel
We hissed along the polished ice in games
Confederate, imitative of the chase,
And woodland pleasures--the resounding horn,
The pack loud chiming, and the hunted hare.
So thro’ the darkness and the cold we flew,
And not a voice was idle; with the din
Smitten, the precipices rang aloud;
The leafless trees, and every icy crag,
Tinkled like iron; while far distant hills
Into the tumult sent an awful sound
Of melancholy not unnoticed, while the stars
Eastward were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.
Not seldom from the uproar I retired
Into a silent bay, or sportively
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng
To cut across the reflex of a star,
That fled, and flying still before me, gleamed
Upon the glassy plain; and oftentimes,
When we had given our bodies to the wind,
And all the shadowy banks on either side
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion, then at once
Have I, reclining back upon my heels
Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs
Wheeled by me, even as if the earth had rolled,
With visible motion, her diurnal round!
Behind me did they stretch in solemn train,
Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched,
Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.”
And with this famous skating passage--the finest realization of the kind
in poetry, I will conclude this outline of the poet’s school-days and
mental history.
CAMBRIDGE.
It was in October, 1787, that Wordsworth was sent to St. John’s College,
Cambridge, by his uncles, Richard Wordsworth, and Christopher
Crackanthorpe, under whose care his three brothers and his sister were
placed on the death of their father, in 1795. The orphans were at this
time nearly, if not entirely, dependent upon their relatives, in
consequence of the stubborn refusal of the wilful, if not mad, Sir James
Lowther, to settle the claims of their father upon his estate.
The impressions which Wordsworth received of Cambridge, on his arrival,
and during his subsequent residence in that university, are vividly
pictured in the “Prelude.” The “long-roofed chapel of King’s College,”
lifting its “turrets and pinnacles in answering files,” high above the
dusky grove of trees which surrounded it, was the first object which met
his eye, as he approached the town. Then came the students, “eager of
air and exercise,” taking their constitution walks; and the old Castle,
built in the time of the Conqueror; and finally Magdalene bridge, and
the glimpse of the Cam caught in passing over it, and the far-famed and
much-loved Hoop Hotel.
“My spirit was up, my thoughts were full of hope;
Some friends I had, acquaintances who there
Seemed friends, poor simple school-boys, now hung round
With honour and importance; in a world
Of welcome faces up and down I roved;
Questions, directions, warnings, and advice
Flowed in upon me from all sides; fresh day
Of pride and pleasure, to myself I seemed
A man of business and expense, and went
From shop to shop about my own affairs,
To tutor or to tailor, as befel,
From street to street, with loose and careless mind.”
The University seemed like a dream to him:
“I was the dreamer, they the dream; I roamed
Delighted thro’ the motley spectacle;
Gowns--grave or gaudy--doctors, students, streets,
Courts, cloisters, flocks of churches, gateways, towers;
Migration strange for stripling of the hills--
A northern villager.”
And then he goes on to describe his personal appearance and habits; how
suddenly he was changed amidst these scenes, as if by some fairy’s wand;
rich in monies, and attired--
“In splendid garb, with hose of silk, and hair
Powdered, like rimy trees when frost is keen;
My lordly dressing-gown, I pass it by,
With other signs of manhood, that supplied
The lack of beard.--The weeks went roundly on;
With invitations, suppers, wine, and fruit;
Smooth housekeeping within--and all without
Liberal, and suiting gentlemen’s array.”
The contrast is picturesque and striking enough of Wordsworth, the
Hawkshead schoolboy, clad in rustic garb, and placed under the control
of his good dame, in her little whitewashed cottage, with its warm
peat-fire; to Wordsworth, the collegian, dressed in silk-stockings, with
his powdered hair, plentiful monies, troops of wine-drinking, and
sight-loving friends. Perhaps, it was natural that Wordsworth should be
proud of his butterfly-wings, after having escaped from the shell of
the chrysallis--but no one could have imagined, from the grave, high,
and austere character he afterwards sustained, that he had, at any
previous time of his life, given way to the weakness of dandyism. Youth,
however, is not to be measured by severe standards; and even if it were
to be so measured, Wordsworth has not many sins to answer for, and
certainly none of a venial cast. He was, nevertheless, what would be
called a gay young fellow, during the first year of his college life;
and he himself attributes a good deal of this to the fact that he was
before the freshmen of his year in Latin and mathematics, and had,
therefore, no pressing inducement to study. Pleasure called him with her
syren voice, and he, nothing loath, obeyed her behests. Still he did not
neglect his studies; although French and Italian, with the literature of
his own country, seem to be the staple of the scholarship he acquired at
Cambridge. “It is true,” says De Quincy, “that he took the regular
degree of B.A., and in the regular course; but this was won in those
days by a mere nominal examination, unless where the mathematical
attainments of the student prompted his ambition to contest the
honourable distinction of Senior Wrangler. This, in common with all
other honours of the university, is won, in our days, with far severer
effort than in that age of relaxed discipline; but at no period could it
have been won, let the malicious and the scornful say what they will,
without an amount of mathematical skill very much beyond what has ever
been exacted of its _alumni_ by any other European university.
Wordsworth was a professed admirer of the mathematics; at least of the
higher geometry. The secret of this admiration for geometry lay in the
antagonism between this world of bodiless abstraction and the world of
passion.”
Leaving this subject of his attainments, however, and returning to his
college life, it may farther be stated, as a proof of Wordsworth’s love
of good fellowship at this time, that during a visit to a friend who
occupied the rooms which John Milton, the blind old Homer of the
Commonwealth occupied, during his residence in Cambridge, he drank so
copiously in his enthusiasm and reverence for the place, and its grand
and golden memories, that he was fairly carried away on the other side
of the rational barriers, and in short got gloriously drunk; not so
drunk, however, that he could not attend the chapel service, and behave
there with due decorum. Speaking of the great men who had trod the
streets of Cambridge and worn an university gown before him, and of his
great reverence for them, he has occasion to introduce Milton, and
alludes to this excess at the close of the passage. I will quote it
entire.
“Beside the pleasant mill of Trumpington,
I laughed with Chaucer in the hawthorn shade;
Heard him, while birds were warbling, tell his tales
Of amorous passion. And that gentle bard,
Chosen by the muses for their page of state!--
Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven
With the moon’s beauty, and the moon’s soft pace,
I called him brother, Englishman, and friend.
Yea our blind poet, who in his later day,
Stood almost single, uttering odious truth--
Darkness before, and danger’s voice behind.
Soul awful,--if the earth has ever lodged
An awful soul--I seem’d to see him here
Familiarly, and in his scholar’s dress,
Bounding before me, yet a stripling youth--
A boy, no better, with his rosy cheek
Angelical, keen eye, courageous look,
And conscious step of purity and pride.
Among the band of my compeers was one
Whom chance had stationed in the very room
Honoured by Milton’s name. O temperate bard!
Be it confest, that for the first time, seated
Within thy innocent lodge and oratory,
One of a festive circle, I poured out
Libations to thy memory, drank, till pride
And gratitude grew dizzy in a brain
Never excited by the fumes of wine
Before that hour, or since. Then forth I ran
From the assembly; through a length of streets
Ran, ostrich like, to reach our chapel door
In not a desperate or opprobrious time,
Albeit long after the importunate bell
Had stopped, with wearisome Cassandra voice
No longer haunting the dark winter night.
Call back, O friend! a moment to thy mind,
The place itself, and fashion of the rites.
With careless ostentation shouldering up
My surplice, through the inferior throng I clove
Of the plain Burghers, who, in audience stood
On the last skirts of their permitted ground,
Under the pealing organ. Empty thoughts!
I am asham’d of them; and that great bard
And thou, my friend! who in thy ample mind
Hast placed me high above my best deserts,
Ye will forgive the weakness of that hour,
In some of its unworthy vanities,
Brother to many more.”
It is interesting to know all this--to be assured that although
Wordsworth was in after life as temperate as Milton--drinking nothing
but water, and requiring, indeed, no stimulants but that which healthy
and robust exercise afforded--I say it is pleasant to be assured that
once in his life our poet did really link himself with the imperfections
of man, and by an excess of sympathy got drunk--or as De Quincy calls
it, “boozy,”--to the honour and glory of Milton. It is a thing to be
pardoned, and is almost the only anecdote of Wordsworth which possesses
a really human interest.
The rooms which Wordsworth occupied at St. John’s were so situated, that
had he been a hard student instead of a gay gownsman, the circumstances
which environed them might very materially have affected his studies;
for immediately below him ran the great college kitchen, which was
continually in an uproar of dissonance with the voices of cooks, and
their preparations for the eating necessities of the college members. To
atone, however, for this animal riot, the poet could look forth from his
pillow by the light
“Of moon or favouring stars,”
and there behold through the majestic windows of Trinity Chapel, the
pale statue
“Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.”
It must not be supposed, however, from what has now been stated
respecting the _gay_ life of Wordsworth, that he committed any of those
excesses which are so common to the undergraduates of Cambridge. He was
not a Barnwell-man, nor a Newmarket jockey, nor a gambler, nor gay,
indeed, at all, in the gross meaning of that word. He was more idle and
genial than this; and a lover of generous society. It was not in his
nature, which was always high and pure, and which had been strengthened
and solemnised by his converse with the majestic scenery of his
childhood,--to descend to the low forms of vice; on the contrary, he had
always a dread, horror, and loathing for vice, and vicious society. And,
perhaps, one primal cause of his carelessness at Cambridge, lay in his
contempt for its scholastic discipline, and for the character and
conduct of its chiefs and professors. He felt that Cambridge could
teach him but little--that he was “not for that hour, or that place,” as
he himself expresses it; but for quite another hour and another place.
The dead, cold formality of its religious services,--the absence from
chapel of those who “ate the bread of the founders of the colleges, and
had sworn to administer faithfully their statutes;” whilst the students
were required, under penalties, to attend the senseless mummery;--all
these things, and others, revolted Wordsworth’s mind against them, and
made him regard the whole system, of which they were part, with distrust
and abhorrence. He thus alludes to these matters in the “Prelude:”--
“---- Spare the house of God. Was ever known
The witless shepherd who persists to drive
A flock that thirsts not to a pool disliked?
A weight must surely hang on days begun
And ended with such mockery. Be wise,
Ye Presidents and Deans, and, till the spirit
Of ancient times revive, and truth be trained
At home in pious service, to your bells
Give seasonable rest, for ’tis a sound
Hollow as ever vexed the tranquil air;
And your officious doings bring disgrace
On the plain steeples of our English church,
Whose worship, ’mid remotest village trees,
Suffers for this.”
Wordsworth felt this, at the time, very keenly, and saw what a grist it
afforded for the grinding ridicule of the scoffer and the atheist.
Turning from these melancholy reflections, to the dear old times, when
men of learning were really pious, and devoted to their scholarly
functions, when
“Bacon, Erasmus, or Melancthon read
Before the doors or windows of their cells,
By moonshine, thro’ mere lack of taper-light,”
he conjures up a vision of scholastic life--a vision of the
future--which however, he says, “fell to ruin round him,” and was all in
vain.
Notwithstanding the confusion of his outer circumstances, and the
general aimless tenor of his life, Wordsworth did not entirely neglect
his own culture--and in the silence of the academic groves, by the
sweetly remembered Cam, or in his own rooms in the Gothic court of St.
John’s, he brooded over the problems of life, death, and immortality.
The ghosts of the mighty dead haunted him likewise, as he walked through
the familiar places, where they were wont to walk whilst dwelling in
their earthly tenements, and roused him, at times, to commence anew the
race of learning and distinction.
“I could not always pass
Thro’ the same gateways, sleep where they had slept,
Wake where they waked, range that enclosure old,
That garden of great intellects, undisturbed.”
And yet, with the exception of “Lines written whilst sailing up the
Cam,” Wordsworth does not seem to have composed a line at Cambridge. He
was learning, however, the first lessons of worldly wisdom all this
time; was initiated into the ways of life, and the characters of men;
and such discipline could not have been spared the poet, without loss to
him. He does not regret, he says, any experience in his college life,
and thinks the gowned youth who only misses what he missed, and fell no
lower than he fell, is not a very hopeless character.
SUMMER HOLIDAYS.
At length the long vacation, which the good Alma Mater allows for the
refreshment of the minds and bodies of her dear children, came to set
Wordsworth at liberty; and, in the summer of 1788, he revisited his
native scenes at Esthwaite. The old cramp of University life, with its
dissipations, and frivolous pleasures, fell from him like an evil
enchantment, the first moment when he beheld the bed of Windermere,
“Like a vast river stretching in the sun.
With exultation at my feet I saw
Lake, islands, promontories, gleaming bays,
A universe of Nature’s finest forms,
Proudly revealed with instantaneous burst,
Magnificent, and beautiful, and gay.
I bounded down the hill, shouting amain
For the old ferryman; to the shout the rocks
Replied; and when the Charon of the flood
Had stay’d his oars, and touched the jutting pier,
I did not step into the well-known boat
Without a cordial greeting.”
There is something very delightful and refreshing in this burst of
enthusiasm, and it shews clearly enough, which was the University
Wordsworth loved best. At Cambridge he was a prisoner, with his dark
heart yearning for the sunshine of his native hills; but here he was
free, his heart no longer dark nor sad, but flooding with light and joy,
and exulting in the delicious beauty of Nature.
And what strikes me as very touching and beautiful in the poet’s
relation of this visit to his birthplace, is the fact that he did not
forget his old dame,--although certain critics have of late declared
that he had no heart,--but that on the contrary he went straight to her
cottage, and so closed his journey from Cambridge. Hear how he speaks of
her and her reception of him:
“Glad welcome had I, with some tears, perhaps,
From my old dame, so kind and motherly,
While she perused me with a parent’s pride.
The thoughts of gratitude shall fall like dew
Upon thy grave, good creature! While my heart
Can beat, never will I forget thy name.
Heaven’s blessings be upon thee where thou liest
After thy innocent and busy stir
In narrow cares, thy little daily growth
Of calm enjoyment, after eighty years,
And more than eighty of untroubled life,
Childless; yet, by the strangers to thy blood
Honoured with little less than filial love.”
Such is the affectionate tribute which Wordsworth pays to her memory.
And if the reader be anxious to know all the small and large delights
which the poet felt in renewing his acquaintance with the scenes of his
childhood, I must refer him to the “Prelude.” He will there read how the
old dame led him--he “willing, nay, wishing to be led,” through the
village and its neighbourhood. How each face of the ancient neighbours
was like a volume to him; how he hailed the labourers at their work
“with half the length of a long field between,” how he shook hands with
his quondam schoolfellows; proud and yet ashamed of his fine Cambridge
clothes, doing everything in the way of recognition, in short, which a
kind generous, and loving heart could dictate. The brook in the garden,
which had been imprisoned there until it had lost its voice--he hailed
also, with the delight of many remembrances, and much present pleasure.
And then how his heart overflows at the sight of his favourite dog--the
rough terrier of the hills--an inmate of the dame’s cottage by ancient
right!--a brave fellow, that could hunt the badger, or unearth the
fox--making no bones about either business. The poet slept, too, during
this visit, in his old sleeping room;
“That lowly bed, where I had heard the wind
Roar, and the rain beat hard, where I so oft
Had lain awake on summer nights to watch
The moon in splendour couched among the leaves
Of a tall ash that near our cottage stood;
Had watch’d her with fixed eyes, while to and fro
In the dark summit of the waving tree
She rock’d with every impulse of the breeze.”
The poet then describes the refreshing influence which Nature spread,
like a new element of life, over his spirit, and quotes even the time
and place--viz., one evening at sunset, when taking his first walk,
these long months, round the lake of Esthwaite, when his soul
“Put off her veil, and self-transmuted, stood
Naked in the presence of her God;”
whilst a comfort seemed to “touch a heart that had not been
disconsolate;” and “strength came where weakness was not known to be--at
least not felt.” Then he took the balance, and weighed himself:
“Conversed with promises, had glimmering views
How life pervades the undecaying mind;
How the immortal soul, with godlike power
Informs, creates, and thaws the deepest sleep
That time can lay upon her; how on earth
Man, if he do but live within the light
Of high endeavours, daily spreads abroad,
His being armed with strength that cannot fail.”
Here was evidence that the soul of the poet was settling down, if we may
say so, to something like repose, preparatory to the grand aim and
purpose of his life. He begins to see that idleness and pleasure will
not last--will not serve any end in the world; and that man must be a
worker, with high endeavours, if he is indeed to be or do anything
worthy of a man.--And this light breaking in upon him, through the
twilight of Nature and his own soul, is soothing, consolatory, and
hopeful to him. He begins, likewise, to take a fresh interest in the
daily occupations of the people around him; read the opinions and
thoughts of these plain living people, “now observed with clearer
knowledge;” and saw “with another eye” “the quiet woodman in the woods,”
and the shepherd roaming over the hills. His love for the grey-headed
old dame returns to him again and again in these latter pages of the
“Prelude,” and he pictures her as a dear object in the landscape, as she
goes to church,
----“Equipped in monumental trim;
Short velvet cloak, (her bonnet of the like,)
A mantle, such as cavaliers
Wore in old time.”
And then her
----“smooth domestic life,
Affectionate, without disquietude,
Her talk, her business pleased me, and no less
Her clear, though shallow stream of piety,
That ran on Sabbath days a fresher course;
With thoughts unfelt till now, I saw her read
Her Bible on hot Sunday afternoons,
And loved the book, when she had dropped asleep,
And made of it a pillow for her head.”
It would be impossible to follow the poet in all those minute relations
of incident and feeling which run throughout the “Prelude,” during this
first vacation amongst the hills.--One anecdote, however, must be told,
for it is an inlet into the poet’s nature, and shewed that he had a
heart, and deep sympathies also for suffering and poverty, let the
critics say what they will.
During the autumn, while Wordsworth was wandering amidst the hills round
Windermere,--with no living thing in sight, and breathless silence over
all,--he was suddenly startled by the appearance of an uncouth shape, in
a turning of the road. At first he was a little timid, and perhaps
alarmed, for it was close to him, and he knew not what to make of it.
The dusky light of the evening increased the mystery, and Wordsworth
retreated noiselessly under the shadow of a thick hawthorn, that he
might watch it unobserved. It turned out to be a poor wanderer, of tall
stature,
“A span above man’s common measure, tall,
Stiff, lank, and upright; a more meagre man
Was never seen before, by day or night.
Long were his arms, pallid his hands; his mouth
Looked ghastly in the moonlight; from behind
A mile-stone propped him up.”
He wore a faded military garb, and was quite alone--
“Companionless,
No dog attending, by no staff sustained,
He stood, and in his very dress appeared
A desolation, a simplicity,
To which the trappings of a gaudy world
Make a strange back-ground.”
Presently, he began to mutter sounds as of pain, or birth-pangs of
uneasy thought,--
“Yet still his form
Kept the same awful steadiness; at his feet
His shadow lay, and moved not.”
Wordsworth now came from his hiding place, and hailed the poor, lone,
desolate, old man, who rose, slowly, from his resting place,
“and with a lean and wasted arm,
Returned the salutation; then resumed
His station, as before.”
The poet entered into conversation with him, and asked him to relate
his history. It was the old tale--told with a quiet uncomplaining voice,
a stately air of mild indifference. He had served in the Tropic islands,
and on landing, three weeks ago, he had been dismissed the service. He
was now journeying homeward, to lay his weary bones in the churchyard of
his native village. Wordsworth was touched at the uncomplaining misery
of the poor old man, and invited him to go with him. The veteran picked
up his staff from the shadowy ground, and walked by the poet’s side down
into the valley, where a hospitable cottage was soon found, and the
soldier bestowed for the night. On leaving him, Wordsworth
“entreated that, henceforth,
He would not linger in the public ways,
But ask for timely furtherance and help,
Such as his state required.”
And now, mark the touching reply of the friendless old man:
“With the same ghastly mildness in his look
He said, “My trust is in the God of heaven,
And in the eye of him who passes me.”
And in this manner,--with occasional adventures, but none so memorable
as this,--Wordsworth passed his vacation. Nature, too, had claimed him
for her own--for her bard, minister, and interpreter; had purified him
of the frivolities which had previously lowered his mind, and loosed the
girds of his gigantic spirit, and she now made him happy in the
consciousness of his destiny. During one of his morning walks, he thus
describes this consciousness:--
“My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
Was given, that I should be; else sinning greatly,
A dedicated spirit. On I walked
In thankful blessedness, which yet survives.”
Subsequent portions of his vacations were spent in Wales, and Penrith,
on the southern border of Cumberland. His mother’s relations resided at
this latter town, and it was with them that his beloved sister Dorothy
was placed when the poet’s family was broken up. It was the daughter of
these relations also to whom the poet was married in after life. Her
name was Mary Hutchinson; she was a schoolmate of the poet’s at
Penrith, and an affectionate, intelligent, good wife she made him,
during the forty-eight years of their wedded life. And now, during the
holidays, these beautiful persons--viz. Dorothy and Mary, were his
companions, as he roved amongst the scenery of Penrith.[E]” He mounted
with them the Border Beacon, on the north-east of the town; and, on that
eminence, now overgrown with fir trees, which intercept the view, but
which was then free and open, and displayed a glorious panorama, he
beheld the wide plain stretched far and near below, closed by the dark
hills of Ullswater on the west, and by the dim ridges of Scotland on the
north. The road from Penrith towards Appleby, on the south-east, passes,
at about a mile’s distance, the romantic ruins of that
“Monastic castle mid tall trees,
Low standing by the margin of the stream,”
where the river Lowther flows into the Emont, which descends from the
lake of Ullswater through a beautiful and fertile valley, in which at
the village of Sockbridge, some of Wordsworth’s ancestors lived, and
where, at the church of Burton, some of them lie buried. That “monastic
castle” is Brougham Castle, a noble and picturesque ruin. This was a
favourite resort of the youthful poet and his sister.
“Those mouldering towers
Have seen us side by side, when having clomb
The darksome windings of a broken stair,
And crept along a ridge of fractured wall,
Not without trembling, we in safety looked
Forth, through some Gothic window’s open space,
And gather’d with one mind a rich reward
From the far stretching landscape, by the light
Of morning beautified, or purple eve.”
In aftertimes this castle was to be the subject of one of his noblest
lyrical effusions. “The Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle.”
“High in the breathless hall the minstrel sate,
And Emont’s murmur mingled with the song.”
A little beyond the castle, by the roadside, stands the Countess’
Pillar, a record of filial affection, and Christian charity to which
also he has paid a poetical tribute; and the woods of Lowther, at a
short distance on the south, were ever associated in his memory with the
delightful days which he passed in his vacations at Penrith, and were
afterwards the scene of intellectual enjoyment in the society of the
noble family whose name they bear.”
A remarkable man, and one connected by friendship with the poet, lived
between Penrith and Lowther, at Yanwath. This was Mr. Thomas Wilkinson
“a quaker, a poet, a professor of the topiarian art, a designer of
walks, prospects, and pleasure grounds.
‘Spade! with which Wilkinson hath till’d his land,
And shap’d these pleasant walks by Emont’s side,’
and the verses which follow, will hand down the name of Wilkinson to
posterity, together with that of John Evelyn, and the Corycian old man
of Virgil.”
Wordsworth’s last college vacation was spent in a pedestrian tour in
France, along with his friend Robert Jones, of Plas-yn-llan, near
Ruthin, in Denbighshire. De Quincy thinks that the poet took Jones along
with him as a kind of protective body-guard, against the rascality of
foreign landlords, who in those days were apt to play strange tricks
upon travellers, presenting their extortionary bills with one hand,
whilst they held a cudgel in the other, to enforce payment. De Quincy,
however, is not quite sure of this, but conjectures the fact to have
been so, because Wordsworth has only apostrophised him in one of his
poems commencing
“I wonder how Nature could ever find space
For so many strange contrasts in one human face.”
Jones, however, seems to have been a scholar and gentleman; and
Wordsworth frequently visited him, not only at his house, in
Plas-yn-llan, but afterwards at Soulderne, near Deddington, in
Oxfordshire, when Jones was made incumbent of that place. At all events,
whatever sympathies--whether intellectual or those of friendship--united
these college chums, it is certain that they commenced their tour
together, and ended it with mutual satisfaction. They set out on the
13th of July, 1790, for Calais, _via_ Dover, “on the eve of the day when
the king took an oath of fidelity to the new constitution.” The poet
gives a highly coloured account of his wanderings through France,
Switzerland, and Italy, in the “Prelude,” and a chart of the entire
journey, commencing July 13th, at Calais, and ending September 29th, at
a village three miles from Aix-la-Chapelle, is recorded in the
“Memoirs.” There is likewise a letter addressed to his sister, dated
September 6th, 1790, Kesill (a small village on the Lake of Constance),
in which the poet describes his own feelings and reflections during this
romantic journey. In this letter he says, “My spirits have been kept in
a perpetual hurry of delight, by the almost uninterrupted succession of
sublime and beautiful objects which have passed before my eyes during
the past month.” He then describes the course they took from, the
wonderful scenery of the Grande Chartreuse to Savoy and Geneva; from the
Pays de Vaud side of the lake to Villeneuve, a small town seated at its
head. “The lower part of the lake,” he says, “did not afford us a
pleasure equal to what might have been expected from its celebrity. This
was owing partly to its width, and partly to the weather, which was one
of those hot, gleamy days, in which all distant objects are veiled in a
species of bright obscurity. But the higher part of the lake made us
ample amends; ’tis true we had some disagreeable weather,--but the banks
of the water are infinitely more picturesque, and as it is much
narrower, the landscape suffered proportionally less from that pale
steam, which before almost entirely hid the opposite shore.” From
Villeneuve they proceeded up the Rhone, to Martigny, where they left
their bundles, and struck over the mountains to Chamouny, and visited
the glaciers of Savoy.
“That very day,
From a bare ridge, we also first beheld,
Unveiled, the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved
To have a soulless image on the eye,
That had usurped upon a living thought
That never more could be. The wondrous vale
Of Chamouny stretched far below, and soon,
With its dumb cataracts, and streams of ice,
A motionless array of mighty waves,
Five rivers, broad and vast, made rich amends,
And reconciled us to realities;
There small birds warble from the leafy trees,
The eagle soars high in the element;
There doth the reaper bind the yellow sheaf,
The maiden spread the haycock in the sun;
While Winter, like a well-tamed lion, walks,
Descending from the mountain to make sport,
Among the cottages, by beds of flowers.”
From Chamouny they returned to Martigny, and went from thence, along the
Rhine, to Brig, where, quitting the Valais, they made for the Alps,
which they crossed at Simplon, and visited the Lake Como, in Italy.
Wordsworth’s description of the scenery round Como, is in his highest
manner:--
“The banks,” he says, “of many of the Italian and Swiss lakes are so
steep and rocky as not to admit of roads; that of Como, is partly of
this character. A small footpath is all the communication by land
between one village and another, on the side along which we passed for
upwards of thirty miles. We entered upon this path about noon, and owing
to the steepness of the banks, were soon unmolested by the sun, which
illuminated the woods, rocks, and villages of the opposite shore. The
lake is narrow, and the shadows of the mountains were early thrown
across it. It was beautiful to watch them travelling up the side of the
hills--for several hours, to remark one-half of a village covered with
shade, and the other bright with the strongest sunshine. It was with
regret that we passed every turn of this charming path, where every new
picture was purchased by the loss of another, which we should never have
been tired of gazing upon. The shores of the lake consist of steeps,
covered with large sweeping woods of chestnut, spotted with villages,
some clinging upon the summits of advancing rocks, and others, hiding
themselves in their recesses. Nor was the surface of the lake less
interesting than its shores; half of it glowing with the richest green
and gold, the reflection of the illuminated wood and path, shaded with a
soft blue tint. The picture was still further diversified by the number
of sails which stole lazily by us, as we passed in the wood above them.
After all this, we had the moon. It was impossible not to contrast that
repose, that complacency of spirit, produced by these lovely scenes,
with the sensations I had experienced two or three days before in
passing the Alps. At the lake of Como my mind ran through a thousand
dreams of happiness, which might be enjoyed upon its banks, if
heightened by conversation, and the exercise of the social affections.
Among the more awful scenes of the Alps, I had not a thought of man, or
a single created being; my whole soul was turned to Him, who produced
the terrible majesty before me.” From Como the tourists proceeded to the
country of the Grisons; from thence to Switzerland, and the lakes
Lucerne, Zurich, Constance, and the falls of the Rhine. At Basle, a town
in Switzerland, upon the Rhine, they bought a boat, and floated down
that glorious river, which, as Longfellow says, “rolls through his
vineyards, like Bacchus, crowned and drunken,” as far as Cologne,
returning home by Calais.
In passing the Alps, the travellers lost their way, and were benighted.
They were afterwards indebted for their safety to a peasant; and in
speaking of this event, the poet has the following fine passage in the
“Prelude:”--
“The melancholy slackening that ensued
Upon these tidings by the peasant given,
Was soon dislodged. Downwards we hurried fast,
And with the half-shaped road which we had missed,
Entered a narrow chasm. The brook and road
Were fellow-travellers in this gloomy strait,
And with them did we journey several hours,
At a slow pace. The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,--
And in the narrow rent, at every turn
Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside,
As if a voice were in them; the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds, and region of the Heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness of the light--
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types, and symbols of eternity,
Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.”
This Swiss tour furnishes the materials for many autobiographical
passages in the “Prelude,” which was written about ten years
afterwards--and more immediately for the poem entitled “Descriptive
Sketches,” written in 1791-2, and dedicated to Mr. Jones. These
sketches, and another poem, called “The Evening Walk,” were published by
Johnson, of Cambridge, in 1793. They are, according to De Quincy, who
bought up the remainder, in 1805, as presents, and as future curiosities
in literature--“forcibly picturesque, and the selection of
circumstances is very original and felicitous.” I cannot speak of these
poems at first hand, for they were never republished, and only a few
extracts are included in the poet’s collected works. De Quincy,
however--himself the greatest master of our language, and the highest
literary judge in Britain--is good to speak after. “The Evening Walk” is
dedicated to the poet’s sister, and was written during his school and
college days. It is an ideal representation of the Lake scenery. The
“Sketches” were composed chiefly in the poet’s wandering on the banks of
the Loire, 1791-2. From the specimens I have seen of them, they appear
to be founded, like the earlier pieces already quoted, upon the style of
Pope, though they are clothed in high and dignified language, and glow
with all the gorgeous colouring which poetry can command and apply. They
are totally unlike his mature poems, and have a different artistic base
and execution. It will be seen from them, however, that what is called
the “meanness” and “poverty” of Wordsworth’s latest effusions, is not
the result of incapacity, but of theoretic principle.
The “Sketches” fell into the hands of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 1794,
and were the means of introduction between these two great men, and of a
life-enduring friendship.
“There is in them,” says Coleridge, in his “Biographia,” a harshness and
acerbity combined with words and images all aglow, which might recal
those products of the vegetable world, where gorgeous blossoms rise out
of a hard and thorny rind or shell, within which the rich fruit is
elaborating. The language is not only peculiar and strong, but at times
knotty and contorted, as by its own impatient strength; while the
novelty and struggling crowd of images, acting in conjunction with the
difficulties of the style, demand always a greater attention than
poetry,--at all events, than descriptive poetry has a right to claim.”
Here is a specimen of this “gorgeous blossomy” style:
“Here half a village shines in gold arrayed,
Bright as the moon; half hides itself in shade;
While from amid the darkened roof, the spire,
Restlessly flashing, seems to mount like fire:
There all unshaded, blazing forests throw
Rich golden verdure on the lake below.
Slow glides the sail along the illumined shore,
And steals into the shade the lazy oar;
Soft bosoms breathe around contagious sighs,
And amorous music on the water dies.”
MORE TOURS, AND FRANCE.
In 1791 Wordsworth graduated, and left the University for London, where
he spent four months; and in May of the same year he visited his friend
Jones, in Wales, and made a tour through the northern parts of the
Principality. A moonlight night on Snowdon is thus finely described in
the “Prelude:--
“It was a close, warm, breezeless summer night,
Wan, dull, and glaring with a dripping fog,
Low hung, and thick, that covered all the sky;
But undiscouraged, we began to climb
The mountain side. The mist soon girt us round,
And after ordinary traveller’s talk
With our conductor, presently we sank
Each into commerce with his private thoughts:
Thus did we breast the ascent, and by myself
Was nothing either seen or heard that checked
Those musings, or diverted, save that once
The shepherd’s lurcher, who, among the grass,
Had to his joy unearthed a hedge-hog, teased
His coiled-up prey, with barkings turbulent.
This small adventure, for even such it seemed
In that wild place, and at the dead of night,
Being over and forgotten, on we wound
In silence as before. With forehead bent
Earthward, as if in opposition set
Against an enemy, I panted up
With eager pace, and no less eager thoughts.
Thus might we wear a midnight hour away,
Ascending at loose distance each from each,
And I, as chance, the foremost of the band.
When at my feet the ground appeared to brighten,
And with a step or two, seemed brighter still;
Nor was time given to ask or learn the cause,
For instantly a light upon the turf
Fell like a flash, and lo! as I looked up,
The moon hung naked in a firmament
Of azure without cloud, and at my feet
Rested a silent sea of hoary mist.
A hundred hills their dusky backs upheaved
All over this still ocean, and beyond
Far, far beyond the solid vapours stretched
In headlands, hills, and promontory shapes,
Into the main Atlantic, that appeared
To dwindle, and give up his majesty
Usurped upon, far as the sight could reach.
Not so the ethereal vault; encroachment none
Was there, nor loss; only the inferior stars
Had disappeared, or shed a fainter light
In the clear presence of the full-orbed moon,
Who, from her sovereign elevation gazed
Upon the billowy ocean, as it lay
All meek and silent, save that thro’ a rift--
Not distant from the shore whereon we stood,
A fixed, abysmal, gloomy, breathing place--
Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams
Innumerable, roaring with one voice!
Heard over earth and sea, and in that hour,
For so it seemed, felt by the starry heaven.”
This is poetry; and with the exception of the Arab and Dromedary
passage, is certainly the finest in the “Prelude.”
After the completion of this tour, Wordsworth was urged by his friends
to take holy orders; but he was not of age for ordination, nor was his
mind sufficiently imbued with love for the clerical functions at this
time, even had he been of age, to have induced him to have assumed them.
A Mr. Robinson offered him the curacy of Harwich, whilst he was in
Wales, and the curacy was the high way to the Living. But from the above
circumstances, and other motives of an active and political nature, the
offer was declined, and his non-age was the apology. The truth is, that
Wordsworth, like all the young, enthusiastic, and highly-gifted men of
that time, was filled with the grand idea of liberty, and the hope of
further enfranchisement from old forms of error and superstition, which
France had raised upon the theatre of her soil. And accordingly, in
November, 1791, he determined to cross the channel, and winter in
Orleans, that he might watch the progress of events. He had at this time
a very imperfect acquaintance with the French language, and set out on
his journey alone. In that same month, France was in the convulsions of
her first agony--her first birth-pangs of Revolution. “The National
Assembly met; the party of Madame Roland and the Brissotins were in the
ascendant; the war of La Vendee was raging; the army was in favour of a
constitutional monarchy; Dumourier was Minister of the Exterior; a
German army was hovering on the French frontier; popular sedition was
fomented by the Girondists, in order to intimidate the government, and
overawe the Crown. In the following year, 1792, the sanguinary epoch of
the Revolution commenced; committees of public safety struck terror
into the hearts of thousands; the king was thrown into the prison of the
Temple; the massacres of September, perpetrated by Danton and his
associates, to daunt the invading army and its adherents, deluged Paris
with blood; the Convention was constituted; monarchy was abolished; a
rupture ensued between the Gironde and the Montagne; Robespierre arose;
Deism was dominant; the influence of Brissot and of the Girondists was
on the decline; and in a short time they were about to fall victims to
the power which they themselves had created.”[F]
Such is a summary of the events which transpired whilst Wordsworth was
in France; and he has left us a record of the hopes, and wild
exultations with which he hailed the Revolution, when it first boomed
above the horizon of the morning.
“Before him shone a glorious world
Fresh as a banner bright, unfurled
To music suddenly;
He looked upon the hills and plains,
And seemed as if let loose from chains,
To live at liberty.”
But, alas! the counterpart of the picture came as suddenly, not attended
by the sweet breathings of a delicious music, but by the roar of mad and
fiery throats, and the pageantry of blood and death. Before these dread
events took place, and whilst hope was still high in the poet’s heart,
he made acquaintance with some of the most distinguished personages on
the republican side--and, amongst others, with General Beaupuis, whom he
characterises as a philosopher, patriot, and soldier, and one of the
noblest men in France. At length, he stands in the midst of the
Revolution; quits Orleans for Blois, and, in 1792, arrived in Paris,
only a month after the horrors and massacres of September. Republicanism
had prevailed--and what a republic it proved! All law and order
suspended, or dead--thousands of innocent and patriotic men condemned to
death on the faintest suspicions--the ghastly skeleton of Atheism seated
on the throne of God--and liberty strangled in her own cradle. “What a
picture,” says De Quincy, “does Wordsworth give of the fury which then
possessed the public mind; of the frenzy which shone in every eye, and
through every gesture; of the stormy groups assembled at the Palais
Royal, or the Tuilleries, with ‘hissing factionists,’ for ever in their
centre? ‘hissing,’ from the self-baffling of their own madness, and
incapable, from wrath, of speaking clearly; of fear already creeping
over the manners of multitudes; of stealthy movements through back
streets; plotting and counter-plotting in every family; feuds to
extermination--dividing children of the same house for ever; scenes,
such as those of the _Chapel Royal_ (now silenced on that public stage),
repeating themselves daily amongst private friends; and to show the
universality of this maniacal possession--that it was no narrow storm
discharging its fury, by local concentration, upon a single city, but
that it overspread the whole realm of France--a picture is given,
wearing the same features of what passed daily at Orleans, Blois, and
other towns. The citizens are described in the attitudes they assumed at
the daily coming in of the post from Paris; the fierce sympathy is
pourtrayed with which they echoed back the feelings in the capital; men
of all parties had been there up to this time--aristocrats as well as
democrats, and one, in particular, of the former class, is put forward
as a representative of this class. This man, duly as the hour arrived
that brought the Parisian newspapers, read, restlessly, of the tumults
and insults amongst which the Royal Family now passed their days; of the
decrees by which his own order were threatened or assailed; of the
self-expatriation, now continually swelling in amount, as a measure of
despair on the part of myriads, as well priests as gentry,--all this,
and worse, he read in public; and still as he read--
‘his hand
Haunted his sword, like an uneasy spot
In his own body.’
“In short, as there never has been so strong a national convulsion
diffused so widely, with equal truth, it may be asserted that no
describer, so powerful, or idealizing, so magnificent in what he deals
with, has ever been a living spectator of parallel scenes.”
The reaction of the atrocities and enormous crimes of the Revolution,
upon Wordsworth’s mind, was terrible. But a short time before the
Revolution commenced, we find him the espouser, the advocate of
democracy; the enemy of monarchial forms of government, and
consequently of _hereditary_ monarchy; the foe, likewise, of all class
distinctions and privileges; for he regarded these as enemies to human
progress and happiness.--After his return to England, he says, in one of
his unpublished letters to the Bishop of Llandaff, “In my ardour to
attain the goal, I do not forget the nature of the ground where the race
is to be run. The destruction of those institutions which I condemn,
appears to me _to be hastening on too rapidly. I abhor the very idea of
a revolution._ I am a determined enemy to every species of violence. I
see no connection, but what the obstinacy of pride and ignorance renders
necessary, between reason and bonds. I deplore the miserable condition
of the French, and think that we can only be guarded from the same
scourge by the undaunted efforts of good men. I severely condemn all
inflammatory addresses to the passions of men. I know that the multitude
walk in darkness. I would put into each man’s hand a lanthern to guide
him; not have him to set out on his journey depending for illumination
on abortive flashes of lightning, the corruscations of transitory
meteors.” These were the opinions of Wordsworth before, and at the
commencement of the Revolution. As I said, however, the crimes into
which the leaders of it subsequently plunged, and the mad passions which
influenced them, completely revolutionised the mind of Wordsworth, and
filled him with the darkest forebodings. He lost for a time, his
generous faith in men, his hope of human liberty, and his belief in the
perfection of human nature. He has given a fearful picture of his state
of mind at this period, in the _Solitary_ of the “Excursion,” which the
reader will do well to consult. The events of the Revolution, however,
brought with them much wisdom to Wordsworth. They turned his thoughts
inward, and compelled him to meditate upon man’s nature and
destiny,--upon what it is possible for man to become; whilst they gave
breadth, and depth, and expansion to his higher sympathies. From this
time Wordsworth’s mission as a priest may be dated. He was no longer a
mere dreamer, but was deeply impressed with the stern realities--with
the wants and necessities of his time; and he resolved to devote
himself to the service of humanity.
In De Quincy’s admirable “Lake Reminiscences,” in Tait’s Magazine,
already alluded to, it is stated that by his connection with public men,
Wordsworth had become an object of suspicion long before he left France,
and was looked upon as an English spy. How little did these persons know
of Wordsworth! At this very time his whole soul was in the cause for
which the patriots were struggling; and his own noble heart was rendered
still nobler, braver, and better, by his daily communings with the grand
and sublime nature of his friend Beaupuis. To this man De Quincy pays
the finest tribute of admiration and reverence which ever came from the
pen of the historian, or the mouth of the orator. “This great season,”
he says, of “public trial had searched men’s natures, revealed their
real hearts; brought into life and action qualities of writers not
suspected by their possessors; and had thrown man as in alternating
states of society, each upon his own native resources, unaided by the
old conventional forms of rank and birth. Beaupuis had shone to unusual
advantage under this general trial. He had discovered, even to the
philosophic eye of Wordsworth, a depth of benignity very unusual in a
Frenchman; and not of local, contracted benignity, but of large,
illimitable, apostolic devotion to the service of the poor and the
oppressed;--a fact the more remarkable, as he had all the pretensions,
in his own person, of high birth, and high rank; and, so far as he had
any personal interest embarked in the struggle, should have allied
himself to the aristocracy. But of selfishness in any shape, he had no
vestiges; or if he had, it shewed itself in a slight tinge of vanity;
yet no--it was not vanity, but a radiant quickness of sympathy with the
eye which expressed admiring love--sole relic of the chivalrous devotion
once limited to the service of the ladies. Now again he put on the garb
of chivalry; it was a chivalry the noblest in the world, which opened
his ear to the Pariah and the oppressed all over his misorganized
country. A more apostolic fervour of holy zealotry in this great cause
has not been seen since the days of Bartholomew Las Casas, who shewed
the same excess of feeling in another direction. This sublime
dedication of his being to a cause which, in his conception of it,
extinguished all petty considerations for himself, and made him
thenceforward a creature of the national will,--“a son of France,” in a
more eminent and lofty sense than according to the heraldry of
Europe--had extinguished his sensibility to the voice of worldly honour:
‘injuries,’ says Wordsworth--
----‘injuries
Made him more gracious.’
And so utterly had he submitted his own will, or separate interests, to
the transcendant voice of his country, which, in the main, he believed
to be now speaking authentically for the first time since the foundation
of Christendom, that, even against the motions of his own heart, he
adopted the hatreds of the young Republic, growing cruel in his purposes
towards the ancient oppressors, out of very excess of love for the
oppressed; and against the voice of his own order, as well as in stern
oblivion of every early friendship, he became the champion of democracy
in the struggle everywhere commencing with prejudice, or feudal
privileges. Nay, he went so far upon the line of this new crusade
against the evils of the world, that he even accepted--with a
conscientious defiance of his own inevitable homage to the erring spirit
of loyalty embarked upon that cause--a commission in the Republican
armies preparing to move against La Vendee; and finally in that cause,
as commander-in-chief, he laid down his life.”
RETURNS TO ENGLAND.
Before this last event occurred, however, in the autumn of 1792,
Wordsworth had left France for London, where he remained, more or less,
for upwards of a year; and it was during this time, that he wrote the
unpublished letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, respecting the political
opinions of his lordship, contained in an appendix to one of his
sermons, a portion of which letter has already been quoted. And although
Wordsworth still cleaves to his democratic ideas, and announces them
fearlessly to the bishop, he by no means sympathises, as will be seen,
with the mad actors in the Revolution. On the contrary, he is pained to
agony when he hears of the atrocities committed in the name of liberty;
and when, in the year 1794, crossing the sands of Morecomb Bay, during
one of his visits to Cumberland, he asked of a horseman who was passing,
“_What news?_” and received for answer, that “_Robespierre had
perished_,” “a passion seized him, a transport of almost epileptic
fervour prompted him, as he stood alone upon the perilous waste of
sands, to shout aloud anthems of thanksgiving, for this great
vindication of Eternal justice.”
Wordsworth was shocked, however, when England, after the death of the
king, on January 21st, 1793, declared war with France; and now resolved
to withdraw his mind, as much as possible, from the disappointed hopes
which politics had brought him as their harvest, and devote himself to
poetry. Accordingly, he left London, and once more commenced his
ramblings, and poetic labours. He passed a part of the summer of 1793 in
the Isle of Wight, hoping to find repose there; but the booming of
terrible cannon, every evening, at Portsmouth, and the consciousness
that a fleet was equipping in that port against France, made him sad,
and full of misgivings as to the result of the enterprise. He soon left
the beautiful island, therefore, and wandered, on foot, all over the
vast plain of Salisbury--visiting the old and melancholy temple of the
ancient Druids--and passing thence by Bristol and Tintern to North
Wales. It was during this tour, on Salisbury Plain, that he commenced
his poem entitled “Guilt and Sorrow;” a production of considerable
vigour and ability.
Having now, in 1793, completed his twenty-third year, his friends again
urged him to receive holy orders; but, feeling that he was not
_inwardly_ prepared for this important step, he again refused. The
principle manifested in this refusal, is all the more worthy and
memorable, because the poet had, at this time, no hearthstone, no place
that he could call _his_. His time was employed, therefore, in
travelling about, from place to place, and from friend to friend; now to
good Robert Jones, in Wales,--the man whom De Quincy conjectures to have
had no brains, and for which I owe the said De Quincy a grudge,
notwithstanding that I think more highly of him than any other man now
living in these realms,--and now to Mr. Rawson’s, of Millhouse, Halifax,
who had married Wordsworth’s cousin, Miss Threlkeld, the lady who
brought up Dorothy Wordsworth, the dearly beloved sister of the poet.
In 1794, Wordsworth writes to his friend Mathews “that his sister is
under the same roof with him; but that he is doing nothing, and knows
not what will become of him.” All his path lay dark and gloomy before
him. He was recommended to study the law, but he absolutely refused; and
the Fates seemed to be sporting with him. His love for Dorothy grew in
him every day, and it was in the year I am now speaking of, that she,
having accompanied him by coach from Halifax to Kendal, _walked_ with
him from the latter place to Grasmere--eighteen miles, and from thence
to Keswick--fifteen miles further, where they put up at a farm-house,
called Windybrow, and became thenceforth all-in-all to each other.
But the grand question for Wordsworth now to solve was, how he should
earn his daily bread. His poetry brought no grist to the mill; and he
had no friends to fall back on. In this condition, he wrote to his
friend Mathews, who was connected with the London Press, to get him
employment upon one of the daily or weekly papers, but without success.
He projected, likewise, several literary journals, with the same bad
fortune.
At last, however, Providence had ordained that a young man, named
Raisley Calvert, should die, and leave the poet £900. Poor fellow! He
seems to have been born for this special purpose. Wordsworth had known
him previous to his illness, and the young man was so impressed with the
genius and capabilities of the poet, that he bequeathed his little
fortune to him, in order that he might have leisure to develope them.
This was in 1795, whilst the negociations respecting the newspaper
employment were still pending. It was at Mrs. Sowerby’s hostel, at the
sign of the “Robin Hood,” in Penrith, where poor Calvert lay sick--where
Wordsworth nursed and tended him,--and where also he died.
This bequest was of the last importance to Wordsworth, for it rescued
him from poverty and distress, and enabled him to _live_.
All the avenues of the world were closed against him; for he was, by
nature and education, unfitted for the tradesman’s service, or the
clerk’s office, or the schoolman’s desk. He was a solitary dreamer; a
lonely, meditative man, who thought golden thoughts, and built starry
ladders to heaven, and did all sorts of strange things, similar in
character, which unfortunately could not be sold as wares in the public
market-place. And it was necessary, if Wordsworth was to be any thing,
that he should continue this foolish habit of dreaming, of rhyming, and
writing, into which he had so singularly fallen. For in her education of
the poet, Nature--who is a wise teacher and developer--always adopts one
regular method, although she frequently varies the process: and this
method consists in impressing the mind with her manifold forms, colours,
sounds, and works, that they may hereafter be reproduced in the glorious
imagination of the poet, and shine, like rich mosaics, in the wisdom of
his teaching. But for the friend alluded to, however, our poet could
never have afforded to have gone through his initiation in the mysteries
of poetry, but must have squatted down as a school-master in some
suitable town (which De Quincy says he once thought of doing), and have
turned professor of flogging Greek into pigmy humanities. Or, perhaps,
the Poet of Rydal might have been little better than a _scribe-engro_,
if I may coin a word from George Borrows’ “Romany,” and have ended his
life as a political or literary hack, in some _Times’_ omnibus, or other
vehicle of less note and more principle.
Fortunately for literature, and for men, as the readers of literature,
Raisley Calvert was born and died--and the “Excursion” was written. I
would not, however, be thought to speak ungenerously of poor
Calvert:--God forbid!--but still I cannot help thinking about
Providence, and His dark, inscrutable ways how He smites one frail child
to the grave that another may have leisure to sing songs.--The poet
never forgets the bounty and generosity of the poor dead heart, now
hushed to silence, but raises this monument to his memory:
“Calvert! it must not be unheard by them
Who may respect my name, that I to thee
Owe many years of early liberty.
This care was thine, when sickness did condemn
Thy youth to hopeless wasting, root and stem,
That I, if frugal and severe, might stray
Where’er I liked, and finally array
My temples with the Muse’s diadem.
Hence, if in freedom I have loved the truth,
If there be aught of pure, or good, or great,
In my past verse, or shall be in the lays
Of highest mood, which now I meditate,
It gladdens me, O worthy short-lived youth,
To think how much of this will be thy praise.”
In a letter which Wordsworth wrote to his dear friend, Sir George
Beaumont, Bart., in the year 1806, we learn the manner in which the
£900, bequeathed to him by Calvert, were invested. “Upon the interest of
the £900, £400 being laid out in annuity, with £200,” says Wordsworth,
“deducted from the principal, and £100, a legacy to my sister, and £100
more, which the “Lyrical Ballads” have brought me, my sister and I lived
seven years--nearly eight.” And it is certain that this sister, who
never left him from this time through his long life, exercised a
beautiful and benign influence over the poet, softened the asperities of
his character, and cheered him in his despondency. He thanks God that
his “beloved sister,”
----“in whose sight
Those days were passed,”
maintained for him a saving intercourse with his true self. It was to
her that he was indebted for many salutary admonitions; it was she who,
in the midst of the clashing politics and noisy-throated revolutions of
Europe, preserved him “still a poet,” and made “him seek beneath that
name, and that alone, his office upon earth.”
In 1795, Wordsworth, accompanied by his sister, left Cumberland, for
Racedown Lodge, near Cremkerne, in Dorsetshire. The country was
delightful, and the house pleasantly situated, with a garden attached to
it. They passed their time in reading, gardening, writing, and in
translating Ariosto, and other Italian poets. We also find the poet
making imitations of Juvenal’s Satires, copies of which he sent to his
friend Wrangham, with a view to joint publication. They were never
printed, however; and Wordsworth, in 1805, when he was urged by the same
friend to allow them to appear, repudiated them altogether, and
regretted that he had spent so much time in their composition, declaring
that he had come to a “fixed resolution to steer clear,” now and for
ever, of all personal satire. During this same year of ’95, he finished
his poem on “Guilt and Sorrow,” and began his tragedy of “The
Borderers,” which was completed before the close of the following year.
It is a cumbrous affair, and will not act; but it contains some fine
passages. It was first published in 1842, and was offered to Mr. Harris,
the manager of the Covent Garden Theatre, through Mr. Knight, the actor,
and was, as Wordsworth confesses, “_judiciously_ returned, as not
calculated for the stage.”
In the year 1797, Coleridge came to Racedown. Miss Wordsworth describes
him in one of her letters as “a wonderful man;” his conversation teeming
with “soul, mind, and spirit,”--three things very nearly related to each
other, one would think. He is benevolent, too, good-tempered, and
cheerful, like her dear brother William, and “interests himself much
about every little trifle.” At first she thought him very plain--that is
for about “three minutes” for he is “pale, thin, has a wide mouth, thick
lips, and not very good teeth; longish, loose growing, half-curling,
rough black hair.” But he no sooner began to talk than she forgot his
want of comeliness, his bad teeth, and wide mouth, and was entranced by
the magic of his eloquence. “His eye,” she adds, “is large and full,
not very dark, but grey; such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul
the dullest expression; but it speaks every emotion of his animated
mind; it has more of the ‘poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling,’ than I
ever witnessed. He has fine dark eye-brows, and an overhanging
forehead.”
Such was the apparition of Coleridge, in Wordsworth’s house at Racedown.
The poet himself was delighted with his visitor, and they were soon in
deep conversation about literature, and their own several adventures,
and proposed argosies on that great and shoreless deep.--Wordsworth read
a new poem, which he had just written, called the “Ruined Cottage,”--and
Coleridge praised it highly. Then they sat down to tea, and presently
the latter “repeated two acts and a half of his tragedy, ‘Osoris.’”
The next morning, the “Borderers” was read, and passages from “twelve
hundred lines of blank verse,--superior,” says Coleridge, in a letter to
a friend, “I hesitate not to aver, to anything in our language which in
any way resembles it.” “I speak with heart-felt sincerity, and I think
combined judgment, when I tell you,” he elsewhere writes, “that I feel
a little man by his side.”
Coleridge came several times to see his big man, after this; and the two
poets grew so much attached to each other, and found such profitable
advantages in each other’s conversation and literary judgments, that
they resolved to dwell nearer to each other. Accordingly Wordsworth and
his sister went to live at Alfoxden, near Stowey, where Coleridge was
residing. This was in July, 1797,--and he describes his sojourn there as
a very “pleasant and productive time of his life.” The house which
Wordsworth occupied belonged to Mr. St. Aubyn, who was a minor,--and the
condition of occupancy seems to have been, that the poet should keep the
house in repair.
In one of Miss Wordsworth’s letters, dated August 14, 1797, she speaks
with great enthusiasm and delight, both of the house and the country.
“Here we are,” she says, “in a large mansion, in a large park, with
seventy head of deer around us.... Sea, woods wild as fancy ever
painted, brooks clear and pebbly as in Cumberland, villages so romantic,
&c. The woods are as fine as those at Lowther, and the country more
romantic; it has the character of the less grand part of the
neighbourhood of the Lakes.” She then describes their “favourite
parlour,” which, like that of Racedown, looks into the garden. They were
three miles from Stowey, and only two from the sea. Look which way they
would, their eyes were filled with beauty: smooth downs, and valleys
with small brooks running down them, through green meadows, hardly ever
intersected with hedges, but scattered over with trees. The hills were
covered with bilberries, or oak woods. They could walk for miles over
the hill-tops, which was quite smooth, without rocks.
And in this beautiful locality did the poet reside for about twelve
months, composing during that time, all the poems contained in the first
edition of the “Lyrical Ballads,” with the exception of the “Female
Vagrant.” These _Ballads_ are in many ways remarkable: in the first
place, because they were the joint production of men who subsequently
proved themselves to be two of our greatest poets; and, secondly,
because they brought these men prominently before the eyes of the public
and of the critical world. The Ballads, as they were called, were
likewise of a very high order; and it is not too much to say, that such
a book of poems as this had not been published since the Augustan era of
our literature, Milton’s alone excepted, if Milton may not be said to
have closed that era. Here first appeared the “Ancient Mariner,” and the
“Nightingale,” by Coleridge; “Tintern Abbey,” and “Lines left under a
Yew-tree Seat,” by Wordsworth; four poems which of themselves were
sufficient to float half a dozen volumes. It is true that the “Ancient
Mariner,” the “_Old Navigator_,” as Coleridge loved to call it, is what
may be styled a _made-up_ poem--a wild, unearthly patchwork of the
imagination,--but it contains, nevertheless, such passages as it would
be rare to match outside those seas. It is full, too, of all kinds of
music--sweet, wild, natural, and supernatural--now grand, like the
rolling bass of some mighty organ, and now, ærial, celestial; catching
up the reader into a strange heaven, and filling him with an unspeakable
ecstacy. Wonderful power is likewise manifested in the structure of the
tale; and one is amazed how so slender an incident, as that upon which
the tale is founded, could be worked out so successfully, and with such
deep and thrilling interest. The “Nightingale,” however, is quite a
different poem, and is redolent of nature. “Tintern Abbey,” and “Lines
left under a Yew-tree Seat,” are in Wordsworth’s best style, and have
never been surpassed by him, in the fullest maturity of his genius.
The idea of the “Ballads” originated in the following circumstances:
Wordsworth and his sister, accompanied by Coleridge, commenced a
pedestrian tour, in November 1797, to Linton, and the Valley of Stones,
near it. The whole party, however, were so poor that they could ill
afford the expense of the journey, and the two poets resolved to write a
poem for the “New Monthly Magazine,” for which they hoped to get £5, and
thus balance the outlay which they required for the tour. The course of
the friends lay along the Quartock Hills, towards Watchet; and here it
was that Coleridge planned his “Old Navigator,” the base of it being, as
he said, a dream of Cruikshanks’. Wordsworth and Coleridge were to have
written this poem conjointly, but the great dissimilarity of their
manner soon compelled them to abandon this idea, and Coleridge was left
to complete the work by himself. Wordsworth suggested, however, as some
crime was to be committed by the Mariner, which was to bring upon him a
spectral persecution in his wanderings, as the consequence of that
crime, that he should be represented as having killed an Albatross on
entering the South-Sea, and that the tutelary spirits of these regions
should follow him and avenge the crime. The navigation of the ship by
the dead men was also a suggestion of Wordsworth’s. As Coleridge
proceeded with his work, it was very soon found that it would be too
long for the Magazine, and they began to think of issuing it as a
volume, along with other poems, by both bards. These poems were to be
founded “on supernatural subjects, taken from common life, but to be
looked at, as much as might be, through an imaginative medium.”
Wordsworth’s share in the poetical contributions to this volume, besides
those already mentioned were, amongst others, “The Idiot Boy,” “Her Eyes
are Wild,” “We are Seven,” and “The Thorn.” The last verse of “We are
Seven,” was composed first, and Coleridge threw off, impromptu, the
first verse of the poem, whilst the little party were sitting down to
tea, in the pretty little parlour at Alfoxden, which looked out into the
garden. Speaking of the “Idiot Boy,” Wordsworth says:--“The last stanza,
‘The cocks did crow, and moon did shine so cold,’ was the production of
the whole. The words were reported to me by my dear friend Thomas Poole;
but I have since heard the same reported of other idiots. Let me add,
that this long poem was composed in the groves of Alfoxden, almost
extempore; not a word, I believe, being corrected, though one stanza was
omitted. I mention this in gratitude to those happy moments, for in
truth I never wrote anything with so much glee.”
It was in 1798 that the Lines to Tintern Abbey were written. The poet
and his sister had been staying for a week with Mr. Cottle, of Bristol,
visiting Coleridge by the way, who had a little time before resigned his
ministerial engagement with a Unitarian congregation at Bristol, and was
now in receipt of an annuity of £150, given to him by the magnificent
generosity of “Josiah and Thomas Wedgwood.” From Mr. Cottle’s they
proceeded to the Banks of the Wye, crossed the Severn ferry, and walked
ten miles further to Tintern Abbey, a very beautiful ruin on the Wye.
They proceeded, next morning, along the river, through Monmouth, to
Goderich Castle, returning to Tintern in a boat, and from thence in a
small vessel back again to Bristol.
“The Wye,” says Wordsworth, “is a stately and majestic river, from its
width and depth, but never slow and sluggish--you can always hear its
murmur. It travels through a woody country, now varied with cottages and
green meadows, and now with huge and fantastic rocks.... No poem of mine
was composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember than
this [viz., “Tintern Abbey:”]--I began it upon leaving Tintern, after
crossing the Wye, and concluded it just as I was entering Bristol, in
the evening, after a ramble of four or five days with my sister. Not a
line of it was uttered, and not any part of it written down, till I
reached Bristol. It was published almost immediately after in the
“Lyrical Ballads.”
“Peter Bell” was likewise written about this time; and the following
interesting particulars, respecting its origin, are furnished by the
poet:
“This tale was founded upon an anecdote which I read in a newspaper, of
an ass being found hanging his head over a canal, in a wretched
posture. Upon examination, a dead body was found in the water, and
proved to be the body of its master. In the woods of Alfoxden, I used to
take great delight in noticing the habits, tricks, and physiognomy of
asses; and it was here, no doubt, that I was put upon writing the Poem
of ‘Peter Bell,’ out of liking for the creature that is so often
dreadfully abused. The countenance, gait, and figure of Peter were taken
from a wild rover with whom I walked from Builth, on the river Wye,
downwards, nearly as far as the town of Hay. He told me strange stories.
It has always been a pleasure to me through life, to catch at every
opportunity that has occurred in my rambles, of being acquainted with
this class of people. The number of Peter’s wives was taken from the
trespasses in this way of a lawless creature who lived in the county of
Durham, and used to be attended by many women, sometimes not less than
half a dozen, as disorderly as himself; and a story went in the county,
that he had been heard to say, whilst they were quarrelling: “Why can’t
you be quiet?--there’s none so many of you.’ Benoni, or the child of
sorrow, I knew when I was a school-boy. His mother had been deserted by
a gentleman in the neighbourhood, she herself being a gentlewoman by
birth. The circumstances of her story were told me by my dear old dame,
Ann Tyson, who was her confidante. The lady died broken-hearted. The
crescent moon, which makes such a figure in the prologue, assumed this
character one evening, while I was watching its beauty, in front of
Alfoxden House. I intended this poem for the volume before spoken of;
but it was not published for more than twenty years afterwards. The
worship of the Methodists, or Ranters, is often heard during the
stillness of the summer evening, in the country, with affecting
accompaniments of moral beauty. In both the psalmody and voice of the
preacher there is not unfrequently much solemnity, likely to impress the
feelings of the rudest characters, under favourable circumstances.”
It was during Wordsworth’s residence in the South, in 1794, that a
circumstance occurred, which has not been alluded to before in these
memoirs, but which is interesting in itself, and still more so from the
fact that it was the means of making Wordsworth acquainted with
Coleridge, Southey, Robert Lovell, and George Burnet. I will relate this
circumstance in the language of a writer for Chambers’ Papers for the
People, and quote still further passages from the same tract,
illustrative of the life of Wordsworth and his friends, at this time.[G]
The circumstance was as follows: Coleridge, Southey, Lovell, and Burnet
“came down to Bristol, as the most convenient part from which they could
embark for the wild banks of the Susquehana. On that remote river they
were to found a Platonic Republic, where everything was to be in common,
and from which vice and selfishness were to be for ever excluded. These
ardent and intellectual adventurers had made elaborate calculations how
long it would take them to procure the necessaries of life, and to build
their barns, and how they should spend their leisure in what Coleridge
sung as
‘Freedom’s undivided dell,
Where toil and health with mellowed love shall dwell;
Far from folly, far from men,
In the rude romantic glen.’
Yet, it is supposed, they knew nothing of the Susquehana more than of
any other American river, except that its name was musical and sonorous;
and far from having anything wherewith to convey themselves and their
moveables across the Atlantic, they had to borrow five pounds to make up
their lodging bill. This sum was advanced them, with unalloyed pleasure,
by Mr. Cottle, a bookseller in the town, a benevolent and worthy man,
who seems almost to have been located there for no other purpose than to
introduce the three chief Lake Poets to the world.
“The bubble of the Susquehana, or, as it was called, Pantisocracy, was
exploded, by Southey, Coleridge, and Lovell, all getting into the bonds
of matrimony, which have a miraculous virtue in testing the solidity of
schemes of life. They married three sisters of the name of Fricker. It
was the perpetual restlessness of Coleridge which first brought him and
his companions into contact with Wordsworth. The former wonderful man,
in capabilities perhaps the mightiest of that illustrious group, and in
his mental constitution one of the most puzzling psychological phenomena
which human nature has ever presented, was the originator of the
Pantisocratic proposal. He was a man of luxurious imagination, deep
emotiveness, various learning, and an exquisite nervous susceptibility.
In 1795, he was making excursions through the lovely and tranquil
scenery of Somersetshire, when he became acquainted with a most worthy
and excellent man, Mr. Poole, resident in the quiet village of Stowey.
On his return to Bristol, where he was married, he still exhibited his
uneasiness. First he removed to his immortal rose-bound cottage at
Clevedon, then back to the pent-up houses at Redcliff Hill, and from
these again to the more open situation of Kingsdown. Nothing would then
satisfy him but he must set up a serial, to be called ‘The Watchman;’
and his own sketches of his travelling canvass for that periodical,
might take rank with some chapters of Don Quixote. Take, for instance,
this picture of a great patriot at Birmingham, to whom he applies for
his magnificent patronage:--He was ‘a rigid Calvinist, a tallow-chandler
by trade. He was a tall, dingy man, in whom length was so predominant
over breadth, that he might almost have been borrowed for a foundry
poker! Oh, that face!--I have it before me at this moment. The lank,
black, twine-like hair, pinguinitescent, cut in a straight line along
the black stubble of his thin, gunpowder eyebrows, that looked like a
scorched aftermath from a last week’s shaving. His coat-collar behind,
in perfect unison, both of colour and lustre, with the coarse yet glib
cordage which I suppose he called his hair, and which, with a bend
inward at the nape of the neck--the only approach to flexure in his
whole figure--slunk in behind his waistcoat; while the countenance,
lank, dark, very hard, and with strong, perpendicular furrows--gave me a
dim notion of some one looking at me through a gridiron,--all soot,
grease, and iron.’ This thoroughbred lover of liberty, who had proved
that Mr. Pitt was one of the horns of the second beast in the
‘Revelations’ that spake as a dragon, nevertheless declined to take ‘The
Watchman’; and in short, after a disastrous career, that serial died a
natural death. The disappointed editor took refuge, for a brief season,
with Mr. Poole, at Stowey, and there, for the first time, he met
Wordsworth, who then resided about twenty miles off, at Racedown, in
Dorsetshire.
“Coleridge returned for a short time to Bristol, but in January, 1797,
he removed to Stowey, where he rented a small cottage. This must have
been a pleasant episode in the lives of the gifted individuals whom it
brought together in that sweet village. Wordsworth, who was now
twenty-seven, had come with his sister to Alfoxden, which was within two
miles of Stowey. Charles Lloyd, a young man of most sensitive and
graceful mind, and of great poetical susceptibility, resided in the
family with Coleridge. Charles Lamb, then in the spring-time of his
life, was also a frequent inmate; and often afterwards, under the cloud
which lowered over his noble devotedness in London, his fancy wandered
back to that happy valley.--Why, says he to Charles Lloyd, who
unexpectedly looked in upon him in the great Babylon:
‘Why seeks my Lloyd the stranger out?
What offering does the stranger bring
Of social scenes, home-bred delights,
That him in aught compensate may
For Stowey’s pleasant winter nights,
For loves and friendships far away?’
The Pantisocratist, George Burnet, was also a visitor. Mrs. Coleridge
herself had a poetical taste, and there is one very graceful piece of
hers written on the receipt of a thimble from her kind friend Mr.
Cottle. Just such a thimble, sings Sarah Coleridge--
‘Just such a one, _mon cher ami_
(The finger-shield of industry),
The inventive gods, I deem, to Pallas gave,
What time the vain Arachne, madly brave,
Challenged the blue-eyed virgin of the sky
A duel in embroidered work to try.
And hence the thimbled finger of grave Pallas
To the erring needle’s point was more than callous.
But, ah! the poor Arachne! she, unarmed,
Blundering through hasty eagerness, alarmed
With all a rival’s hopes, a mortal’s fears,
Still missed the stitch, and stained the web with tears.’
Hartley Coleridge, the ærial child who awakened the fears and sympathies
of Wordsworth, was a fine boy, rejoicing his parents’ hearts; and the
happy pair had cut a road into their neighbours’ orchards, that they
might pass to their firesides under the arches of blossoms, with a speed
suiting to their affections. Alas! that sweet Stowey. Cottle, in his old
age, has painted one or two pictures of it and of its gifted habitants,
now in their graves, that go to the heart. Take the scene with Coleridge
in the jasmine arbour, where the tripod table was laden with delicious
bread and cheese, and a mug of the true brown Taunton ale. ‘While the
dappled sunbeams,’ says the old man, calling up kindly memories, ‘played
on our table through the umbrageous canopy, the very birds seemed to
participate in our felicities, and poured forth selectest anthems. As we
sat in our sylvan hall of splendour, a company of the happiest mortals,
the bright blue heavens, the sportive insects, the balmy zephyrs, the
feathered choristers, the sympathy of friends, all augmented the
pleasurable to the highest point this side the celestial.... While thus
elevated in the universal current of our feelings, Mrs. Coleridge
approached with her fine Hartley; we all smiled, but the father’s eye
beamed transcendental joy. But all things have an end! Yet pleasant it
is for Memory to treasure up in her choicest depository a few such
scenes (those sunny spots in existence), on which the spirit may repose
when the rough adverse winds shake and disfigure all besides.’ Or take
the more lively visit to Alfoxden, on Wordsworth’s invitation. Away
they all went from Stowey; the poet and Emmeline, Coleridge and Cottle.
They were to dine on philosopher’s fare--a bottle of brandy, a loaf, a
piece of cheese, and fresh lettuces from Wordsworth’s garden. The first
mishap was a theftuous abstraction of the cheese; and, on the back of
it, Coleridge, in the very act of praising the brandy as a substitute,
upset the bottle, and knocked it to pieces. They all tried to take off
the harness from the horse. Cottle tried it, then the bard of Rydal; but
in vain. Coleridge, who had served his apprenticeship as Silas
Comberbatch in the cavalry, then twisted the poor animal’s neck almost
to strangulation; but was at last compelled to pronounce that the
horse’s head must have grown since the collar was put on! It was
useless, he said, to try to force so huge an _os frontis_ through so
narrow a collar. All had given up, when lo! the servant girl turned the
collar upside down, and slipped it off in an instant, to the
inconceivable wonder and humiliation of the poets, who proceeded to
solace themselves with the brown bread, the lettuces, and a jug of
sparkling water. Who, knowing the subsequent fate of the tenants of
Stowey, would not love to dwell on these delightful pictures of their
better days?
“It must not be supposed, however, that the tempter never entered into
this Eden; but when he did so, it was generally through the
mischief-making pranks of Coleridge, who constantly kept his friends in
hot water. He and Lamb had just published a joint volume of poems, and
Coleridge could not refrain from satirising and parodying their
offspring in the newspapers. Take this epigram as a specimen:--
‘TO THE AUTHOR OF THE ANCIENT MARINER.
‘Your poem must eternal be--
Dear Sir, it cannot fail;
For ’tis incomprehensible,
And without head or tail.’
Of course nobody could suspect Coleridge of this; and, indeed, to his
infinite amusement, a vain fellow affected to hesitate about being
introduced to him, on the ground that he had mortally injured him by the
writing of this very epigram! But Lamb could not fail to observe the
doings of the poet-metaphysician more closely, and the result was a
quarrel, which induced that ‘gentle creature’ to send him an
unnaturally bitter series of theological questions, such as--‘Whether
the vision beatific be anything more or less than a perpetual
representment, to each individual angel, of his own present attainments
and future capabilities, somehow in the manner of mortal
looking-glasses, reflecting a perpetual complacency and
self-satisfaction?’ Troubles from without added to this confusion
within. The village wiseacres, to whom the habits of Wordsworth and his
eccentric friend were totally incomprehensible, had decided that they
were terrible scoundrels, who required to be looked after. One sage had
seen Wordsworth look strangely at the moon; another had overheard him
mutter in some unintelligible and outlandish brogue. Some thought him a
conjuror; some a smuggler, from his perpetually haunting the sea-beach;
some asserted that he kept a snug private still in his cellar, as they
knew by their noses at a hundred yards distance; while others where
convinced that he was ‘surely a desperate French Jacobin, for he was so
silent nobody ever heard him say one word about politics.’ While the
saturnine and stately Wordsworth was thus slanderously assailed, his
fluent and witty associate could not expect to escape. One day,
accordingly while on a pedestrian excursion, Coleridge met a woman who,
not knowing who he was, abused him to himself in unmeasured Billingsgate
for a whole hour, as a vile Jacobin villain, who had misled George
Burnet of her parish. ‘I listened,’ wrote the poet to a friend, ‘very
particularly, appearing to approve all she said, exclaiming, “Dear me!”
two or three times; and, in fine, so completely won her heart by my
civilities, that I had not courage enough to undeceive her.’ This is all
very ludicrous and amusing now; but at the time its effect was such,
that the person who had the letting of Alfoxden House refused
point-blank to relet it to Wordsworth. This was of course a great
vexation to Poole and Coleridge, who set about trying to procure another
house in the vicinity.
“But the two bards were not a subject of jealousy and suspicion to the
ignorant peasantry alone. A country gentleman of the locality became so
alarmed, that he called in the aid of that tremendous abstraction--the
state; and a spy was sent down from head-quarters, and lodged in
mysterious privacy in Stowey Inn. The poets could never stir out but
this gentleman was at their heels, and they scarcely ever had an
out-of-doors conversation which he did not overhear. He used to hide
behind a bank at the seaside, which was a favourite seat of theirs. At
that time they used to talk a great deal of Spinosa; and as their
confidential attendant had a notable Bardolph nose, he at first took it
into his head that they were making light of his importance by
nicknaming him ‘Spy Nosy;’ but was soon convinced that that was the name
of a man ‘who had made a book, and lived long ago.’ On one occasion
Bardolph assumed the character of a Jacobin, to draw Coleridge out; but
such was the bard’s indignant exposure of the Revolutionists, that even
the spy felt ashamed that he had put Jacobinism on. Poor Coleridge was
so unsuspicious, that he felt happy he had been the means of shaking the
convictions of this awful partisan, and doing the unhappy man some good.
At last the spy reported favourably, to the great disgust of the rural
magnate who had engaged his services, and who now tried to elicit fresh
grounds of suspicion from the village innkeeper. But that worthy was
obstinate in his belief that it was totally impossible for Coleridge to
harangue the inhabitants, as he talked ‘real Hebrew-Greek,’ which their
limited intellects could not understand. This, however, only exasperated
his inquisitor, who demanded whether Coleridge had not been seen roving
about, taking charts and maps of the district. The poor innkeeper
replied, that though he did not wish to say any ill of anybody, yet he
must confess he had heard that Coleridge was a poet, and intended to put
Quantock into print. Thus the friends escaped this peril, which was then
a formidable one. Coleridge was at the time wandering about the romantic
coombes of the Quantock Hills, making studies for a poem on the plan
afterwards followed out by Wordsworth in his ‘Sonnets to the Duddon;’
and in the heat of the moment he resolved to dedicate it to Government,
as containing the traitorous plans which he was to submit to the French,
in order to facilitate their schemes of invasion. ‘And these, too,’ says
he, ‘for a tract of coast that from Clevedon to Minehead scarcely
permits the approach of a fishing-boat.’”
This episode brings us back to Wordsworth, and shows, amongst other
things, the reason why he left Alfoxden, although not the slightest
allusion is made to this spy business, or to the Pantisocratic scheme in
the memoirs of the poet by Doctor Wordsworth. The poet’s removal to
Bristol sometime about July, in the year 1798, was caused, according to
the doctor, by Wordsworth’s “desire to be nearer the printer,” and he
(the doctor) quotes a letter from Miss Wordsworth, bearing date July
18th of that year, in which she says, “William’s poems are now in the
press; they will be out in six weeks.” These poems, or “Lyrical
Ballads,” as they were called, were printed by Cottle, of Bristol, and
Wordsworth received thirty guineas as his share, for the copyright of
the volume.
“At his first interview with Wordsworth, Cottle had heard some of the
lyrical poems read, and had earnestly advised their publication,
offering for them the same sum he had given to Coleridge and Southey for
their works, and stating flatteringly that no provincial bookseller
might ever again have the honour of ushering such a trio to renown.
Wordsworth, however, strongly objected to publication; but in April,
1798, the poet sent for Cottle to hear them recited ‘under the old
trees in the park.’ Coleridge despatched a confirmatory invitation. ‘We
will procure a horse,’ wrote persuasive Samuel Taylor, ‘easy as thy own
soul, and we will go on a roam to Linton and Limouth, which, if thou
comest in May, will be in all their pride of woods and waterfalls, not
to speak of its august cliffs, and the green ocean, and the vast Valley
of Stones, all which live disdainful of the seasons, or accept new
honours only from the winter’s snow.’ The three friends did go on their
romantic excursion, saw sweet Linton and Limouth, and arranged the
publication of the first volume of the ‘Lyrical Ballads,’ which we have
now seen brought to their publication day, and submitted to the judgment
of the public. Dr. Wordsworth, however, does not allude in the “Memoirs”
to Cottle as one of their party to the Valley of Stones.
The reader of this day, accustomed to dwell with delight and reverence
upon the Old Navigator, the Nightingale, Tintern Abbey, &c., will be a
little startled to hear that although only five hundred copies of the
Lyrical Ballads were printed, Cottle had to dispose of the greater part
of them to a London bookseller at a loss, in consequence of the terrific
mud-showers of abuse which the critics poured upon the poems.
Nevertheless, and in spite of the failure of the adventure, as a
commercial speculation, there were minds of no mean order that detected
the genius which produced them. Professor Wilson and De Quincy were
amongst the number of these; and the former said, in speaking of the
Ballads, that a new sun had risen at midday. Hannah More, also, who,
notwithstanding her own milk-and-water productions, was a woman of
discernment, was delighted with “Harry Gill,” and deigned to say so in
the teeth of the dirty demireps that abused it. But the volume gradually
sunk for a time below the public horizon, and when Cottle gave up his
business, and disposed of his copyright to the Longmans of London, these
publishers returned that of the Ballads as valueless, and Cottle made a
present of it to its authors.
In the meanwhile, Wordsworth and his sister, accompanied by Coleridge,
with the proceeds of their poetry in their pockets, went to Germany. The
writer for Chambers says--
“The different temperaments of the poets displayed themselves very
remarkably on the voyage. The bard of Rydal seems to have kept very
quiet; but his mercurial companion, after indulging in most questionable
potations with a motley group of eccentric foreigners, got up and danced
with them a succession of dances, which, he says, might very
appropriately have been termed _reels_. Where Wordsworth was may be
conjectured from Coleridge’s remark, that those ‘who lay below in all
the agonies of sea-sickness must have found our Bacchanalian merriment
----“a tune
Harsh and of dissonant mood from their complaint.”
One of the party was a Dane, a vain and disgusting coxcomb, whose
conversation with Coleridge, whom he first took for a ‘Doctor Teology,’
and then for ‘un philosophe,’ actually outburlesqued burlesque. The
astounded bard, for the first time in his life, took notes of a
dialogue, of which a single sample is enough.
“THE DANE.--Vat imagination! vat language! vat vast science! vat eyes!
vat a milk white forehead! Oh my heafen! vy, you’re a got!
“ANSWER.--You do me too much honour, sir.
“THE DANE.--Oh me, if you should tink I is flattering you! I haf ten
tousand a year--yes, ten tousand a year--yes, ten tousand pound a year!
Vell, and vat is dhat? Vy, a mere trifle! I ’ould’nt gif my sincere
heart for ten times dhe money! Yes, you’re a got! I a mere man! But, my
dear friend, dhink of me as a man! Is--is--I mean to ask you now, my
dear friend--is I not very eloquent? Is I not speak English very fine?
“And so his Daneship, in this extraordinary style, went on fishing for
compliments, and asking whether he did not speak just like Plato, and
Cato, and Socrates, till he lost all opinion of Coleridge on finding
that he was a Christian. The discarded poet then wrapped himself in his
great-coat, and looked at the water, covered with foam and stars of
flame, while every now and then detachments of it ‘darted off from the
vessel’s side, each with its own constellation, over the sea, and
scoured out of sight like a Tartar troop over a wilderness.’ By and by
he lay down, and ‘looking up at two or three stars, which oscillated
with the motion of the sails, fell asleep.’
“They landed at Hamburg, on the Elbe Stairs, at the Boom-House.
Wordsworth, with a French emigrant, whose acquaintance he had cultivated
at sea, went in search of a hotel, and put up at ‘Die Wilde Man,’ while
the other wild man, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, strolled about, amusing
himself with looking at the ‘Dutch women, with large umbrella hats
shooting out half a yard before them, and a prodigal plumpness of
petticoat behind,’ and many similar striking and unusual spectacles.
“In Hamburg the pair were introduced to the brother of the poet
Klopstock, and to Professor Ebeling, a lively and intelligent man, but
so deaf that they had to ‘drop all their pearls into a huge
ear-trumpet.’ At Mr. Klopstock’s they saw a bust of the poet, whom they
afterwards visited. It had a solemn and heavy greatness in the
countenance, which corresponded with the notions entertained by
Coleridge of his style and genius, and which were afterwards discovered
not to exist in the prototype himself. Coleridge, whose chief object in
coming to Germany was to become acquainted with the German language and
literature, left Wordsworth in Hamburg, and went to Ratzeburg, where he
boarded in the pastor’s house. He returned, however, for a few days, to
take final leave of his friend, and the two paid a visit to Klopstock
together. His house was one of a row of what appeared small
summer-houses, with four or five rows of young meagre elms in front, and
beyond these a green, bounded by a dead flat. The bard’s physiognomy
disappointed them as much as his domicile. Coleridge recognised in it no
likeness to the bust, and no traces either of sublimity or enthusiasm.
Klopstock could only speak French and German, and Coleridge only English
and Latin, so that Wordsworth, who was accomplished in French, acted as
interpreter. It may here be mentioned that this ignorance of Coleridge’s
brought upon him a peculiar sort of civility at Ratzeburg. The _amtmann_
of that place, anxious to be civil, and totally unable to find any
medium of communication, every day they met, as the only courtesy he had
it in his power to offer, addressed to him the whole stock of English he
possessed, which was to this effect:-- ‘----ddam your ploot unt eyes,
my dearest Englander, vhee goes it?’ The conversation with Klopstock
turned entirely upon English and German literature, and in the course of
it Wordsworth gave ample proofs of his great taste, industry, and
information, and even showed that he was better acquainted with the
highest German writers than the author of the ‘Messiah’ himself. On his
informing the latter that Coleridge intended to translate some of his
odes, the old man said to Coleridge--‘I wish you would render into
English some select passages of the “Messiah,” and _revenge_ me of your
countrymen.’ ‘This,’ says Coleridge, ‘was the liveliest thing he
produced in the whole conversation.’ That genius was, however, deeply
moved, but could not help being disgusted with the venerable bard’s
snow-white periwig, which felt to his eye what Mr. Virgil would have
been to his ear. After this, Coleridge left Hamburg, and resided four
months in Ratzeburg, and five in Gottingen. Wordsworth had two
subsequent interviews with Klopstock, and dined with him. He kept notes
of these conversations, some of which are given in ‘Satyrane’s Letters,’
in the second volume of the ‘Biographia Literaria.’ One or two
incidents strongly illustrate Wordsworth’s peculiar character and
poetical taste. He complained, for example, of Lessing making the
interest of the ‘Oberon’ turn upon mere appetite. ‘Well, but,’ said
Klopstock, ‘you see that such poems please everybody.’ He immediately
replied, that ‘it was the province of a great poet to raise a people up
to his own level--not to descend to theirs.’ Klopstock afterwards found
fault with the Fool in ‘Lear,’ when Wordsworth observed that ‘he gave a
terrible wildness to the distress’--a remark which evinced a deep
appreciation of that awful drama. Wordsworth subsequently made a short
tour, and visited Coleridge at Gottingen on his return.’
Wordsworth, during the greater part of his time in Germany lived at
Goslar, and he found the people neither very friendly nor hospitable.
Goslar is situate at the foot of the Hartz Mountains, which are covered
with fine oaks and beech, and the poet and his sister, to make up for
the loss of society in the town, sought solitude amongst these
magnificent woods. Among the poems written at this time were, “Strange
fits of passion have I known,” “Three years she grew in sun and
shower,” “Lines to a Sexton,” “The Danish Boy,” intended as a prelude to
a ballad never written; “A Poet’s Epitaph,” “Art thou a Statist?” “Lucy
Gray.” All these poems and many more were written in 1799; and the
latter is founded on a circumstance related by the poet’s sister “of a
little girl, who, not far from Halifax, in Yorkshire, was bewildered in
a snow-storm. Her footsteps were tracked by her parents to the middle of
the lock of a canal, and no other footsteps of her, backward or forward,
could be traced. The body, however, was found in the canal. The way in
which the incident was treated, and the spiritualizing of the character,
might furnish hints for contrasting the imaginative influences, which I
have endeavoured to throw over common life, with Crabbe’s matter-of-fact
style of handling subjects of the same kind. This is not spoken to his
disparagement,--far from it; but to direct the attention of thoughtful
readers into whose hands these notes may fall, to a comparison that may
enlarge the circle of their sympathies, and tend to produce in them a
catholic judgment.” “Lines written in Germany, ’98-9” have the following
note attached to them in the “Memoirs,” with which I will conclude
these extracts.
“A bitter winter it was when these verses were composed, by the side of
my sister, in our lodgings at a draper’s house, in the romantic imperial
town of Goslar, on the edge of the Hartz Forest. In this town the German
emperors of the Franconian line were accustomed to keep their court, and
it retains vestiges of ancient splendour. So severe was the cold of this
winter that when we passed out of the parlour warmed by the stove, our
cheeks were struck by the air as if by cold iron. I slept in a room over
a passage that was not ceiled. The people of the house used to say,
rather unfeelingly, that they expected I should be frozen to death some
night; but with the protection of a pelisse lined with fur, and a
dog-skin bonnet, such as was worn by the peasants, I walked daily on the
ramparts, in a sort of public ground or garden, in which was a pond.
Here I had no companion but a kingfisher, a beautiful creature that used
to glance by me. I consequently became much attached to it.” During
these walks he composed the ‘Poet’s Epitaph.’ His ‘Poem of Ruth,’ ‘The
Address to the Scholars of a Village School,’ ‘The two April Mornings,’
‘The Fountain,’ ‘A Conversation,’ ‘Matthew,’ and a variety of others
were likewise written about this time. In his correspondence with
Coleridge at this time, the latter speaks in terms of the highest
affection for him. ‘I am sure I need but say,’ he writes, ‘how you are
incorporated with the better part of my being; how whenever I spring
forward into the future with noble affections, I always alight by your
side.’”
On the 10th of February, 1799, Wordsworth and his sister left Goslar,
and returned towards England. The poet was now nearly thirty years of
age; and as the gates of the Imperial City closed behind him, he felt
like a bird suddenly released from captivity, and resolved to build up
some stately architecture of verse, which men would not willingly let
die. Accordingly he commenced the “Prelude,” within the very hum of the
city. Six out of the fourteen books which compose it, were written
before 1805.
In the spring of 1799 the poet and his sister returned to England; and
in a letter to Cottle, written immediately after their arrival, we find
them in “the county of Durham, just on the borders of Yorkshire,”
thankful, after sufficient experience of Germany, for the dear face of
old England once more.
GRASMERE.
THE wandering minstrel and his sister--that great-hearted, most
beautiful, and devoted sister, whom we cannot help loving so
devoutly,--went in the spring of 1799 to visit their friends, the
Hutchinsons, at Stockton-on-Tees, and remained there, with occasional
exceptions, until the close of the year. Here dwelt Miss Mary
Hutchinson, for whom the poet had begun to conceive such passion as he
was capable of from the time of her visit to him and his sister, at
Alfoxden. For although Dr. Wordsworth is silent also respecting this
visit, De Quincy tells us that it actually took place.--And now the
lovers--in their saturnine way--had leisure to cement their attachment,
and what is more, they took advantage of it, as their subsequent
marriage, about the commencement of the present century, sufficiently
proves.--Many other things, however, occupied the poet’s attention
beside this, and we find him, September 20, planning another tour, and
this time through the lake district, with his friends Cottle and
Coleridge. It was the first time that the latter had seen the lake
country, and he, in writing to Miss Wordsworth, thus speaks of it:--
“At Temple Sowerby we met your brother John, who accompanied us to
Hawes-water, Ambleside, and the divine sisters, Rydal and Grasmere. Here
we stayed two days. We accompanied John over the fork of Helvellyn, on a
day when light and darkness co-existed in contiguous masses, and the
earth and sky were but one. Nature lived for us in all her grandest
accidents. We quitted him by a wild turn, just as we caught a sight of
the gloomy Ullswater.
“Your brother John is one of you; a man who hath solitary usings of his
own intellect, deep in feelings, with a subtle tact, a swift instinct
of truth and beauty; he interests me much.
“You can feel what I cannot express for myself, how deeply I have been
impressed by a world of scenery, absolutely new to me. At Rydal and
Grasmere I received, I think, the deepest delight; yet Hawes-water,
through many a varying view, kept my eyes dim with tears; and the
evening approaching, Derwent-water, in diversity of harmonious features,
in the majesty of its beauties, and in the beauty of its majesty ... and
the black crags close under the snowy mountains, whose snows were
pinkish with the setting sun, and the reflections from the rich clouds
that floated over some, and rested over others!--it was to me a vision
of a fair country: why were you not with us?”
It was in this tour that Wordsworth resolved to settle at Grasmere.
First he thought of building a house by the lake side, and to enable him
to do this, his brother John offered to give him £40 to buy the land.
There was a small house to let, however, at Grasmere, which, after much
deliberation with his sister, he finally hired, and the two
inseparables entered upon it on St. Thomas’s Day, 1799.
One of the very finest of all Wordsworth’s letters--written to Coleridge
four days after the settlement at Grasmere--details, with a graphic and
truly poetic power, the wanderings of the sister and brother from
Sockburn to their new home. It is too long, however, to quote here, and
for a perusal of it the reader is referred to the Memoirs.[H]
The poet lived at Grasmere with his sister for eight years.[I] “The
cottage,” says Dr. Wordsworth, in which Wordsworth and his sister took
up their abode, and which still retains the form it wore then, stands on
the right hand, by the side of what was then the coach road, from
Ambleside to Keswick, as it enters Grasmere, or, as that part of the
village is called, “Town End.” The front of it faces the lake; behind is
a small plot of orchard and garden-ground, in which there is a spring,
and rocks; the enclosure shelves upward towards the woody sides of the
mountain above it.--Many of his poems, as the reader will remember, are
associated with this fair spot:
“This spot of orchard ground is ours;
My trees they are, my sister’s flowers.”
In the first book of the “Recluse,” still unpublished, he thus expresses
his feelings in settling in this house at Grasmere, and in looking down
from the hills which embosom the lake.
“On Nature’s invitation do I come,
By reason sanctioned. Can the choice mislead,
That made the calmest, fairest spot on earth,
With all its unappropriated good,
My own, and not mine only, for with me
Entrenched--say rather peacefully embowered--
Under yon orchard, in yon humble cot,
A younger orphan of a home extinct
The only daughter of my parents, dwells;
Aye, think on that, my heart, and cease to stir;
Pause upon that, and let the breathing frame
No longer breathe, but all be satisfied.
O, if such silence be not thanks to God
For what hath been bestowed, then where, where then,
Shall gratitude find rest? Mine eyes did ne’er
Fix on a lovely object, nor my mind
Take pleasure in the midst of happy thoughts,
But either she, whom now I have, who now
Divides with me that loved abode was there,
Or not far off. Where’er my footsteps turned,
Her voice was like a hidden bird that sung;
The thought of her was like a flash of light
Or an unseen companionship, a breath
Or fragrance independent of the wind.
In all my goings, in the new and old
Of all my meditations, and in this
Favourite of all, in this the most of all....
Embrace me then, ye hills, and close me in.
Now in the clear and open day I feel
Your guardianship; I take it to my heart;
’Tis like the solemn shelter of the night,
But I would call thee beautiful; for mild,
And soft, and gay, and beautiful thou art,
Dear valley, having in thy face a smile,
Though peaceful, full of gladness. Thou art pleased,
Pleased with thy crags, and woody steeps, thy lake
Its one green island, and its winding shores,
The multitude of little rocky hills,
Thy church, and cottages of mountain stone
Clustered like stars, some few, but single most,
And lurking dimly in their shy retreats,
Or glancing at each other cheerful looks,
Like separated stars with clouds between.”
All this is a burst of quiet, yet beautiful, and almost ecstatic,
enthusiasm--the like of which is not to be met with elsewhere, I think,
in poetry. Surely, Wordsworth was worthy of his sweet cottage, and
sweeter and dearer sister, and his glorious lake, with its one green
island,--his mountains, and woods, and dales,--his church, and the
cottages, “clustered like stars,” around it; for he had the great heart,
and large brain, which Nature makes the condition for all those who
would share her communion. And, then, his tastes were so simple,
natural, and unaffected; he lived so close to Nature, and knew so many
of her secrets, and loved her too, with the passion of a first and only
love. Yes, surely, he was worthy of all he enjoyed.
During the three years which elapsed, between the poet’s entering upon
the cottage at Grasmere, and his marriage, he was very industriously,
and even laboriously, employed in cultivating his art; for he had
resolved that poetry should be the business and not the pastime of his
life. We find Coleridge urging him to continue the “Recluse,”--by which
he meant, as Dr. Wordsworth informs us, the “Prelude;”--in the summer of
1799, and again in October of the same year, he says he will hear of
nothing else but the “Recluse;” for in the mood he was in at that time,
he was wholly against the publication of any small poems. He desired
that his friend should build, what my friend J. H. Stirling calls an
“Opus;” but Wordsworth, though still at work upon the foundations of his
_opus_, cannot rest without making little oratories--holy cells--in the
pauses of his labour. Hence a new volume of poems was soon ready for
publication; and as the 12mo. edition of the “Lyrical Ballads,” was by
this time exhausted, Wordsworth determined to reprint them, and add this
new volume to the work, calling the two conjointly “Lyrical Ballads, in
two Volumes.” The pieces now presented to the public, included some of
his finest lyrical effusions. Amongst others, “Lucy Gray,” “Nutting,”
“The Brothers,” “Ruth,” “Poor Susan,” “The Waterfall, and the
Eglantine.” This new edition was published, in 1800, by Messrs.
Longmans, who offered the poet £100 for two editions of the two volumes.
In 1801, Wordsworth presented a copy of the “Lyrical Ballads” to the
Right Hon. C. J. Fox, accompanied by a characteristic letter; in reply
to which, Mr. Fox expresses his high admiration of many of the poems,
particularly of “Harry Gill,” “We are Seven,” “The Mad Mother,” and “The
Idiot Boy.” Mr. Fox, however, takes exception to blank verse, as a
vehicle for subjects which are to be treated with simplicity.
Other poems of deep interest succeeded these new lyrics; and I will name
“The Leech Gatherer,” and the “Ode to Immortality,” because these poems
have always been great favourites with me; and, further, because I wish
to add here the notes which the poet has furnished respecting them. And
first of all “The Leech Gatherer:”--speaking of this poem to his friends
he says,--
“I will explain to you in prose, my feelings in writing that poem. I
describe myself as having been exalted to the highest pitch of delight
by the joyousness and beauty of Nature; and then as depressed, even in
the midst of these beautiful objects, to the lowest dejection and
despair. A young poet in the midst of the happiness of Nature is
described as overwhelmed by the thoughts of the miserable reverses which
have befallen the happiest of all men--viz., poets. I think of this till
I am so deeply impressed with it, that I consider the manner in which I
was rescued from my dejection and despair almost as an interposition of
Providence. A person reading the poem with feelings like mine, will have
been awed and controlled, expecting something spiritual or supernatural.
What is brought forward? A lonely place, ‘a pond by which an old man
_was_, far from all house and home;’ not _stood_, nor _sat_, but _was_.
The figure presented in the most naked simplicity possible. This feeling
of spirituality or supernaturalness is again referred to as being strong
in my mind in this passage. How came he here? thought I, or what can he
be doing? I then describe him, whether ill or well is not for me to
judge with perfect confidence; but this I _can_ confidently affirm, that
though I believe God has given me a strong imagination, I cannot
conceive a figure more impressive than that of an _old_ man like this,
the survivor of a wife and children, travelling alone among the
mountains, and all lonely places, carrying with him his own fortitude in
the necessities which an unjust state of society has laid upon him. You
speak of his speech as tedious. Everything is tedious when one does not
read with the feelings of the author. The ‘Thorn’ is tedious to
hundreds; and so is the ‘Idiot Boy.’ It is in the character of the old
man to tell his story, which an impatient reader must feel tedious. But,
good heavens! should he ever meet such a figure in such a place; a
pious, self-respecting, miserably infirm old man telling such a tale!”
Having thus shown the feelings of the poet in writing “The Thorn,” I
will quote, secondly and lastly, the note to the celebrated “Ode.”
“This,” he says, “was composed during my residence at Town End,
Grasmere. Two years at least passed between the writing of the first
four stanzas and the remaining part. To the attentive and competent
reader the whole sufficiently explains itself; but there may be no harm
in adverting here to particular feelings or _experiences_ of my own mind
on which the structure of the poem partly rests. Nothing was more
difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a
state applicable to my own being. I have said elsewhere--
“A simple child
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?”
But it was not so much from the source of animal vivacity that my
difficulties came, as from a source of the indomitableness of the spirit
within me. I used to brood over the stories of Enoch and Elijah, and
almost to persuade myself that, whatever might become of others, I
should be translated in something of the same way to heaven. With a
feeling congenial to this, I was often unable to think of external
things as having externally existence, and I communed with all that I
saw as something not apart from, but inherent in my own immaterial
nature. Many times, when going to school, have I grasped at a wall or
tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality. At
that time I was afraid of such processes. In later periods of life I
have deplored, as we have all reason to do, a subjugation of an opposite
character, and have rejoiced over the remembrances, as is expressed in
the lines “Obstinate Questionings,” &c. To that dream-like vividness of
splendour which invests objects of sight in childhood, every one, I
believe, if he would look back, could bear testimony, and I need not
dwell upon it here; but having in the poem regarded it as presumptive
evidence of a prior state of existence, I think it right to protest
against such a conclusion which has given pain to some good and pious
persons, that I meant to inculcate such a belief. It is far too shadowy
a notion to be recommended to faith as more than an element in our
instincts of immortality. But let us bear in mind that, though the idea
is not advanced in revelation, there is nothing there to contradict it,
and the fall of man presents an analogy in its favour. Accordingly, a
pre-existent state has entered into the popular creeds of many nations,
and among all persons acquainted with classic literature is known as an
ingredient in Platonic philosophy. Archimedes said that he could move
the world if he had a point whereon to rest his machine. Who has not
felt the same aspirations as regards the world of his own mind? Having
to wield some of its elements when I was impelled to write this poem on
the ‘Immortality of the Soul,’ I took hold of the notion of
pre-existence, as having sufficient foundation in humanity for
authorising me to make for my purpose the best use of it I could as a
poet.”
Now, in this note, and in the “Ode” which it illustrates, will be found
the key to all Wordsworth’s philosophy, and to the secret of his mind as
a poet. The mystic spiritualism which imbues all his writings, is the
great distinguishing feature which marks and separates him from merely
didactic and descriptive poets; and, were this element wanting in him,
we should have a fine reporter of Nature’s doings--a fine painter of
objective effects--but no creator--no idealist, and therefore, properly
speaking, no _poet_, in the high signification of that term. Luckily,
however, for Wordsworth and for the world, he possessed the spiritual
faculty, and kept it always active; so that his eye, even in the
presence of the meanest objects, was open to the ideal things of which
the symbols they were. The _infinite_ was ever present to his mind, and
he saw all objects through that medium of light and relationship. But
the great band of critics outside the fine region in which Wordsworth
dwelt, could not of course understand this “Ode,” or the general tone of
Wordsworth’s poetry, and therefore they denounced it, as
incomprehensible, mystic, and absurd. But because they had no faculty
with which to appreciate spiritual representation, or even to believe
in spirituality as a fact belonging to the nature of man, that was no
reason in the estimation of our poet, that he should cease to sing his
wonted strains in his wonted manner. In alluding to this depreciation of
his poems, he very sorrowfully says, somewhere in his letters or notes,
that it is a fact that “nineteen out of every twenty persons are unable
to appreciate poetry;” and we are bound to confess that this hard
judgment is truth. Even the better sort of “Reviews,” in which we should
have expected at least a recognition of the genius and noble aims of the
poet, stood out dead against him; and Jeffrey’s “_This will never do_,”
in speaking of “The Excursion,” shows how blindly bigotted and
intolerant were such critics in those days. As a sample of the abuse,
and utter want of judgment which characterised Wordsworth’s critics,
take the following anecdotes, which are recorded by the writer on
“Wordsworth,” (Chamber’s Tracts) as a good joke, or I will hope, as a
picture of the folly of the time.
“A writer in Blackwood for November, 1829, gives an amusing sketch of a
party where the ‘Intimations of Immortality,’ revered by the initiated
as _the_ ‘Revelation,’ was read aloud by a true disciple, in a kind of
unimaginable chant then peculiar to the sect. There were one or two
believers present, with a few neophytes, and one or two absolute and
wicked sceptics! No sooner had the recitation fairly commenced, than one
of the sceptics, of laughing propensities, crammed his handkerchief
half-way down his throat; the others looked keen and composed: the
disciples groaned, and the neophytes shook their heads in deep
conviction.’ The reciter proceeded with deeper unction, till on being
asked by a neophyte to give an explanation, which he was unable to give,
he got angry, and ‘roundly declared, that things so out of the common
way, so sublime, and so abstruse, could be conveyed in no language but
their own. When the reciter came to the words, ‘Callings from us,’ the
neophyte again timidly requested an explanation, and was informed by one
of the sceptics, that they meant the child’s transitory gleams of a
glorious pre-existence, that fall away and vanish almost as soon as they
appear. The obstinate neophyte only replied, in a tone of melancholy,
‘When I think of my childhood, I have only visions of traps and balls,
and whippings. I never remember being “haunted by the eternal mind.” To
be sure I did ask a great many questions, and was tolerably obstinate,
but I fear these are not the “obstinate questionings” of which Mr.
Wordsworth speaks.’ This is but a small sample of the Wordsworthian
scenes and disputations then of every-day occurrence. In 1816 a kind of
shadow of Horace Smith again took the field. It seems that Hogg intended
to publish an anthology of the living British bards, and had written to
some of them for specimens. A wag, who had heard of the project,
immediately issued an anthology, purporting to be this, but containing
merely the coinage of his own brain. As may be imagined, Wordsworth
occupied a prominent corner; and indeed some of the imitations--for most
were imitations rather than parodies--did him no discredit. ‘The Flying
Tailor,’ however, was not an infelicitous burlesque of the poet’s blank
verse:--
“Ere he was put
By his mother into breeches, Nature strung
The muscular part of his anatomy
To an unusual strength; and he could leap,
All unimpeded by his petticoats,
Over the stool on which his mother sat,
More than six inches--o’er the astonished stool!”
Enough, however, has been said about these critics, for the present, at
least. Wordsworth’s was a struggle to get for poetry, once more, a true
utterance; to annihilate the old dead, mechanical form which it had for
the most part assumed, from the time of Pope downwards to him; for
although Burns and Cowper had sounded the first trumpet in this morning
of the resurrection, it was reserved for Wordsworth to awake the dead,
and infuse into them a new and living soul.
During the residence of the poet at Grasmere, his sister kept a diary of
the proceedings of their little household, which, with Wordsworth’s
letters, are the chief biographical records of this period, respecting
the poet himself. The following extracts will give some idea of the calm
and beautiful life which they led together:--
“As we were going along, we were stopped at once, at the distance,
perhaps of fifty yards from our favourite birch-tree; it was yielding
to the gust of wind, with all its tender twigs; the sun shone upon it,
and it glanced in the wind like a flying sunshiny shower; it was a tree
in shape, with a stem and branches, but it was like a spirit of
water....
When we were in the woods before Gowbarrow Park, we saw a few
_daffodils_ close to the water-side.... As we went along there were
more, and yet more; and at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw
there was a long belt of them along the shore. I never saw daffodils so
beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about them; some rested
their heads on these stones, as on a pillow; the rest tossed, and
reeled, and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind,
they looked so gay and glancing.”
The poet was frequently indebted to this beautiful sister for the
_material_ of his poems; and many of the minor pieces are a musical
transformation of her descriptions of natural scenery, and the feelings
with which she beheld it. The poem of “The Beggars” is an instance of
this; and if the reader will peruse “The Daffodils,” and compare it with
Miss Wordsworth’s description of these fair flowers, as quoted above,
he will perhaps discover how much the poet is indebted to her, in this
instance also. Here is the poem.
“I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of _golden daffodils_,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
_Fluttering and dancing in the breeze_.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretch’d in never ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but feel gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought.
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant, or in passive mood,
_They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude_;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.”
In writing to his friends the Wranghams, November 4, 1802, Wordsworth,
after thanking them for their good opinion of this poem, alludes to
“Butler, Montague’s friend,” as having said of it (the poem,) “Aye, a
fine morsel this for the reviewers,”--and adds, “When this was told me
(for I was not present) I observed that there were _two lines_ in that
little poem, which, if thoroughly felt, would annihilate nine-tenths of
the reviews of the kingdom, as they would find no readers. The lines I
alluded to were these--
‘They flash upon that inward eye,
Which is the bliss of solitude.’”
And, now, I will make a few quotations from Miss Wordsworth’s journal:--
“1802. Wednesday, April 28.--Copied the ‘Prioress’ Tale.’ W. in the
orchard tired. I happened to say, that when a child, I would not have
pulled a strawberry blossom; left him, and wrote out the ‘Manciples’
Tale.’ At dinner he came in with the poem on children gathering flowers
[the poem entitled ‘Foresight’].
“April 20.--We went into the orchard after breakfast, and sat there.
The lake calm; sky cloudy. W. began poem on the “Celandine.”
“May 1.--Sowed flower seeds; W. helped me. We sat in the orchard. W.
wrote the ‘Celandine.’ Planned an arbour,--the sun too hot for us.
“May 7.--W. wrote ‘The Leech Gatherer.’
“May 21.--W. wrote two sonnets, ‘On Buonaparte,’ after I had read
Milton’s sonnets to him.
“May 29.--W. wrote his poem “On going to M. H.” I wrote it out.
“June 8.--W. wrote the poem ‘The sun has long been set.’
“June 17.--W. added to the ‘Ode’ he is writing [‘On the Immortality of
the Soul’].
“June 19.--Read Churchill’s ‘Rosciad.’
“July 9.--W. and I set forth to Keswick, on our road to Gallow Hill (to
the Hutchinsons’, near Malton, York). On Monday, the 11th, went to
Eusemere (the Clarksons’). 13th, walked to Emont Bridge, thence by Greta
Bridge. The sun shone cheerfully, and a glorious ride we had over the
moors; every building bathed in golden light; we saw round us miles
beyond miles, Darlington spire, &c. Thence to Thirsk; on foot to the
Hamilton Hills--Rivaux. I went down to look at the ruins; thrushes
singing, cattle feeding amongst the ruins of the abbey; green hillocks
about the ruins--these hillocks scattered over with grovelets of wild
roses, and covered with wild flowers: could have staid in this green
quiet spot till evening, without a thought of moving, but W. was waiting
for me....
July 30.--Left London between five and six o’clock of the morning,
outside the Dover coach. A beautiful morning. The city, St. Paul’s, with
the river--a multitude of little boats--made a beautiful sight, as we
crossed Westminster Bridge [Wordsworth’s sonnet “On Westminster Bridge”
was written on the roof of the Dover coach]; the houses, not overhung by
their clouds of smoke, were spread out endlessly; yet the sun shone so
brightly, with such a pure light, that there was something like the
purity of one of Nature’s own grand spectacles.... Arrived at Calais at
four in the morning of July 31st.
Delightful walks in the evening; seeing far off in the west the coast of
England, like a cloud, crested with Dover Castle, the evening star, and
the glory of the sky: the reflections in the water were more beautiful
than the sky itself; purple waves, brighter than precious stones, for
ever melting away on the sands.
August 29.--Left Calais, at twelve o’clock in the morning, for Dover ...
bathed, and sat on the Dover Cliffs, and looked upon France; we could
see the shores almost as plain as if it were but an English lake.
Mounted the coach at half-past four; arrived in London at six, August
30. Stayed in London till 22nd September: arrived at Gallow Hill on
Friday, September 24th.
On Monday, October 4th, 1802, W. was married, at Brompton church, to
Mary Hutchinson.... We arrived at Grasmere, at six in the evening, on
October 6th, 1802.”
And that the reader may hereafter have a clear perception of the persons
of the poetic household at Grasmere, I will now go to De Quincy, who has
drawn portraits of them, which, in the absence of any similar literary
venture, are invaluable. Speaking of Mrs. Wordsworth, he says,--she was
a tall young woman, with the most winning expression of benignity upon
her features that he had ever beheld; her manner frank, and
unembarrassed. “She was neither handsome or comely, according to the
rigour of criticism, and was generally pronounced _plain-looking_, but
the absence of the practical power and fascination which lie in beauty,
were compensated by sweetness all but angelic, simplicity the most
entire, womanly self-respect, and purity of heart, speaking through all
her looks, acts, and movements. She rarely spoke; so that Mr.
Slave-trade Clarkson used to say of her, that she could only say _God
bless you_. Certainly her intellect was not of an active order; but in a
quiescent, reposing, meditative way, she appeared always to have a
social enjoyment from her own thoughts; and it would have been strange
indeed, if she, who enjoyed such eminent advantages of training, from
the daily society of her husband and his sister; not only hearing the
best parts of English literature daily read, or quoted by short
fragments, but also hearing them very often critically discussed in a
style of great originality and truth, and by the light of strong poetic
feeling,--strange would it have been had any person, dull as the weeds
of Lethe in the native constitution of mind, failed to acquire the
power of judging for herself, and putting forth some functions of
activity. But undoubtedly that was not her element: to feel and to enjoy
a luxurious repose of mind--there was her forte and her peculiar
privilege; and how much better this was adapted to her husband’s taste,
how much more suited to uphold the comfort of his daily life, than a
blue-stocking loquacity, or even a legitimate talent for discussion and
analytic skill may be inferred from his celebrated verses, beginning:
‘She was a phantom of delight
When first she gleamed upon my sight;’
and ending with this matchless winding up of
‘A perfect woman, nobly planned
To warn, to comfort, to command;
And yet----’
going back to a previous thought, and resuming a leading impression of
the whole character--
‘And yet a spirit too, and bright
With something of an angel light.’”
“From these verses,” continues De Quincy, “it may be inferred what were
the qualities which won Wordsworth’s admiration in a wife; for these
verses were written upon Mary Hutchinson, his own cousin, and his wife;
and not written as Coleridge’s memorable verses upon “Sara,” for some
forgotten original Sara, and consequently transferred to every other
Sara who came across his path. Once for all, these exquisite lines were
dedicated to Mrs. Wordsworth; were understood to describe her--to have
been prompted by the feminine graces of her character; hers they are and
will remain for ever.” To these, therefore, De Quincy refers the reader
for an idea infinitely more powerful and vivid, he says, than any he
could give, of what was most important in the partner and second self of
the poet. And to this abstract of her moral portrait he adds the
following remarks upon her physical appearance. “She was tall, as
already stated; her figure was good--except that for my taste it was
rather too slender, and so it always continued. In complexion she was
fair; and there was something peculiarly pleasing even in this accident
of the skin, for it was accompanied by an animated expression of health,
a blessing which in fact she possessed uninterruptedly, very pleasing
in itself, and also a powerful auxiliary of that smiling benignity which
constituted the greatest attraction of her person. Her eyes--the reader
may already know--her eyes
‘Like stars of twilight fair;
Like twilight, too, her dark brown hair;
But all things else about her drawn
From May time and the cheerful dawn.’
But strange it is to tell, that in these eyes of vesper gentleness,
there was a considerable obliquity of vision; and much beyond that
slight obliquity which is often supposed to be an attractive _foible_ of
the countenance; and yet though it _ought_ to have been displeasing or
repulsive, in fact it was not. Indeed, all faults, had they been ten
times and greater, would have been swallowed up or neutralised by that
supreme expression of her features, to the intense unity of which every
lineament in the fixed parts, and every undulation in the moving parts
or play of her countenance, concurred, viz., a sunny benignity--a
radiant perception--such as in this world De Quincy says he never saw
equalled or approached.”
Such, then, is the portrait of Mrs. Wordsworth; and now for that of
sweet, musical, romantic, true and generous Dorothy. She was much
shorter, much slighter, and perhaps in other respects as different from
Mrs. Wordsworth in personal characteristics as could have been wished
for the most effective contrast. “Her face was of Egyptian brown: rarely
in a woman of English birth had a more determined gipsy tan been seen.
Her eyes were not soft, as Mrs. Wordsworth’s, nor were they fierce or
bold; but they were wild and startling, and hurried in their motion. Her
manner was warm, and even ardent; her sensibility seemed
constitutionally deep; and some subtle fire of impassioned intellect
apparently burned within her, which, being alternately pushed forward
into a conspicuous expression by the irrepressible instinct of her
temperament, and then immediately checked in obedience to the decorum of
her sex and age, and her maidenly condition (for she had rejected all
offers of marriage, out of pure sisterly regard to her brother, and
subsequently to her sister’s children) gave to her whole demeanour and
to her conversation, an air of embarrassment and even of self conflict,
that was sometimes distressing to witness. Even her very utterance, and
enunciation often, or rather generally, suffered in point of clearness
and steadiness, from the agitation of her excessive organic sensibility,
and perhaps from some morbid irritability of the nerves. At times the
self-contracting and self-baffling of her feelings, caused her even to
stammer, and so determinedly to stammer, that a stranger who should have
seen her, and quitted her in that state of feeling, would have certainly
set her down for one plagued with that infirmity of speech, as
distressingly as Charles Lamb himself.... The greatest deductions from
Miss Wordsworth’s attractions, and from the exceeding interest which
surrounded her in right of her character, her history, and the relation
which she fulfilled towards her brother, was the glancing quickness of
her motions, and other circumstances in her deportment--such as her
stooping attitude when walking, which gave an ungraceful, and even an
unsexual character to her appearance when out of doors. She did not
cultivate the graces which preside over the person and its carriage. But
on the other hand she was a person of very remarkable endowments
intellectually; and in addition to the other great services which she
rendered to her brother, this may be mentioned as greater than all the
rest, and it was one which equally operated to the benefit of every
casual companion in a walk--viz., the extending sympathy, always ready,
and always profound, by which she made all that one could tell her, all
that one could describe, all that one could quote from a foreign author,
reverberate as it were _a plusieurs reprises_ to one’s own feelings, by
the manifest pleasure it made upon her.... Her knowledge of literature
was irregular, and not systematically built up. She was content to be
ignorant of many things; but what she knew and had really mastered, lay
where it could not be disturbed--in the temple of her own most fervid
heart.”... At the time this sketch was written, both the ladies were
about twenty-eight years old. “Miss Wordsworth,” continues De Quincy,
“had seen most of life, and even of good company; for she had lived,
when quite a girl, under the protection of a near relation at Windsor,
who was a personal favourite of the royal family, and consequently of
George the Third.” Nevertheless, De Quincy thinks that “Mrs. Wordsworth
was the more ladylike person of the two.”
The last figure, and the greatest, in this little group of portraits, is
Wordsworth’s, and it is certainly hit off, like the others, with a free
and discriminating hand.
“Wordsworth was, upon the whole, not a well-made man. His legs were
positively condemned by all the female connoisseurs in legs that De
Quincy ever heard lecture on that topic; not that they were bad in any
way that would force itself upon your notice--there was no absolute
deformity about them; and undoubtedly they had been serviceable legs,
beyond the average standard of human requisition; for with these
identical legs Wordsworth must have travelled a distance of one hundred
and seventy-five to one hundred and eighty thousand English miles,--a
mode of exertion which to him stood in the stead of wine, spirits, and
all other stimulants whatever to the animal spirits; to which he has
been indebted for a life of unclouded happiness, and even for much of
what is most excellent in his writings. But useful as they have proved
themselves, the Wordsworthian legs were certainly not ornamental; it
was really a pity that he had not another pair for evening dress
parties, when no boots lend their friendly aid to mask our imperfections
from the eyes of female rigourists--the _elegantes formarum
spectatrices_.... But the worst part of Wordsworth’s person was the
bust; there was a narrowness and a stoop about the shoulders, which
became striking, and had an effect of meanness, when brought into close
juxtaposition with a figure of a most statuesque “order.” ... Further
on, De Quincy relates how he was walking out with Miss Wordsworth, the
poet being before them, deeply engaged in conversation with a person of
fine proportions, and towering figure,--when the contrast was so marked,
and even painful to the poet’s sister, that she could not help
exclaiming: “Is it possible? Can that be William? How very mean he
looks!” “And yet,” continues De Quincy, “Wordsworth was of a good
height, just five feet ten, and not a slender man; on the contrary, by
the side of Southey, his limbs looked thick, almost in a
disproportionate degree. But the total effect of Wordsworth’s person was
always worst in a state of motion; for, according to the remark I have
heard from the county people, ‘he walked like a cade;’ a cade being a
kind of insect which advances by an oblique motion. This was not always
perceptible, and in part depended (I believe) upon the position of his
arms; when either of these happened (as was very customary) to be
inserted into the unbuttoned waistcoat, his walk had a wry or twisted
appearance; and not appearance only,--for I have known it by slow
degrees gradually to edge off his companion, from the middle to the side
of the high road.’ Meantime his face--that was one which would have made
amends for greater defects of figure; it was certainly the noblest for
intellectual effect, that, De Quincy says, he ever saw. Haydon, the
eminent painter, in his great picture of _Christ’s Entry into
Jerusalem_, has introduced Wordsworth in the character of a disciple
attending his Divine Master.... “Wordsworth’s face was of the long
order, often classed as oval, ... and if not absolutely the indigenous
face of the lake district, at any rate a variety of that face,--a
modification of the original type. The head was well filled out.... The
forehead was not remarkably lofty ... but it was, perhaps, remarkable
for its breadth and expansive development. Neither were the eyes large,
... on the contrary, they were rather small; but that did not interfere
with their effect, which at times was fine, and suitable to his
intellectual character.... The mouth and the region of the mouth--the
whole circumference of the mouth, were about the strongest feature in
Wordsworth’s face. There was nothing especially to be noticed in the
mere outline of the lips, but the swell and protrusion of the parts
above and around the mouth are noticeable.” And then De Quincy tells us
why. He had read that Milton’s surviving daughter, when she saw the
crayon drawing representing the likeness of her father, in Richardson
the painter’s thick octavo volume of Milton, burst out in a rapture of
passionate admiration, exclaiming--“This is my father! this is my dear
father!” And when De Quincy had procured this book, he saw in this
likeness of Milton a perfect portrait of Wordsworth. All the
peculiarities, he says, were retained--“A drooping appearance about the
eyelids--that remarkable swell that I have noticed about the mouth,--the
way in which the hair lay upon the forehead. In two points only there
was a deviation from the rigorous truth of Wordsworth’s features--the
face was a little too short and too broad, and the eyes were too
large.--There was also a wreath of laurel about the head, which, (as
Wordsworth remarked,) disturbed the natural expression of the whole
picture; else, and with these few allowances, he also admitted that the
resemblance was, _for that period of his life_ (but let not that
restriction be forgotten;) perfect, or, as nearly so as art could
accomplish. This period was about the year 1807.
Here, then, thanks to De Quincy, who, for these “Lake Reminiscences”
alone, is well worthy of a pension, which, had I been Prime Minister, he
should have had long ago; for no living man is more deserving of this
distinction for the service he has rendered to our literature:--here, I
say, we have portraits of the inmates of the white cottage at Grasmere;
and beautiful portraits they are. One could have wished that Dr.
Wordsworth had given a little more vitality to his biography of these
inmates--that he had used his pallet and brushes a little more freely
(for he _can_ paint, if he likes, as the description of Rydal Mount
shows); but instead of vitality, we have dry facts--which are the mere
bones of biography--and these are often strung together with very
indifferent tendons. We have no picture, for example, of the poet’s
wedded life at this time--we cannot get _behind_ the scenes; all we know
is, that a wedding had taken place, and the good doctor tells us, that
the twain were afterwards very happy all the days of their life, just as
fairy tales wind up. There seems to be a good deal of needless reserve
about this matter; and I, for one, do not thank the greedy poet when he
says, touching his private life, that “a stranger intermeddleth not with
his joy.” No one wishes to _meddle_ with it; but to _sympathise_ with
it, and to know how this joy manifested itself in the little household,
appear to be legitimate demands of the curious lovers of Wordsworth,
and, indeed of all curious men, whether lovers of Wordsworth or not. But
the doctor has nothing to say on these points; and all we can gather
respecting them is to be found in the “Prelude,” and one or two other
poems. Here is the extract from the “Prelude,” expressing the poet’s
feelings as he left the cottage with his sister before his marriage:--
“Fareweil! thou little nook of mountain-ground,
Farewell! we leave thee to Heaven’s peaceful care,
Thee, and the cottage, which thou dost surround.
We go for one to whom ye will be dear;
And she will prize this bower, this Indian shed,
Our own contrivance--building without peer;
A gentle maid....
Will come to you, to you herself will wed,
And love the blessed life that we lead here.”
And in this place it will be well to give De Quincy’s sketch of the
cottage itself, where this blessed life was lived, and to share which
the poet went to fetch his bride from her father’s house:--“A little
semi-vestibule between two doors, prefaced the entrance into what might
be considered the principal room of the cottage. It was an oblong
square, not above eight and a half feet high, sixteen feet long, and
twelve broad; very prettily wainscotted, from the floor to the ceiling,
with dark polished oak, slightly embellished with carving. One window
there was--a perfect and unpretending cottage window--with little
diamond panes, embowered, at almost every season of the year, with
roses; and in the summer and autumn, with jessamine and other fragrant
shrubs. From the exuberant luxuriance of the vegetation around it, and
from the dark hue of the wainscotting, this window, though tolerably
large, did not furnish a very powerful light to one who entered from the
open air.... I was ushered up a little flight of stairs--fourteen in
all--to a little dingy room, or whatever the reader chooses to call it.
Wordsworth himself has described the fire-place of this, his--
‘Half kitchen and half parlour fire.’
It was not fully seven feet six inches high, and in other respects of
pretty nearly the same dimensions as the rustic hall below. There was
however, in a small recess, a library of perhaps three hundred volumes,
which seemed to consecrate the nook as the poet’s study, and composing
room; and so occasionally it was.”
So far then, De Quincy; and the following poem, already alluded to, will
give an idea of the poet’s feelings respecting the bride he brought with
him to share the cottage blessedness of Grasmere.
“She was a phantom of delight,
When first she gleamed upon my sight;
A lovely apparition, sent
To be a moment’s ornament.
Her eyes as stars of twilight fair;
Like twilight too her dusky hair;
But all things else about her drawn
From May time and the cheerful dawn;
A dancing shape, an image gay,
To haunt, to startle, and waylay.
I saw her upon nearer view,
A spirit, yet a woman too!
Her household motions light and free,
And steps of virgin liberty;
A countenance in which did meet
Sweet records, promises as sweet;
A creature not too bright or good
For human nature’s daily food;
For transient sorrows, simple wiles,
Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles.
And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine;
A being breathing thoughtful breath,
A traveller between life and death;
The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength and skill;
A perfect woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, to command;
And yet a spirit still, and bright,
With something of angelic light.”
This beautiful poem, so full of calm affection, and intellectual homage,
is a fair sample of Wordsworth’s love poems, as well as a charming
tribute to his wife’s loveliness and virtue. In early life, it is
thought by De Quincy and others, that the poet had experienced a
tragical termination to an early love, and that the poems of which
“Lucy” is the theme, were addressed to the object of this love; but
Wordsworth always maintained a mysterious silence about the whole
affair, and would never resolve the riddle of this attachment. The
“Lucy” poems, however, beautiful as they are, are chiefly valuable as
exhibiting the _kind_ of passion which _love_ showed itself in
Wordsworth. Passion, in the proper meaning of the word--viz., deep,
fiery, intense, and all-embracing feeling, was certainly not
Wordsworth’s. His love was calm, intellectual, and emotional--but it was
not passion. All his love seems to have passed through his head before
it touched his heart. And yet he loved his wife, and lived, as I said
before, very happily with her.
Mrs. Wordsworth, however, was a true household woman, and had not
acquired that faculty of walking which Wordsworth and his sister
possessed, in so eminent a degree. In about a year, therefore, after his
marriage--that is, August 14, 1803,--we find Wordsworth parting from his
wife, and making a tour into Scotland, with his sister and Coleridge,
taking Carlisle on the way. When they arrived at Longtown, they found a
guide-post pointing out two roads,--one to Edinburgh, the other to
Glasgow. They took the latter road, and entered Scotland by crossing the
river Sark. Edinburgh was no favourite place with Wordsworth, and for
reasons which are sufficiently obvious. The tourists then passed through
Gretna Green to Annan, leaving the Solway Frith, and the Cumberland
hills to their left hand. On Thursday the 18th August, they went to the
churchyard where Burns is buried; a bookseller accompanied them, of whom
Miss Wordsworth had bought some little books for Johnny, the poet’s
first child. He showed them first the outside of Burns’ house, where he
had lived the last three years of his life, and where he died. It had a
mean appearance, and was in a bye situation, white-washed, and dirty
about the doors, as all Scotch houses are; flowering plants in the
windows. They went on to visit his grave. He lies in a corner of the
churchyard, and his second son, Francis Wallace, is beside him. There
was no stone to mark the spot. The greatest bard that had sung in
Britain for some centuries, lay buried there like a dog. A hundred
guineas, however, had been collected to build a monument over his ashes.
“There,” said the bookseller to the visitors, pointing to a pompous
monument, a few yards off, “there lies Mr. John Bushby, a remarkably
clever man; he was an attorney, and hardly ever lost a cause he
undertook. Burns made many a lampoon upon him; and there they rest as
you see.” Yes, indeed, there they rested; and that was the deep, sad
moral of the story. We shall all rest so at last. They then went to
Burns’ house. Mrs. Burns was not at home, but had gone to the sea-shore
with her children. They saw the print of “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,”
which Burns mentioned in one of his letters having received as a
present. In the room above the parlour Burns died, and his son
after him; and of all who saw this parlour on this 18th of
August,--Wordsworth and his sister, Coleridge and the poor
bookseller--who survives? “There they rest, as you see.”
The tourists travelled subsequently through the Vale of the Nith, and
crossing the Frith, reached Brownhill, where they slept.
“I cannot take leave of this country,” says Miss Wordsworth, in her
Journal, “without mentioning that we saw the Cumberland mountains within
half a mile of Ellisland (Burns’ house) the last view we had of them.
Drayton has prettily described the connection which the neighbourhood
has with ours, when he makes Skiddaw say--
‘Scurfell from the sky,
That Annandale doth crown, with a most amorous eye,
Salutes me every day, or at my pride looks grim,
Oft threatening me with clouds, as I oft threatening him!’
These lines occurred to William’s memory; and while he and I were
talking of Burns, and the prospect he must have had, perhaps from his
own door, of Skiddaw and his companions, we indulged ourselves in
fancying that we might have been personally known to each other, and he
have looked upon those objects with more pleasure for our sakes. We
talked of Coleridge’s children and family, then at the foot of Skiddaw,
and our own new-born John, a few miles behind it; and the grave of
Burns’ son, which we had just seen, by the side of that of his father;
and the stories we had heard at Dumfries, respecting the dangers which
his surviving children were exposed to, filled us with melancholy
concern, which had a kind of connection with ourselves, and with
thoughts, some of which were afterwards expressed in the following
supposed address to the sons of the ill-fated poet:--
“Ye now are toiling up life’s hill,
’Tis twilight time of good and ill!”
During this Scotch tour the party walked through the vale of the Clyde,
visited Glengyle, the scene of some of Rob Roy’s exploits, Loch Lomond,
Inverary, Glencoe, Kenmore, and the Duke of Athol’s gardens; resting
whilst in this latter place on “the heather seat which Burns was so loth
to quit that moonlight evening when he first went to Blair Castle.” Then
they went to the Pass of Killicranky, respecting which Wordsworth wrote
the following sonnet.
“Six thousand veterans practis’d in war’s game,
Tried men, at Killicranky were arrayed
Against an equal host that wore the plaid,
Shepherds and herdsmen. Like a whirlwind came
The Highlanders; the slaughter spread like flame;
And Garry, thundering down his mountain road,
Was stopped, and could not breathe beneath the load
Of the dead bodies! ’Twas a day of shame
For them whom precept, and the pedantry
Of cold mechanic battle do enslave.
Oh for a single hour of that Dundee,
Who on that day the word of onset gave!
Like conquest might the men of England see!
And their foes find a like inglorious grave.
In the year 1803, when this sonnet was written, an invasion was hourly
looked for; and Miss Wordsworth and her brother (for Coleridge had left
them, worried by the “evil chance,” and something worse perhaps at Loch
Lomond) could not but think with some regret of the times when from the
now depopulated Highlands, forty or fifty thousand men might have been
poured down for the defence of the country, under such leaders as the
Marquis of Montrose, or the brave man who had so distinguished himself
upon the ground where they were standing.
The tourists returned by way of Edinburgh, visiting Peebles and Melrose
Abbey. Sir Walter, then Mr. Scott, was, at the time of their visit to
the abbey, travelling as Sheriff of Selkirk to the assizes at Jedburgh.
They dined together at the Melrose Inn. Sir Walter was their guide to
the abbey, taking them into Mr. Riddel’s gardens and orchard, where they
had a sweet view of it through trees, the town being quite excluded. Sir
Walter was of course at home in the history and tradition of these noble
ruins, and pointed out to his visitors many things which would otherwise
have escaped their notice. Beautiful pieces of sculpture in obscure
corners, flowers, leaves, and other ornaments, which being cut in the
durable pale red stone of which the abbey is built, were quite perfect.
What destroyed, however, the effect of the abbey, was the barbarous
taste of the good Scotch people who had built an ugly, damp charnel
house within the ruins, which they called a church!
Quitting Melrose, they crossed the Teviot by a stone bridge, and
visited Jedburgh. It rained all the way, and they arrived at the inn
just before the judges were expected out of court to dinner, very wet
and cold. There was no private room but the judges’ sitting-room, and
they had to get private lodgings in the town. Scott sat with them an
hour in the evening, and repeated a part of his “Lay of the Last
Minstrel.” Their landlady was a very remarkable woman; and Wordsworth
wrote some verses expressive of the feelings with which she inspired
him. Here is the burden.
“Aye! twine thy brows with fresh spring flowers,
And call a train of laughing hours,
And bid them dance, and bid them sing,
And thou, too, mingle in the ring.”
Miss Wordsworth gives the following sweet picture of the home at
Grasmere on their return:--
“September 25th.--A beautiful autumnal day. Breakfasted at a
public-house by the road-side; dined at Threlkeld; and arrived there
between eight and nine o’clock, where we found _Mary in perfect health.
Joanna Hutchinson with her, and little John asleep in the
clothes-basket by the fire._”
At the ferry-house, and waterfall of Loch Lomond, Wordsworth had been
struck with the beauty and kindness of two girls whom they met there,
and on his return to Grasmere he wrote the following lines upon one of
them:--
“Sweet Highland girl, a very shower
Of beauty is thy earthly dower!
Twice seven consenting years have shed
Their utmost bounty on thy head:
And these grey rocks; this household lawn;
These trees, a veil just half withdrawn;
This fall of water that doth make
A murmur near the silent lake;
This little bay, a quiet road,
That holds in shelter thy abode;
In truth together ye do seem
Like something fashioned in a dream;
Such forms as from their covert peep
When earthly cares are laid asleep.
Yet dream and vision as thou art,
I bless thee with a human heart:
God shield thee to thy latest years!
I neither know thee, nor thy peers;
And yet my eyes are filled with tears.”
This Scottish tour was a little episode in the quiet history of the
poet’s residence at Grasmere. The truth is, that Wordsworth could not at
this time rest long, even in his beautiful Grasmere, without the
excitement of pedestrian travel and adventure. It was likewise a part of
his education as a poet; the knowledge which he thus acquired of men,
manners, and scenery. He had devoted himself to poetry; and every thing
that tended to feed the divine faculty, he grasped at with an avidity
equally as intense as that with which your mere canine man grasps at
food for his perishing body. Nothing comes amiss to him; high and low,
great and small; from the daffodil to Skiddaw--from Skiddaw to heaven
and its hosts of glorious stars,--all are seized by this omnivorous
poet, fused in his mind, and reproduced by him in song. His limited
means are no barrier to his wanderings; he and his sister can live upon
black bread and water, so far as rations are concerned; but setting
aside the necessity of the case, this economy is for a sacred
purpose,--viz.:--that they may enjoy the communion of Nature, and
partake of her spiritual banquets. The gods, however, had determined to
pet Wordsworth, and recompense him for his religious devotion to their
doings through early life; and, to say nothing of the bequest of Raisley
Calvert, the second Lord Lonsdale, just as the poet needed a wife, and
larger means, paid the debt which his predecessor owed to Wordsworth’s
father, amounting to £1,800, as the share of each member of the family.
This was a most fortunate circumstance to Wordsworth and his sister;
though it mattered little to the rest, because they were well appointed
in life. De Quincy says that, a regular succession of similar, but
superior, God-sends fell upon Wordsworth, to enable him to sustain his
expenditure duly, as it grew with the growing claims upon his purse; and
after enumerating the three items of “good luck,” mentioned above, he
adds:--and “fourthly, some worthy uncle of Mrs. Wordsworth’s was pleased
to betake himself to a better world; leaving to various nieces, and
especially to Mrs. W., something or other, I forget what, but it was
expressed by thousands of pounds. At this moment Wordsworth’s family had
begun to increase; and the worthy old uncle, like every body else in
Wordsworth’s case (I wish I could say the same in my own), finding his
property clearly ‘wanted,’ and as people would tell him ‘bespoke,’ felt
how very indelicate it would look for him to stay any longer, and so he
moved off. But Wordsworth’s family, and the wants of that family, still
continued to increase; and the next person, being the fifth, who stood
in the way, and must, therefore, have considered himself rapidly growing
into a nuisance, was the Stamp-Distributor for the county of
Westmorland. About March, 1814, I think it was, that this very
comfortable situation was vacated. Probably it took a month for
the news to reach him; because in April, and not before, feeling
that he had received a proper notice to quit, he, good man--this
Stamp-Distributor--like all the rest, distributed himself and his
offices into two different places,--the latter falling of course into
the hands of Wordsworth.
“This office, which it was Wordsworth’s pleasure to speak of as a
_little_ one, yielded, I believe, somewhere about £500 a year. Gradually
even that, with all former sources of income, became insufficient; which
ought not to surprise anybody; for a son at Oxford, as a
gentleman-commoner, could spend at least £300 per annum; and there were
other children. Still it is wrong to say, that it had become
insufficient; as usual it had not come to that; but, on the first
symptoms arising that it would soon come to that, somebody, of course,
had notice to consider himself a sort of nuisance elect,--and in this
case it was the Distributor of Stamps for the county of Cumberland.” And
in this strain of good-humoured banter--stimulated no doubt by his own
precarious circumstances, in a measure, circumstances which ought not in
his case to be precarious,--De Quincy relates how another £400 a year
was added to the poet’s income from the increase of his district as
Stamp-Distributor.
In 1842, since De Quincy wrote the above, Wordsworth resigned this
office, and it was bestowed upon his son,--whilst he (the poet,) was put
down upon the Civil-list for £300 a year, and finally made Poet
Laureate.
To return, however, to the more even tenor of these Memoirs:--A
circumstance occurred in the year 1803, shortly after the Scottish tour,
which will further illustrate the “good luck” of Wordsworth, although in
this instance he did not avail himself of it. Sir George Beaumont, the
painter, out of pure sympathy with the poet,--and before he had seen or
written to him,--purchased a beautiful little estate at Applethwaite,
near Keswick, and presented it to him, in order that he (Wordsworth) and
Coleridge, who was then residing at Greta Hall, might have the pleasure
of a nearer and more permanent intercourse. A fragment of Sir George’s
letter (good Sir George, who _could_ recognise genius, and was noble and
generous enough to prove his recognition in a most practical form) is
printed in Dr. Wordsworth’s “Memoirs,” and it shews what a fine heart he
had, God bless him! It is dated October 24, 1803, and runs thus:--
“I had a most ardent desire to bring you and Coleridge together. I
thought with pleasure on the increase of enjoyment you would receive
from the beauties of Nature, by being able to communicate more
frequently your sensations to each other, and that this would be the
means of contributing to the pleasure and improvement of the world, by
stimulating you both to poetic exertions.” The benevolent project of
this excellent baronet was defeated, partly because Coleridge soon
after left Greta Hall for a warmer climate, being impelled to this
course by ill health, and partly from private considerations respecting
Wordsworth and his family, which, however, do not transpire in the
“Memoirs.” A curious fact in connection with this gift of Sir George is,
that Wordsworth neglected to thank the donor, or to take the slightest
notice of it, for eight weeks after the writings were placed in his
hands. In a letter addressed to the baronet, dated Grasmere, October
14th, 1803, Wordsworth apologises for this apparent neglect, and
attributes it partly to the overpowering feelings with which the gift
inspired him, and partly to a nervous dread of writing, and a fear lest
he should acknowledge the honour that had been done him in an unworthy
manner. “This feeling,” he says, “was indeed so very strong in me, as to
make me look upon the act of writing to you, not as the work of a
moment, but as a thing not to be done, but in my best, my purest, my
happiest moments.” Thus strangely began one of the few friendships which
Wordsworth cultivated with men, and one which lasted through the life of
the noble-hearted baronet, who, in dying, in the year 1827 (on the 7th
of February), left Wordsworth an annuity of £100 to defray the expenses
of an annual tour. (Another instance of the poet’s “good luck!”) It is
right to add, that Wordsworth was deeply affected by his friend’s death,
and that he has left, in his “Elegiac Musings,” some noble lines to his
memory.
Amongst the occasional visitors at Grasmere between the years 1800 and
1804, was Captain John Wordsworth, the poet’s second brother, who was
eventually lost in the Abergaveny East Indiaman, on the 5th of February,
1804. His brother was a man of fine taste and discernment, and
prophesied in various letters and at various times, the ultimate success
of Wordsworth’s poetry. Wordsworth felt severely the untimely death of
his brother, whom he loved with that devoted family fondness, which was
characteristic of him. Writing to Sir George Beaumont upon this event,
he says: “February 11th, 1808. This calamitous news we received at two
o’clock to-day; and I write to you from a house of mourning. My poor
sister, and my wife, who loved him almost as we did (for he was one of
the most amiable of men) are in miserable affliction, which I do all in
my power to alleviate; but, Heaven knows, I want consolation myself. I
can say nothing higher of my ever dear brother than that he was worthy
of his sister, who is now weeping beside me, and of the friendship of
Coleridge; meek, affectionate, silently enthusiastic, loving all quiet
things, and a poet in everything but words.” The lyre of the poet
sounded his praises in three poems. The first is entitled “Elegiac
Stanzas suggested by a picture of Peel Castle in a storm, painted by Sir
George Beaumont.” The next is “To a Daisy,” which suggests his brother’s
love of quiet and peaceful things, and closes with the tragedy of his
death, and the discovery and final burial of the body in the country
churchyard of Wythe, a village near Weymouth.
“And thou, sweet flower, shalt sleep and wake,
Upon his senseless grave,”
he concludes, returning thus finely to the simple flower which suggested
the melancholy train of thought that runs through the poem. The third of
these sad lyrical verses refers to the scene where the poet bade his
brother farewell, on the mountains from Grasmere to Patterdale. The
verses upon the “Picture of Peel Castle,” is the best of all these
pieces; and as a fitting conclusion to this brief memorial of the poet’s
brother, I will transcribe it.
“I was thy neighbour once, thou rugged pile!
Four summer weeks I dwelt in sight of thee:
I saw thee every day; and all the while
Thy form was sleeping on a glassy sea.
So pure thy sky, so quiet was the air!
So like, so very like, was day to day!
Where’er I looked, thy image still was there;
It trembled, but it never passed away.
How perfect was the calm! it seemed no sleep;
No mood, which season takes away or brings:
I could have fancied that the mighty deep
Was even the gentlest of all gentle things.
Ah! _then_, if mine had been the painter’s hand,
To express what then I saw; and add the gleam,
The light that never was on sea, or land,
The consecration, and the poet’s dream;
I would have planted thee, thou hoary pile!
Amid a world how different from this!
Beside a sea that could not cease to smile
On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss.
A picture had it been of lasting ease,
Elysian quiet, without toil or strife;
No motion but the moving tide, a breeze,
Or merely silent Nature’s breathing life.
Such, in the fond illusion of my heart,
Such picture would I at that time have made;
And seen the soul of truth in every part,
A steadfast peace that might not be betrayed.
So once it would have been--‘tis so no more;
I have submitted to a new control;
A power is gone, which nothing can restore;
A deep distress hath humanised my soul.
Not for a moment could I now behold
A smiling sea, and be what I have been;
The feeling of my loss will ne’er be old;
This, which I know, I speak with mind serene.
Then, Beaumont, friend! who would have been the friend,
If he had lived, of him whom I deplore,
This work of thine I blame not, but commend;
This sea in anger, and that dismal shore.
O ’tis a passionate work!--yet wise and well;
Well chosen is the spirit that is here;
That hulk, which labours in the deadly swell,
This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear!
And this huge castle, standing here sublime,
I love to see the look with which it braves,
Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time,
The lightning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves.
Farewell, farewell, the heart that lives alone,
Housed in a dream, at distance from the kind!
Such happiness, wherever it be known,
Is to be pitied, for ’tis surely blind.
But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer,
And frequent sights of what is to be borne!
Such sights, or worse, as are before me here.--
Not without hope we suffer, and we mourn.”
--1805.
About a month after his brother’s death, Wordsworth concluded his
“Prelude,” upon which he had been employed for upwards of six years. In
allusion to this poem, Coleridge, in the “Table Talk,” says: “I cannot
help regretting that Wordsworth did not first publish his thirteen books
(there are fourteen of them,) “On the growth of an individual
mind,”--superior, as I used to think, on the whole, to the “Excursion!”
... Then the plan laid out, and I believe partly suggested by me was,
that Wordsworth should assume the station of a man in mental repose,
one whose principles were made up, and so prepared to deliver upon
authority a system of philosophy. He was to treat man as man, a subject
of eye, ear, touch and taste, in contact with external nature, and
inferring the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out of
the senses; then he was to describe the pastoral and other states of
society, assuming something of the Juvenalian spirit as he approached
the high civilization of cities and towns, and opening a melancholy
picture of the present state of degeneracy and vice; thence he was to
infer and reveal the proof of, and necessity for, the whole state of man
and society being subject to, and illustrative of, a redemptive process
in operation, showing how this idea reconciled all the anomalies, and
promised future glory and restoration.”
Wordsworth himself unfolds his own plan of the poem to Sir George
Beaumont, in a letter dated December 25th, 1804. It was to consist,
first of all, of a poem to be called “The Recluse,” wherein the poet was
to express in verse, his own feelings concerning Man, Nature, and
Society--and, secondly, a poem on his _earlier life_ or the _growth of
his own mind_. This latter poem was “The Prelude,” two thousand verses
of which, he says, in the same letter, he had written during the last
ten weeks. “The Prelude,” therefore, which was not published till after
the poet’s death, was first written, and “The Recluse,” subsequently.
Only a part of this poem, however--viz., “The Excursion,” except, of
course, “The Prelude,” is published; “The Recluse” Proper, being still
in MS.
Besides these larger works, Wordsworth threw off--not without care and
meditation,--for no man ever wrote with more method and purpose--many
minor poems, and amongst them was “The Waggoner,” dedicated to Charles
Lamb, but not published until 1819. It was in this year (1805) that
Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, and Sir Humphry Davy ascended Helvellyn
together; and learned the sad story of poor Charles Gough, who perished
in attempting to cross over Helvellyn to Grasmere, by slipping from a
steep part of the rock, where the ice was not thawed, and beside whose
remains his faithful dog was found many days afterwards, almost starved
to death. This affecting incident afforded a theme for both
poets--viz., Sir Walter and Wordsworth, and each wrote upon it without
knowing that the other was similarly engaged. Scott’s poem is entitled
“Helvellyn,” and Wordsworth’s “Fidelity.”
In 1807, Wordsworth issued two new volumes of poetry, in 12mo., which
contained some of his best pieces; but which, like all his poems, did
not gain immediate popularity. It is true that a fourth edition of the
“Lyrical Ballads” had been called for, and that this indicated a growing
taste in the public mind for Wordsworth’s effusions; but the critics
assailed him with the bitterest animosity, and on the whole without much
reason. With no reason, in short, so far as the poetic principles--the
canon of his poetry--was concerned, and only with some show of reason in
the instance of his peculiar mannerism. For although he was often misled
by his craving after simplicity, and uttered what might be called
without any violation of truth or desecration of the poet’s name and
memory--_drivel_--still he had published poems of a very high order,
such as had not been published in the lifetime of any man then living.
The critics, however, could not let him alone, could not see the
manifest beauties of his poetry, or _would_ not see them, but denounced
the whole without reserve or mercy. In the meanwhile Coleridge cheered
him on, and on his return to England, in the summer of 1806, Wordsworth
read “The Prelude” to him in the gardens of Coleorton, near
Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire, where the poet was then residing at
the invitation of Sir George Beaumont; and the high commendations which
Coleridge poured upon this poem animated Wordsworth to increased
exertion and perseverance. During his residence at this beautiful house,
he composed the noble “Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle,”--the
finest thing of the kind in our language; and he left behind him as
usual, many records of his feelings at Coleorton. The poet’s letters to
Sir George Beaumont and an occasional one to Sir Walter Scott, are
amongst the most interesting transcripts we have of his mind at this
period.
It was in the beginning of the winter, 1807, that De Quincy paid his
first visit to Wordsworth; and I find great fault with Dr. Wordsworth
that he makes no allusion to De Quincy in all his memoirs of the poet.
This is the more unpardonable, inasmuch as De Quincy is a man of the
highest calibre--of the most refined taste,--of the profoundest
scholarship, and possessing the widest acquaintance with general
literature--to say nothing of his transcendant genius--of any man who
has lived in this generation. Unpardonable, likewise, because De Quincy
was a devout lover, and a chivalrous defender of Wordsworth, when it was
not fashionable to speak well of him, and when a man who praised him
stood a fair chance of being estimated, if not called, a madman. Neither
can I ever forgive the poet himself for his cold neglect of the great
Opium Eater. Such a man as De Quincy is not to be treated with contumely
and despite, even by such a man as Wordsworth; for assuredly, in point
of genius, both men stood pretty much upon the same level, and
Wordsworth was far inferior to De Quincy in the other important matters
specified above. De Quincy’s demon did not inspire him to write verses,
but to write essays--and what essays! I do not know the writer who has
ever taken so wide a range of subjects, and written upon them in such
grand and noble English. De Quincy was a prose architect, Wordsworth a
poetic one; and this is all the difference between them. In genius they
were equal. Some day, perhaps, De Quincy will be better appreciated. We
are indebted to De Quincy for the best account existing of the poet, his
family, and home at Grasmere and Rydal; and no one would go to Dr.
Wordsworth for information when he could go to De Quincy. Not that I
have anything to say against Dr. Wordsworth personally, but I dislike
his studied exclusiveness. The men who for long years were in constant
intercourse with the poet, and on terms of friendship with him--Wilson,
for example, as well as De Quincy--cannot be shut out from his biography
without manifest injustice both to them and to the poet; and yet this is
systematically done. Perhaps the good doctor has a clerical horror of
his great-uncle being associated with loose Men of Letters; men, too, of
not quite an orthodox cast in their opinions; genial, jovial, and full
of all good fellowship besides. But of what avail could such horror so
manifested be? The world _will_ know the truth at last; and it is right
they should; and one thing is certain enough, that Wordsworth will
suffer no dishonour in the companionship of De Quincy and Wilson.
When I first read No. 1, of the “Lake Reminiscences,” by De Quincy, in
“Tait’s Magazine,” I could scarcely believe what I read; and nothing
would have convinced me of its truth, short of the authority which
announced it. I had looked upon Wordsworth as a kind-hearted, generous,
and unselfish man; noble, friendly, and without the vanity which has so
often blurred the fair page of a great man’s nature. I was sorry to find
that I was mistaken in this estimate of the poet; and that he, like me,
and all the rest of us, had faults and failings manifold. De Quincy’s
own account of his first visit to Wordsworth, the deep reverence with
which he regarded him, and the overwhelming feelings which beset him on
the occasion, is very affecting; and contrasted with the poet’s
subsequent treatment of him, his wanton throwing away of that noble and
affectionate heart, and his total disregard of the high intellectual
homage which De Quincy offered to him, is still more affecting, and
full, likewise, of pain and sorrow. Whilst he was a student at Oxford,
De Quincy twice visited the Lake Country, on purpose to pay his respects
to Wordsworth; and once, he says, he went forward from Coniston to the
very gorge of Hammerscar, “from which the whole vale of Grasmere
suddenly breaks upon the view in a style of almost theatrical surprise,
with its lovely valley stretching in the distance, the lake lying
immediately below, with its solemn boat-like island, of five acres in
size, seemingly floating on its surface; its exquisite outline on the
opposite shore, revealing all its little bays, and wild sylvan margin,
feathered to the edge with wild flowers and ferns!
“In one quarter a little wood, stretching for about half a mile towards
the outlet of the lake, more directly in opposition to the spectator; a
few green fields: and beyond them, just two bow-shots from the water, a
little white cottage gleaming from the midst of trees, with a vast and
seemingly never-ending series of ascents, rising above it to the height
of more than three thousand feet. That little cottage was Wordsworth’s,
from the time of his marriage, until 1808. Afterwards, for many a year,
it was mine. Catching one glimpse of this loveliest of landscapes, I
retreated, like a guilty thing, for fear I might be surprised by
Wordsworth, and then returned faint-hearted to Coniston, and so to
Oxford, _re infecta_.--This was in 1806. And thus, from mere excess of
nervous distrust in my own powers for sustaining a conversation with
Wordsworth, I had for nearly five years shrunk from a meeting for which,
beyond all things under heaven, I longed.”
This nervous distrust yielded in after life to a sober confidence, and a
matchless power of unfolding his thoughts colloquially. In the
meanwhile, that is to say, in 1807, Coleridge returned from Malta, and
De Quincy was introduced to him first of all at Bridgewater, and met him
again at the Hot-wells, near Bristol,--when, upon discovering that he
was anxious to put his wife and children under some friendly escort, on
their return homewards to Keswick, De Quincy offered to unite with Mrs.
Coleridge in a post-chaise to the north. Accordingly they set out.
Hartley Coleridge was then nine years old, Derwent about seven, and the
beautiful little daughter about five. In such companionship, then, did
De Quincy pay his first visit to Wordsworth, at Grasmere,--a most
interesting and artistic account of which he has written in “Tait’s
Magazine,” and to which I have been frequently indebted in the
compilation of these Memoirs. The cottage has already been described,
and the reader who has followed the course of this imperfect history,
will remember the portraits of its illustrious inmates. Let us now see
how it fared with De Quincy, when he met the mighty man of his heart. He
was “stunned,” when Wordsworth shook him cordially by the hand, and went
mechanically towards the house, leaving Mrs. Coleridge in the chaise at
the door. The re-appearance of the poet, however, after exercising due
hospitality to his lady guest, gave him courage, and he found that the
said poet was, after all, but a man. His reverence for him, however,
continued unabated, and for twenty-five years, during which time De
Quincy lived at the lakes, in constant communion with Wordsworth, his
reverence for the poet’s genius remained the same, and still remains,
although he has long since ceased to respect him in so highly as a man;
not, however, because Wordsworth was not of unimpeachable character, and
estimable in so many ways, but because he had not that generous love for
his friends which friendship demands. De Quincy confesses his
estrangement from the poet with sorrow, and some bitterness of heart;
and the following extract will throw all the light upon this subject
which can be thrown at present:--
“I imagine a case such as this which follows,” says De Quincy, in
alluding to the estrangement spoken of above--“the case of a man who for
many years has connected himself with the domestic griefs and joys of
another, over and above his primary service of giving to him the
strength and the encouragement of a profound literary sympathy, at a
time of universal scorning from the world; suppose this man to fall into
a situation, in which, from want of natural connections, and from his
state of insulation in life, it might be most important to his feelings
that some support should be lent to him by a friend having a known place
and acceptation, and what may be called a root in the country, by means
of connections, descent, and long settlement. To look for this might be
a most humble demand on the part of one who had testified his devotion
in the way supposed. To miss it might---- But enough. I murmur not;
complaint is weak at all times; and the hour is passed irrevocably, and
by many a year, in which an act of friendship so natural, and costing so
little (in both senses so priceless), could have been availing. The ear
is deaf that should have been solaced by the sound of welcome. Call, but
you will not be heard; shout aloud, but your ‘ave!’ and ‘all hail!’ will
now tell only as an echo of departed days, proclaiming the hollowness of
human hopes. I, for my part, have long learned the lesson of suffering
in silence; and also I have learned to know that, wheresoever female
prejudices are concerned, _there_ it will be a trial, more than
Herculean, of a man’s wisdom, if he can walk with an even step, and
swerve neither to the right nor to the left.”
Leaving this sad subject, however, let us return to De Quincy at
Grasmere in 1807. Mrs. Coleridge, on leaving the poet’s family for
Keswick, invited De Quincy to visit her and Southey, and it was arranged
that Wordsworth and the Opium Eater should go together. Accordingly
they set off in a farmer’s cart to Ambleside, and from thence mounted
the ascent of Kirkstone. Descending towards Brothers’ Water--“a lake
which lies immediately below; and about three miles further, through
endless woods, and under the shade of mighty fells, immediate
dependencies and processes of the still more mighty Helvellyn” they
approached the vale of Patterdale, and reached the inn, by moonlight.
“All I remember,” says De Quincy is--“that through those romantic woods
and rocks of Stybarren--through those silent glens of Glencoin and
Glenridding--through that most romantic of parks then belonging to the
Duke of Norfolk--viz., Gobarrow Park--we saw alternately for four miles,
the most grotesque and the most awful spectacles--
----“Abbey windows
And Moorish temples of the Hindoos,”
all fantastic, all as unreal and shadowy as the moon-light which created
them; whilst at every angle of the road, broad gleams came upwards of
Ullswater, stretching for nine miles northward, but fortunately for its
effect, broken into three watery channels of about equal length, and
rarely visible at once.”
The party, (for Miss Wordsworth and the poet’s children were present on
this occasion,) passed the night in a house called _Ewsmere_, and in the
morning, leaving his family at this inn, the poet set out, with De
Quincy, for a ramble through the woods of Lowther. These are the woods
concerning which the poet, in a letter to Sir George Beaumont, dated
October 17, 1805, says:--“I believe a more delightful spot is not under
the sun. Last summer I had a charming walk along the river, for which I
was indebted to this man [alluding to a good quaker, who was Lord
Lowther’s _arbiter elegantiarum_, or master of the grounds, and who was
making improvements in them, by virtue of his office], whose intention
is to carry the walk along the river side till it joins the great road
at Lowther Bridge, which you will recollect, just under Brougham, about
a mile from Penrith. This, to my great sorrow! for the manufactured
walk, which was absolutely necessary in many places, will, in one place,
pass through a few hundred yards of forest-ground, and will there efface
the most beautiful specimen of forest pathway ever seen by human eyes,
and which I have paced many an hour when I was a youth, with one of
those I best loved. There is a continued opening between the trees, a
narrow slip of green turf, besprinkled with flowers, chiefly daisies;
and here it is that this pretty path plays its pranks, weaving among the
turf and flowers at its pleasure.” And it was in these woods, just five
days after their introduction to each other, that Wordsworth and De
Quincy spent a whole glorious morning in wild ramblings and in
conversation. They dined together, towards evening, at Emont Bridge, and
then walked on to the house of Captain Wordsworth, at Penrith. The
family was absent, and the poet had business which occupied him all the
next day; so De Quincy took a walk, sauntering along the road, about
seventeen miles, to Keswick, where he enquired for Greta Hall, the
residence of the poet Southey. “It stands out of the town a few hundred
yards, upon a little eminence, overhanging the river Greta.” Mrs.
Coleridge and Southey came to the door to welcome their visitor.
“Southey was in person somewhat taller than Wordsworth being about five
feet eleven in height, or a trifle more, whilst Wordsworth was about
five feet ten; and partly from having slenderer limbs, partly from being
more symmetrically formed about the shoulders, than Wordsworth, he
struck me as a better and lighter figure, to the effect of which his
dress contributed; for he wore, pretty constantly, a short jacket and
pantaloons, and had much the air of a Tyrolese mountaineer.... His hair
was black, and yet his complexion was fair; his eyes, I believe, hazel,
and large, but I will not vouch for that fact; his nose aquiline; and he
had a remarkable habit of looking up into the air, as if looking at
abstraction. The expression of his face was that of a very acute, and an
aspiring man. So far it was even noble, as it conveyed a feeling of
serene and gentle pride, habitually familiar with elevating subjects of
contemplation. And yet it was impossible that this pride could have been
offensive to anybody, chastened as it was by the most unaffected
modesty; and this modesty made evident and prominent, by the constant
expression of reverence for the great men of the age (when he happened
to esteem them such), and for all the great patriarchs of our
literature. The point in which Southey, however, failed most in
conciliating regard was, in all which related to the external expression
of friendliness. No man could be more sincerely hospitable, no man more
completely disposed to give up, even his time (the possession which he
most valued), to the service of his friends; but, there was an air of
reserve and distance about him--the reserve of a lofty, self-respecting
mind, but, perhaps, a little too freezing,--in his treatment of all
persons who were not amongst the _corps_ of his ancient fireside
friends. Still, even towards the veriest strangers, it is but justice to
notice his extreme courtesy, in sacrificing his literary employments for
the day, whatever they might be, to the duty (for such he made it,) of
doing the honors of the lake, and the adjacent mountains.”
De Quincy says that the habits of the poet Southey were exceedingly
regular, and that all his literary business was conducted upon a
systematic plan. He had his task before breakfast, which, however, must
have been an inconsiderable nothing, for it occupied him only an hour,
and rarely that, for he never rose until eight, and always breakfasted
at nine o’clock. He went to bed precisely at half-past ten, and no
sleep short of nine hours, refreshed him, and enabled him to do his
work. He usually dined between five and six, and his chief labour was
done between breakfast and dinner. If he had visitors, he would sit over
his wine, and talk; if not, he retired to his library, until eight, when
he was summoned to tea. At ten he read the London papers; “and it was
perfectly astonishing,” says De Quincy, “to men of less methodical
habits, to find how much he got through of elaborate business, by his
unvarying system of arrangement in the distribution of his time.” All
his letters were answered on the same day that they arrived. Even his
poetry was written by forced efforts, or rather, perhaps, by what De
Quincy calls, “a predetermined rule.” It was by writing prose, however,
that Southey got his living--made “his pot boil,” as he says; and his
chief source of regular income was derived from “The Quarterly Review.”
At one time, however, he received £400 a year for writing the historical
part of “The Edinburgh Annual Register.” This, however, he gave up,
because the publisher proposed to dock £100 from the salary which he had
previously paid him.--Southey, however, could afford to lose this large
income, because he had an annuity which had been settled upon him by his
friend, Charles Wynne, “the brother of Sir Watkin, the great autocrat of
Wales.” This annuity, however, when his friend married, Southey
voluntarily gave up; and the Granvilles, to whom Wynne was related by
his marriage, placed Southey on the civil list, for the sacrifice which
he thus made.
Such, then, were the circumstances of Southey at the time of De Quincy’s
visit, and it must be owned that they were very comfortable, for a poet.
Wordsworth came on the day after De Quincy’s arrival, and it was evident
that the two poets were not on the most friendly terms; not that there
was any outward sign of this,--on the contrary, there were all the
exteriors of hospitality and good feeling on both sides; but De Quincy
saw that the spiritual link between them was not complete, but broken;
that, indeed, they did not understand, or fully sympathise with each
other. Their minds and habits were different--I had almost said totally
different. Wordsworth lived on the mountain top, composed there, and
drew his inspiration direct from Nature; Southey lived in his
magnificent library, and was inspired more by books than by natural
objects.--Wordsworth’s library consisted of two or three hundred
volumes, mostly torn and dilapidated; many were odd volumes; they were
ill bound--not bound--or put in boards. Leaves were often wanting, and
their place supplied occasionally by manuscript. These books “occupied a
little homely book-case, fixed into one of two hollow recesses, formed
on each side of the fireplace by the projection of the chimney into the
little solitary room up stairs, which he had already described as his
‘half kitchen, half parlour.’.... Southey’s collection occupied a
separate room--the largest, and every way the most agreeable in the
house.”
Wordsworth’s poetry was _subjective_--referred chiefly to the inner life
of man; and his dealings with Nature had a special reference to this
inner life, his imagery being the mere vehicle of his thought. Southey’s
poetry, on the contrary, was essentially _objective_,--a reflex of the
outward nature, heightened by the fiery colouring of his imagination.
Wordsworth had a contempt for books, or, at all events, for _most_
books,--whilst Southey’s library, as De Quincy says, was his estate.
Wordsworth would toss books about like tennis balls; and to let him into
your library, quoth Southey, “is like letting a bear into a
tulip-garden.” De Quincy relates, that Wordsworth being one morning at
breakfast with him at Grasmere, took a handsome volume of Burke’s from
his book-case, and began very leisurely to cut the leaves with a knife
smeared all over with butter. Now tastes and habits such as those which
marked the two poets could not unite them very closely together; at all
events, not at this time; although they were subsequently, and in later
years, upon terms of close intimacy and friendship. Upon the present
occasion, however,--that is to say, during De Quincy’s visit to
Southey--the two poets managed very well together, and the evening was
passed agreeably enough. Next morning they discussed politics, and to
the horror of De Quincy, who was then a young man, and took no interest
in the passing movements of nations, and had always heard the French
Revolution, and its barbaric excesses, stigmatised as infernal,--who
was, moreover a loyal person according to the tradition of his fathers,
and a lover of Mr. Pitt--to his horror, the two poets uttered the most
disloyal sentiments, denouncing all monarchial forms of government, and
proposed to send the royal family to Botany Bay! This proposal, which
Southey immediately threw into extempore verse, was so comical, that the
whole party laughed outright, and outrageously; they then set off
towards Grasmere.
De Quincy speaks in the highest terms of Southey, and in the comparison
which he institutes between Southey and Wordsworth, the latter certainly
sustains loss. I refer the reader to the “Lake Reminiscences” for this,
and other most interesting particulars relating to these poets. Still I
cannot bid adieu to these “Reminiscences,” without using them once more,
as materials for an account of Greta Hall and its occupants.
Southey and his family did not occupy the whole of the Hall, but shared
it with Coleridge and his family, and with Mrs. Lovell and her son.
There was no absolute partition, but an amicable distribution of the
rooms. Coleridge had a study to himself, in which was a grand organ,
about the only piece of furniture it could boast of. To atone for this,
the windows looked out upon a magnificent sweep of country, and objects
of sublimity and beauty met the eye wherever it wandered. Southey’s
library--already described as the best room of the house--was open to
all the ladies alike. The books in it were chiefly English, Spanish, and
Portuguese, well selected, being the best cardinal classics of the three
literatures; fine copies, and decorated externally with a reasonable
elegance, so as to make them in harmony with the other embellishments of
the room. This was aided by the horizontal arrangement, upon brackets,
of many rare manuscripts, Spanish or Portuguese. The two families always
met at dinner, in a common drawing-room.
The scenery around Greta Hall was grand beyond all power of description.
“The lake of Derwent Water, in one direction, with its lovely islands--a
lake about ten miles in circuit, and shaped pretty much like a boy’s
kite; the lake of Bassinthwaite in another; the mountains of Newlands,
arranging themselves like pavilions; the gorgeous confusion of
Borrowdale, just revealing its sublime chaos through the narrow vista
of its gorge; whilst the sullen rear, not fully visible on this side of
the house, was closed for many a league by the vast and towering masses
of Skiddaw and Blencathara--mountains which are rather to be considered
as frontier barriers, and chains of hilly ground, cutting the county of
Cumberland into great chambers, and different climates, than as
insulated eminences; so vast is the area which they occupy; though there
are, also, rich, separate, and insulated heights, and nearly amongst the
highest in the county.”
Such, then, is the description of Southey’s house and neighbourhood, as
given by De Quincy. The first visit of the Opium Eater to
Wordsworth--including these visits to Greta Hall, and wanderings through
the lake districts--extended over a week; and at the conclusion of that
time, when it was necessary for him to return to Oxford, to save his
Michaelmas term, he witnessed, and has described one of the most
extraordinary scenes, at the table of the woman with the “_Saracen’s
Head_,” in company with Wordsworth and his sister, that has, perhaps,
ever been enacted at any supper table in the kingdoms of this world. I
can give no account of it here, and refer the reader once more to the
“Reminiscences:” all I will say, in conclusion is, that in the following
November (1808), De Quincy returned to Grasmere, and took possession of
the late cottage of the poet; who, with his family, had removed to a
house, called Allan Bank, about three-quarters of a mile off, which had
recently been built by a Liverpool merchant, at a cost of £1,500; a
damp, cold, and incurably smoky house, which defects the poet set forth
so eloquently to the proprietor, that he allowed him to live in it for a
merely nominal rent.
The reason for Wordsworth’s removal, was the increasing number of his
family. And here I may as well give a list of this family, adding to it
the only one who was born after the period to which I now allude. They
are as follow:--
John, born 18th June, 1803.
Dorothy, called, and generally known as, Dora, born 16th August, 1804.
Thomas, born 16th June, 1806.
Catharine, born 6th September, 1808.
William, born 12th May, 1810.
Thomas and Catharine, died in their childhood; John and William are
still living; and Dora, “My own Dora,” as the poet loved to call her,
after a wedded life, more or less happy (she married Edward Quillinan,
Esq.), she died in 1847, just three years before her venerable father.
Wordsworth was singularly fortunate in his family. There was no jars nor
discords in the sacred temple of his home; but beauty, love, and all the
virtues and the graces dwelt with him, and ministered to his happiness
and repose. He loved his children with an intense affection; and sweet
Dora, his best beloved, exercised an influence over him, more beautiful
and harmonising perhaps, even than that which his sister exercised in
his early life, and still continued to exercise, because it was deeper,
and struck deeper into the very being of the poet. This child threw a
sacred halo round his soul, and inspired one of the sweetest of his
lyrics. Only a month after her birth he wrote:--
“Hast thou then survived
Mild offspring of infirm humanity?
.... Hail to thee!
Frail, feeble monthling.... On thy face
Smiles are beginning, like the beams of dawn,
To shoot, and circulate. Smiles have there been seen;
Tranquil assurances that heaven supports
The feeble motions of thy life, and cheers
Thy loveliness; or shall those smiles be called
Feelers of love, put forth as if to explore
This untried world, and to prepare thy way
Through a strait passage intricate and dim?”
In the autumn of the same year we find him writing the lines “The Kitten
and the Falling Leaves,” suggested by the delight of his dear Dora at
the pretty frolics of a kitten on the wall, playing with the leaves of
autumn.
“Such a light of gladness breaks
Pretty kitten! from thy freaks;
Spreads with such a living grace,
O’er my little Dora’s face.”
then the poet resolves that he will have his glee out of life:--
“I will have my careless season,
Spite of melancholy reason;
Will walk thro’ life in such a way,
That, when time brings on decay,
Now and then, I may possess
Hours of perfect gladsomeness;
Keep the sprightly soul awake,
And have faculties to take,
Even from things by sorrow wrought,
Matter for a jocund thought;
Spite of care and spite of grief,
To gambol with life’s falling leaf.”
He likewise addresses “The Longest Day” to her; and what a contrast to
the last poem! Instead of gambolling with the falling leaves, and making
life a grand holiday, he exhorts his child, now grown older, to think of
higher matters:--
“Summer ebbs; each day that follows
Is a reflex from on high,
Tending to the darksome hollows,
Where the frosts of winter lie.
Now, even now, e’er wrapped in slumber,
Fix thine eyes upon the sea,
That absorbs time, space, and number,--
Look thou to eternity!”
And a little later, when the possibility of blindness came like a gloomy
shadow to darken his more thoughtful moments; he anticipates the time
when his own Dora shall guide his lonely steps. Poor Dora! she died of
consumption, after trying, in vain, the warm south of Portugal. And yet
she is not dead, and cannot die. In Dr. Wordsworth’s Memoirs, second
volume, there is a fine portrait of her, and a sweet, mild, gentle, and
spiritual girl she is; the eye singularly beautiful, and full of deep
mystic fire. The poet has also drawn a portrait of her:--
“Open, ye thickets! let her fly,
Swift as a Thracian nymph, o’er field or height!
For she, to all but those who love her, shy,
Would gladly vanish from a stranger’s sight;
Tho’ where she is beloved, and loves
Light as the wheeling butterfly she moves;
Her happy spirit as a bird is free,
That rifles blossoms on a tree,
Turning them inside out, with rich audacity.”
And all this sweet surfeit of painting is true to the spirit of the
beautiful girl; the spirit which stirs her thoughts, and makes all her
movements an impulsive comminglement of music and poetry. A more airy,
celestial form could not be imagined than hers. It seems to float on the
atmosphere. And then she is so happy, and loving to those who love her.
“Alas! how little can a moment show
Of an eye where feeling plays
In ten thousand dewy rays;
A face o’er which a thousand shadows go!--
She stops--is fastened to that rivulet’s side;
And these (while, with sedater mien
O’er timid waters that have scarcely left
Their birthplace in the rocky cleft,
She bends) at leisure may be seen
Features to old ideal grace allied,
Amid their smiles and dimples dignified--
Fit countenance for the soul of primal truth;
The bland composure of eternal youth!
What more changeful than the sea?
But over his great tides
Fidelity presides;
And this light-hearted maiden constant is as he.
High is her aim, as heaven above,
And wide as ether her good will;
And like the lowly reed, her love
Can drink its nurture from the scantiest rill;
Insight as keen as frosty star
Is to her charity no bar,
Nor interrupts her frolic graces
When she is far from those wild places,
Encircled by familiar faces.
O the charms that manners draw,
Nature, from thy genuine law!
If from what her hand would do
Her voice would utter, aught ensue
Untoward or unfit;
She in benign affections pure
In self-forgetfulness, secure,
Sheds round the transient harm, or vague mischance
A light unknown to tutored elegance:
Hers is not a cheek shame-stricken,
But her blushes, are joy-flushes;
And the fault, if fault it be,
Only ministers to quicken
Laughter-loving gaiety,
And kindly sportive wit,
Leaving this daughter of the mountains free
As if she knew that Oberon, king of faery
Had crossed her purpose with some quaint vagary,
And heard his viewless bands
Over their mirthful triumph clapping hands.”
A fairer drawn portrait--a more beautiful poem, as a whole--does not, I
think, exist. Alas! sweet Dora.
To return, however, to the narrative. When Wordsworth was living at
Allan Bank, and during the time that Coleridge sojourned with him, two
prose works appeared, by these two poets, which are memorable to all
scholars. The former wrote his famous “Essay on the Convention of
Cintra,” and the latter dictated (for he did not write it) his still
more famous work entitled “The Friend.” Notwithstanding Wordsworth’s
devotion, therefore, to poetry, it will be seen that he was not
indifferent to the passing events which were writing their history in
the blood of nations. Speaking of his “Convention of Cintra,” in a
letter to Southey, he says, “My detestation, I may say abhorrence, of
that event, is not at all diminished by your account of it. Bonaparte
had committed a capital blunder in supposing that when he had
_intimidated_ the _Sovereigns_ of Europe, he had _conquered_ the several
nations. Yet it was natural for a wiser than he was to have fallen into
this mistake; for the old despotisms had deprived the body of the people
of all practical knowledge in the management, and of necessity of all
interest in the course of affairs. The French themselves were astonished
at the apathy and ignorance of the people whom they had supposed they
had utterly subdued, when they had taken their fortresses, scattered
their armies, entered their capital cities, and struck their cabinets
with dismay. There was no hope for the deliverance of Europe till the
nations had suffered enough to be driven to a passionate recollection of
all that was honourable in their past history, and to make appeal to the
principles of universal and everlasting justice. These sentiments the
authors of that Convention most unfeelingly violated; and as to the
principals, they seemed to be as little aware even of the existence of
such powers, for powers emphatically may they be called, as the tyrant
himself. As far, therefore, as these men could, they put an extinguisher
upon the star that was then rising! It is in vain to say that after the
first burst of indignation was over, the Portuguese themselves were
reconciled to the event, and rejoiced in their deliverance. We may infer
from that, the horror which they must have felt in the presence of their
oppressors; and we may see in it to what a state of helplessness their
bad government had reduced them. Our duty was to have treated them with
respect, as the representatives of suffering humanity, beyond what they
were likely to look for themselves, and as deserving greatly, in common
with their Spanish brethren, for having been the first to rise against
that tremendous oppression, and to show how, and how only, it could be
put an end to.” The poet apologises for the seeming inconsistency of his
conduct in opposing the war against France at its commencement, and in
urging the necessity of it in the later affairs of Spain and Portugal,
by showing that he, and those who thought with him, “proved that they
kept their eyes steadily fixed upon principles; for though there was a
shifting or transfer of hostility in their minds, as far as regarded
persons, they only combated the same enemy opposed to them under a
different shape; and that enemy was the spirit of selfish tyranny and
lawless ambition.”
So far, then, the “Essay on the Convention of Cintra.” Coleridge’s prose
work, “The Friend,” was a serial, composed of papers upon various
subjects, written mostly by Coleridge himself, with occasional
assistance from Wordsworth, Professor Wilson, and others. In the
seventeenth number of “The Friend,” the latter writer, in a letter to
the Editor, speaks of Wordsworth as a “great teacher,” and a “mighty
voice not poured out in vain.” “There are hearts,” he says, “that have
received into their inmost depths all its varying tones; and even now
there are many to whom the name of Wordsworth calls up the recollection
of their weakness and the consciousness of their strength.” The letter
was signed “Mathetes,” and might be called a warning voice to the young
upon the illusions and popular fallacies of the age. It insisted
likewise upon the dues belonging to antiquity; combated the notion that
human nature is gradually advancing to perfection, and that the present
time is wiser than the past. “Mathetes” maintained that reliance on
contemporary judgment had grown into contempt for antiquity, and argued
that the youth of his time could only be rescued from this perilous
condition by the warning voice of some contemporary teacher; and that
this teacher he imagined Wordsworth to be.
Wordsworth replied, in numbers seventeen and twenty, acknowledging that
we are too apt to value contemporary opinion, to the neglect of
antiquity; but denying that the doctrine of progress is injurious; and
exhorting the young to rely upon themselves, and their own independent
efforts; cherishing along with this, an abiding sense of personal
responsibility. I cannot, however, analyse the fine treatise which
follows, and must refer the reader to the treatise itself; merely
adding, that a sounder or more philosophical discourse--so practical
withal--has rarely been written. An “Essay on Epitaphs,” was
subsequently written by Wordsworth in “The Friend,” February 22nd, 1810,
and was afterwards republished by him, as a note to “The Excursion.”
Wordsworth regarded epitaphs as holy memorials, and censured the
epigramatic efforts of Pope, and other writers of this species of
composition. A bad man, he says, should have no epitaph; and that which
the poet wrote over his own child, in the churchyard of Grasmere, may be
instanced as illustrating his own idea of what epitaphs should be.
In the year 1810, Wordsworth wrote an introduction to, and edited the
text of, a folio volume entitled, “Select Views in Cumberland,
Westmoreland, and Lancashire;” by the Rev. Joseph Wilkinson, which were
afterwards printed in his volume of “Sonnets on the River Duddon,” and
still later, as a separate publication. This introduction and text
consisted of a description of the Lake Country, which is finer than
anything of the kind existing, if we except the delicate and beautiful
picture-writing of Gray, the poet, who visited this district in October
1767. And here end the chief incidents in the personal and literary
life of Wordsworth, up to the time of his removal to Rydal Mount.
RYDAL MOUNT.
I must here borrow the only picture which I find in Dr. Wordsworth’s
“Memoirs,”--viz., that of the poet’s residence, which I transcribe from
vol. I., p. 19.
“The house stands on the sloping summit of a rocky hill, called Nab’s
Scar. It has a southern aspect. In front of it is a small semicircular
area of grey gravel, fringed with shrubs and flowers, the house forming
the diameter of the circle. From this area is a descent of a few stone
steps southward, and then a gentle ascent to a grassy mound. Here let us
rest a little.--At your back is the house; in front, a little to the
left of the horizon, is Wansfell, on which the light of the evening sun
rests, and to which the poet has paid a grateful tribute in two of his
sonnets:--
‘Wansfell! this household has a favoured lot,
Living with liberty on thee to gaze.’
Beneath it the blue smoke shews the place of the town of Ambleside. In
front is the lake Windermere, shining in the sun; also in front, but
more to the right, are the fells of Loughrigg, on which the poet’s
imagination pleased to plant a solitary castle:
‘Ærial rock, whose solitary brow
From this low threshold daily meets the sight.’
Looking to the right, in the garden, is a beautiful glade, overhung with
rhododendrons, in beautiful leaf and bloom. Near them is a tall
ash-tree, in which a thrush has sung for hours together, during many
years. Not far from it is a laburnum, in which the osier cage of the
doves was hung. Below, to the west, is the vegetable garden, not planted
off from the rest, but blended with it by parterres of flowers and
shrubs.
Returning to the platform of grey gravel before the house, we pass
under the shade of a fine sycamore, and ascend to the westward by
fourteen steps of stones, about nine feet long, in the interstices of
which grow the yellow flowering poppy, and the wild geranium, or Poor
Robin,
‘Gay
With his red stalks, upon a sunny day,’
a favourite with the poet, as his verses show.--The steps above,
northward, lead to an upward _sloping terrace_, about two hundred and
fifty feet long. On the right side it is shaded by laburnums, Portugal
laurels, mountain-ash, and fine walnut-trees and cherries; on the left
it is flanked by a low stone wall, coped with rude slates, and covered
with lichens, mosses, and wild-flowers. The fern waves on the walls, and
at its base grows the wild-strawberry and foxglove. Beneath this wall,
and parallel to it, on the left, is a _level terrace_, constructed by
the poet for a friend most dear to him and his,--who, for the last
twenty years of Mr. Wordsworth’s life, was often a visitor at Rydal
Mount. The terrace was a favourite resort of the poet, being more easy
for pacing to and fro, when old age began to make him feel the
acclivity of the other terrace to be toilsome. Both these terraces
command beautiful views of the vale of the Rothsay, and the banks of the
lake of Windermere.”
Then we have a description of Rydal Lake, and of the “long, wooded, and
rocky hill of Loughrigg beyond, and above it,” as seen from an orifice
on the ascending terrace; of the beautiful sycamore close to the arbour,
the fine firs in the foreground, and the dark woods of fir, ash, oak,
hazel, holly, and birch, on the right and left; of the “FAR FERRDEL on
the mountain’s side,” a little to the right of the “ascending
terrace”--which, after a serpentine course of one hundred and fifty
feet, terminates at a little gate, close to the “Nab Well,” where the
poet was wont to quaff his daily libations. Another walk from the arbour
leads to a field, sloping down to the valley, called “Dora’s field,” and
on the right is a rude stone, bearing this inscription--
“In these fair vales hath many a tree
At Wordsworth’s suit been spared;
And from the builder’s hand this stone,
For some rude beauty of its own,
Was rescued by the bard.
So let it rest, and time will come,
When here, the tender-hearted,
May heave a gentle sigh for him,
As one of the departed.”
A pond containing gold fish, underneath a large oak, close to the gate
which leads to this “Dora’s field,” completes the inventory of the
external features of Rydal Mount.
It was in the spring of 1811 that Wordsworth left Allan Bank, and took
up his temporary residence at the Parsonage, Grasmere. But the death of
his children, Catharine and Thomas, which occurred in 1812, threw so
melancholy a gloom over the neighbourhood, that he resolved to quit it
altogether. It was not, however, without many painful feelings of regret
that he bade adieu to the beautiful scenery in the vale of
Grasmere--scenery which he had so long loved--every feature of which was
as familiar to him as the faces of the dear children whom he had
committed for ever to its quiet keeping. The step, however, was
absolutely necessary, as he himself says in a letter to the Earl of
Lonsdale, for the recurrence of that tranquillity of mind which it was
his duty, and that of his surviving family, to strive for. Accordingly
he removed to Rydal Mount, in 1813, where he resided until his death, in
1850. It was in that year--1813--that he received the appointment of
Distributor of Stamps in the County of Westmoreland, which has already
been alluded to, in the extracts made from the “Reminiscences” of De
Quincy.
This appointment, for which he was mainly indebted to Lord Lonsdale,
placed the poet in easy if not affluent circumstances, and enabled him
to follow his art without anxiety respecting worldly matters,--a
condition which the poet improved to his own honour, and to the public
advantage. Some time after this good fortune had befallen him, he was
offered the collectorship of the town of Whitehaven, an office far more
lucrative than the other; but the poet declined it. He had now
sufficient for his necessities, and no pecuniary inducement could avail
with him to quit the sweet retirement of the lakes. He was fortunate,
also--and De Quincy was right in saying that he was _always_ fortunate,
for Good Luck “threw her old shoe after him” wherever he went--in
securing about this time the services of Mr. John Carter, as coadjutor
in the stamp-office. Dr. Wordsworth speaks in the highest terms of this
gentleman, who, for thirty-seven years, served the poet “faithfully and
zealously, and who added to his business qualifications, those of sound
scholarship and judicious criticism.”
Thus happily circumstanced, Wordsworth continued to write poetry, and to
make more tours, as his fancy dictated. In 1814, he again visited
Scotland, in company with his wife, his wife’s sister, and Miss Mary
Hutchinson. The poems produced on this tour were “The Brownie’s Cell,”
“Cora Linn,” “Effusions on the Banks of the Bran, near Dunkeld,” and
“Sonnet to Mr. Gillies.” The following note, upon the poem “Yarrow
Visited,” is of great interest. It is Wordsworth who writes.
“As mentioned in my verses on the death of the Ettrick Shepherd, my
first visit to Yarrow was in his company. We had lodged the night before
at Traquhar, where Hogg had joined us, and also Dr. Anderson, the editor
of ‘The British Poets,’ who was on a visit at the manse. Dr. Anderson
walked with us till we came in view of the Vale of Yarrow, and being
advanced in life he then turned back. The old man was passionately fond
of poetry, though with not much of a discriminating judgment, as the
volumes he edited sufficiently shows; but I was much pleased to meet
with him, and to acknowledge my obligation to his collection, which had
been my brother John’s companion in more than one voyage to India, and
which he gave me before his departure from Grasmere--never to return.
Through these volumes I became first familiar with Chaucer; and so
little money had I then to spare for books, that in all probability, but
for this same work, I should have known little of Drayton, Daniel, and
other distinguished poets of the Elizabethan age, and their immediate
successors, till a much later period of my life. I am glad to record
this, not for any importance of its own, but as a tribute of gratitude
to this simple-hearted old man, whom I never again had the pleasure of
meeting. I seldom read or think of this poem without regretting that my
dear sister was not of the party, as she would have been so much
delighted in recalling the time when, travelling together in Scotland,
we declined going in search of this celebrated stream, not altogether,
I will frankly confess, for the reasons assigned in the poem on the
occasion.”
At last, in 1814, the great poem was published upon which Wordsworth’s
fame is built, viz., “The Excursion.” It was met, as usual, with
tremendous and most indiscriminate abuse, especially by Jeffrey, in his
“This won’t do” article. But despite all this, the poem grew deeply into
the public mind, and is still growing there; and ranks, at last, with
our highest poetry. All the characters and scenes in it are drawn from
life, and there are few more interesting papers than the memoranda which
the poet has left respecting these characters and their localities. “The
Wanderer,” he acknowledges, is chiefly an embodied idea of what he
fancied _his own character might have become_ in the said _Wanderer_’s
circumstances. His sister, with her gentle love and sweet
remonstrances,--although ready to follow him to the ends of the
earth--did in reality save him from this wild nomadic life, by fixing
his thoughts upon a _home_, and the genial influences which domestic
life would produce and exercise upon his poetic genius. And then his
wife, children, and the rich harvests of fortune, which were reaped
without any sowing of his, and dropped into his lap, finished the work
his sister had begun, and finally settled him as a citizen and a family
man. Otherwise, being strong in body, I should, he says, very probably,
have “taken to the way of life such as that in which my ‘Wanderer’
passed the greater part of his days.” Much, however, of what the
“Wanderer” says and does, was the result, in verse, of the poet’s
experience; was what he had actually heard and seen, although refined,
of course, as it passed through his imagination. He was fond of talking
to all kinds of strange characters;--now treading on the outskirts of
social life, or wandering with a wild, vagabond independence amongst the
highways of towns and cities. Whatever of romance and adventure they had
known, he wormed out of them, or _charmed_ out of them; and he partially
instances, as an illustration of this prying curiosity--this insatiable
longing after experience, and the history of men--an old Scotchman, who
married finally a relation of his wife’s, and settled down at Kendal,
and a travelling packman, from whom he learned much, and whose
adventures and wisdom are embodied in the character of the “Wanderer.”
“The Solitary,” “The Pastor,” “Pedlar,” “Margaret,” “Miser,” and all the
dramatis personæ of the poem, are made up of veritable human materials,
and had their architypes in the great world of humanity. The reader,
however, must go to Dr. Wordsworth for a full relation respecting these
matters. All I can add here, respecting the “Excursion,” is that only
500 copies were disposed of in six years; and when, in 1827, another
edition, of the same number of copies, was printed, it took seven years
more to exhaust it. The poet, however, was not daunted by this culpable
neglect of his immortal lines; but conscious of his own greatness, he
wrote, in a letter to Southey,--“Let the age continue to love its own
darkness; I shall continue to write, with, I trust, the light of heaven
upon me.” Jeffrey, in the pride and arrogance of his position, as
Executioner General of the Courts of Critical Assize, boasted that
HE--poor devil!--had _crushed_ the “Excursion;” and the boast was
repeated to Southey:--“Tell him,” said he, Southey “that he could as
soon crush Skiddaw!” Bernard Barton,--a writer whose chief merit
consists in a letter written to Wordsworth, expressive of his homage
and reverence for the Bard of Rydal--alludes, in the said letter, to
Jeffrey: “He has taken,” says Wordsworth, in reply, “a perpetual
retainer, from his own incapacity, to plead against my claims to public
approbation.” So, we see, that the good poet could hit hard if he liked;
although he rarely descended to this literary pugilism, thinking it
beneath the dignity of his art and character.
It was Wordsworth’s custom to compose in the open air; and as his
servant once said to a visitor, “This, sir, is my master’s library--his
study is out of doors.” He had a great and sickening dread of writing;
and his sister, or some other member of his family was always at hand to
perform for him the office of amanuensis. In the year 1807, when on a
visit to his wife’s brother at Stockton-on-Tees, the weather being very
boisterous, and the winds rough, he used to pace up and down under the
lee of a row of corn-stacks in a field near that town--and it was here
that he composed the earlier part of “White Doe of Ryletone,” chaunting
his verses aloud to the astonished stacks. The poem was not published
until 1815, and has been much misinterpreted, and consequently abused.
The truth is, that Wordsworth wrote always upon principle, and a
carefully premeditated plan; there was always a high purpose in his
poems, both moral and intellectual. His poetical canons were likewise
his own, and his mode of treating a subject was always in conformity
with them, or illustrations of them. Superficial readers, who had been
accustomed to the _objective_ poetry of Scott, could not understand
Wordsworth, therefore; for he was studiously _subjective_, and the
interest of his poems hangs nearly always upon the development of mere
spiritual forces, and their progress, if I may so speak, _outwards_, in
the subjugation of the external world or in the strengthening of the
soul to bear the ills and mishaps of life with a sublime fortitude. “The
White Doe” is a memorable example of this spiritual aim. “Every thing,”
says Wordsworth, ‘attempted by the principal personages in this poem
_fails_, so far as its object is external and substantial; so far as it
is moral and spiritual it _succeeds_. The heroine of the poem knows that
her duty is not to interfere with the current of events, either to
forward or delay them; but
“To abide
The shock, and finally secure
O’er pain and grief a triumph pure.”
This she does in obedience to her brother’s injunction, as most suitable
to a mind and character that, under previous trials, had been proved to
accord with his. She achieves this, not without aid from the
communication with the inferior creature which often leads her thoughts
to revolve upon the past with a tender and humanising influence that
exalts rather than depresses her. Her anticipated beatification of the
mind, and the apotheosis of the companion of her solitude, are the
points at which the poem aims, and constitutes its legitimate
catastrophe.” All this is widely different from the usual mode of
conducting dramatic action, and yet the action of the poem in question
is complete and satisfactory, and is artistically developed from its own
spiritual germ, or starting point.
Whilst walking, and composing “The White Doe,” Wordsworth received a
wound in his foot; and it is curious to remark that, even when he ceased
walking, the _act of composition_ increased the irritation of the wound,
whilst a mental holiday produced a rapid cure. “Poetic excitement,” he
says, “when accompanied by protracted labour in composition, has
throughout my life brought on more or less of bodily derangement.
Nevertheless I am, at the close of my seventy-third year, in what may be
called excellent health. But I ought to add, that my intellectual labour
has generally been carried on out of doors.”
The next group of poems--and two of them certainly amongst
the grandest triumphs of poetic art, were composed respectively as
follows:--“Laodamia,” in 1814; “Dion,” in 1816; and the “Ode to
Lycoris,” in 1817. The first and second of these poems were entirely
Greek in their character and form, and Keates’ “Hyperion” is the only
modern poem (and this a fragment) which is worthy to be placed in
comparison with them. It is singular how the idea of these poems
originated in the mind of the poet. He had been preparing his son for
the University, and had to read up his old classics for this purpose.
Hence the Classic Spirit took up its abode with him, and urged him to
these beautiful and plastic productions. About this time, and with the
same object in view--viz., the education of his son--he translated one
of the earlier books of the “Æneid” into rhyme. Coleridge, in writing to
the author respecting this translation, says, he has attempted an
impossibility, and regrets he should have wasted his time on a work
(viz., of translation) so much below him. Wordsworth was always attached
to the classics; and before he read Virgil, he was so fond of Ovid, that
he invariably got into a passion when he found this author placed below
Virgil. He was never weary of travelling over the scenes through which
Homer led him. “Classical literature,” he says, “affected me by its own
beauty.”
“Peter Bell” appeared in 1819. It was composed twenty years before, as
already related; and sold better than any of Wordsworth’s previous
poems, notwithstanding the abuse of the critics. Five hundred copies
were exhausted before one month, between April and May of this one year
(1819). “The Waggoner” was published at the same time, but was not so
successful, perhaps on account of its mere local interest. The “Sonnets
on the River Duddon” appeared about the same time, and were dedicated to
the Rev. Dr. Wordsworth, the poet’s brother, who was at that time
Rector of Lambeth. “The river Duddon has its main source[J] in the
mountain range near the “Three Shire Stones,” as they were called, where
the three counties, Westmoreland, Cumberland, and Lancashire meet. It
flows to the south through Seathwaite, by Broughton, to the Duddon
Sands, and into the Irish Sea.”--Wordsworth’s first acquaintance with
this stream commenced in his boyhood, during the time that he was so
passionately fond of angling: upon one of his fishing excursions he
joined an old weather-beaten man, and went far away from home, seduced
by the dear delight of his art. On their return, the embryo poet was so
wearied, that the old man had to carry him on his back. He says that his
earliest recollections of this stream were full of distress and
disappointment; but in later times he visited it with so many beloved
persons, that its waters flowed through him in streams of music--in
anthems of affectionate song.
In 1820 Wordsworth made another tour to the Continent, in company with
his wife and sister, Mr. and Mrs. Monkhonse, then just married, and
Miss Herricks. They left these two ladies at Berne, while Mr. Monkhouse
went with the poet and his retinue, on an excursion amongst the Alps, as
far as Milan. They were joined at Lucerne by Mr. H. C. Robinson; and the
two ladies, whom they had left at Berne, rejoined them at Geneva, when
the whole party went to Paris, where they remained five weeks.
In 1822 Wordsworth published a volume of Sonnets, and other Poems, as
the result of this tour, entitled, “Memorials of a Tour on the
Continent.”
In two letters to Lord Lonsdale--one dated from Lucerne, August 19th,
1820, and the other from Paris, dated October 7, 1820,--the poet has
given a general outline of this tour and its incidents.[K] I ought to
add that Wordsworth visited Waterloo, amongst other places of interest,
at this time. The party returned by way of Boulogne, November 2nd, and
had a narrow escape of shipwreck,--the vessel striking upon a sand-bank,
and being then driven with violence on a rocky road in the harbour,
where she was battered about until the ebbing of the tide set her at
liberty--at least from the violence of the sea; “and, blessed be God,”
says Wordsworth, in his Journal, “for our preservation!”
They arrived at Dover on the 7th, and at London on the 9th, where they
met Rogers, Lamb, and Talfourd, amongst other noted persons and friends.
Wordsworth walked on to visit Coleridge, from Hampstead Heath, on the
18th, and then went down to Cambridge, to congratulate his brother, Dr.
Wordsworth, on his appointment to the Mastership of Trinity College.
They returned to Rydal Mount on Christmas Eve, visiting Sir George and
Lady Beaumont, at Coleorton, by the way. Sir George was then about to
build a church on his estate, and this fact led to conversation on
Church History, and eventually to the production of the “Ecclesiastical
Sonnets.” In the third part of the first of these Sonnets occurs the
following line:--
“I saw the figure of a lovely maid.”
And the note attached to it, by the poet, is so interesting, that I must
transcribe it:--
“When I came to this part of the series, I had the dream described in
this sonnet. The _figure was that of my daughter_, and the whole passed
exactly as here represented. The sonnet was composed on the middle road
leading from Grasmere to Ambleside; it was began as I left the last
house in the vale, and finished, word for word, as it now stands, before
I came in view of Rydal. I wish I could say the same of the five or six
hundred I have written; most of them were frequently retouched, in the
course of composition, and not a few laboriously.”
Here is the sonnet in question:--
“I saw the figure of a lovely maid,
Seated, alone, beneath a darksome tree,
Whose fondly-overhanging canopy
Set off her brightness with a pleasing shade.
No spirit was she; that my heart betrayed,
For she was one I loved exceedingly;
But while I gazed in tender reverie
(Or was it sleep that with my fancy played?),
The bright corporeal presence--form and face--
Remaining still distinct, grew thin and rare,
Like sunny mists; at length the golden hair,
Shape, limbs, and heavenly features, keeping pace,
Each with the other, in a lingering race
Of dissolution, melted into air.”
In 1823, Wordsworth again visited the Continent, making a short tour,
with his wife, in Belgium and Holland. As usual, a journal of travel was
kept by the poet, and is printed, partly at least, in the “Memoirs.” At
the close of the summer, in the next year, he made a short excursion in
North Wales, the records of which are contained in a letter to Sir
George Beaumont, dated Hindwell, Radnor, September 20, 1824.[L] Again,
in 1828, the poet, accompanied by his daughter, Dora, made an excursion
to see Coleridge, through Belgium, and up the Rhine. And it was at this
time that the “Incident at Bruges” was written, concerning which the
poet says:--“Dora and I, while taking a walk along a retired part of the
town, heard the voice as here described, and were afterwards informed
that it was a Convent, in which were many English. We were both much
touched, I may say, affected, and Dora moved, as appears in the verses.”
The “Lines on a Jewish Family,” were likewise written on this tour. The
poet, his daughter, and Coleridge were at St. Goar, when they first saw
this family. They had provided themselves with a basket of provisions
for the day, and offered the poor people a share of them. The mother
refused for the rest, because it was a fast-day, adding, that whether
such observances were right or wrong, it was her duty to keep them. They
were all poor, ragged, and hungry, but exceedingly beautiful, and the
self-command, self-respect, and self-sacrifice of the woman is the moral
of this little story, I think, although no allusion is made to it in the
poem.
In 1829, Wordsworth made a tour in Ireland, with J. Marshall, Esq., M.P.
of Leeds. All through his life Wordsworth had a horror of Popery; and
this journey, with his Continental tours, tended to confirm it with
still greater intensity. He hated Popery because it was the avowed enemy
of freedom, and he would not sanction the Catholic Emancipation Bill,
because he thought that by giving freedom to the Catholic religion, the
Government were but paving the way for a frightful domination over the
souls and bodies of men. Still he loved freedom--as his sonnets to
“Liberty,” and his enthusiastic sympathies with republican France, at
the outbreak of the first revolution sufficiently show. He was a
Churchman, however, devotedly attached to the traditions, forms, and
doctrines of the Church, and there was no moving him from these
foundations. He attributed the distress and misery of Ireland to the
priests--Catholic, of course--and to the false tenures of the land. The
country, he said, had never been fully conquered, and this was another
and a chief cause of the degradation of Ireland. The people were under
the control--absolute control--of the priests, ready to do their
bidding, let that bidding be what it might. And he trembled--as well he
might--for the power of the Irish Church! God forgive us, we are all at
the best but short-sighted mortals, and few can see the truth, save
through the medium of prejudice. The Irish Church, if _my_ vision be
clear, is one of the many stumbling blocks, and rubbish heaps in the way
of Irish civilization; and certainly the Roman Catholic Church is
another.
This tour supplied Wordsworth with very few materials for poetry. The
lines, however, in the fine poem on the “Power of Sound,” one of the
_finest_ poems which Wordsworth has written, commencing
“Thou too be heard, lone eagle!”
were, he says, suggested near the Giant’s Causeway, where he saw a pair
of eagles wheel over his head, and then dart off “as if to hide
themselves in a blaze of sky made by the setting sun.”
It was about this time also that the sweet poem, entitled “The Triad,”
was written, in which the daughters of Southey, Wordsworth, and
Coleridge, are bound together in the most musical and flowery forms, as
the three Graces. Wordsworth often promised these fair children to send
them down to immortality in his verses, but it was long before the mood
seized him, and the _modus operandi_ was made plain to him. At last the
ideas embodied in “The Triad” struck him, and the result is something
finer than the most vivid sculpture. The poet commences--
“Shew me the noblest youth of present time,
Whose trembling fancy would to love give birth;
Some god or hero from the Olympian clime
Returned to seek a consort upon earth;
Or, in no doubtful prospect let me see,
The brightest star of ages yet to be,
And I will mate and match him blissfully.”
So confident is he of the beauty and virtue of the three fair girls
hidden amongst the recesses of the hills, that he boasts of their
worthiness to match even the noblest of gods or heroes. And then he
invokes them to appear, whilst a youth expectant at his side, and
breathless as they,
“Looks to the earth and to the vacant air;
And with a wandering air that seems to chide,
Asks of the clouds what occupants they hide.”
And now the poet will fulfil his promise, and show the golden youth this
beautiful triad of Graces.
“Fear not a constraining measure!
--Yielding to the gentle spell,
Lucida! from domes of pleasure,
Or from cottage-sprinkled dell,
Comes to regions solitary,
Where the eagle builds her aery,
Above the hermit’s long-forsaken cell!
--She comes!--behold
That figure, like a ship with silver sail!
Nearer she draws; a breeze uplifts her veil;
Upon her coming wait
As pure a sunshine, and as soft a gale,
As e’er, on herbage-covering earthly mold,
Tempted the bird of Juno to unfold
His richest splendour,--when his veering gait,
And every motion of his starry train,
Seem governed by a strain
Of music, audible to him alone.”
And then we have a picture of the lady:--
“worthy of earth’s proudest throne!
Nor less, by excellence of nature, fit
Beside an unambitious hearth to sit
Domestic queen, where grandeur is unknown;
What living man could fear
The worst of fortune’s malice, wer’t thou near,
Humbling that lily stem, thy sceptre meek,
That its fair flowers may brush from off his cheek
The too, too, happy tear?
--Queen, and handmaid lowly!
Whose skill can speed the day with lively cares,
And banish melancholy
By all that mind invents, or hand prepares;
O thou, against whose lip, without its smile
And in its silence even, no heart is proof;
Whose goodness, sinking deep, would reconcile
The softest nursling of a gorgeous palace,
To the bare life beneath the hawthorn roof
Of Sherwood’s archer, or in caves of Wallace--
Who that hath seen thy beauty could content
His soul with but a _glimpse_ of heavenly day?
Who that hath loved thee, but would lay
His strong hand on the wind, if it were bent
To take thee in thy majesty away?
Pass onward (even the glancing deer
Till we depart intrude not here;)
That mossy slope, o’er which the woodbine throws
A canopy, is smooth’d for thy repose!”
The next lady that he invokes before the astonished youth is his own
daughter--sweet Dora--the previous one was Miss Southey.
“Come, if the notes thine ear may pierce,
Come, youngest of the lovely three,
Submissive to the mighty verse
And the dear voice of harmony,
By none more deeply felt than thee!
I sang; and lo! from pastures virginal
She hastens to the haunts
Of Nature, and the lonely elements.
_Air sparkles round her with a dazzling sheen_;
And mark, her glowing cheek, her vesture green!
And, as if wishful to disarm
Or to repay the potent charm,
She bears the stringed lute of old romance,
That cheered the trellissed arbour’s privacy,
And soothed war-wearied knights in raftered hall.
How vivid, yet how delicate, her glee!
So tripped the muse, inventress of the dance;
So, truant in waste woods, the blithe Euphrosyne!”
But the ringlets of that head,
Why are they ungarlanded?
Why bedeck her temples less
Than the simplest shepherdess?
Is it not a brow inviting
Choicest flowers that ever breathed,
Which the myrtle would delight in,
With Idalian rose enwreathed?
But her humility is well content
With _one_ wild floweret (call it not forlorn),--
FLOWER OF THE WINDS--beneath her bosom worn--
Yet more for love than ornament.”
Then follows that beautiful description of her moral graces, already
quoted in these pages, beginning--
“Open ye thickets! let her fly,
Swift as a Thracian nymph, o’er field and height;”
the whole picture being as fine a conception, and as rich an embodyment,
of this sweet Dora,--judging from her portrait in the second volume of
the “Memoirs,” and from numerous written and spoken reports of her
person and character,--as the highest genius and the highest art
combined, could possibly have produced. And now for Miss Coleridge:--
“Last of the three, tho’ eldest born,
Reveal thyself, like pensive morn
Touched by the skylark’s earliest note,
E’er humble-gladness be afloat.
But whether in the semblance drest
Of dawn, or eve, fair vision of the west,
Come, with each anxious hope subdued
By woman’s gentle fortitude,
Each grief, thro’ meekness, settling into rest.
--Or I would hail thee when some high-wrought page
Of a closed volume, lingering in thine hand,
Has raised thy spirit to a peaceful stand
Among the glories of a happy age.”
And, behold! she is here:--
“Her brow hath opened on me--see it there,
Brightening the umbrage of her hair;
So gleams the crescent moon, that loves
To be descried thro’ shady groves.
Tenderest bloom is on her cheek;
Wish not for a richer streak;
Nor _dread the depth of meditative eye_;
But let thy love, upon that azure field
Of thoughtfulness and beauty, yield
Its homage offered up in purity.
What would’st thou more? In sunny glade,
Or under leaves of thickest shade,
Was such a stillness e’er diffused
Since earth grew calm while angels mused?
Softly she treads, as if her foot were loth
To crush the mountain dew-drop--soon to melt,
On the flower’s breast; as if she felt
That flowers themselves, whate’er their hue,
With all their fragrance, all their glistening,
Call to the heart for inward listening--
And tho’ for bridal wreaths and tokens true
Welcomed wisely; tho’ a growth
Which the careless shepherd sleeps on,
As fitly spring from turf the mourner weeps on--
And without wrong are cropped the marble tomb to strew.
And now the charm is over;
----“the mute phantom’s gone,
Nor will return--but droop not, favoured youth,
The apparition that before thee shone
Obeyed a summons covetous of truth.
From these wild rocks thy footsteps I will guide
To bowers in which thy fortunes may be tried,
And one of the bright three become thy happy bride.”
A fairer subject than this, for the imagination of the true painter,
does scarcely exist in poetry. The gorgeous magnificence of Miss
Southey--the wild, bird-like nature of Dora, the mystic, spiritual,
meditative beauty of Miss Coleridge. Here is material enough for the
highest effort of art.
A number of poems followed this exquisite “Triad”--viz., “The Wishing
Gate,” in 1828--“The Lawn,” “Presentiments,” “The Primrose on the Rock,”
“Devotional Incitements;” these last were written between 1828 and ’32.
A number of gold and silver fishes presented to the poet by Miss H. J.
Jewsbury, who subsequently died of the cholera in India,--and afterwards
removed to the pond already alluded to, under the oak in “Dora’s field,”
suggested the verses “Gold and Silver Fishes in a Vase,” and likewise
“Liberty,” and “Humanity;” “The Poet and the caged Turtle Dove” was
likewise suggested by real circumstances. Miss Jewsbury had given Dora a
pair of these beautiful birds; one of them was killed by an
_un_-necessary cat, and not a “harmless one;” the other survived many
years, and had a habit of cooing the moment Wordsworth began “booing”
his poems, as the country people called it.
Wordsworth gives an amusing account of a visit which he paid about this
time to “Chatsworth.” He had undertaken to ride his daughter’s pony from
Westmoreland to Cambridge, that she might have the use of it during a
visit she was about to make to her uncle at Trinity; and on his way from
Bakewell to Matlock, he turned off to see the splendid mansion of the
great Duke of Devonshire. By-and-bye a tremendous storm came on, and the
poet was drenched through to the very skin, whilst the pony, to make his
rider’s seat the more easy, went “slantwise” all the way to Derby.
Notwithstanding this, however, and the pelting of the pitiless storm,
Wordsworth managed to hold sweet and sad converse with his muse, and
composed his “Lines to the Memory of Sir George Beaumont,” who died 7th
February, 1827. It is a picture which we cannot readily forget, and
shows how completely the poet was master of himself. Sir George Beaumont
and his lady were friends and benefactors of Wordsworth--he loved them
both intensely. Walking through the grounds and gardens of Coleorton
with Sir George--the successor in the Baronetcy to his friend--and after
the death of Lady Beaumont, which took place in 1822, he comes suddenly
to her ladyship’s grotto, near the fountain, and is overwhelmed with his
feelings, and the recollection of the dead, and the happy memories
which rush over his mind in connection with this place, so that he
cannot speak for tears. On his return home he wrote the elegiac musings,
already mentioned in these memoirs, which are full of love, and the
sanctity of a sweet sorrow. In the same year (1831) were composed “The
Armenian Lady’s Love,” “The Egyptian Maid,” and “The Russian Fugitive,”
poems in which all the beauties of language are pressed, along with the
simplicity which marks the old English ballads. Lines on his portrait,
painted by Pickersgill, and preserved with sacred veneration in St.
John’s College, Cambridge, were likewise written in this year, as well
as the inscription already quoted, for the stone at Rydal.
Besides these poetical compositions, however, Wordsworth interested
himself in public affairs; and having fixed principles of political and
social economy in his own mind, regarded all public measures at variance
with them, as fatal errors, and subversive in their consequences of the
highest human concerns. In 1806, he wrote a letter to a friend, who had
consulted him respecting the education of his daughter--in which he
gives some sound and excellent advice respecting the training and
development of youthful minds. For Wordsworth had at an early period
devoted his attention to the subject of education, and had his own views
respecting it--views which were marked by the spiritual peculiarity of
his mind. When he wrote “The Excursion,” he seems to have had the
highest hopes for man, when education should become universal; and
insisted that the State should teach those to obey, from whom she
exacted allegiance:--
“O for the coming of that glorious time,
When, prizing knowledge, as her noblest work
And best protection, this imperial realm
While she exacts allegiance, shall admit
An obligation on her part to _teach_
Them who are born to serve her and obey;
Binding herself, by statute, to secure
For all the children whom her soil maintains
The rudiments of letters, and inform
The mind with moral and religious truth,
Both understood, and practised.”
_Excursion_, Book ix.
He was an avowed enemy, however, at a later period--for his views
respecting the _modus operandi_ of teaching, had undergone some change
since “The Excursion” was written--to all Infant Schools, Madras
Systems, and Bell Systems. The former he regarded as usurping the
functions of motherly duty; the latter, as dead mechanism. Speaking of
the education of girls, he says:--“I will back Shenstone’s ‘School
Mistress,’ by her winter fire, and in her summer garden seat, against
all Dr. Bell’s sour-looking teachers in petticoats. What is the use of
pushing on the education of girls so fast, and moving by the stimulus of
Emulation, who, to say nothing worse of her, is cousin-german to Envy?
What are you to do with these girls? What demand is there for the
ability that they may have prematurely acquired? Will they not be
indisposed to bend to any kind of hard labour or drudgery? And yet many
of them must submit to it, or go wrong. The mechanism of the Bell System
is not required in small places; praying after the _fugleman_, is not
like praying at a mother’s knee. The Bellites overlook the difference:
they talk about moral discipline; but wherein does it encourage the
imaginative feelings? in short, what she practically understands is of
little amount, and too apt to become the slave of the bad passions. I
dislike _display_ in everything; above all, in education.... The old
dame (Shenstone’s) did not affect to make theologians and logicians; but
she taught to read; and she practised the memory, often no doubt by
rote, but still the faculty was improved; something, perhaps, she
explained, but trusted the _rest_ to parents and masters, and to the
pastor of the parish. I am sure as good daughters, as good servants, as
good mothers and wives, were brought up at that time as now, when the
world is so much less humble-minded. A hand full of employment, and a
head not above it, with such principles and habits as may be acquired
_without_ the Madras machine, are the best security for the chastity of
wives of the lower rank.”
The above extract is from a letter dated 1828, and addressed to the Rev.
Hugh Jones Rose, formerly principal of King’s College, London. It
exemplifies, in a very striking manner, the change which had come over
Wordsworth’s mind upon the subject of education, and does not strike me
as being particularly creditable to him.
On the 13th of April, 1836, Wordsworth took part in the ceremony of
laying the foundation-stone of certain new schools, about to be erected
at Bowness, Windermere, and made a speech upon the occasion; in which he
advocates a very humble kind of instruction for the working classes;
forgetting that man is to be educated because he _is a man_, and not
neglected because he happens to be one of the “lower orders.” I have no
sympathy with this foolish cant about educating people according to
their station, and am sorry that Wordsworth’s sanction can be quoted in
its favour. I must reserve what I have to say upon this subject,
however, for my analysis of the mind and writings of the poet.
In 1835, Wordsworth published his “Yarrow Revisited, and other Poems.”
Speaking of “Yarrow Re-visited,” he says: “In the autumn of 1831, my
daughter and I set off from Rydal, to visit Sir Walter Scott, before his
departure for Italy. This journey had been delayed by an inflammation in
my eyes, till we found that the time appointed for his leaving home
would be too near for him to receive us without considerable
inconvenience. Nevertheless we proceeded, and reached Abbotsford on
Monday. I was then scarcely able to lift up my eyes to the light. How
sadly changed did I find him from the man I had seen so healthy, gay,
and hopeful, a few years before, when he said, at the inn at Patterdale,
in my presence, his daughter, Ann, also being there, with Mr. Lockhart,
my own wife and daughter, and Mr. Quillinan: ‘I mean to live till I am
eighty, and shall write as long as I live.’ Though we had none of us the
least thought of the cloud of misfortune which was then going to break
upon his head, I was startled, and almost shocked, at that bold saying,
which could scarcely be uttered by such a man, without a momentary
forgetfulness of the instability of human life. But to return to
Abbotsford. The inmates and guests we found there, were Sir Walter,
Major Scott, Anne Scott, and Mr. and Mrs. Lockhart; Mr. Laidlaw, a very
old friend of Sir Walter’s; one of Burns’s sons, an officer of the
Indian service, had left the house the day before, and had kindly
expressed his regret that he could not wait my arrival, a regret that I
may truly say was mutual. In the evening, Mr. and Mrs. Liddell sang, and
Mrs. Lockhart chaunted old ballads to her harp; and Mr. Allan, hanging
over the back of a chair, told, and acted, odd stories in a humourous
way. With this exhibition, and his daughters’ singing, Sir Walter was
much amused, and, indeed, so were we all, as far as circumstances would
allow.”
On the following morning (Tuesday) Sir Walter accompanied Wordsworth,
and most of his friends, to Newark Castle, on the Yarrow, and it was
upon this occasion that the lines, “Yarrow Revisited,” were written. On
the morning of Thursday following, when the poet left Abbotsford, he had
a serious conversation with Sir Walter, who spoke with gratitude of the
happy life he had led. Sir Walter wrote also a few lines in Dora’s
album, addressed to her; and when he presented her with the book, in his
study, he said: “I should not have done a thing of this kind, but for
your father’s sake; they are probably the last verses I shall ever
write.” “They shew,” says, Wordsworth, “how much his mind was impaired;
not by the strain of thought, but by the execution--some of the lines
being imperfect, and one stanza wanting corresponding rhymes.” Poor Sir
Walter!--what a spectacle it was to see that colossal intellect
tumbling into ruins.
Several poems were the result of this short tour, beside the “Yarrow
Revisited,”--such as “The Place of Burial,” “On the Sight of a Manse in
the South of Scotland,” &c., &c.--Wordsworth’s health, too, was much
improved by this tour, and a violent inflammation of the eyes--a
complaint to which he was much subject,--left him whilst walking through
the Highlands, by the side of his “open carriage,” driven by Dora!
Amongst the poems contained in the volume entitled, “Yarrow Revisited,”
were many of a political character, for they were written between the
years 1830 and 1834, when the Revolution of France, and the Reform party
in England, were agitating society to its centre. Wordsworth now hated
revolution, and reform also; was opposed to a large and enlightened
system of education; and to the admission of Dissenters to the
Universities. His plea was the old constitution of things, which could
not, he thought, be mended without being broken up and destroyed. “Since
the introduction of the Reform Bill, I have been persuaded,” he says,
“that the Constitution of England cannot be preserved. It is a question,
however, of time.” The poem entitled, “The Warning,” will give the best
idea of Wordsworth’s strong political opinions and feelings at this
time. As a contrast, however, to these narrow yet patriotic views, we
turn to the “Evening Voluntaries,” a collection of sweet poems, which
were published in the same volume as the “Yarrow.” They were written on
a high part of the coast of Cumberland, on April 7th (Easter Sunday),
the author’s 63rd birth-day, between Moresby and Whitehaven, whilst he
was on a visit to his son, who was then rector of Moresby.--Very
beautiful, indeed, are these poems, which read like twilight vespers in
some old abbey’s chancel. Wordsworth says of them--“With the exception
of the eighth and ninth, this succession of voluntaries originated in
the concluding lines of the last paragraph of this poem, [i.e. of the
poem, written on the author’s birth-day, and marked No. 2, in the
“Voluntaries,” commencing, “The sun that seemed so mildly to retire.”]
With this coast I have been familiar from my earliest childhood, and
remember being struck, for the first time, by the town and port of
Whitehaven, and the white waves breaking against its quays and piers, as
the whole came into my view from the top of the high ground, down which
the road, that has since been altered, descended abruptly. My sister,
when she first heard the voice of the sea from this point, and beheld
the scene spread before her, burst into tears. Our family then lived at
Cockermouth, and this fact was often mentioned amongst us, indicating
the sensibility for which she was remarkable.”
As a specimen of the “Evening Voluntaries,” take the following:--
“Calm is the air, and loth to lose
Day’s grateful warmth, tho’ moist with falling dews.
Look for the stars, you’ll say that there are none;
Look up a second time, and one by one,
You mark them twinkling out with silvery light,
And wonder how they could elude the sight!
The birds, of late so noisy in their bowers,
Warbled awhile with faint and fainter powers,
But now are silent as the dim-seen flowers.
Nor does the village church clock’s iron tone
The time’s and season’s influence disown;
Nine beats distinctly to each other bound
In drowsy sequence--how unlike the sound
That in rough winter, oft inflicts a fear
On fireside listeners, doubting what they hear!
The shepherd, bent on rising with the sun,
Had closed his door before the day was done,
And now with thankful heart to bed doth creep,
And joins the little children in their sleep.
The bat, lured forth where trees the lane o’ershade,
Flits and reflits along the dark arcade;
The busy dor-hawk chases the white moth
With burring note, which industry and sloth
Might both be pleased with, for it suits them both.
A stream is heard--I see it not but know
By its soft music where the waters flow:
Wheels and the tread of hoofs are heard no more;
One boat there was, but it will touch the shore
With the next dipping of its slackened oar;
Faint sound that for the gayest of the gay,
Might give to serious thought a moment’s sway,
As a last token of man’s toilsome day.”
Wordsworth does not seem, during any period of his life, to have been on
intimate terms with any of his contemporaries. He preferred the flower
of the literateurs, Coleridge, Scott, Southey; and these, with the
exception perhaps of Rogers, were his chief friends. We have letters of
his, however, to much smaller fry; to Mrs. Hemans, and Miss Jewsbury,
for example--and to sundry editors of other men’s wares; but there is
little or no recognition of Byron, Shelly, Keats, Tennyson, Baily,
Campbell, Moore, nor yet of Dickens or Bulwer. His letters represent
his character even better than his poetry; they are Wordsworth in
undress, without the “garland and singing robe,” and are worthy to be
studied. I like much what he says to the Rev. Robert Montgomery, author
of “The Devil and Father Luther,” and pious Robert would do well even at
this late day to think on it. Montgomery had sent Wordsworth a copy of
his poems, and in reply, the poet answers: “I cannot conclude without
one word of literary advice which I hope you will deem my advanced age
entitles me to give. Do not, my dear sir, be anxious about any
individual’s opinion concerning your writings, however highly you may
think of his genius, or rate his judgment. Be a severe critic to
yourself; and depend upon it no person’s decision upon the merit of your
works will bear comparison in point of value with your own. You must be
conscious from what feeling they have flowed, and how far they may or
may not be allowed to claim on that account, permanent respect; and
above all I would remind you, with a view to tranquillise and steady
your mind, that no man takes the trouble of surveying and pondering
another’s writings with a hundredth part of the care which an author of
sense and genius will have bestowed upon his own. Add to this reflection
another, which I press upon you, as it has supported me through
life--viz.: That posterity will settle all accounts justly, and that
works which deserve to last will last; and if undeserving this fate, the
sooner they perish the better.”
In the year 1836 the sister of the poet’s wife--Miss Sarah Hutchinson,
who had resided with the family at Rydal, died, and was buried in
Grasmere church, “near the graves of two young children removed from a
family to which through life she was devoted.”
In the following year, 1837, Wordsworth, accompanied by his friend H. C.
Robinson, Esq., set off from London for Rome, returning in August. The
“Itinerary” of the travellers is contained in the “Memoirs,” along with
some memoranda by the poet; but they are not of much interest. Many fine
pieces, however, sprung as usual from the journey, as well as a goodly
number of sonnets. They originally appeared in a volume entitled “Poems,
chiefly of Early and Late Years,” in 1842. In 1839, Wordsworth received
the degree of D.C.L., from the University of Oxford, which was conferred
on him in the Sheldonian Theatre, amidst shouts of rejoicing such as had
never before been heard in that city, except upon the occasion of an
unexpected visit of the Duke of Wellington. In 1838, Wordsworth prepared
a new edition of his poems, to be published by Moxon, and continued to
live at Rydal, in his quiet and musical manner, writing poems, taking
rambles, and conducting his correspondence until 1843, when he was
appointed Poet Laureate of England, Southey having died on the 21st of
March of that year, and the appointment having been offered to
Wordsworth on the 31st of the same month. One occurrence only broke the
even tenor of the poet’s life in the interim alluded to, and this was an
accident by which he was upset from his gig, and thrown violently into a
plantation. The accident was owing to the carelessness and want of skill
in the driver of a coach, which they met on the road. No serious
consequences followed, however, and inquiries and congratulations flowed
in on all sides, from the peasant up to Queen Adelaide.
From the time of Wordsworth’s appointment as Laureate,--which it ought
to be said he at first refused, and only accepted with the understanding
that it should be an honorary office,--he wrote very little poetry. His
work, indeed, was done, his mission accomplished; and his old days were
spent in rambling over the hills, and in the quiet enjoyment of his
family, friends, fame, and fortune. Honours of a high order were
subsequently heaped upon him. In the year 1838, the University of Durham
took the initiative in conferring an academic degree on the poet; then
the grand old Mother, Oxford, followed,--and in 1846 he was put in
nomination, without his knowledge, for the office of Lord Rector of the
University of Oxford, and gained a majority of twenty-one votes, in
opposition to the premier, Lord John Russell. “The forms of election,
however,” says Wordsworth, in a letter to Sir W. Gomm, of Port Louis,
Mauritius, dated November 23, 1846, “allowed Lord John Russell to be
returned through the single vote of the sub-rector voting for his
superior. To say the truth, I am glad of this result, being too advanced
in life to undertake with comfort any considerable public duty, and it
might have seemed ungracious to have declined the office.”
On the 20th of January, 1847, Mr. William Wordsworth, the younger son of
the poet, was married at Brighton, to Fanny Eliza Graham, youngest
daughter of Reginald Graham, Esq., of Brighton, who was a native of
Cumberland; and whilst the joy of this event was still fresh in the
hearts of the Rydal household, a dread calamity awaited them in the
death of Mrs. Quillinan--the sweet Dora so often spoken of in these
pages, the beloved daughter of the poet. As previously stated, she had
accompanied her husband to Portugal for the benefit of her health,--and
although the change seemed at first to have operated favourably upon
her, it was soon evident, on her return home, that she was doomed for
the silent bourne of all travellers in this world. She died on the 9th
day of July, 1847, and was buried in Grasmere church-yard. Her death was
a terrible blow to the venerable poet, now in his eightieth year,--but
he bore up patiently, with the heart and hope of a Christian.
Three years after this sad loss, Wordsworth himself was summoned away.
On Sunday, the 10th of March, 1850, he attended at Rydal chapel for the
last time, visiting, during the day, a poor old woman, who had once been
his servant, and another person who was sick, and as the poet said,
“never complained.”
“On the afternoon of the following day, he went towards Grasmere, to
meet his two nieces, who were coming from Town End. He called at the
cottage near the White Moss Quarry, and the occupant being within, _he
sat down on the stone seat of the porch, to watch the setting sun_. It
was a cold, bright day. His friend and neighbour, Mr. Roughsedge, came
to drink tea at Rydal, but Mr. Wordsworth not being well, went early to
bed.”
From this time he gradually grew worse; and in order to convey to him
the impressions of his physicians, Mrs. Wordsworth whispered in a soft
voice, full of deep devotion, “Dear William, you are going to Dora.” How
delicate, how affectionate, how poetical! But the poet did not hear, or
did not seem to hear; and yet, twenty-four hours after, when one of his
nieces came into the room, and gently drew aside the curtains of his
bed, he caught a glimpse of her figure, and asked, “Is that Dora?”
On the 23rd of April--the birth-day, and death-day of Shakspeare, the
great-hearted Wordsworth went back again to God.
He was buried on the 27th, in Grasmere church-yard.
Those who would know more of the poet must go to his writings; and, I
may add, that the “Memoirs” of Dr. Wordsworth are indispensable to a
full understanding both of the Poet and the Man. His letters, containing
his most private thoughts, are printed there with plentiful profuseness;
and the “Memoranda” respecting the origin of his poems are intensely
interesting and important to all students of Wordsworth. The
reminiscences of various persons who knew him, set the character of the
poet before us in strong relief. All agree in speaking of him as a most
kindly, affectionate, and hospitable man, living with the simple tastes
and manners of a patriarch, in his beautiful home. My limits prevent me
from entering into an analysis of his mind and character, as I had
intended to do; I must reserve this work, therefore, for another
occasion, and will conclude with a few quotations from the poet’s
“Table-Talk,” respecting his cotemporaries.--Speaking of Goethe, he
says:--
“He does not seem to me to be a great poet in either of the classes of
poets. At the head of the first I would place Homer and Shakspeare,
whose universal minds are able to reach every variety of thought and
feeling, without bringing his own individuality before the reader. They
infuse, they breathe life into every object they approach, but you
cannot find _themselves_. At the head of the second class, those whom
you can trace individually in all they write, I would place Spenser and
Milton. In all that Spenser writes, you can trace the gentle,
affectionate spirit of the man; in all that Milton writes, you find the
exalted, sustained being that he was. Now, in what Goethe writes, who
aims to be of the first class, the _universal_, you find the man
himself, the artificial man, where he should not be found; so that I
consider him a very artificial writer, aiming to be universal, and yet
constantly exposing his individuality, which his character was not of a
kind to dignify. He had not sufficiently clear moral perceptions to make
him anything but an artificial writer.
And again:--
“I have tried to read Goethe. I never could succeed. Mr.---- refers me
to his ‘Iphigenia,’ but I there recognise none of the dignified
simplicity, none of the health and vigour which the heroes and heroines
of antiquity possess in the writings of Homer. The lines of Lucretius
describing the immolation of Iphigenia are worth the whole of Goethe’s
long poem. Again there is a profligacy, an inhuman sensuality, in his
works, which is utterly revolting. I am not intimately acquainted with
them generally. But I take up my ground on the first canto of ‘Wilhelm
Meister;’ and as the attorney-general of human nature, I there indict
him for wantonly outraging the sympathies of humanity. Theologians tell
us of the degraded nature of man; and they tell us what is true. Yet man
is essentially a moral agent, and there is that immortal and
unextinguishable yearning for something pure and spiritual which will
plead against these poetical sensualists as long as man remains what he
is.”
Of Scott he says:--
“As a poet, Scott cannot live, for he has never in verse written
anything addressed to the immortal part of man. In making amusing
stories in verse, he will be superseded by some newer versifier; what he
writes in the way of natural description is merely rhyming nonsense. As
a prose writer, Mr. Wordsworth admitted that Scott had touched a higher
vein, because there he had really dealt with feeling and passion. As
historical novels, professing to give the manners of a past time, he did
not attach much value to those works of Scott’s, so called, because that
he held to be an attempt in which success was impossibility. This led to
some remarks on historical writing, from which it appeared that Mr.
Wordsworth has small value for anything but contemporary history. He
laments that Dr. Arnold should have spent so much of his time and powers
in gathering up, and putting into imaginary shape, the scattered
fragments of the history of Rome.”
And again:--
“He discoursed at great length on Scott’s works. His poetry he
considered of that kind which will always be in demand, and that the
supply will always meet it, suited to the age. He does not consider that
it in any way goes below the surface of things; it does not reach to
any intellectual or spiritual emotion; it is altogether superficial, and
he felt it himself to be so. His descriptions are not true to nature;
they are addressed to the ear, not to the mind. He was a master of
bodily movements in his battle-scenes; but very little productive power
was exerted in popular creations.”
Moore:--
“T. Moore has great natural genius; but he is too lavish of brilliant
ornament. His poems smell of the perfumer’s and milliner’s shops. He is
not content with a ring and a bracelet, but he must have rings in the
ear, rings on the nose--rings everywhere.”
Shelley:--
“Shelley is one of the best _artists_ of us all: I mean in workmanship
of style.”
Tennyson:--
“I saw Tennyson, when I was in London, several times. He is decidedly
the first of our living poets, and I hope will live to give the world
still better things. You will be pleased to hear that he expressed in
the strongest terms his gratitude to my writings. To this I was far from
indifferent, though persuaded that he is not much in sympathy with what
I should myself most value in my attempts--viz., the spirituality with
which I have endeavoured to invest the material universe, and the moral
relations under which I have wished to exhibit its most ordinary
appearances.”
Hartley Coleridge--
He spoke of with affection. “There is a single line,” he added, “in one
of his father’s poems, which I consider explains the after life of the
son. He is speaking of his own confinement in London, and then says,--
‘But thou, my child, shalt wander like a breeze.’
“He thought highly also of some of Hartley’s sonnets.
Southey--
He said had outlived his faculties. His mind he thought had been wrecked
by long watching by the sick bed of his wife, who had lingered for years
in a very distressing state.
Coleridge--
He said the liveliest and truest image he could give of Coleridge’s talk
was that of “a mystic river, the sound or sight of whose course you
caught at intervals, which was sometimes concealed by forests, sometimes
lost in sand, and then came flashing out broad and distinct; then again
took a turn which your eye could not follow, yet you knew and felt that
it was the same river....[M] Coleridge had been spoilt as a poet by
going to Germany. The bent of his mind, at all times very much inclined
to metaphysical theology, had there been fixed in that direction.”
Lord Byron--
“Has spoken severely of my compositions. However faulty they may be, I
do not think I ever could have prevailed with myself to print such lines
as he has done, for instance--
‘I stood at Venice on the Bridge of Sighs,
A palace and a prison on each hand.’
“Some person ought to write a critical review analising Lord Byron’s
language, in order to guard others against imitating him in these
respects.”
Emerson and Carlyle--
“Do you know Miss Peabody of Boston? She has just sent me, with the
highest eulogy, certain essays of Mr. Emerson. Our---- and he appear to
be what the French called _esprits forts_, though the French idols
showed their spirit after a somewhat different fashion. Our two present
_Philosophes_, who have taken a language which they suppose to be
English, for their vehicle, are, verily, _par nobile fratrum_, and it is
a pity that the weakness of our age has not left them exclusively to
this appropriate reward--mutual admiration. Where is the thing which now
passes for philosophy at Boston to stop?”
Such are a few random selections from the spoken opinions of the poet.
He hated innovation, hence his attack upon the two last named authors,
not made, I think, in the very best spirit. I must here leave him,
however. He will stand well upon his honours in all future generations,
and must certainly be ranked as a poet in the same category with Milton.
_FINIS._
J. S. Pratt, Stokesley, Yorkshire.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] These remarks do not of course apply to Cowper and Burns, to whom
our modern literature is so deeply indebted, but to their predecessors,
from Pope downwards.
[B] Memoirs of William Wordsworth, by Dr. Wordsworth, vol. 1, page 7.
[C] De Quincy, Tait’s Magazine, for 1839.
[D] It is related by De Quincy, that during Wordsworth’s early
residence in the lake country--after his return from Cambridge--his
mind was so oppressed by the gloomy aspect of his fortunes, that
evening card-playing was resorted to, to divert him from actual
despondency.
[E] Dr. Wordsworth’s Memoir, page 53.
[F] Memoir, page 71-2.
[G] Chambers’ Papers for the People, article Wordsworth.
[H] Vol. 1, page 149 to 154.
[I] Memoirs, Vol. 1., page 156
[J] Dr. Wordsworth’s “Memoirs,” vol. 2, p. 94.
[K] “Memoirs,” vol. 2, p. 102-105.
[L] Memoirs, vol. ii., p. 121.
[M] This view of Coleridge is confirmed by Carlyle, in his “Life of
John Sterling,” just published.
“Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate-hill, in those years, looking
down on London and its smoke tumult, like a sage escaped from the
inanity of life’s battle; attracting towards him the thoughts of
innumerable brave souls still engaged there. His express contributions
to poetry, philosophy, or any specific province of human literature
or enlightenment, had been small and sadly intermittent; but he had,
especially among young inquiring men, a higher than literary,--a kind
of prophetic, or magician character. He was thought to hold,--he
alone in England,--the key of German and other transcendentalisms;
knew the sublime secret of believing by ‘the reason’ what ‘the
understanding’ had been obliged to fling out as incredible; and could
still, after Hume and Voltaire had done their best and worst with
him, profess himself an orthodox Christian, and say and point to
the Church of England, with its singular old rubrics and surplices
at Allhallowtide, _Esto perpetua_. * * * * He distinguished himself
to all that ever heard him as at least the most _surprising_ talker
extant in this world,--and to some small minority, (by no means to
all,) the most excellent. The good man, he was now getting old, towards
sixty perhaps,--and gave you the idea of a life that had been full
of sufferings; a life heavy-laden, half-vanquished, still swimming
painfully in seas of manifold physical and other bewilderment. * * *
* * I still recollect his ‘object’ and ‘subject,’ terms of continual
recurrence in the Kantean province; and how he sung and snuffled them
into ‘om-m-mject’ ‘sum-m-mject,’ with a kind of solemn shake or quaver,
as he rolled along. No talk, in his century or in any other, could be
more surprising.
* * * * *
“He had knowledge about many things and topics,--much curious reading;
but generally all topics led him, after a pass or two, into the
high seas of theosophic philosophy, the hazy infinitude of Kantean
transcendentalism, with its ‘sum-m-mjects’ and ‘om m-mjects.’ Sad
enough, for with such indolent impatience of the claims and ignorances
of others, he had not the least talent for explaining this or anything
unknown to them; and you swam and fluttered in the mistiest, wide,
unintelligible deluge of things,--for most part in a rather profitless,
uncomfortable manner. Glorious islets, too, I have seen rise out
of the haze; but they were few, and soon swallowed in the general
element again. * * * * * * One right peal of concrete laughter at some
convicted flesh-and-blood absurdity, one burst of noble indignation
at some injustice or depravity rubbing elbows with us on this solid
earth,--how strange would it have been in that Kantean haze-world, and
how infinitely cheering amid its vacant air-castles, and dim-melting
ghosts and shadows! None such ever came. His life had been an abstract
thinking and dreaming, idealistic one, passed amid the ghosts of
defunct bodies and of unborn ones. The mourning sing-song of that
theosophico-metaphysical monotony left on you, at last, a very dreary
feeling.”
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