The Parents' Review

They met the The Leech-Gatherer on White Moss; The Recluse was written in the upstairs room, Dorothy copying it from his dictation. The Beggars were encountered by her at the cottage gate; The Two April Mornings flowed from him almost spontaneously in Easedale; Michael the shepherd lived in Greenhead Ghyll, just beyond the village; The Wishing Gate, or its descendant, still stands, names carved on each surface of its posts and bars. Every spot in the poems on the naming of places has been identified: the church in The Excursion with its crossed rafters, marble monuments, and footworn epitaphs, still shows the corner in which Wordsworth sat; the Pastor of The Excursion was the Vicar of the parish, and in The Churchyard Among the Mountains the remains of the whole Wordsworth family are laid. Its daily life is told for us in Dorothy's journal. No working man would have lived more plainly. Tea they found mostly too expensive, meat was rarely seen. He chopped wood and brought in coal; she cooked, baked, washed, with help from an Old Village Dame. Guests filled constantly the little chamber on the wall; Coleridge oftenest of all, coming in suddenly or late at night, sitting till dawn to talk, to hear Wordsworth's poems and to recite his own. John the sailor brother was a frequent inmate; "John's Walk" a quarter-deck promenade among the trees in a grove hard by. DeQuincey came, and has left an immortal record of the home which was one day to be his own; Southey too, and, later, Walter Scott. We walk, says Dorothy, at all hours of the day; we row upon the water—William and John go fishing, I read German. Again and again we hear how William wearies himself with company; he goes to bed too nervous to sleep, she brings the Faery Queen and reads to him. Some chance of speech of hers kindles inspiration, and he can neither eat nor sleep till the fit is past, leaving him weak as is a breaking wave. She is perpetually copying his verse, for his eyes made writing painful to him; they read together Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Ben Jonson, Chaucer—little else. At the end of 1800 appears at last the second volume of the Lyrical Ballads. As I handle the shabby little book, with its careless printing and its outrageous market value of to-day—as I read over Hart-Leap Well, The Brothers, Lucy Gray, The Fountain, Michael, and the rest, I understand how the veteran readers of the opening century, suckled on Pope and weaned on Johnson, must have loathed it all; how the race of younger men, panting for simplicity of life, for loftiness of thought, for truth of diction, for some key to the perplexities of life, turned to this Zaphnath-paaneah, this Revealer of Secrets, such as no former literature enshrined, hailing him as more than a Prophet.

In October, 1802, a third inmate came to the cottage. Mary Hutchinson, the Poet's cousin, had been from childhood intimate with his sister and himself, and their marriage had been some time in contemplation. William and Dorothy set out on a three months' tour before the wedding day. He writes his exquisite Farewell to the little spot of mountain ground—she takes leave of it in her diary—"Dear Mary, dear William, the hour is come, I must prepare to go. The swallows! I must leave them, the wall, the garden, the roses—all. Dear creatures! they sang last night after I was in bed: seemed to be singing to one another, just before they settled to rest for the night. Well, I must go—farewell!" They ramble in Yorkshire; they visit London; the sonnet to Westminster Bridge composed as they pass over it on the coach top in the early dawn; go on to Calais; return to Gallow Hill where Mary was staying, and the two are married ten days later in the little Brompton Church. Dorothy and Mary are agitated; William, like Marjorie Fleming's bereaved turkey, is "more than usual calm." The three set off together in a post chaise; study the gravestones in Kirby churchyard while the horses feed. They rest for the night at a place called Leeming Lane, William ending the day with a sonnet which was not thought worth preserving. Next morning on they go, William leaving them ever and anon to search for waterfalls, until they reach Grasmere late in the evening after a four days' drive; hasten with candles into the garden to note the growth of trees and plants, and settle down to a life in no way different to that which went before, except that the figures on its stage are three instead of two. In all biography there is nothing so curious as the prompt facile adaptation of these three to their united life. It was due, I think, mainly to Wordsworth's passionless absorption in his being's end and aim. He was vowed to a visionary life, inspired, dedicated, called; there was no room in his temperament for the delicious yet distracting raptures of a romantic life: his marriage was but an incident in his experience: his Mary, formerly a cousin and a guest, was now his wife—and that was all. Dorothy retained unimpaired the place which she had always held in his affections and his daily habits. The young wife, as sympathetic as she was tactful, fitted easily into the triune life, too noble-minded and too clear-sighted to begrudge a rival in the sister, content to win from the husband, if not vehement fondness, yet tranquil, life-long, continuous affection. For nearly six more years the Grasmere life flows on. We have the tour in Scotland. Walter Scott is visited at Lasswade. John Wordsworth dies at sea—a bereavement deeply felt and touchingly recorded, in the Poet's letters, in the lines on Peel Castle, in the last of the Daisy Poems [1, 2, 3, 4], in The Happy Warrior, which he himself looked upon as his finest piece. By degrees, the increasing family makes the little home straitened and impossible. They migrate to a farm house at Coleorton, lent them by Sir. G. Beaumont; to Allan Bank, still in Grasmere; to the Vicarage, saddened by the death of two young children; till, in 1813, all removed to Rydal, and the third period of both the personal and the literary biography began beside lovely Rotha, second only to the Avon in associations of acquired sacredness. The lovely Rotha! yes. The old Greeks flung locks of hair into their running rivers. In a famous passage Wordsworth tells us the meaning of the rite. The inhabitants of Rydal to-day—some of them, that is—charge the Naiad of their divine stream with garden refuse, broken pots and pans, tin carcases of devoured confections. The sentiment possibly is there, but it is latent, and I have not been able to interpret it.

It is more than forty-five years, since, travelling with a pupil in the Lakes, and armed with an introduction from the late Bishop Christopher Wordsworth, I visited Rydal Mount. My mind's eye still sees distinctly the drawing-room made familiar to me by Westall's lithograph; its painting of the Poet, its San Sisto Madonna, the portraits of the Duke of Wellington, and of Jemina Quillinan, the books, among which I picked out the copy of Daniel containing the fine quotation in The Excursion, the Luca di Giordano on the staircase, the paintings by Sir. G. Beaumont, the cuckoo clock; all shown to me by William, the Poet's grandson, whom I knew at Oxford, and whose strong likeness to the Haydon portrait hanging in my rooms was always remarked at the breakfast parties where he was present. Miss Edith Coleridge was set to make the tea, and I enjoyed an hour's talk, repeated on the following day, with Mrs. Wordsworth, not then blind, full of life and merriment. She spoke of Oxford, of my own College where her eldest son was educated, of my old master and friend Charles Wordsworth, whom she described as having been the most winning youth she ever saw. She was eloquent in her admiration of the Rydal Valley, pronouncing it to be the loveliest in winter when none came to see it. She spoke often of her husband—"William" she always called him—delighted to find I could pass an examination in his writings. She sat, I remember, by the window, leaning back and shading her eyes, but bending forward eagerly when interested. Finally, I was handed over to the gardener, James Dixon, with whom, and with a wiry Dandie Dinmont terrier, I visited all the "points"—Mount, terraces, summer house, Nab well, gold-fish pond—James talking of his master, relating how he would let the servants off work the whole day long in skating time, pointing to the ferns and mosses clothing every spot, which Wordsworth would never suffer to be clipped or weeded.

Rydal then was, henceforth, for thirty-seven years the Poet's home; the home with which, witnessing at once the ebb of his poetic genius, and the flow of his poet fame, Englishmen have learned especially to connect him. From the migration to the Mount, his life, still plain and frugal, relaxed something of its Grasmere austerity. Through Lord Lonsdale's influence he was made Stamp Distributor for the county; and while the labours of the office could be discharged by deputy, its emoluments set him at ease as to the education of his sons and the increased expenses of a larger house. The first-fruit of his new abode was the completion of The Excursion and its publication in quarto form, dedicated to the Earl of Lonsdale. It was followed after a year or two by Peter Bell, by The White Doe of Rylstone and The Waggoner, by the Duddon sonnets (1, 2). He frequently visited London, where faithful Crabb Robinson everywhere followed and Boswellised him; travelled on the Continent, in Scotland, and in Ireland. In 1830 a cruel blow fell upon him in his sister's illness, issuing, ultimately, in her mental aberration. In 1831 occurred his mournful farewell visit to Abbotsford, accompanied by his daughter Dora and his nephew Charles. Scott, though paralysis had set its mark upon him, was full of brightness; taking his guests, as Charles Wordsworth who was with them told me once, to Melrose and to Yarrow, inscribing in Dora's album the last lines he ever wrote, faulty in metre, in spelling, in signature; misquoted curiously in almost every report, even in [William] Knight's Wordsworth. The beautiful Abbotsford sonnet (here) is Wordsworth's own tribute to his friend, followed not long afterwards by the stanzas in his extempore poem on the death of [James] Hogg (here). In 1839 he received the degree of D.C.L. from the University of Oxford, being presented in the theatre, with an overpowering reception, by John Keble, the Professor of Poetry. An eye-witness has told me how pleased was the old man by the cries of William Wordsworth, with which the undergraduates saluted him, and records meeting him afterwards at a private house where a young lady sang to him the lines on Lucy, set to music by Professor Donkin. A visit was paid to the old Quantock haunts, in 1841—"a farewell visit for life" he calls it, "and, of course, not a little interesting"; but the sadness must have balanced the interest, for Coleridge and Tom Poole were dead, and the beloved sister was insane. His companions were his wife and his daughter Dora, with her newly-wedded husband, Mr. Quillinan; from the sorrow of her subsequent death, after five years of married life, he never raised his head. Of the closing Rydal days, Crabb Robinson is the best biographer. He tell us of the men and women who made its brilliant society in those days—Professor Wilson, Quillinan, De Quincey, Aubrey de Vere, Faber, Mrs. Fletcher, Miss Martineau, Lady Richardson, the Arnolds. On Southey's death he was made Poet Laureate, receiving about the same time, through Mr. Gladstone's good offices with Sir Robert Peel, a life pension of £300 a year. He chose the grave and attended the funeral of Hartley Coleridge, ordering a space to be marked out close beside it for his own interment and his wife's—"keep the ground for us," he said to the sexton, "we are old people, and it cannot be for long." Long it was not; he caught cold in watching a sunset on a chilly spring evening, and died a fortnight after the completion of his eightieth year—on the 23rd of April, 1850—a day already memorable as that of Shakespeare's birth and death. He lies close beside the rippling murmuring Rotha—"William Wordsworth," when I saw it first in 1855, the only inscription on the slab of slate which formed his headstone. "He loved us all, sir," said the girl who showed me the grave, "he would lay his hand on the heads of us young ones—and his own was grey and bowed. He was never happy away from these valleys, and always came back to them the earliest he could." She had heard tell, she went on, that The Excursion was his finest poem—there were others she liked better. Her father had known the real Peter Bell—he was sometimes in Grasmere with his donkey—why Mr. Wordsworth had written a poem to her sister Sarah Mackareth—did I know it? It was headed "To a Westmoreland Girl." "See how this yew tree is worn, sir, on this side; that is because so many people pluck it to bear away—English people often—visitors from America most of all." I did as "many people" do; a sprig of the yew, with a frond of spleen-wort form the Rydal Terrace, still consecrates my copy of the poems.

Simon Lee ends with the classic lines—

The great Ode reaches a level of lyrical excellence which our poetry had not attained since Lycidas. Slightly declamatory here and there, it contains some of Wordsworth's most majestic lines:—

In Tintern Abbey is concentrated all of him that is most animatingly characteristic. It was composed during a walk from the Wye to Bristol and written down unaltered—a burst of absolute inspiration. Fragments of it—such as

cling to us for ever. It was written in 1798; he recalls having visited the same spot five years before, and compares then with now. Of all tributes to his sister, it contains the sweetest: no poem is so interpenetrated with his exquisite Pantheism.

To Goslar we owe Lucy Gray, just bordering here and there upon the infantine, yet a great poem, as fastidious Arnold admits. Nutting reproduces subtly the Grecian Hamadryad sympathy with the forms of Nature as individual personalities. Lucy was the favourite of Sara Coleridge—the girl shaped by nature into loveliness and ladyhood. In A Poet's Epitaph, as in Rob Roy, he discloses a power of sarcasm alien from his usual secure serenity. Walter Scott, in The Antiquary, makes Monkbarns linger over the delicious lines in the Fountain—"No check, no stay," etc. When next you walk that way, take [Matthew] Arnold's Wordsworth [contents here] in your pocket, and read the Grasmere poems in the nooks where they were composed; the poetry will exalt each spot as the spot will illuminate each poem. Read Michael in Green Head Ghyll—the stones in the unfinished sheepfold lie there still in a moss-grown heap—read The Green Linnet under the apple trees in the orchard; listen to the stockdove cooing in the Brother's Grove, and to the cuckoo's wandering voice coming to you as it came to him across the lake from Silver How. Read the Farewell as you lift the latch of the little gate to go; The Happy Warrior as you step the Sailor's walk; The Leech-Gatherer beside the White Moss pool. Follow the pictures in this: the sunny morn fresh from last night's rain—the hare running races in her mirth, and raising as she runs a mist from the plashy earth—the dejection weighing on the poet, as with Burns, Hogg, Chatterton, in his mind he reflects on the mutabilities which Fortune may have laid up for himself—the unexpected apparition of the grey-haired man—

stirring the pond for leeches with his staff; his grave, resigned, yet independent speech; the dissipation of the poet's anxieties by this spectacle of moral dignity.

Go further afield if you will. Walk in spring along Gowbarrow, where the Daffodils danced, and I am told still dance, beside Ullswater. Travel on to Ennerdale, with its lofty pillar and its bridge; sit in the churchyard of the little chapel and read in the Brothers how Leonard searched among the graves and went his way forlorn. All these are local; there remain one or two others belonging to that time. The lines on his Mary—

—the song at Feast of Brougham Castle, with its change at the close from the rapid martial menacing and jubilant strain into the mirror key of quiet, thoughtful, Nature-teaching.