■*&<%- mm \0¥ LITERATU RE1 I* HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIEtf * m\ ^^■■5 <^^^-i/SS ^.V ^ mmSPfSfk* ■OS^i ^rwl W^T^ wJm^k m\^Jjk Bb^L kWm\Wl^!*mw Mftiify^RSl 1 ^ 1kmhh| yyJJSjJ S^^^vQj^Xg rNrfPS^^j l XT] ^k "C^tl3 l> "Mf J FjBttV .t^™rl : T^^?^T^ffl 1 ^J#*V*»^ j Class _J&NJ_M_ Book L3._0. Copyright If COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. c/oackgtoandd of Joitezatuzes My Study Fire My Study Fire, Second Series Under the Trees and Elsewhere Short Studies in Literature Essays in Literary Interpretation Essays on Nature and Culture Essays on Books and Culture Essays on Work and Culture The Life of the Spirit Norse Stories William Shakespeare The Forest of Arden A Child of Nature Works and Days Parables of Life In Arcady Uuackqwaadd of J^ttetatwtes abamiltotiD VViight (y/Oaoie^ SLLudttated : , %ew HJozk One Outlook (oompany igo3 ' 11 THE C OCT 14 1903 Copyright ti.tij CLASSO CL. XXc. No ; COPY B. ' Copyright, 1903, by The Outlook Co. THE DE VIKKE PRESS Cj- s TO LAWRENCE F. ABBOTT CONTENTS PAGE THE LAKE COUNTRY AND WORDSWORTH 1 EMERSON AND CONCORD 57 THE WASHINGTON IRVING COUNTRY . . 99 WEIMAR AND GOETHE 135 THE LAND OF LORNA DOONE 181 AMERICA IN WHITMAN'S POETRY . . . 195 THE LAND OF SCOTT . . 247 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Dove Cottage, Grasmere Frontispiece Honister Crag and Pass 5 Hawkshead, where Wordsworth went to School . . 11 Kirkstone Pass 18 Ullswater 23 Rydal Mount 29 Striding Edge, Helvellyn 36 Langdale Pikes 41 - Derwentwater 47 Emerson's Home from the Orchard 56 -' Drawn by Elizabeth Wentwortb Roberts The Great Meadows 63 - Drawn by Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts The Pines of Walden 69 Drawn by Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts The Elms of the Concord River 76 Drawn by Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts A Corner of the Study 81 Drawn by Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts x LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Early Morning at the Old Manse 87 Drawn by Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts Walden Ledge by Moonlight 94 Drawn by Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts Sunnyside 98 The Entrance to Sleepy Hollow 103 On Sleepy Hollow Brook 109 » Old Willows near Tarrytown 115 Along Sleepy Hollow Brook on the Old Philipse Manor 122 The Old Dutch Church in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery 127 Goethe's House 134 Goethe's Working-room 141 The State Church at Weimar 147 The Castle and Ducal Palace 155 The Bronze Serpent in the Park 162 The Garden of Goethe's House 167 A Corner in the Garden 175 The Valley of the Doones 180 Whitman's Birthplace 194 Old Well at Huntington 204 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xi PAGE The Garden of Whitman's House in Camden . . . 217 At Cold Spring Harbor, where Whitman had his First Glimpse of the Sea 227 - A Byway in Huntington 237 Whitman's Grave at Camden 241 Abbotsford 246 The Brig o' Turk 251 v St. Margaret's Loch and Arthur's Seat, Edinburgh . 258 Edinburgh Castle 263 Loch Achray and Ben Venue 270 Dryburgh Abbey 275 The Canongate Tolbooth, Edinburgh 282 • Loch Katrine 287 Melrose Abbey 294 The Quadrangle, Edinburgh University . . . . 299 THE LAKE COUNTRY AND WORDSWORTH THE LAKE COUNTRY AND WORDSWORTH He spoke, and loosed our hearts in tears. He laid us as we lay at birth, On the cool flowery lap of earth ; Smiles broke from us and we had ease; The hills were round us, and the breeze Went o'er the sunlit fields again; Our foreheads felt the wind and rain. Our youth return'd; for there was shed On spirits that had long been dead, Spirits dried up and closely furl'd, The freshness of the early world. and purity of O wrote Matthew Arnold in 1850, when the long life of Wordsworth ended and he was laid at rest in the churchyard at Grasmere, the Rotha sweeping past his grave with the freshness the mountains in its bosom. 3 THE LAKE COUNTRY Half a century has passed since the bells in the old square tower tolled on that memor- able day, but the peace with which the poet touched the fevered life of the century has not lost its healing, nor has his message lost its power. There are still differences of opinion concerning minor points in his work, but his genius is no longer questioned ; and his art, in its best moments, has won complete recognition. Some foreign critics, it is true, have doubted and even sneered; but one of the most valuable of recent contributions to the large literature which has grown up about Wordsworth comes from the hand of a very intelligent and sympa- thetic French critic. It is safe to say that, in the settled opinion of this country and of England, Wordsworth gave the world between 1798 and 1815 work that has enriched English poetry for all time both in substance and in form. For this poetry had not only a new music for the ear which made men think suddenly of mountain brooks ; it had also a new view of nature and a new conception of life. * A poet so freighted with spiritual insight, with meditative habit, and with moral fervor, is *3 P - AND WORDSWORTH always in danger of straining his art and dissi- pating its magic in the endeavor to produce ethical results; and a touch of didacticism ban- ishes the bloom and dissolves the spell. There was in Wordsworth a natural stiffness of mind which showed itself more distinctly as time im- paired the vivacity of his moods and the fresh- ness of his imagination. He was, by instinct and the habit of a lifetime, a moralist ; and there were times when he came perilously near being a preacher in verse. He was, as often happens, radically unlike the popular impression of him; he and Keats have been widely and astonish- ingly misunderstood. One constantly comes upon expressions of the feeling that Words- worth had the calmness of the philosophic tem- per, and that he was by nature self -poised and cold ; and this in the face of the fact that one of the great qualities of his verse is its passion! Wordsworth was, by nature, headstrong, ar- dent, passionate, with great capacity for emo- tion and suffering ; the sorrows of his life shook him as an oak is shaken by a tempest, and years afterward, when he referred to the deaths of his children or of his brother, his emotion was pain- 7 THE LAKE COUNTRY f ul to look upon. He bore himself with a noble fortitude through the trials and disappoint- ments of his long career ; but that fortitude was won through struggle. He had a stubborn will, which became inflexible when a principle was involved; he passed through a great spiritual crisis when the French Revolution first liber- ated and then blasted the hopes of ardent and generous spirits in Europe; he sought seclusion and maintained it to the end; he was rejected and derided by the great majority of those who made literary opinion during his youth and ma- turity ; and his verse brought him no returns, al- though he had both the need and the wholesome desire for adequate payment for honorable work. All these and other conditions told against the free development of the pure poetic quality in Wordsworth's nature, and against that spon- taneity which is the source of natural magic in poetry. It is not surprising that he wrote so much didactic verse; it is surprising that he wrote so much poetry of surpassing charm and beauty. When all deductions are made from his work, there remains a body of poetry large 8 AND WORDSWORTH enough and beautiful enough to place the poet among the greatest of English singers. At his best no one has more of that magic which lends to thought the enchantment of a melody that seems to flow out of its heart as the brook runs shining and singing out of the heart of the hills. No English poet has command of a purer music, and none has more to say to the spirit ; he speaks to the ear, to the imagination, to the in- tellect, and to the soul of his fellows. He was always high-minded, devoted to his work, stain- less in all his relations; during fifteen golden years he was so in tune with Nature that she breathed through him as the wind breathes through the harp, and the deep silence of the hills became a haunting music in his verse, and the inarticulate murmur of the mountain streams a reconciling and restful melody to tired spirits and sorrow-smitten hearts. Such a life is a spiritual achievement; add to it a noble body of poetry, and the measure of Wordsworth's greatness and service becomes more clear, although that measure has not yet been finally taken. In this poetry Nature is not only presented 9 THE LAKE COUNTRY in every aspect, but is interpreted in a way which was in effect a revelation. It is true, poets as far back as Lucretius had conceived of Nature as a whole, and had felt and expressed the inspiration which flowed from this great conception; but Wordsworth was the first poet in whose imagination this view of the world was completely mastered and assimilated; the first poet who adequately presented Nature, not only as a vast unity of form and life, but as a sublime symbol; the first poet who suc- ceeded in blending the life of man with Nature with such spiritual insight that the deeper corre- spondences between the two were brought into clear view, and their subtle and secret relations indicated. He is constantly spoken of as pre- eminently the poet of Nature, because in no other English verse does Nature fill so vast a place as in his poetry; but he was even more distinctly the poet of the spirit of man, discern- ing everywhere in Nature those spiritual forces and verities which came to consciousness in his own soul, and those hints and suggestions of spiritual truth which found in his own spirit an interpreter. 10 Hawkshead, where Wordsworth went to School AND WORDSWORTH It was inevitable that a poetry of Nature which was, at bottom, a poetry of life, with Na- ture as a background, a symbol, a spiritual en- ergy, a living environment, should have its roots deep in the soil and should reflect, not general impressions of a universe, but aspects, glimpses, views of a world close at hand. In art great conceptions are successfully presented only when they find forms so beautiful and in- evitable that the thought seems born in the form as the soul is lodged in the body; not con- ditioned by it, but so much a part of it that it cannot be localized, and so pervasive that it irradiates and spiritualizes every part. In like manner, in his best moments, Wordsworth fills our vision with the beauty of some actual scene or place before he opens the imagination by natural and inevitable dilation to some great poetic idea. In the noble " Lines written above Tintern Abbey,'' in which his imagination rises to a great height and his diction rises with it on even wing, we are first made to see with mar- velous distinctness the steep and lonely cliffs, the dark sycamore, the orchard-tufts, the hedge-rows — " little lines of sportive wood run 13 THE LAKE COUNTRY wild " — the pastoral farms and wreaths of smoke, before we are brought under the spell of That serene and blessed mood, In which the affections lead us on, and we become living souls and see into the heart of things. In like manner the great Ode rises from familiar things — the rose, the moon, the birds, the lamb, the sweet, homely sights and sounds — to that sublime height from which the whole sweep and range of life become visible. And the lover of Wordsworth who recalls the Highland girl, the dancing daffodils, and a hundred other imperishable figures and scenes, knows with what unerring instinct the poet fas- tens upon the familiar and near when he pur- poses to flash into the imagination the highest truths. Wordsworth's poetry has a singular unity and consistency; from beginning to end it is bound together not only by great ideas which continually reappear, but it is harmonized by a background which remains unchanged from stage to stage. This double unity was made possible by the good fortune of a lifelong resi- 14 AND WORDSWORTH dence in the Lake Country. With the excep- tion of the years at Cambridge, when he was a student in St. John's College, and later in London and Dorsetshire, and of occasional visits to the Continent, the poet spent his whole life almost within sight of Skiddaw and Hel- vellyn. In childhood, youth, maturity, and age he saw the same noble masses of mountain, the same sleeping or moving surfaces of water; he heard the same music of running streams and the same deep harmonies of tempests among the hills. The sources of his poetry were in his own nature, but its scenery, its incidents, its occasions, are, with few exceptions, to be found in the Lake Country. No one can catch all the tones of his verse who has not heard the rush of wind and the notes of hidden streams in that beautiful region; no one can fully possess the rich and splendid atmosphere which gathers about his greater passages who has not seen the unsearchable glory of the sunset when the up- per Vales are filled with a mist which is trans- formed into such effulgence of light as never yet came "within the empire of any earthly pencil." In a word, the poetry of Wordsworth is rooted 15 THE LAKE COUNTRY in the Lake Country as truly as the other flora of that region; and the spirit and quality of the landscape not only come to the surface in separate poems and in detached lines, but penetrate and irradiate the whole body of his verse. The poet was born at Cockermouth, on the 7th of April, 1770, the second son of John Words- worth, law agent of the Earl of Lonsdale. The town is in the northeastern part of the Lake region, not many miles from the English Chan- nel, and within sound of the water of the Der- went. On the main street of the old market town stands the plain, substantial, two-storied house, spacious and comfortable, in which Wil- liam and Dorothy were born ; for the two names ought never to be separated, the sister's pas- sionate devotion and genius contributing not only to the brother's growth and comfort, but to his work. To the south rises the castle, half in ruins; about are soft, grassy hills. The garden at the back of the house, with its hedges and the river murmuring near, was the play- ground of the children. There flowers bloomed 16 AND WORDSWORTH and birds built safely, and the days went by in a deep and beautiful calm: Stay near me : do not take thy flight ! A little longer stay in sight! Much converse do I find in thee, Historian of my infancy! Float near me: do not yet depart. Dead times revive in thee: Thou bring'st, gay creature as thou art ! A solemn image to my heart, My father's family ! Oh! pleasant, pleasant were the days, The time, when, in our childish plays, My sister Emmeline and I Together chased the butterfly! A very hunter did I rush Upon the prey; with leaps and springs I followed on from brook to bush; But she, God love her! feared to brush The dust from off its wings. In the " Prelude " Wordsworth has left to the world a unique autobiography; a human document of the highest interest. In this story of his poetic life the landscape of his physical life is reflected in almost numberless glimpses, from his childhood to those rich years at Gras- 19 THE LAKE-COUNTRY mere. In this meditative, descriptive poem, as in a quiet stream, his childhood and youth are preserved, and we are enabled to note the scenes and incidents which left their permanent im- press on his memory. Under the northwest tower of the Castle at Cockermouth the Der- went runs swift and deep, and sweeps tumultu- ously over the blue-gray gravel of the shallows which spread out from the bank opposite. The boy never forgot this striking effect, and years after he wrote of . . . the shadow of those towers That yet survive, a shattered monument Of feudal sway, the bright blue river passed Along the margin of our terrace walk. Standing in the garden at the back of the house, he saw constantly the footpath that led from the ford over the rocky brow of a neigh- boring hill ; and that worn line of human travel became a highway to his imagination: ... a disappearing line, One daily present to my eyes, that crossed The naked summit of a far-off hill Beyond the limits that my feet had trod, Was like an invitation into space Boundless, or guide into eternity. 20 AND WORDSWORTH In 1778 the boy was sent to the Grammar School at Hawkshead, founded by Archbishop Sandys in 1585, at that memorable time when William Shakespeare, escaping from the tasks of the Stratford Grammar School and the quiet which broods along the banks of the slow-mov- ing Avon, had gone up to London to seek and find the greatest fortune of literary opportu- nity and fame which has yet come in the way of mortal man. The school is still largely un- changed ; there is a spacious room on the ground floor where the ancient hum of industrious boys is still heard ; there is a small library made up of gifts from the students, each pupil presenting a volume when he leaves the school. The names of the Masters are preserved on a tablet in this room, and in an oaken chest the original charter of the school is kept. The old oak benches in the lower room bear witness to the traditional activity of the jack-knife, and " W. Words- worth " is cut deeply in the wood. Here the boy worked at his books for eight happy years ; boarding, as was the custom of the place, with a village dame — Anne Tyson — for whom he came to have a deep and lasting affection. The 21 THE LAKE COUNTRY house in which she lived, like its fellows in the village, is small and unpretentious. The village lies in the beautiful country between Winder- mere and Coniston Water, with Esthwaite Water close at hand. It is a quaint old market town, with narrow streets, low archways, houses with many-paned windows; the old church dominating the place: The snow-white church upon the hill Sits like a throned lady, sending out A gracious look all over her domain. The " Prelude " lingers long over the scenes, incidents, and experiences of the eight years at Hawkshead; and it would be quite impossible to find a locality more nobly planned for the unfolding and enrichment of a poet's imagina- tion. The lover of Wordsworth can still feel something of the spell which was laid upon the boy in those golden days of fresh and aspiring youth. The teaching which the school gave was, for its time, admirable; but the deepest education was gained out of school hours, and, largely, out of doors. The memory of those years was always fresh and grateful: 22 AND WORDSWORTH Well do I call to mind the very week When I was first intrusted to the care Of that sweet Valley. The " Prelude " makes us aware of the spir- itual richness and growth of these school days; of the joy of reading and the deeper joy of seeing; of long walks of exploration; of silent hours upon Esthwaite, or, in vacation, upon Windermere, when the deep and solemn beauty of mountain and star sank into his heart : Dear native Regions, wheresoe'er shall close My mortal course, there will I think on you ; Dying, will cast on you a backward look; Even as this setting sun (albeit the Vale Is nowhere touched by one memorial gleam) Doth with the fond remains of his last power Still linger, and a farewell luster sheds On the dear mountain-tops where first he rose. Within easy walking distance one comes upon some of the most impressive or enchant- ing scenery of the Lake Country. Winder- mere, with its group of mountains ; the striking lines of the Uangdale Pikes, and other peaks, crowd the horizon in all directions. To the west, over the hill, through lovely stretches of 25 THE LAKE COUNTRY meadow or across the moorland, lies Conis- ton Water, with the massive front of Coniston Old Man rising across the quiet lake. One cannot look down on that exquisite Valley with- out thinking of Brantwood, and of the last of the group of great writers who were contempo- raneous with Wordsworth's later years. The leisure hours of that happy time were not, however, wholly given over to wandering and solitude; there was companionship with books as well: Of my earliest days at school [writes the poet] I have little to say, but that they were very happy ones, chiefly because I was left at liberty there, and in the vacations, to read whatever books I liked. For example, I read all Fielding's works, Don Quixote, Gil Bias, and any part of Swift that I liked, Gulliver's Travels and The Tale of a Tub being both much to my taste. It may be, perhaps, as well to mention that the first verses which 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. There was nothing remarkable in either poem ; but I was called upon, among other scholars, to write verses upon the completion of the second centenary from the foundation of the school in 1585 by Arch- bishop Sandys. These verses were much admired — ■ 26 AND WORDSWORTH far more than they deserved, for they were but a tame imitation of Pope's versification, and a little in his style. The real education of the boy — the libera- tion of his imagination and the unfolding of his spiritual nature — was gained, however, in the woods and fields and upon the quiet lakes. Esthwaite, Windermere, and Winander, and the mountains which encircled them and made them a world by themselves, were his most po- tent teachers. Here, in boyhood, he began to reveal that union of exact observation with imaginative insight which was to give his po- etry vividness of pictorial effect and depth of spiritual suggestion. He learned both to see the object upon which his eye rested, and also, by a sudden extension of vision, to discern its significance in that invisible order of which all things seen are but types and symbols. And out of this clarity and range of vision there came the double beauty of his verse : the beauty of the flower or tree or landscape suddenly and vividly presented to the imagination, and the beauty of the great world of earth and sky which enfolds flower and tree and landscape; 27 THE LAKE COUNTRY the beauty of the daffodil dancing along the margin of the bay, and that other beauty which flashes upon . . . that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude. In October, 1787, Wordsworth left the Lake Country for the first time and took up his resi- dence in the southwestern corner of the first quadrangle of St. John's College, Cambridge. Here he found another kind of beauty: the beauty of low-lying fields, of streams that run through marshes to the sea, of low, veiled skies. Here, too, was the ripe loveliness of an ancient seat of learning; and here, above all, were the richest traditions and associations of English poetry. Those glorious windows and noble roofs which Milton loved so well Wordsworth loved also, and from those dark carven seats where one sits to-day under the spell of choral singing of almost angelic sweetness he doubtless searched, with reverent gaze, That branching roof Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells Where light and shade repose, where music dwells 28 — o - S3 AND WORDSWORTH Lingering, and wandering on as loth to die — Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof That they were born for immortality. Having taken his Bachelor's degree in Janu- ary, 1791, Wordsworth went up to London, uncertain as to his future vocation. Every reader of his poetry knows how vividly he saw certain things in London — the thrush that sang on Wood Street, and by the magic of its notes made poor Susan suddenly aware of trees and mountains, of rolling vapor and running streams; and that noble vision from Westmin- ster Bridge; but the great city touched him mainly as it reminded him of things remote from its turmoil and alien to its mighty rush and war of strife and toil. In November of the same year he landed in France, at the very mo- ment when the hopes of humanity were still full winged on their sublimest flight; hopes so soon to fall, maimed and bruised, to the earth whence they had risen with such exultant joy. The spiritual crisis through which the ardent young poet passed lies outside the scope of this article; it may be said in passing, however, that those who are tempted to make the usual common- 31 THE LAKE COUNTRY place comments on his subsequent change of attitude will do well to study first the tempera- ment of one whose nature had a kind of ocean- like capacity for emotion, and whose convictions were born in absolute integrity of thought. The world would not willingly lose Browning's strik- ing lines on " The Lost Leader "; but the world is glad to remember that the younger poet, with characteristic candor, in later and wiser years disclaimed his interpretation of the older poet's course. In 1795 Wordsworth made his first home! at Racedown, in Dorsetshire. His sister joined him, and that beautiful companionship, which was to be one of the prime sources of his in- spiration, brought him calmness and hope af- ter months of darkness and discouragement. Here began that long career which was not only to develop poetic genius of a high order, but to illustrate a devotion to the things of the spirit so nobly sustained that the history of literature hardly affords its parallel. The beginnings were not very promising; the poet seemed to need the touch of some quicker mind than his own. The impulse came two years 32 AND WORDSWORTH later when Coleridge became the guest of the quiet household, and in one of the long walks in which the two poets and Dorothy Words- worth found such delight, the "Ancient Mar- iner " was planned. In the autumn of the fol- lowing year a new date was made in English literature by the appearance of the "Lyrical Ballads." To that slender volume Wordsworth contributed both his weakness and his strength; it contained "Goody Blake" and "The Idiot Boy," but it also contained "Expostulation and Reply " and " The Tables Turned." Above all, it gave the world the "Lines written above Tin- tern Abbey," in which the genius of the poet touched its highest reach of insight and power. The poet was now on the threshold of his great career; there were before him fifteen years in which the breath of inspiration touched him again and again, and he sang with the mag- ical ease of the bird; after this productive dec- ade and a half the glow slowly faded, the spell was broken, the magic lost. At the very begin- ning of this epoch in his spiritual and artistic growth, Wordsworth, with his sister, returned to the Lake Country, from which he never 33 THE LAKE COUNTRY again departed save for brief journeys or visits. In the very heart of that lovely region he found the home of his genius and of his affections. "To be at Grasmere," wrote Dorothy, "is like being at a natural church. To spend one's holi- day there is like having a week of Sundays." And now, nearly a century later, the Vale still keeps its ancient silence despite the tide of travel which follows the highways. One may stand to-day in the ancient churchyard and feel the peace of the landscape enfolding him as it enfolded Wordsworth. The latest poet to cele- brate the sacred associations of the place has not missed the repose which the older poet loved so well: Afar though nation be on nation hurled, And life with toil and ancient pain depressed, Here one may scarce believe the whole wide world Is not at peace; and all men's hearts at rest. In December, 1799, when the Wordsworths took possession of Dove Cottage, the tiny, blue- gray stone house was almost without neigh- bors, and the lake lay before it like a mirror; to-day it is part of a small but compactly built village. It faces the lake, which is but a short 34* - > X