WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
WILLI A.M WORDSWORTH 
 
 BY MARGARET GILLIES 
 
WORDSWORTH AND HIS 
 CIRCLE 
 
 BY 
 
 DAVID WATSON RANNIE, M.A. 
 
 AUTHOR OF " A STUDENt's HISTORY OF SCOTLAND " 
 
 WITH TWENTY ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 OF THE "^ 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
 New York: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 London: METHUEN & CO. 
 
 1907 
 
^2l 
 
PREFACE 
 
 This book does not aim at being a biography of Wordsworth, 
 though it is strung on a biographical thread ; and, as the title 
 indicates, it is in many places as much about Wordsworth's 
 contemporaries as about himself. 
 
 As my method is deliberately desultory, I have tried, with 
 whatever success, to be on my guard against repetition, the 
 attendant shadow of desultoriness. The first chapter, being 
 introductory, contains a kind of forecast, or summary in advance, 
 of the chief contents of the chapters that follow. 
 
 It is impossible to be even initiated into Wordsworth without 
 knowing, and knowing well, a great deal of his poetry. I have, 
 therefore, not stinted myself in quotation and comment, though 
 I have tried to avoid the reproduction of verses which might 
 conceivably be regarded as trite or insignificant. In the 
 Appendix will be found references for those quotations the 
 whereabouts of which is not clearly shown in the text. 
 
 The prefixed list of authorities may serve the double purpose 
 of showing the sources from which I have drawn, and guiding 
 the reader who may wish to go more deeply into the subject 
 
 D. W. R. 
 
 Winchester, 1907 
 
 171587 
 
GENERAL 
 
PRINCIPAL AUTHORITIES 
 
 ordsworth : Complete Works. Edited by William Knight, with Memoirs, 
 tie Poetical Works of Wordsworth. Edited by Thomas Hutchinson 
 
 (Oxford Edition.) 1895. 
 tie Complete Poetical Works of Wordsworth. With an Introduction by 
 
 John Morley. 9th ed. 1903. In this edition the Poems are arranged 
 
 chronologically, 
 'ordsworth's Prose Works. Edited by Grosart. 3 vols. 1876. 
 rose Works of William Wordsworth. Edited by William Knight. 2 vols. 
 
 1896. 
 ''ordsworth's Literary Criticism. Edited, with an Introduction, by Nowell 
 
 C. Smith. 1905. 
 ''ordsworth's Guide to the Lakes. 5th ed., 1835. With an Introduction, etc., 
 
 by Ernest de Selincourt. 1906. 
 mrnals of Dorothy Wordsworth. Edited by William Knight. 2 vols. 2nd 
 
 ed. 1904. 
 orothy Wordsworth's Recollections of a Tour in Scotland. Edited by 
 
 J. C. Shairp. 1874. 
 
 [emoirs of W. Wordsworth. By Christopher Wordsworth, D.D. 2 vols. 
 
 1851. 
 /"ordsworth. By F. W. H. Myers. (EngHsh Men of Letters.) 
 /"ordsworth. By Elizabeth Wordsworth, 
 oetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited, with a Biographical 
 
 Introduction, by James Dykes Campbell, 
 ife of Coleridge. By J. D. Campbell, 
 oleridge : Biographia Liter aria. (Bohn's Libraries.) 
 oleridge : Table Talk. 
 
 otelis : Eat'ly Recollectio7is. {Remijiiscences.) 1837 and 1847. 
 Irs. Sandford : Thomas Poole and his Frie7ids. 2 vols, 
 lemorials of Coleorton. Edited by WilHam Knight. 2 vols. 1887. 
 outhey's Works. 
 
 outhey : Life, Letters, and Select Correspondence. By his Son. 
 outhey. By Edward Dowden. (English Men of Letters.) 
 Charles Lamb : Complete Works, with Memoir. Edited by Alfred Ainger. 
 hades Lamb. By Ainger. (English Men of Letters.) 
 .ife of Charles Lamb. By E. V. Lucas. 
 )e Ouincey : Collected Works. Edited by David Masson. 
 )e Ouincey. By David Masson. (English Men of Letters.) 
 app's (H. A. Page) Life of De Ouincey. 
 
 lazlitt: Complete Works. (Waller and Glover.) 12 vols. Specially 
 ^able Talk; Spirit of the Age; Winter slow. 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 William Wordsworth Frontispiece 
 
 By Margaret Gillies. 
 
 From a photograph by Messrs. Waltmley Bros., Amhhside. Facing Page 
 
 Wordsworth's Birthplace 24 
 
 From a photograph hy Air. Pettitt, Kcsxvick. 
 
 Ann Tyson's Home at Hawkshead . . . . . .26 
 
 Coleridge's House at Nether Stowey 57 
 
 From a photograph by Messrs. Frith, Reigate. 
 
 Alfoxden House as it is now 65 
 
 From a photograph by Messrs. Frithy Reigate, 
 
 Dorothy Wordsworth 91 
 
 By W. Crowbent. 
 
 From a photograph by Messrs. Waimsley Bros., Ambleside. 
 
 Robert Southey in 1798 icx) 
 
 By Robert Hancock, in the National Portrait Gallery. 
 
 Dove Cottage, Town End, Grasmere 124 
 
 From a photograph by Mr. Pettitt, Keswick. 
 
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1814 142 
 
 By Washington Allston, A.R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery. 
 
 Grasmere Church 154 
 
 From a photograph by Mr. Pettitt, Keswick. 
 
 Mrs. Wordsworth 172 
 
 By Margaret Gillies. 
 
 From a photograph by Messrs. Waimsley Bros., Afiibleside. 
 
 Thomas de Quincey 207 
 
 By Sir J. Watson Gordon, R.A., P.R.S.A., in the National Portrait 
 Gallery. 
 
Xll 
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Facing Page 
 . 230 
 
 Charles Lamb in 1824 or 1825 
 
 By Thomas Wageman. 
 
 Sir Walter Scott ^^ 
 
 By Sir Edwin Landseer, R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery. 
 
 Professor John Wilson ("Christopher North") . . .252 
 
 From a pkoto-raph by Messrs. Walmsley Bros., Ambleside. 
 
 270 
 
 Rydal mount 
 
 Front a photograph by Mr. Pettitt, Kes-^ick. 
 
 William Wordsworth -°9 
 
 By Henry William Pickersgill, R.A., in the National Portrait 
 Gallery. 
 
 DORA Wordsworth (Mrs. Ouillinan) ...... 294 
 
 By Margaret Gillies. 
 
 Froitt a photograph by Messrs. Wahnsley Bros., Ambleside. 
 
 Fox How ^°^ 
 
 From a photograph by Mr. Pettitt, Keswick. 
 
 The Graves ^^^ 
 
 From a photograph by Mr. Pettitt, Keswick. 
 
/ OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS 
 CIRCLE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 WORDSWORTH IN HIS CIRCLE 
 
 IN one sense it seems a dubious use of metaphor to regard 
 Wordsworth as the centre of any circle. For, if we think 
 of a body of men as a circle, we must think of the centre as one 
 of a group who shares its qualities ; one who gives and takes, 
 who lives in intellectual community and not alone. Yet no fact 
 about Wordsworth is more certain and more striking than his 
 essential solitariness. To him, even more than to Milton, his 
 own words belong : /its soul luas like a star and dwelt apart. 
 The Puritanism of his age, the culture of his age, are much 
 more perceptible in Milton, than are any sympathies of the 
 eighteenth or nineteenth century in the work of Wordsworth. 
 Milton, for all his mighty originality, was a classicist ; he was 
 proud to work on traditional lines ; his form was as great as his 
 matter, and is inseparable from it. But Wordsworth had the 
 daring, defiant individuality of the true Romantic. He thought 
 of himself, and he thought rightly, as a reformer, an innovator, 
 in poetry ; and he neither had, nor believed himself to have, 
 much essential kinship with any of his contemporaries. He 
 always had enthusiastic admirers, and always friends whose 
 cordial admiration fell short of enthusiasm ; but there was 
 not one of them, who was wholly without perplexity and 
 
2 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 disappointment about the master, not one who could wholly 
 abandon the attitude of apology. 
 
 While disciples and admirers were not without r.ncertainty 
 and occasional dissent, Wordsworth himself habitually felt a 
 serene self-complacency which enclosed him as a constant 
 envelope, but which must not be confounded with any kind of 
 vulgar egotism. Traces of such egotism there undoubtedly 
 were in Wordsworth ; but they have really nothing to do with 
 that consciousness of mission and certainty of ultimate success 
 which gave to this poet the prophet's high self-regard and 
 solitary outlook. 
 
 Wordsworth wrote to Lady Beaumont in 1807 that he was 
 " easy-hearted " with respect to his poems. " Trouble not 
 yourself," he wrote, " upon their present reception ; of what 
 moment is that compared with what I trust in their destiny ? 
 — to console the afflicted ; to add sunshine to daylight by 
 making the happy happier ; to teach the young and the 
 gracious of every age to see, to think, and feel, and therefore to 
 become more actively and securely virtuous ; this is their office." 
 Such self-criticism is nearly as impersonal as the words which 
 immediately precede it — 
 
 " It is an awful truth, that there neither is nor can be, any 
 genuine enjoyment of poetry among nineteen out of twenty of 
 those persons who live, or wish to live, in the broad light of the 
 world — among those who either are, or are striving to make 
 themselves, people of consideration in society. This is a truth, 
 and an awful one, because to be incapable of a feeling of poetry, 
 in my sense of the word, is to be without love of human nature 
 and reverence for God." 
 
 One who thus thinks of poetry and of his own effort in its 
 service, must feel and speak as if alone in a wilderness ; and 
 perhaps no British man of letters was ever in this sense so un- 
 related, so original, as Wordsworth. His detachment is only 
 made more obvious by the recognition of his debt to fore- 
 runners, and of his disciples' debt to him. In two very 
 important respects, the way was prepared for Wordsworth, not 
 in Britain only, but in Europe : men's affections were turning 
 from purely human interests to interests in which landscape had 
 a large share ; and from the attractions of elaborate civilization 
 to those of extreme simplicity. No two men ever moved further 
 
INTRODUCTORY S 
 
 apart than Rousseau and Wordsworth ; yet their common 
 ground and the identity of some of their presuppositions are 
 notorious. Nor, among his British contemporaries, is it only 
 Wordsworth who reminds us of Rousseau. Goldsmith and 
 Cowper, not less than the ballad-restorers or such a Romantic 
 medisevalist as Chatterton, felt, each in his own way, that dis- 
 approval of things as they were, that discontent with civilized 
 man, which Rousseau indulged with such startling results. 
 Goldsmith expressed them with a somewhat conventional 
 pensiveness ; in Cowper they were made to subserve the 
 Evangelicalism of the age ; but the burden, in both, was a 
 praise of rusticity and simplicity, an appreciation of man as 
 man, without any lendings or trappings, which are not far from 
 Rousseau's central thought. And if Rousseau's thought became 
 revolutionary, it must be remembered that Wordsworth's 
 sympathies, in some of his strongest hours, were on the side of 
 the Revolution. He hailed the great French upheaval as a 
 resuscitation of man ; and the passion of his maturity, his hatred 
 of Napoleon, was passion for the freedom which the tyrant had 
 overthrown. So he read the events. 
 
 But none of this makes Wordsworth's originality less com- 
 plete. The Nature to which he preached and led a return, had 
 a very different complexion from the Nature of Rousseau's 
 worship ; and in the rare atmosphere of its high places we may 
 be sure that Goldsmith and Cowper would have found it hard 
 to breathe. Even in his earliest work, in the Evening Walk 
 and Descriptive Sketches (in the latter of which, indeed, Cole- 
 ridge saw "the emergence of an original poetic genius above 
 the horizon," but which are only remotely Wordsworthian), we 
 find a treatment of landscape very different from Cowper's. 
 Cowper's feeling for landscape leaves little to be desired in 
 genuineness ; but his method of description has nothing of the 
 intimacy of Wordsworth's. And when, in and after Lyrical 
 Ballads, Wordsworth became Wordsworthian, he thought and 
 spoke of Nature, whether as revealed in man, or in that world 
 of the open air in which man lives and moves, as no one, 
 either in or out of Britain, had thought and spoken of it before. 
 Some of his predecessors had observed Nature with affectionate 
 care and truly and beautifully rendered her details ; many 
 had personified her ; but it was left for Wordsworth to realize 
 
4 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 her as a living unity, and to love her as the saints love 
 God. 
 
 Nor is Wordsworth's isolation less striking if we think of 
 the history of his influence. Immediately and remotely, by 
 repulsion as well as by attraction, his influence has been 
 immense ; but it has never been of the kind which leads to 
 imitation. Wordsworth founded no school. His words ran 
 over the length and breadth of the land ; his thought has sunk 
 deep into one generation after another ; but hardly any one has 
 borrowed his accents or attempted to complete his message. 
 Nor can it be said of him, as it can be said of, e.g, Byron, Scott, 
 or Tennyson, that he was the spokesman of an age, that he 
 ministered to prevalent taste, that he made articulate the 
 thoughts and feelings which were striving for expression in 
 younger as well as lesser men. What in this sense we call. 
 popularity could never be affirmed of Wordsworth. He sang of 
 " things common " indeed ; but there are many ways of " touch- 
 ing" such things, and Wordsworth's way was not the world's. 
 
 To find Wordsworth's circle, then, we must think partly of 
 his many contemporary literary and artistic friends and ad- 
 mirers, cordial always, but always critical ; partly of that opulent 
 cluster of Romantic poets with their attendant and Hke-minded 
 critics, among whom Wordsworth, in spite of his singularity, 
 must be ranked. In the latter sense, the circle must be held 
 to include Burns and Blake, Shelley and Keats, as much as 
 Coleridge and Southey, De Quincey and Charles Lamb. 
 
 About the great literary outburst which marked the close of 
 the eighteenth, and the first quarter of the nineteenth century, 
 so much has been said that, probably, the less one now says the 
 better. All that one may hope, or need attempt, to do, is to 
 rehearse some generally recognized conclusions and point out 
 some special aspects and distinctions. If we ignore these we 
 shall miss Wordsworth's place in literary history. 
 
 The Romantic Revival, as it is the fashion to call the out- 
 burst, was a Kunity in diversity. It was a unity, as the spring- 
 time is a unity, inasmuch as it brought new life into the world, 
 the world of verse and prose, of feeling and thought. It was a 
 unity inasmuch as it depended upon novelty ; as it worked on 
 men's minds by way of surprise, excitement, sense of change. 
 It was a unity inasmuch as it came to be associated, often 
 
INTRODUCTORY 5 
 
 loosely and rhetorically, with the French Revolution, as if it 
 were a kind of literary and artistic counterpart of that great 
 social and political movement. But its diversity is more 
 apparent than its unity; Even if we could bring ourselves to 
 believe that one impulse, or a small number of kindred impulses, 
 produced the Romantic Revival, we should have to acknowledge 
 that the Revival included a great many very different things, of 
 which the interconnection is by no means obvious. It has been 
 called — not without good reason — the " Renascence of Wonder." 
 It has been called, with equally good reason, the restoration of 
 English poetry to Nature, or of Nature to English poetry. It 
 was certainly the revival of various and beautiful lyrical 
 measures ; it was a new birth of lyrical passion ; it was the 
 revival of delight in love; it was the recovery of power to 
 recognize and render the beautiful. It was a reaction against 
 a long monopoly in poetry of the satire of society. It included, 
 as we have seen, a recovered sense of the beauty and significance 
 of landscape ; and with this must be conjoined a recovered 
 sense of the attractiveness of animals, and of their claim on 
 human interest and affection. It was an assertion of the rights 
 of individuality in genius against the obligation of literary 
 tradition. It was the discovery of light in the "Dark Ages," 
 in that mediaeval world which had seemed the mere ruin and 
 negation of classical culture. Last, but not least, in the 
 Romantic Revival poetry became essentially and truly " meta- 
 physical." It asserted its kinship with theology and philosophy ; 
 it assumed prophetic garments and mystical accents ; it became 
 the interpreter of symbols, the revealer of realities beyond the 
 phantasmagoria of the senses. 
 
 One feature was, on the whole, common to the many aspects 
 of the movement, and the recognition of it will bring us back to 
 Wordsworth. Romance is the cult of the extraordinary, the 
 unusual ; its presupposition is that in the world of art a refuge 
 is to be found from the tyranny of what is common, under 
 which daily experience groans. Very different were the pre- 
 suppositions of the poetry and fiction dominant in Britain for 
 more than a hundred years before the Romantic Revival can 
 be said to have begun. The poetry of Dryden and Pope 
 assumed the all-sufficiency as poetic themes of contemporary 
 society, manners, and politics. The so-called " comedy of 
 
6 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 manners," which culminated in Congreve, found its subject- 
 matter and inspiration in the same quarters. The English novel 
 renounced all connection with the preposterous romarxe of the 
 seventeenth century, and nourished its mighty youth on the 
 most homely, sometimes the most sordid, realities of British life. 
 The poetry which intervened between Pope on the one hand, 
 and Coleridge and Wordsworth on the other, was a poetry of 
 transition, which foreshadowed the future as well as recalled the 
 past. But in the prose romance of awe and supernatural terror 
 which Horace Walpole handed on to Mrs. Radcliffe, and in the 
 old-world opulence of Chatterton and Ossian and the ballad- 
 restorers, literature turned its face resolutely from the temporary 
 and the ordinary towards the extraordinary and the remote. 
 And this conversion was of the very essence of the Romanticism 
 which glowed like a bright star on the opening of the nineteenth 
 c^tury. 
 
 " But what," the reader may ask, " has it got to do with 
 Wordsworth ? " Was not Wordsworth's battle for the homely, 
 the ordinary ; was it not his boast, his reproach, and his glory, 
 that he found *' a tale in everything " ; that " the moving acci- 
 dent " was not his trade ; and that in humble, everyday life, its 
 peasantry, its flowers, its speech, its " nameless unregarded acts," 
 the best stuff of poetry was to be found ? The Romanticism of 
 Coleridge, of Byron, of Scott, of Southey, of Keats, is evident ; 
 but, if the cult of the extraordinary and remote is essential to 
 Romanticism, is it consistent, is it reasonable, to call Words- 
 worth a Romantic ? 
 
 The answer is that Romanticism claims Wordsworth by 
 virtue of his imagination. In the following pages we shall have 
 to hear much about imagination. It is enough to say now that 
 Wordsworth regarded that faculty very seriously ; that he con- 
 ceived himself to possess it in large measure ; and that he 
 thought of it as the poet's chief warrant. And while he gloried 
 in choosing lowly themes for poetry, he utterly repudiated the 
 judgment that his poetry itself was lowly. He believed that 
 his imaginative faculty transformed the themes, and transformed 
 them creatively, as we may believe that Divine Power transforms 
 the raw material or primordial protoplasm of the physical 
 universe. The result, according to Wordsworth, was that the 
 common lost its commonness, and gained what Romanticism of 
 
INTRODUCTORY 7 
 
 the more ordinary type sought in the preternatural, the remote, 
 the unusual. 
 
 Avhen Wordsworth and Coleridge made the famous compact 
 out of which Lyrical Ballads sprang in 1798, they agreed upon 
 a division of labour in a joint enterprise. How they did it 
 cannot be better told than in Coleridge's words : " It was agreed 
 that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters 
 supernatural, or at least romantic ; yet so as to transfer from 
 our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth 
 sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that 
 willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes 
 poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose 
 to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of 
 every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, 
 by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, 
 and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world 
 before us ; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in con- 
 sequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have 
 eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel 
 nor understand." 
 
 "To excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural;" that 
 was the end which Wordsworth proposed to himself in his 
 poetic operations. It was to be reached by the exercise^ of 
 imagination, and, by virtue of imagination, he was a fellow- 
 worker with the author of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. 
 
 Perhaps we best understand Wordsworth's literary relation- 
 ships and his place in literary history when we realize his differ- 
 ences from one or two of his predecessors on the one hand, and 
 from some of his famous contemporaries on the other. 
 
 Among the predecessors none are more eminent and none 
 more characteristic of the eighteenth century than Pope and 
 Gray. With both Wordsworth thought of himself as in antago- 
 nism ; against both, at least in certain respects, he led a revolt. 
 Against Pope, indeed, the revolt had begun long before Words- 
 worth's day, when, in 1756, Joseph Warton published the first 
 volume of his Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope, The 
 reputation of Pope's successors, of Gray and Ossian and the 
 ballad-editors, was itself a testimony to reaction against the 
 Popian despotism. But Wordsworth was more than ten years 
 old when Dr. Johnson published his Lives of the Poets, in which 
 
8 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Pope, though treated with searching critical discrimination, was 
 held up as a genuine and great poet. " Let us look round upon 
 the present time," cried the Doctor, " and back upon the past ; 
 let us inquire to whom the voice of mankind has decreed the 
 wreath of poetry ; let their productions be examined and their 
 claims stated ; and the pretensions of Pope will be no more 
 disputed. Had he given the world only his version [of Homer] 
 the name of poet must have been allowed him." Wordsworth's 
 view of Pope was very different. He admits that he had 
 " melody " and " a polished style," but he considered his great 
 reputation a false one. He hated personal satire, which plays 
 such a large part in the poetry of Dryden and Pope ; and he 
 found Pope wanting in the three essentials of poetry — passion, 
 imagination, and truth to Nature. It was chiefly because of his 
 lack of the last-named quality that Wordsworth was in antago- 
 nism to Pope. In an admirable sentence he says that Pope 
 "having wandered from humanity [in his Pastorals] with boyish 
 inexperience, the praise which these compositions obtained 
 tempted him into a belief that Nature was not to be trusted, 
 at least in pastoral poetry." Pope, like Dryden before him, 
 wrote about Nature as a man born blind might write. And 
 Wordsworth's mission was to show that Nature might be 
 trusted. 
 
 " Nature never did betray the heart that loved her." 
 
 Wordsworth's revolt against Gray was part of his revolt 
 against " poetic diction." He tried, in practice and in criticism, to 
 break down distinctions between expression in prose and expres- 
 sion in verse ; and, rightly or wrongly, he held that Gray did 
 all he could to raise and confirm such distinctions. In other 
 words, he thought Gray an artificial poet, and as such, he, the 
 Poet of Nature, felt obliged to treat him as a foe. 
 
 Towards the more Romantic of his predecessors, the author 
 of the Ossian poems, and the ballad-writers, and even towards 
 such true landscape lovers as Thomson and Cowper, Words- 
 worth was very critical. He frankly admits Thomson's inspira- 
 tion ; but he says that he has a vicious style with false ornaments, 
 and that he utters sentimental commonplaces. He mocks at 
 Cowper for his apologetic admiration of " that coarse object, a 
 furze-bush." For Percy's Reliques, indeed, he has nothing but 
 
INTRODUCTORY 9 
 
 praise. But Ossian ! Gray, whose work it is not easy to regard 
 as in any sense Romantic, Gray, the most fastidious of classicists, 
 was delighted with Ossian. When the first instalment appeared, 
 he wrote to Horace Walpole : " Is there any more to be had of 
 equal beauty, or at all approaching to it ? " And on a further 
 acquaintance with the poems, he describes himself as " struck, 
 extasi^, with their infinite beauty." 
 
 Wordsworth, for his part, mercilessly tears the unhappy 
 imposture to tatters ; he spurs on his somewhat sluggish rhetoric, 
 and decides that the book "is essentially unnatural ... a 
 forgery audacious as worthless." 
 
 With the rank and file of Germano-British Romanticism in 
 prose fiction and in verse, Wordsworth had no sympathy. 
 Reformer among reformers as he was, he took a pessimistic 
 view of the efforts of those who were in some respects his fellow- 
 workers. Like all the reformers, he wished literature to be 
 exciting and stimulating rather than formal and dull ; but he 
 held that the ruck of the Romanticists used " gross and violent 
 stimulants" to attain their end. He aimed at passion and 
 emotion, they at sentimentalism and sensationalism ; and the 
 result was a degradation of Hterature. " The invaluable works 
 of our elder writers," he wrote in 1800, "I had almost said the 
 works of Shakespeare and Milton, are driven into neglect by 
 frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and deluges 
 of idle and extravagant stories in verse." 
 
 Such being Wordsworth's temper, it is a matter of interest to 
 observe his relation to his great poetic contemporaries,' and to the 
 younger men who came after them. Coleridge was his dear 
 and Hfe-long friend ; and, in Lyrical Ballads, one of the land- 
 marks of Romanticism, the Ancient Mariner appeared side by 
 side with the Idiot Boy and the Tintern Abbey lines. Was not 
 the Ancient Mariner an "idle and extravagant story in verse," 
 or was it redeemed only by Wordsworth's contributions to it, 
 the tale of the shot albatross and a line or two here and there, 
 and by the moral about cruelty to animals ? There is no 
 evidence to show that critical questions greatly disturbed 
 Wordsworth's admiration of and loyalty to his "marvellous" 
 colleague and friend. But we do know that Wordsworth had 
 his doubts about the rank of Coleridge's most distinctively 
 Romantic poetry. We know that he considered that Coleridge's 
 
10 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 poetic achievement fell short of his poetic gifts ; that the in- 
 felicity of his lot had shut him from that sympathy with others, 
 which is granted only to long and tranquil experience, and 
 without which the best poetry, which is a poetry of human 
 nature, cannot be made. And we know, finally, that he regarded 
 the preternatural, which counts for so much in Coleridge, as the 
 pis aller of a poet who could not reach the natural. 
 
 If Wordsworth thought thus of Coleridge's most famous 
 efforts in poetry, we must be prepared to find him somewhat 
 cold to others of his contemporaries. We should hardly expect 
 him to find spiritual kinship in Byron, whose satirical treatment 
 of him was hardly relieved by even a passing expression of 
 admiration. But what of him who was in R. L. Stevenson's 
 phrase, " far and away the King of the Romantics," what of 
 Walter Scott ? Deep was the respect, and genuine the love 
 which the two men had for one another ; and much of their 
 work, surely, was done in the same field. Scott was more of a 
 narrative poet than Wordsworth ; he had the externalism to 
 which the narrative poet is prone, and his love of pomp and 
 circumstance ; and Wordsworth recognized this. In the intro- 
 duction to The White Doe of Rylstone he points out that it was 
 the inwardness of historical events that interested him ; and that 
 whereas Scott made events march in the orthodox manner 
 towards a catastrophe, he, for his part, was content with an 
 external pageantry of mere failure, so long as it might be made 
 the exponent of some hidden moral victory. But surely in their 
 rendering of Nature, in the loving portraiture of mountain and 
 sky and flower, the two poets were in fullest sympathy and 
 co-operation. Yet Wordsworth does not seem to have felt the 
 sympathy. His criticism of Scott is always depreciatory, and 
 he does not seem to have even dreamed of placing him in a high 
 rank. He recognized Southey's great cleverness and power of 
 narrative in verse ; but denied him imagination and inspiration. 
 Burns he loved and reverenced ; but could never forget his 
 moral shortcomings, and was curiously insensible of his lyrical 
 merit. 
 
 Keats and Shelley were a generation younger than Words- 
 worth ; yet they were as truly reformers and restorers of English 
 poetry as he was. In spite of occasional scofiftngs, they regarded 
 him as a doyen ; and the three were linked together against all 
 
INTRODUCTORY 11 
 
 artificiality and Philistinism in their art. Yet it does not 
 appear that Wordsworth took any real interest in the work of 
 his two great junior contemporaries. 
 
 As the world knows, Wordsworth's unsympathetic critics tried 
 to fix him in a circle of their own drawing. " The Lake 
 School," the " Lakists," such was the circle of Francis Jeffrey's 
 devising: it was a triangle rather, and denoted Wordsworth, 
 Coleridge, and Southey, while it connoted " lakishness," that 
 is to say, poetical incompetence and triviality, parading as 
 affected simplicity, and pretentious philosophy. The animus 
 which Jeffrey breathed into others is dead, and the criticism 
 which it moved is obsolete ; but the Lake School will live for 
 ever, not as a sect, but as a noble band of pioneers, or say rather 
 as a cluster of satellites about a star, whose brightness, like that 
 in the prophet's vision, shines "out of the North." Nowhere 
 else in Britain, save in the wizard-held borderland, has any 
 limited area of soil been so definitely and solemnly set apart for, 
 and consecrated to, the Muses, as that region of mountain, lake, 
 and gushing streams which is shared by the three counties of 
 Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancaster. Grasmere Vale, 
 with its sweet lake and engirdling hills ; Windermere, with its 
 islands, reaching away to the south ; the shores of Derwent- 
 water under the stately bulk of Skiddaw ; these are the spots 
 where the ghostly presences are thickest. It was a great 
 moment in British literary annals when Wordsworth, a wanderer 
 on the face of the earth, resolved to return to the place of his 
 birth, and live and die there. 
 
 " Many were the thoughts 
 Encouraged and dismissed, till choice was made. 
 Of a known Vale, whither my feet should turn, 
 Nor rest till they had reached the very door 
 Of the one cottage which methought I saw." 
 
 Nearly as memorable was the July day, six months after the 
 Wordsworths settled at Grasmere, when Coleridge tried to 
 become a respectable householder at Greta Hall, near Keswick. 
 For to Greta Hall, three years later, came Southey ; and there 
 he remained for half a century, a centre of strenuous intellectual 
 life long after poor Coleridge had drifted away on his dreary 
 and discreditable course. Wordsworth and Southey were the 
 
12 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 two fixed points in the Lake Country to which admirers and 
 settlers resorted. ' Coleridge was sometimes to be seen. Thomas 
 de Quincey, like Coleridge an opium-eater, one of Wordsworth's 
 sympathetic exponents in the ears of an unbelieving generation, 
 came to be his neighbour for about twenty years. Shelley took 
 his first wife to Keswick and tried, though in vain, to become 
 something of a Lakist To the shores of Windermere, came 
 " Christopher North " and Mrs. Remans, both well within 
 Wordsworth's circle. Hardly could that be said of Harriet 
 Martineau, who nevertheless was Wordsworth's fairly intimate 
 neighbour for a few years. But it might surely be said of 
 Thomas Arnold, the great headmaster of Rugby, who was lord 
 of Fox How and Wordsworth's true friend from 1832 to his 
 sudden death ten years later. Whatever share Wordsworth's 
 influence may have had in bringing John Ruskin to spend the 
 afternoon and evening of his days on Coniston Water, it is 
 legitimate to remark on the fitting juxtaposition of the two 
 men who, more than any other Englishmen of the nineteenth 
 century, or perhaps in any age, were the interpreters of Nature's 
 message to mankind. 
 
 The poet who dwelt in so imperial a solitude and in so royal 
 a company remains, after the criticism of a hundred years has 
 done its worst and best on him, somewhat of an enigmatical 
 figure. That which the blunt insensibility of the early critics 
 scorned as " lakishness," was undoubtedly there, in the man, his 
 genius and his work ; and, though we no longer scorn it, we are 
 sometimes daunted and sometimes perplexed by it. In the 
 cHmate of poetry we expect sunshine and balmy airs ; in 
 Wordsworth we feel, now and again, a chill and blight which 
 spoil one's pleasure. Whence come this east wind and these 
 dull skies } Why does Wordsworth's poetry seem so unequal 
 in value, so apt to fail in charm ? How can one who some- 
 times, who often, rises so high, sink at times so low .? How 
 should so transcendent and so inartificial a poet fail to know 
 when he is writing mere dull prose in conventional form of 
 verse? Or is it we, his readers, who are at fault, and not 
 Wordsworth ? Is it only that we are but partially initiated, 
 and that, with more perfectly purged ears, we should hear 
 nothing but music ? 
 
 These questions are put only that they may be deprecated 
 
INTRODUCTORY 13 
 
 and dismissed. It is best to take Wordsworth as he took him- 
 self, quite seriously, and to dwell with him for a season, not so 
 much that we may reconsider him critically, not that we may 
 make a new attempt to " place " him, not that we may sift what 
 we like in his poetry from what we dislike, but that we may 
 know him as he was, and try to be worthy of his friendship. 
 
 Some things we shall do well to grasp firmly at the outset. 
 There were certain features in Wordsworth which give a kind 
 of gnarled structure to his character and his poetry. (He insisted 
 on reconciling and combining certain things which are often 
 kept apart, and which some people think should always be kept 
 apart. Imagination and morality are two such things. In 
 Wordsworth's estimation, imagination was the mainspring of 
 poetry. When he speaks about imagination in prose, Words- 
 worth tries to be logical and precise ; but when he speaks of it 
 in poetry, he uses language of that vaguely adumbrative kind 
 which one has to be content with in presence of transcendent 
 religious ideas. And, indeed, Wordsworth's feeling about 
 imagination was giiasl-religious. Imagination was creative energy, 
 in using which the poet was transmitting Divine power. And 
 so has many another poet thought of it — so far, at least, as its 
 prerogatives go. Many poets and many critics have claimed 
 for genius the absolutism of a Divine right, as though it could 
 make its own rules or dispense with rules of any kind ; as if it 
 had its own atmosphere and independent criteria. But no such 
 claim did Wordsworth make. For him imagination had rules as 
 stringent as its power was divine. Not for one instant did he 
 conceive of his art as exercised in a non-moral way, represent- 
 ing, without any preference that was not purely aesthetic, the 
 facts of life for pleasure's sake only. Wordsworth's morality 
 makes him enigmatic and hard to approach. There would be 
 no enigma in the matter if we could class him as a didactic 
 poet, as one who simply sought to recommend religion and 
 morality in good verse. From some of his writing about his 
 own work, some of the letters in which he spoke with least 
 formality about his own purposes, we might almost conclude 
 that he aimed at nothing but the crudest didacticism. But, if 
 his achievement had been of this kind, his name might have 
 been conspicuous in the annals of morality and religion, but 
 could not have stood where all men now find it, in the front 
 
14 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 rank of English poetry. When Wordsworth thought carefully 
 about his poetry, he made it plain that its object was artistic ; 
 he spoke of pleasure as his end, with a frankness which might 
 satisfy the most ardent devotee of art for art's sake. And 
 indeed his practice speaks as eloquently as his theory. In all 
 his central poetic work he sings of the human and the Divine 
 at their meeting-points with the vagueness of the poet, not the 
 definiteness of the moralist or theologian. Yet it is not always 
 so ; occasions are frequent when he seems to lapse into the 
 didactic ; when the mood which he creates is too serious to be 
 called pleasure, and the truth which he enforces is too austere to 
 be called beauty. And the reader of Wordsworth will often 
 be embarrassed by the apparently conflicting efforts of such 
 imagination as Shakespeare might have done obeisance to, and 
 such mere moral reflectiveness as seems anything but imagina- 
 tive. He is troubled by an uncomfortable antithesis between 
 philosophy and profit ; and he is surprised that the poet seems 
 to have felt so little the discomfort that is so irksome to him. 
 He wonders whether Wordsworth's imagination acted inter- 
 mittently ; whether his genius was a kind of mechanical mixture 
 of gold and clay; or whether a more patient and intense study 
 may not show some higher unity in which the contradiction is 
 resolved. 
 
 Another knot in the Wordsworthian structure which forces 
 the reader to exert himself, is the political element in his genius 
 and poetry. He has to realize, in fact, that the two cardinal 
 things in Wordsworth are his passion for Nature and his passion 
 for public liberty, and that the latter passion is as strong as the 
 former. He once told an American visitor, the Rev. Orville 
 Dewey, that he had given twelve hours' thought to the condition 
 and prospects of society for one to poetry ; and we can believe 
 it. We find that, strictly speaking, even Wordsworth's best 
 poetry of Nature has a social and political source ; that not 
 until the impulses of his boyhood had been chastened by social 
 experience and political shocks, was he able to interpi-et Nature 
 at all. The whole of his early manhood was determined by 
 England's active hostility to France ; by the shock and the 
 shame of finding his country at war — so it seemed to him — with 
 the struggle for liberty of a neighbouring land. His best poetr}' 
 \^ was made as the result of, and in reaction from, that shock ; 
 
 / 
 
INTRODUCTORY 15 
 
 through it mainly he heard "the still, sad music of humanity;" 
 and he first truly knew Nature as the healer of a soul thus 
 suffering. Not less true is it, though perhaps less widely known, 
 that the main bent of his genius in middle life was determined 
 by another political shock, the revelation of the aims of Napoleon. 
 A common, and not wholly erroneous, way of putting this 
 matter is to represent Wordsworth as having changed his 
 political opinions from something not far short of republicanism 
 to a Toryism that would admit no thought of compromise. 
 But the change was more dramatic. No reader of the Sonnets 
 Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty can miss the 
 wonderful ring of their passionate patriotism, or will be surprised 
 to learn that such passion had a powerful and very definite cause. 
 It was in 1793 that Wordsworth's love of England was shocked 
 by her hostility to the French Revolution ; it was in 1807, when 
 he knew that Swiss liberty had been destroyed by Napoleon, 
 that his sympathies forsook a nation which could suffer its 
 destinies to be moulded by such a tyrant. Even as late as 
 September, 1806, the solemn hymn on the dying of Charles James 
 Fox shows that Wordsworth was not alienated from the states- 
 man whose sympathy with the French had been so constant. 
 When the Genius of Liberty, the " High-souled Maid," was 
 driven from the sound of her Alpine torrent, the poet's patriotism^ 
 became less anxious and more passionate ; but it was none 
 the less a passion f»r freeil^m and the impartial sway %i 
 righteous law. 
 
 Then, when the tyrant was overthrown, the passion fell, 
 and the poet passed into that mood of undisturbed tranquillity 
 with which we most easily associate him. In theory he had 
 always insisted on tranquillity as the necessary solvent of poetic 
 emotion ; he defined poetry as emotion recollected in tranqidllityy 
 and he had always, in some measure, realized the theory. For 
 the last twenty-five or thirty years of his life, the pulse of 
 emotion was feeble, and there seemed little but tranquil reflec- 
 tion left. These uncertain relations between emotion and 
 tranquillity make a difficulty for the student of Wordsworth. 
 The idea of Browning's Lost Leader haunts him ; and though 
 he may have no word of political blame for the eager revolu- 
 tionist \vho became so stern a Conservative, he can hardly 
 help feeling that the poet whom he hailed as the herald of a 
 
16 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 new age seemed to become a mere holder of forlorn hopes, 
 a timid and obstinate opponent of essays towards freedom in 
 almost all directions. 
 
 It is, indeed, at once Wordsworth's weakness and his glory 
 that the tranquillity of his genius put him to some extent out 
 of sympathy with the adventurous temper of the nineteenth 
 century. For if it is part of the business of a great poet to 
 lead the van in the conflict of his age, it is surely not alien from 
 his office to proclaim uhe peace which passeth all understanding 
 apart from which the stress of battle would be unendurable ; 
 to sing in the ears of a generation much given to change of " a 
 repose which ever is the same." Wordsworth lived long enough 
 to witness many reactions ; and perhaps, when we know him 
 better, we shall come to feel that both flow and ebb were less 
 marked in him than in the periods in which he lived. Perhaps, 
 as in fancy we grow with his growth, share his companionship 
 and compare our poet with contemporary leaders of thought 
 and action as they speak for themselves, we shall learn to rate 
 higher that perfect self-control, those ''sober certainties," that 
 philosophic mind which were the conquest of Wordsworth's 
 years. We may find that the conquest was won earlier than 
 we knew or he realized, and that the thought which underlies 
 his work from first to last was more timeless and less dependent 
 upon either external events or changes of mood than at first 
 sight appears. Wordsworth was, after all, a philosopher ; and 
 it is a poor philosophy which does not transcend the changing 
 appearances of the time in which it utters itself. 
 
 One thing the associate of Wordsworth is sure to feel as a 
 mere drawback, and that is his lack of humour. Probably this 
 lack, so common yet always so lamentable, apparently so un- 
 important but really so far-reaching in its power of hindrance 
 and harm, is one of the chief sources of what is unpleasant in 
 the 'Makishness" of Wordsworth. It makes it possible to 
 feel his poetry old-fashioned: an epithet complimentary to 
 furniture and landscape-gardening, but hardly to poetry. For 
 poetry, at all events of the rank of Wordsworth's, should always 
 be fresh, fresh with the eternal freshness of the spring or the 
 morning. And if this freshness, this unmistakable, inexpress- 
 ible, irresistible gusto is sometimes lacking in Wordsworth, is it 
 not very often because humour is weak ? For humour is much 
 
INTRODUCTORY 17 
 
 more than the parent of wit, though this is not to be despised 
 in poetry. It is a phase of intelligence, an exercise of sym- 
 pathy ; and the lack of it involves, possibly earnestness, but cer- 
 tainly dulness, and some insensitiveness, both of the understand- 
 ing and the affections. Such insensitiveness was undoubtedly 
 present in Wordsworth ; and it prevented the man, as it pre- 
 vents his poetry, from being wholly and unfailingly fresh 
 and charming. It explains also the occasional lapses into 
 individual self-satisfaction which flaw the noble self-conscious- 
 ness of the great poet. For humour, even better than humility, 
 makes a man immune from the possibility of conceit. 
 
 Wordsworth's fame, like his genius, suffered great vicissitudes. 
 " Forty and seven years it is," wrote De Quincey in 1845, " since 
 William Wordsworth first appeared as an author {i,e. since the 
 publication of Lyrical Ballads). Twenty of those years he was 
 the scoff of the world, and his poetry a by-word of scorn. 
 Since then, and more than once. Senates have rung with 
 acclamations to the echo of his name." But as to one phase 
 of his life there was no vicissitude. From a certain day in his 
 eager youth, of which we shall hear in the next chapter, when 
 on his way home from a night of innocent pleasure through 
 growing light he passed through one of- those decisive crises 
 which few men and women with souls are u^fprtiinate enough 
 to miss, Wordsworth was the priest and prophet of Nature, almost 
 exclusively identified with the lakeland of Northern England. 
 There he was born ; thither, before his youth had quite faded, 
 he returned ; there he lay down to die ; there, under its modest 
 headstone, rests his dust. All else, Cambridge, London, France, 
 even happy and fruitful hours in Dor^t and Somerset, was 
 either education or episode. One cannot know Wordsworth 
 without understanding the English Lakes. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD AMONG THE LAKES 
 
 IN a passage of fine, lucid, old-fashioned prose Wordsworth 
 himself has described the main features of the English 
 lakeland. He asks the reader "to place himself, in imagina- 
 tion, on some given point ; let it be the top of either of the 
 mountains, Great Gavel, or Scawfell ; or, rather, let us suppose 
 our station to be a cloud hanging midway between those two 
 mountains, at not more than half a mile's distance from the 
 summit of each, and not many yards above their highest eleva- 
 tion ; we shall there see stretched at our feet a number of 
 valleys, not fewer than eight, diverging from the point on which 
 we are supposed to stand, like spokes from the nave of a wheel. 
 First, we note, lying to the south-east, the vale of Langdale, 
 which will conduct the eye to the long lake of Winandermere, 
 stretched nearly to the sea ; or rather to the sands of the vast 
 bay of Morecambe, serving here for the rim of this imaginary 
 wheel ; let us trace it in a direction from the south-east towards 
 the south, and we shall next fix our eyes upon the vale of 
 Coniston, running up likewise from the sea, but not (as all the 
 other valleys do) to the nave of the wheel, and therefore it may 
 be not inaptly represented as a broken spoke sticking in the 
 rim. Looking forth again ... we see immediately at our feet 
 the vale of Duddon. . . . The fourth vale, next to be observed, 
 viz. that of the Esk, is of the same general character as the 
 last. . . . Next, almost due west, look down into, and along the 
 deep valley of Wastdale, with its little chapel and . . . neat 
 dwellings scattered upon a plain of meadow and corn-ground. . . . 
 Beyond the little fertile plain lies, within a bed of steep moun- 
 tains, the long, narrow, stern, and desolate lake of Wastdale. . . . 
 Next comes in view Ennerdale, with its lake of bold and i 
 
 i8 
 
CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD AMONG THE LAKES 19 
 
 somewhat savage shores. . . . The vale of Buttermere, with the 
 lake and village of that name, and Crummock-water, beyond, next 
 present themselves. We will follow the main stream, the Coker, 
 through the fertile and beautiful vale of Lorton, till it is lost in 
 the Derwent, below the noble ruins of Cockermouth Castle. 
 Lastly, Borrowdale, of which the vale of Keswick is only a 
 continuation, stretching due north, brings us to a point nearly 
 opposite to the vale of Winandermere, with which we began. . . . 
 The image of a wheel, thus far exact, is little more than one-half 
 complete ; but the deficiency on the eastern side may be supplied 
 by the vales of Wytheburn, Ulls water, Haweswater, and the vale 
 of Grasmere and Rydal ; none of these, however, run up to the 
 central point. . . . From this take a flight of not more than 
 four or five miles eastward to the ridge of Helvellyn, and you 
 will look down upon Wytheburn and St. John's Vale, which are 
 a branch of the vale of Keswick ; upon Ullswater, stretching 
 due east ; and not far beyond to the south-east ... lie the vale 
 and lake of Haweswater ; and lastly, the vale of Grasmere, 
 Rydal, and Ambleside, brings you back to Winandermere." 
 
 The mere symmetry of this region, however, is nothing to 
 its concentration, to the thick sowing and close company of its 
 beauties. Surely on no other equally small space of the earth's 
 surface is there such unity in variety ; nowhere are there such a 
 majestic type and such delightful surprises. Wordsworth's 
 '* image of a wheel " gives no idea of the wealth and intricate 
 grouping of mountains, the abundance of lakes, the individuality 
 of valleys. And though three counties contribute, the result, in 
 mere area, is so small ! For we must not think of the highlands 
 of the West Riding, the wild hills and dales of the Pennines, as 
 part of the Lake District. Physically and spiritually, regarded 
 either geologically or scenically, they lie outside it. The 
 sweeping, lakeless dales of Western Yorkshire with the slopes 
 of mountain limestone that bound them, belong to another order 
 of things from the Silurian uplands and big volcanic and granitic 
 tiills enclosing the lakes and tarns, and sending down the 
 [lurrying " becks " of Westmorland and Cumberland. The 
 /alley of the Lune, which joins the sea below Lancaster, or 
 :he main line of the London and North Western Railway may 
 DC held to mark, with practical, though not with geological, 
 iccuracy, the slight but most real boundary. At Kendal, or at 
 
20 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Penrith, you stand outside the Lakes, just as you do on the flat 
 wastes of Morecambe or of Solway. The whole of little West- 
 morland, a protruding tongue of Lancashire, a bit of Cumber- 
 land : that is all. " O Love," the poets might have apostrophized 
 their paradise, 
 
 " O Love, thy province were not large, 
 A bounded field, nor stretching far." 
 
 The central point of the region is the pleasant little 
 mountain town of Ambleside in Westmorland. Stand just out- 
 side it, or look down on it from high ground on either side of 
 Windermere, and you see the heart of the district laid open 
 before you. Seeming close to the lake, though a short mile 
 from the actual wash of its waters, the dark houses lie at the 
 very bases of the mountains, and the valleys stretch away from 
 the quiet streets. Far to the west, you catch a glimpse of the 
 highest height of all, the highest height in England — Scafell 
 Pike and its neighbour Scafell. Belonging, for the eye at least, 
 to the same group, are the Coniston Fells, dear to Ruskin, and 
 the two knobs of the Langdale Pikes. These are the " lusty 
 twins " on which the " Solitary " of Wordsworth's Excursion 
 looked from his cottage-window by Blea Tarn, and those who 
 know the Lakes at all feel, like him, that they are " prized com- 
 panions." Let us learn at once to associate them with the 
 great lines in which their spiritual meaning is given. - 
 
 " Many are the notes 
 Which, in his tuneful course, the wind draws forth 
 From rocks, woods, caverns, heaths, and dashing shores ; 
 And well those lofty brethren bear their part j 
 
 In the wild concert — chiefly when the storm 
 Rides high ; then all the upper air they fill 
 With roaring sound, that ceases not to flow, 
 Like smoke, along the level of the blast, 
 In mighty current ; theirs, too, is the song 
 Of stream and headlong flood that seldom fails ; 
 And, in the grim and breathless hour of noon, 
 Methinks that I have heard them echo back 
 The thunder's greeting. Nor have Nature's laws 
 Left them ungifted with a power to yield 
 Music of finer tone ; a harmony. 
 So do I call it, though it be the hand 
 Of silence, though there be no voice ; — the clouds, 
 The mist, the shadows, light of golden suns, 
 
CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD AMONG THE LAKES 21 
 
 Motions of moonlight, all come thither — 
 
 Touch, and have an answer — thither come, and shape 
 
 A language not unwelcome to sick hearts 
 
 And idle spirits : — there the sun himself. 
 
 At the calm close of summer's longest day. 
 
 Rests his substantial orb ; — between those heights 
 
 And on the top of either pinnacle, 
 
 More keenly than elsewhere in night's blue vault, 
 
 Sparkle the stars, as of their station proud. 
 
 Thoughts are not busier in the mind of man 
 
 Than the mute agents stirring there." 
 
 Before we turn our eyes away from the Langdales and their 
 peers, let us see what the Solitary saw there one day at the 
 clearing of a mist. 
 
 " A step 
 A single step, that freed me from the skirts 
 Of the blind vapour, opened to my view 
 Glory beyond all glory ever seen 
 By waking sense or by the dreaming soul ! 
 The appearance, instantaneously disclosed, 
 Was of a mighty city — boldly say 
 A wilderness of building, sinking far 
 And self- withdrawn into a boundless depth. 
 Far sinking into splendour — without end ! 
 Fabric it seemed of diamond and of gold, 
 With alabaster domes and silver spires, 
 And blazing terrace upon terrace, high 
 Uplifted ; here, serene pavilions bright. 
 In avenues disposed ; there, towers begirt 
 With battlements that on their restless fronts 
 Bore stars — illumination of all gems ! 
 By earthly nature had the effect been wrought 
 Upon the dark materials of the storm 
 Now pacified ; on them, and on the coves 
 And mountain-steeps and summits, whereunto 
 The vapours had receded, taking these 
 
 Their station under a cerulean sky. 
 Oh, 'twas an unimaginable sight ! 
 
 Clouds, mists, streams, watery rocks and emerald turf. 
 
 Clouds of all tincture, rocks and sapphire sky, 
 
 Confused, commingled, mutually inflamed, 
 
 Molten together, and composing thus 
 
 Each lost in each, that marvellous array 
 
 Of temple, palace, citadel, and huge 
 
 Fantastic pomp of structure without name. 
 
 In fleecy folds voluminous, enwrapped. 
 
22 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Right in the midst, where interspace appeared 
 
 Of open court, an object like a throne 
 
 Under a shining canopy of state 
 
 Stood fixed ; and fixed resemblances were seen 
 
 To implements of ordinary use. 
 
 But vast in size, in substance glorified ; 
 
 Such as by Hebrew Prophets were beheld 
 
 In vision-forms uncouth of mightiest power 
 
 For admiration and mysterious awe. 
 
 This little Vale, a dwelling-place of Man, 
 
 Lay low beneath my feet ; 'twas visible — 
 
 I saw not, but I felt that it was there. 
 
 That which I saw was the revealed abode 
 
 Of spirits in beatitude : my heart 
 
 Swelled in my breast — ' I have been dead,' I cried, 
 
 'And now I live ! '" 
 
 The soft velvety valley along which the eye travels to the 
 Langdales is the valley of the Brathay ; and from its heights 
 there descends to the westward that '' River Duddon," to which 
 Wordsworth was to write so many sonnets. Loughrigg, with 
 its many memories, divides it from the valley of the Rothay or 
 Rotha, a valley which seems to lead straight north to the 
 gloomy bulk of Fairfield. A nearer view would show that it is 
 the Rydal stream which comes from those formidable heights, 
 and that the Rothay comes from the north-westward. It 
 comes, in fact, from Helvellyn through Grasmere, which is 
 folded among the hills under Dun mail Raise, over which you 
 can see the gray thread of road making towards Thirlmere and 
 Keswick. To the right of that road you catch a glimpse of the 
 top of Helvellyn. On the other, eastern side of Fairfield beyond 
 Wansfell, you see another road climbing to a summit : that 
 is Kirkstone Pass, leading to Ullswater. Other hills, below 
 the gigantic dimensions of Fairfield and Helvellyn, but how 
 rich in story ! — come out clear. There is Nab Scar below 
 Fairfield, where Wordsworth's ghost, and Dorothy's^ must walk ; 
 there, looking down on Grasmere from the west, is Silver How ; 
 and there, further north, keeping guard over Easedale, is the 
 Helm, with the Old Woman crouching on the top. In that one 
 view (and you need spend no long time over it) you will 
 embrace the central features of the district. One other bit of 
 Wordsworth's most fanciful verse will fix them for us. It is 
 from that poem On tJie Namiitg of Places addressed To Joajina, 
 
CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD AMONG THE LAKES 23 
 
 and describes the effect of a wild girl's laughter among the hills. 
 The poet was admiring the view from Grasmere : — 
 
 " When I had gazed perhaps two minutes' space, 
 Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld 
 That ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud. 
 The Rock, like something starting from a sleep, 
 Took up the lady's voice, and laughed again ; 
 That ancient Woman seated on Helm-crag 
 Was ready with her cavern ; Hammar-scar, 
 And the tall steep of Silver-how, sent forth 
 A noise of laughter ; southern Loughrigg heard. 
 And Fairfield answered with a mountain tone ; 
 Helvellyn far into the clear blue sky 
 Carried the Lady's voice, — old Skiddaw blew 
 His speaking-trumpet ; — back out of the clouds 
 Of Glaramara southward came the voice ; 
 And Kirkstone tossed it from his misty head." 
 
 The mention of Skiddaw and Glaramara reminds us, as we 
 look over Ambleside to the mountains, of what lies beyond the 
 barrier. From the heights of Glaramara the streams descend 
 northwards ; and, in particular, the Derwent, flowing through 
 Borrowdale, expands into Dervventwater, the most perfect, 
 perhaps, of all the lakes ; rushes past Keswick, where it is joined 
 by the Greta from Thirlmere ; disappears in the long lake of 
 Bassenthwaite, and thence flows in a pleasant valley to the Irish 
 Sea at Workington. All this region, with Borrowdale and the 
 Vale of St. John as its avenues of approach, is dominated by the 
 great granitic masses of Skiddaw and Blencathara with their 
 bare sides. Neither of these can be seen from our view-point 
 near Ambleside ; and the places on which they look are not 
 rich in central Wordsworthian associations. They belong rather 
 to Coleridge and Southey — to Coleridge, who found out Greta 
 Hall on its mound by the Greta just outside Keswick, and to 
 Southey, who spent in that house half a century of quiet and 
 laborious days. Yet Skiddaw and the Derwent were dear to 
 Wordsworth, and for a very good reason. 
 
 Halfway between Keswick and Workington, where the 
 Derwent flows, broad and tranquil, but still with quick pace 
 and whence the outlines of Skiddaw are blue with the haze of 
 distance, stands the market-town of Cockermouth. You can 
 see at once that it has a busy present-day life, and also that it is 
 
24 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 rich in associations with a distant past. Its broad main street 
 is both busy and dignified ; its two streams (Dervvent and its 
 tributary the Cocker, which comes from Buttermere and her 
 neighbour lakes) feed some busy mills, while from the high 
 ground on the right of the rivers, the remains of a mediaeval 
 castle look down. On your right, as you walk along the main 
 street westward, you come upon a house which is evidently, 
 even now, the handsomest house in the town. It is not a 
 poetical house ; indeed, its many windowed frontage, its high 
 walls and heavy gates almost suggest a public institution rather 
 than a home. Behind it, a garden slopes shortly down to the 
 Derwent. 
 
 In that house, unchanged since then, Wordsworth was born 
 in 1770, on April /th^ His father, Richard Wordsworth, was an 
 attorney, well to do, as the character of his house testifies, and 
 agent to the Lord Lonsdale of his time. The Wordsworths were 
 Yorkshire people, the poet's grandfather, father of the Cocker- 
 mouth attorney, being the first immigrant into lake-land. 
 Richard, the attorney, strengthened his hold on the district by 
 marrying Anne Cookson of Penrith, the daughter of a tradesman 
 there, who had, however, tempered his civic blood by taking to 
 wife a Crackanthorp of Newbiggen Hall. At Cockermouth 
 were also born the rest of Richard Wordsworth's children, an 
 elder brother of the poet, Richard, a London attorney, who 
 died in 18 16; Dorothy, a year and a half younger than 
 William ; John, the sailor, of whom we shall hear much in the 
 sequel ; and Christopher, the Master of Trinity College, Cam- 
 bridge, from 1820 to 1841. He died in 1846, four years before 
 his brother. He was the father of two bishops, Christopher, 
 Bishop of Lincoln, and Charles, Bishop of St. Andrews ; and 
 grandfather of Dr. John Wordsworth, the present (1907) bishop 
 of Salisbury. 
 
 Wordsworth was thus a northerner to the core, a child hardy 
 and hard-featured. Yorkshire blood, Westmorland blood : the 
 dales and the fells and the rapid brooks ; such was the material, 
 such were the surroundings, the nursery, of this austere and yet! 
 most English poet, of this nobly conventional, yet most fearlessly 
 natural soul. There was nothing in the near neighbourhood of 
 Cockermouth to pamper poetic taste ; Skiddaw and Blenca- 
 thara were too far off, and the fields and uplands were tame. 
 
CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD AMONG THE LAKES S5 
 
 Two things only there were which breathed romance ; the high- 
 pitched castle of the thirteenth century, where Mary Stewart 
 was harboured after Langside and her landing at Workington ; 
 and the broad and clear waters of the Derwent with their 
 tidings of the lakes and hills. The child made the most of 
 both. He chased butterflies on the castle-hill; he rejoiced in 
 the yellow summer-flowers that shone] on its green slopes ; he 
 ventured awestruck into the darkness of its dungeon. Coming 
 back as an old man he hears the spirit of the place speak to 
 him. 
 
 " Thou look'st upon me, and dost fondly think, 
 Poet ! that, stricken as both are by years, 
 We, differing once so much, are now Compeers, 
 Prepared, when each has stood his time, to sink 
 Into the dust. Erewhile a sterner link 
 United us ; when thou, in boyish play, 
 Entering my dungeon, didst become a prey 
 To soul-appalling darkness. Not a blink 
 Of light was there ; — and thus did I, thy Tutor, 
 Make thy young thoughts acquainted with the grave ; 
 While those went chasing the winged butterfly 
 Through my gi-een courts ; or climbing, a bold suitor. 
 Up to the flowers whose golden progeny 
 Still round my shattered brow in beauty wave." 
 
 The romance of the river, with its living voice, was more 
 congenial to this child. It was born in the eagle's haunts ; in 
 its modest valley, it kept green a wreath fairer than that of the 
 proudest Roman conqueror. To the imagination of the man it 
 was " the fairest of all rivers ; " its voice, as he said, " flowed 
 along " the dreams of his childhood. Into the streets, with their 
 " fretful dwellings," it breathed something of Nature's own calm. 
 The garden of the big house sloped down to the blue stream, 
 and was " a tempting playmate." In its backwaters the little 
 boy would bathe all day long, and then scamper about among 
 the ragwort on its sandy fields like a naked savage. It was, as 
 he said, " fair seed-time " for his soul ; and he grew up " fostered 
 by beauty." 
 
 When school-time arrived, he went a step nearer the central 
 beauty. Let us go back for a moment to our view-point on the 
 high ground south of Ambleside. Hitherto, so fascinated have 
 we been by the mountain panorama to the north, that we have 
 
26 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 given no look or thought to the expanse of Windermere behind 
 us, to the low, soft heights that make its banks ; itd islands, and 
 its woods to the water's edge. Nor have we lingered long on 
 the Coniston Fells and the " Old Man," so strong was the 
 attraction of the Langdale Pikes just beyond them. Cross 
 Windermere by its famous ferry, just south of the largest of 
 the islands, and then climb the heights westward, as if you were 
 making for the Coniston Fells. You are in that bit of Lanca- 
 shire which helps to form the Lake district ; and, for a time, 
 when a turn of the road has banished the last visible fragment 
 of Windermere, you seem quite removed from all the ordinary 
 associations of the Lakes. Suddenly, as you dip down west- 
 ward, you drop upon an unexciting lake with rushy banks, 
 parallel to Windermere, along which the road runs northward. 
 It is Esthwaite Water. Follow the road the full length of the 
 lake, and you become aware of a large village of dark grey 
 houses climbing towards a long church on a hill, looking like an 
 island in the flats by which the lake is bounded on the north. 
 Entering the village, you have a sense of much quaintness, and 
 also of some importance. There are real streets in the place, 
 climbing and twisting curiously, with archways thrown across 
 here and there. Above all there is the dominance of the long 
 church with its graveyard on the hill. As you stand by its 
 door you see that you have much the same view as you had 
 before. For there in front of you is the great mountain-barrier ; 
 there is the central paradise. 
 
 This large village, or little town, is Hawkshead. At the 
 eastern fooc of the church-hill you see school buildings, some old, 
 some recently restored. The Hawkshead grammar-school is an 
 old and famous foundation. It was founded in 1585 by Edwin 
 Sandys, Archbishop of York, one of the most praiseworthy of the 
 Elizabethan divines, and in the eighteenth century had a high 
 reputation in the north. To Hawkshead school all the Words- 
 worth boys were sent ; and William was there from 1778 when 
 he was eight, until 1787, when he was sixteen, and went up to 
 St. John's College, Cambridge. He was boarded with a dame 
 called Ann Tyson, in a house by one of the archways. 
 
 Wordsworth's school life was very important in his spiritual 
 development, and it is clearly reflected in his poetry. He 
 learned much from his excellent schoolmasters : much from the 
 
CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD AMONG THE LAKES 27 
 
 wholesome conditions of normal companionship and boyish 
 sport ; most of all from that teaching of Nature in which the 
 waters and shores of Esthwaite carried on the lessons of 
 Derwent. In the psychology of poetic adolescence, as a study 
 of the degrees by which a rather ordinary boy climbs, and 
 climbs naturally, to be a poet, nothing could be more significant 
 than Wordsworth's school-time at Hawkshead. He went there 
 a healthy, rather passionate child ; he left it still healthy, still 
 passionate, but with new elements of health and fresh food for 
 passion. His simplest experiences in that plain village, by 
 that' tame lake, were part of a most transcendent training, and 
 some of them are among the permanent poetic riches of the 
 race. Even Ann Tyson, and her cottage by the archway, the 
 little boy's second nursery, went beyond themselves in their 
 mission. " Why should I speak," Wordsworth asks — 
 
 "Why should I speak of what a thousand hearts 
 Have felt, and every man alive can guess ? " 
 
 Yet it was well, even for a great poet, to record the charm of 
 that cottage home, the stone table under the pine tree, the 
 imprisoned brook in the garden, the moon seen from the 
 boy's bed — 
 
 " In splendour couched among the leaves 
 Of a tall ash, that near our cottage stood " ; 
 
 how, 
 
 " In the dark summit of the waving tree, 
 She rocked with every impulse of the breeze," 
 
 for these simple sensuous impressions were the first stage of a 
 spiritual experience such as had never before been told, they were 
 the alphabet of that poetry of common life which it was Words- 
 worth's mission to add to the poetry of the world. 
 
 Nearer the heart of things was the idealization of one of the 
 Hawkshead teachers, that mysterious village schoolmaster, 
 "with hair of glittering gray," that "Matthew" who never lived, 
 save for the poet himself, and his lovers, that " delicate creation '* 
 of the poet's mind for which a worthy concrete man supplied 
 the initial suggestion. The Rev. William Taylor, we have 
 svery reason to believe, an M.A. of Cambridge, and headmaster 
 of Hawkshead School from 1782 to 1786, was one, and only 
 
28 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 one, of Matthew's prototypes. He died while Wordsworth was 
 at school, and the poet has made the circumstance? of his death 
 poetically memorable. But it is the abstract " Matthew " who 
 has the true immortality, and who walks still in the vale of 
 Esthwaite, and will walk, we may predict, for ever. He is the 
 eternal type of that rare and exquisite thing, age as companion 
 on equal terms of youth : he stands, too, for the moral triumph 
 of cheerful serenity over the pathos of long survival and the 
 memories of ancient sorrow. Wordsworth introduces his name 
 as inscribed on a tablet in the school. He pauses on it, and 
 recalls the personality, its lights and shadows. 
 
 '' The sighs which Matthew heaved were sighs 
 Of one tired out with fun and madness ; 
 The tears which came to Matthew's eyes 
 Were tears of light, the deed of gladness. 
 
 " Yet sometimes, when the secret cup 
 
 Of still and serious thought went round, 
 It seemed as if he drank it up — 
 He felt with spirit so profound." 
 
 It was Matthew, and it was by Esthwaite Lake — 
 
 " When life was sweet, I knew not why," 
 
 who rallied William Wordsworth on his dreaminess, and was 
 answered (so in afterthought it seemed), in the technical 
 phraseology of the new philosophy of Nature. 
 
 " The eye — it cannot choose but see ; 
 We cannot bid the ear be still ; 
 Our bodies feel, where'er they be, 
 Against or with our will. 
 
 " Nor less I deem that there are Powers 
 
 Which of themselves our minds impress ; 
 That we can feed this mind of ours 
 In a wise passiveness. 
 
 " Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum 
 Of things for ever speaking. 
 That nothing of itself will come, 
 But we must still be seeking ? 
 
 " Then ask not wherefore, here, alone, 
 Conversing as I may, 
 I sit upon this old grey stone, 
 x\nd dream my time away." 
 
 ' 
 
CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD AMONG THE LAKES 29 
 
 In "memory's shadowy moonshine" this mystical school- 
 master more and more took the shape of Wordsworth's typical 
 elemental person, the plain countryman in a simple beautiful 
 place, who knows, the better for his simplicity, the heights and 
 depths of joy and sorrow. To Matthew belong the twin-poems, 
 The Two April Mornings and The Fotrntain^ written in 1799, 
 which breathe the purest Wordsworthianism, and which are 
 relevant here because they show what came of early Hawks- 
 head impressions. 
 
 If ordinary companionship led to these extraordinary poetic 
 results, so the boyish occupations and sports of the Hawkshead 
 scholar were a natural initiation into the metaphysics of poetry. 
 The mere external details of those days are given in The 
 Prelude with the reminiscent garrulity of autobiographic blank 
 verse. We are told of skating, nutting, dancing, loo or whist 
 parties on winter nights, woodcock-catching by moonlight. But 
 we are also told (and this is what interests us, this is what 
 makes the autobiography poetic), how this ordinary boyish 
 experience turned out to be the training of a poet's soul. 
 
 In the poem called Nutting, for example, which was intended 
 to be part of the Prelude^ we are shown how things seen lead to 
 those things which are not seen, but are of the eternity of poetry. 
 Years afterwards, when the poet thought over happy days 
 among the hazel-coppices on the borders of Esthwaite, he 
 remembered one day in particular — a red-letter day in the 
 history of his feeling for Nature. Regarded merely sensuously, 
 the day was delicious — 
 
 " It seems a day 
 
 (I speak of one from many singled out) 
 One of those heavenly days that cannot die." 
 
 Well protected by shabby clothes against the terrors of 
 thickets, the boy entered the autumnal woods, bent on ravage. 
 In their depths was — 
 
 " One dear nook 
 Unvisited, where not a broken bough 
 Drooped with its withered leaves, ungracious sign 
 Of devastation ; but the hazels rose 
 Tall and erect, with tempting clusters hung 
 A virgin scene ! " 
 
30 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 For a time the young deflowerer watched his victim in a 
 mood of perfect sensuous satisfaction — 
 
 " A little while I stood 
 Breathing with such suppression of the heart 
 As joy delights in ; and with wise restraint 
 Voluptuous, fearless of a rival, eyed 
 The banquet." 
 
 He was — 
 
 " In that sweet mood when pleasure loves to play 
 Tribute to ease ; and of its joy secure, 
 The heart luxuriates with indifferent things 
 Wasting its kindliness on stocks and stones 
 And on the vacant air." 
 
 And now the boy summons his energies to do the common- 
 place thing — 
 
 " Then up I rose 
 And dragged to earth both branch and bough, with crash, 
 And merciless ravage ; and the shady nook 
 Of hazels, and the green and mossy bower, 
 Deformed and sullied, patiently gave up 
 Their quiet being." 
 
 So far, we have a most ordinary situation, distinguished only 
 by the beauty of its presentment. But now mark what happens. 
 In the moment of full sensuous gratification, when the clusters 
 are at his feet, and the ruined trees are quivering from the 
 robbery, the boy feels — or is it that the man, the developed 
 poet, reads his present feelings back into the boy's ? — a strange 
 compunction. There suddenly dawns on his acquisitive, 
 materialistic soul, the vision of Nature as life — life which is 
 an end in itself, and not a mere instrument of human gratifica- 
 tion. He thinks of his act not as gain, but as injury — some- 
 thing that has hurt, something to be resented, regretted. 
 
 " Ere from the mutilated bower I turned 
 Exulting, rich beyond the wealth of kings, 
 I felt a sense of pain when I beheld 
 The silent trees, and saw the intruding sky." 
 
 And so, recalling it all long afterwards, he exhorts Dorothy, 
 who, surely, had little need of the exhortation — 
 
 " Then, dearest maiden, move along these shades, 
 In gentleness of heart ; with gentle hand 
 Touch — for there is a spirit in the woods." 
 
CHILDHOOD AxND BOYHOOD AMONG THE LAKES 31 
 
 " There is a spirit in the zvoods^ This, which in other poets 
 night be a mere play of illusory fancy, is, in Wordsworth, a 
 iogmatic statement of objective fact. 
 
 The same kind of spiritualizing process took place with 
 ichool-companionships. Common schoolboys, like common 
 ichoolmasters, were touched by, and became part of, the unearthly 
 ublimity of Nature. " William Raincock, of Rayrigg," was an 
 idept in the art of mimicking owls by hooting through his 
 ingers ; and he died before he was twelve. Wordsworth 
 dealizes him and his accomplishment and his fate, so that they 
 ire as much part of Windermere as its waters or its woods. 
 
 " There was a Boy : ye knew him well, ye cliffs 
 And islands of Winander ! " 
 
 Wonderful as were the effects of echoing sound which the 
 ad could produce, there were moments when he failed, when — 
 
 " There came a pause 
 Of silence, such as baffled his best skill ! " 
 
 \t such moments the Spirit of Nature laid her hand on him, 
 md play was changed into poetry — 
 
 " Then sometimes, in that silence, while he hung 
 Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise 
 Has carried far into his heart the voice 
 Of mountain-torrents ; or the visible scenes 
 Would enter unawares into his mind 
 With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, 
 Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received 
 Into the bosom of the steady lake." 
 
 And if this trivial experience was replete with spiritual 
 uggestion even to the child, much more so was the sight of 
 is untimely grave to the poet, his friend. The Hawkshead 
 hurchyard — 
 
 " Hangs 
 Upon a slope above the village school ; 
 And, through that churchyard when my way has led 
 On summer evenings, I believe, that there 
 A long half-hour together I have stood 
 Mute — looking at the grave in which he lies ! " 
 
 In other experiences the imaginative and spiritual training 
 as more direct and decisive. The sense of something behind 
 
32 
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 natural appearances, of a spiritual unity at once beautiful, awful 
 and incomprehensible, was born out of one experience after 
 another. When the boy was going at night roimd the wood- 
 cock-snares set by him and his companions, he would b 
 tempted to take more than his own share, and then he woulc 
 fancy himself pursued by invisible feet, and the night-breeze 
 would play the detective. So might any guilty boy feel. Bu ^ 
 not every boy, climbing the rocks to see a raven's nest in broae P 
 daylight, would suspect, as Wordsworth did, the preternatura F; 
 (shall we call it ?) in the natural. 
 
 " While on the perilous ridge I hung alone. 
 With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind 
 Blow through my ear !— the sky seemed not a sky 
 Of earth— and with what motion moved the clouds ! " 
 
 Gradually the sense strengthened of ^pi^^^^^J^ jl^P^^^^ 
 
 Nature, of natural appearances as symbolic and prophetic, 
 boating and skating scenes on Esthwaite and Windermere a 
 well known. One summer evening the boy shot out 
 a boat on Esthwaite in defiance of rules. Moonlight lay c 
 
 the water — 
 
 " Far above 
 Was nothing but the stars and the gray sky 
 
 The consciousness of wrong-doing was present but n 
 strong ; it was an element, but only one element, of an emotior 
 excitement in which it disappeared. In the glamour of t 
 nic^ht the boy made towards "a craggy ridge" on the horizo, 
 suddenly there shot up behind it, as if on the impulse of a livi 
 will a higher height, a peak black in the moonlight. As 
 crrew in size and definiteness it became a terrifying thing ; a 
 at last young Wordsworth had to turn his boat and go ba.JI ^ 
 feeling all the while as if "the grim shape" were following hi* 
 In serious mood he walked across the meadows to Hawkshea 
 and for days he could not lose the impressions of that night. 
 
 What were the impressions ? He tells us ; but it is not esW 
 to translate such things into words with their irritating ag 1: 
 impotent definiteness. His healthy boy's brain was troub^ 
 with a sense of the undetermined, the unknown ; Nature seen 
 to wear no longer her simple, pleasant, intelligible features, ] 
 
 fHI 
 
 IB! 
 
 fer 
 
 F 
 lb 
 
CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD AMONG THE LAKES 33 
 
 to be haunted by " huge and mighty forms," gigantic presences, 
 alive, but not with the life of men. 
 
 So it seemed at the moment ; but, years afterwards, he came 
 to know, and to be able to express better, what was happening 
 to him at such times. He came to realize that this vague feeling 
 of ghostliness among the things of sense was the childish appre- 
 hension of nothing less than Deity in Nature, of the " Wisdom 
 and Spirit of the Universe," the " Soul that is the eternity of 
 Thought.'* He realized that such experiences had greater 
 magnitude and significance than they seemed to have, that they 
 were part of a training of which it was not ridiculous, but 
 perfectly fitting to speak in language grandiloquent and sublime. 
 He realized that Nature — spiritual, alive, one — was in such 
 things beginning to train, discipline, purify him. The ex- 
 periences were to be understood as constituting intercourse, 
 fellowship, of person with person ; fellowship in which there 
 was both intelligence and passion — 
 
 I 
 
 " Wisdom and Spirit of the universe ! 
 Thou Soul, that art the eternity of thought ! 
 That givest to forms and images a breath 
 And everlasting motion ! not in vain. 
 By day or star-light, thus from my first dawn 
 Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me 
 The passions that build up our human soul ; 
 Not with the mean and vulgar works of Man, 
 But with high objects, with enduring things — 
 With life and nature — purifying thus 
 The elements of feeling and of thought, 
 And sanctifying by such discipline 
 Both pain and fear, until we recognize 
 A grandeur in the beatings of the heart." 
 
 As time went on, the fellowship between the schoolboy and 
 Nature became so frequent as to be almost habitual — 
 
 " Mine was it in the fields both day and night. 
 And by the waters, all the summer long." 
 
 It came through ordinary experiences, outings, amusements — 
 
 " Oft amid those fits of vulgar joy 
 Which, through all seasons, on a child's pursuits 
 Are prompt attendants, 'mid that giddy bliss 
 Which, like a tempest, works along the blood 
 
 D 
 
34 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 And is forgotten ; even then I felt 
 Gleams like the flashing of a shield ; — the earth 
 And common face of Nature spoke to me 
 Rememberable things." 
 
 Yet the boy became neither a prig nor a sentimentalist. He 
 skated none the less vigorously that a melancholy note was 
 sent by the hills to mix with the tumult on the ice, or that he 
 occasionally paused, " reclining back upon his heels," to watch 
 the solemn fall of night. The sense of Nature's presence lost 
 its terror ; he felt it as a play of life, life like his own, on all 
 things ; it gave comfort and strength now, as well as awe. 
 
 "The surface of the universal earth," worked, "like a sea" 
 " with triumph and delight, with hope and fear." 
 
 All experience remained natural ; only more and more it 
 became suffused with a purer essence, transfigured by a higher 
 light. The most normally sociable of boys, he began to feel — 
 
 " The self-sufificing power of Solitude." 
 
 The feeling of, and belief in, Nature's personality or quasi- 
 personality became both deeper and stronger before Wordsworth 
 left the vale of Esthwaite. Hitherto Nature had been "interve- 
 nient " and " secondary ; " a time came when she was sought " for 
 her own sake." But the very importance of this change made it 
 all the harder to express clearly. In trying to express it, Words- 
 worth had to become a " metaphysical " poet in very truth, and 
 to use language which suggests that idealistic philosophy which 
 was growing up contemporaneously in Germany. If it was hare 
 for the poet to express his experience, it is equally hard for the 
 reader to put it into any other words. What Wordswortl 
 learned about Nature in his school days came by way oi feeling 
 rather than thought ; and one can only suggest, adumbrate 
 what one feels. But his philosophy seems to resolve itself int( 
 something like the following : — Nature is subjective as well a 
 objective, internal as well as external : what we call the sou 
 in us has a counterpart in Nature. Or we may put it otherwise 
 and say that Nature is a display of spirit, to which our individuc 
 spirits contribute something. The result of all this action c 
 intercourse, or whatever it may be called, is a pleasurable c 
 even rapturous sense of correspondence or fitness, the mutuc 
 recognition, as it were, of parts in a whole. This delightfi 
 
CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD AMONG THE LAKES 35 
 
 or awe-inspiring sense of fitness between the mind and the 
 "external" world — a correspondence testifying to the unity of 
 Nature — is a cardinal part of Wordsworth's poetic philosophy. 
 He felt, when he was ten years old, what, in retrospect, he could 
 describe as — 
 
 " Those hallowed and pure motions of the sense 
 Which seem, in their simplicity, to own 
 An intellectual charm ; that calm delight 
 Which, if I err not, surely must belong 
 To those first-born affinities that fit 
 Our new existence to existing things, 
 And, in our dawn of being, constitute 
 The bond of union between life and joy." 
 
 Already, as a mere happy and ordinary schoolboy, he was 
 dimly recognizing himself as bound by a kind of marriage tie to 
 the world of men and things, and beginning to find warrant for 
 his greatest verse to come. 
 
 " For the discerning intellect of Man, 
 When wedded to this goodly universe 
 In love and holy passion," 
 
 IS to be able to regain the lost Paradise. 
 
 " I, long before the blissful hour arrives, 
 Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse 
 Of this great consummation : — And, by words 
 Which speak of nothing more than what we are, 
 Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep 
 Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain 
 To noble raptures ; while my voice proclaims 
 How exquisitely the individual Mind 
 
 to the External World 
 Is fitted :— and how exquisitely, too — 
 Theme this but little heard of among men — 
 The external world is fitted to the Mind : 
 And the creation (by no lower name 
 Can it be called) which they with blended might 
 Accomplish : — this is our high argument." 
 
 In all this mere feeling was continually passing into intelli- 
 '^ence, and every kind of knowledge became a source of poetry. 
 Society was to him " as sweet as solitude " by — 
 
36 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 " Gentle agitations of the mind 
 From manifold distinctions, difference 
 Perceived in things, where, to the unwatchful eye, 
 No difference is." 
 
 If this language has the unintelligible quality which inevit- 
 ably belongs to mysticism, it has also an intense reality; it 
 expresses the kind of life-long conviction which makes religions 
 and supports martyrs. Wordsworth himself recognized these 
 boyish experiences as religious ; he used about them words 
 specially belonging to the vocabulary of religion ; he spoke of 
 "holy" calm, of communion, of faith. Nor was his sense of 
 the "creative " function of his own " imagination," his conviction 
 that some of what he worshipped in Nature came from within 
 himself, less definite than it was bold. 
 
 " 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 : 
 Hence my obeisance, my devotion hence, 
 And hence my transport." 
 
 The influence of Hawkshead and the vale of Esthwaite did 
 not stop with Wordsworth's school days. He came back in 
 summer vacations during his Cambridge time. He saw again — 
 
 " The snow-white church * upon the hill 
 Sit like a throndd Lady." 
 
 He went to see the dear old dame with whom he had lodged in 
 the little town; the terrier was still there to join him in his 
 walks. Human sympathies which he had not felt before were 
 now astir within him ; not only the lake and the hills, the sky, 
 the fields, and the groves, but the peasant folk now drew forth 
 his love. He began to embrace humanity in his conception of 
 Nature. His outlook became more altruistic ; a "joy in widest 
 commonalty spread," rather than an individual luxury. Yet it 
 by no means lost its vague mystical grandeur, its unspeakable 
 incommunicable privacy. 
 
 * It was then a whitewashed building. 
 
CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD AMONG THE LAKES 37 
 
 " When first I made 
 Once more the circuit of our little lake, 
 If ever happiness hath lodged with man, 
 That day consummate happiness was mine, 
 Wide-spreading, steady, calm, contemplative. 
 The sun was set, or setting, when I left 
 Our cottage door, and evening soon brought on 
 A sober hour, not winning or serene. 
 For cold and raw the air was, and untuned : 
 But as a face we love is sweetest then 
 When sorrow damps it, or, whatever look 
 It chance to wear, is sweetest if the heart 
 Have fulness in herself; even so with me 
 It fared that evening. Gently did my soul 
 Put off her veil, and self-transmuted stood 
 Naked, as in the presence of her God." 
 
 One little scene marks a kind of climax of this phase of the 
 poet's experience. During these vacation days the young man 
 was far from being wholly satisfied with himself; what he looked 
 back upon as frivolity and triviality mixed with the high delights 
 of a poetic soul. Ordinary social pleasures — dancing, games, 
 and^the rest of it — came to "depress zeal" and "damp yearn- 
 ings." He felt himself growing weaker instead of stronger ; his 
 very garments seemed to prey on his strength. Nor did social 
 amusements make him unselfish ; on the contrary, they — 
 
 " Stopped the quiet stream 
 Of self-forgetfulness." 
 
 Yet out of one time which the poet's austerity might have 
 condemned as specially wasteful in its frivolity, came an act of 
 decisive dedication to the unseen and eternal. Somewhere (not 
 far from Hawkshead, and not far from a view-point over the 
 sea) the young Wordsworth had been at a late and long dance. 
 
 " 'Mid a throng 
 Of maids and youths, old men, and matrons staid 
 A medley of all tempers, I had passed 
 The night in dancing, gaiety, and mirth. 
 With din of instruments and shuffling feet. 
 And glancing forms, and tapers glittering. 
 And unaimed prattle flying up and down ; 
 Spirits upon the stretch, and here and there 
 Slight shocks of young love-liking interspersed, 
 Whose transient pleasure mounted to the head, 
 And tingled through the veins." 
 
38 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Then came the end of the ball, and the untimely passing out 
 into the quiet of the early morning. It was after cockcrow ; the 
 east was alive. As the youth walked home the sun rose ; the 
 sea laughed in the distance ; the mountains were as " bright as 
 the clouds." A more ordinary mind than Wordsworth's would 
 have halted on the commonplace contrast between the scenes 
 inside and outside the ballroom, between the tired spirit of the 
 night sinking back among extinguished lights and exhausted 
 fripperies, and the glorious young day, leaping up like a giant 
 refreshed with wine. A more conventional moralist would have 
 vexed himself that the night had hindered him from the best 
 enjoyment of the day. It was otherwise with Wordsworth. To 
 the high mood of that morning the night contributed as much 
 as the day. There was nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to 
 regret The night and the morning made up one great expe- 
 rience, one moment of destiny. It was the accolade of the 
 knightly poet. 
 
 " To the brim 
 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.'' 
 
 So much had come of the schooltime among the mountains 
 and the lakes. And it was their work. They had made their 
 poet. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 THE WEST COUNTRY 
 
 AMONG the pleasant English shires none is pleasanter, 
 none richer, than Somerset. Nor is there any more 
 various or more fertile in surprises. Hill, plain, and sea " bear 
 each an orchestral part " in the general character and effect. 
 In the north-west the county is flat plain, bounded by the 
 Bristol Channel. Beyond wide expanses, relieved from dulness 
 by cheerful apple-orchards, you guess rather than see the 
 gleaming streaks of sand and silver ; you may be aware of 
 a hazy sail on the horizon ; if the air is clear, you will see, from 
 miles inland, the irregular outlines of Steepholm and Flatholm, 
 the rocky islets that stand at the outlet of Severn Sea ; and at 
 night, as you look from any high ground, the sky will be 
 reddened by the glare of the furnaces of South Wales. 
 
 Bridgwater, with its long streets, its fine church and its 
 busy markets, stands on the little river Parret, which sinks 
 sluggishly north-westward from the Jurassic uplands near 
 Yeovil and the Dorset border. Its course is through marshy 
 alluvium ; and a poor muddy concern it looks at Bridgwater, 
 though the tide is plainly felt there, and good-sized vessels 
 are in the ooze on either side of the bridge, waiting for high 
 water. But, on the whole, the town is beyond the flats 
 through which the traveller's course from Bristol has lain, 
 beyond the cornfields and orchards of the present, the pathless 
 wastes of Alfred's and even of Monmouth's days. West of it 
 the ground rises into pleasant fertile upland of New Red 
 Sandstone, to merge, a few miles further on, in the much 
 older Devonian strata, which stretch, with only one small 
 interruption, across Exmoor to the Atlantic shore. 
 
 The high ground in which the Parret rises forms the 
 
 39 
 
40 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 boundary between Somerset and Dorset, and, to the westward, 
 makes a background for the scenery of eastern Devon. The 
 whole region, dividing the Bristol from the English Channel, 
 is the heart of the "west country," a land of cider and the 
 letter "z"; soft and moist in climate ; abounding in orchards; 
 its peasantry without the shrewdness of the north, but rich in 
 qualities of the heart, due, perhaps, to the Celtic strain ; gracious, 
 neighbourly, civil folk, with a kindly greeting for the stranger, 
 but with a deep local patriotism. Remote and primitive the 
 west country remains, even in these days ; perhaps, in a sense, 
 even more so, in spite of railways, than it was when Words- 
 worth and Coleridge made it a land of the Muses. 
 
 For, as a glance at the map shows, it is the natural play- 
 ground and rural outlet and refuge of Bristol ; and Bristol, a 
 century since, was relatively a more important place than it 
 is now. It was still the second city in the kingdom, the 
 counterpart in the west of London in the east ; for in those 
 days the industrial importance of the north had hardly arisen : 
 the greatness of Manchester, the greatness of Liverpool, lay in 
 the future, though a future close at hand. Moreover, was 
 not Bath close to Bristol — Bath with its pump-room and its 
 waters, the chief cynosure of eighteenth-century fashionable 
 idleness and mild invalidism ? And had not Bristol its own 
 " hot-wells," whereof we read in Humphrey Clinker and Evelina^ 
 to which humbler people resorted } 
 
 Among the personalities who adorn the annals of the great 
 Atlantic port in the eighteenth century, a few stand out 
 conspicuous. One was Edward Colston (whom the annual 
 " Colston banquets " commemorate to this day), the philan- 
 thropic West India merchant who represented the city in 
 Parliament in the last days of Queen Anne's reign and did so 
 much for Bristol's highest good. A more famous representative 
 was Edmund Burke, who, though an outsider, was elected for 
 Bristol in 1774, and sat for the city until 1780. It was as 
 member for Bristol that Burke made his great speeches on the 
 American question ; and it was to the Sheriffs of Bristol that he 
 wrote, in 1777, a letter almost as great, in which he laid claim j 
 to the full sympathy of the citizens, and paid them a compli- 
 ment of which they might well be proud. " By the favour of 
 my fellow-citizens," he wrote, " I am the representative of an 
 
 C;! 
 
THE WEST COUNTRY 41 
 
 honest, well-ordered, virtuous city ; of a people who preserve 
 more of the original English simplicity and purity of manners 
 than perhaps any other. You possess among you several men 
 and magistrates of large and cultivated understandings ; fit 
 for any employment in any sphere." Yet this eminent 
 constituency was on the eve of quarrelling with Burke, and, a 
 little later, spurning him altogether. In 1778, the selfishness of 
 the Bristol merchants made them oppose Burke's noble efforts 
 for the liberation of Irish industry ; the city was in a state of 
 such " miserable distraction," that Burke, knowing that defeat 
 was certain, refused to submit himself to its suffrages, and 
 humbly and respectfully, and for ever, took his leave of the 
 sheriffs, the candidates, and the electors. This time it was the 
 Protestantism of Bristol which resented Burke's support of 
 the mitigation of Roman Catholic disabilities. 
 
 Burke's chief friend and correspondent in his Bristol 
 constituency was Richard Champion, the inventor of the famous 
 "Bristol China." Hannah More, the "improver" of so many 
 occasions, and a larger figure, perhaps, in English life than we 
 realize, lived and worked close to Bristol. 
 
 To the lover of literature, however, more interesting than 
 any of those names are certain comparatively obscure in- 
 habitants, whose fortunes were linked with the fortunes of 
 English poetry at a great crisis of its history. There was, for 
 instance, Joseph Cottle the bookseller and publisher, whose enter- 
 prise and literary sympathy helped the genius of Wordsworth, 
 Coleridge, and Southey forth into the outer air. Of him we 
 shall hear again. Not so eminent as Cottle was another Bristol 
 man named Robert Southey, a countryman of West Somerset 
 by birth, who became a linen-draper in the great town, with a 
 hare for his shop sign, and the father of a younger Robert 
 Southey, destined to fame. 
 
 Neither Southey the elder nor his wife was interesting ; but 
 the young Robert had an ambitious aunt who insisted on the 
 boy's being sent to school at Westminster, and after that to 
 Balliol College, Oxford. Even at school Southey had been 
 drinking at the sources of Romanticism, and his head was full 
 of Rousseau when he went up to Balliol in 1792. His sympathies 
 were as revolutionary as Wordsworth's, and Gibbon had taught 
 him to be a sceptic in religion. Instead of " minding his books,'* 
 
/ 
 
 42 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 as the authorities expected him to do, he planned epic poems ; 
 and meditated, with kindred enthusiasts, emigratirn to virgin 
 soil in America, and the plantation of a republican settlement 
 there, where perfect social equality might be realized without 
 the lurid horrors that were spoiling the French Revolution. 
 One day in the summer term of 1794, there appeared in Oxford 
 and in Southey's rooms a young man from Southey's west 
 country though not from Bristol. He was a strange-looking 
 youth, with masses of long black hair parted Miltonically in the 
 middle, and so emphasizing the expanse of a noble brow ; open, 
 luminous grey eyes ; and a curiously large mouth, which, with 
 its parted lips, looked weak in repose, but which, when it 
 became the agent of the intelligence bespoken by brow and 
 eye, uttered speech even then unparalleled in its radiant fulness. 
 It was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, younger son of the quaint 
 pedantic vicar of Ottery St. Mary in Devon, who was still an 
 undergraduate at Jesus College, Cambridge, but had run away 
 and enlisted in the King's Dragoons, from which escapade he 
 had been some months returned. Coleridge had a companion 
 with him with whom he was on his way to begin a walking-tour 
 in Wales ; and they had an introduction' to Southey. A young 
 man who would run away from Cambridge to enlist ; a young 
 man of rare originality, full of enthusiasm, and copious of 
 speech, was the sort likely to fall in with Southey's American 
 dream, and so it proved. They left Oxford together ; and, when 
 Coleridge's Welsh tour was over, he came to Bristol, and he and 
 Southey walked about Somersetshire, and talked their scheme 
 of Rousseauish Transatlantic equality — " Pantisocracy," the 
 rule of all and sundry, was to be its name — into definite shape. 
 The shape was very definite indeed. Twelve gentlemen sym- 
 metrically matched with twelve ladies vvere to embark for 
 America in the following spring. They were to plant them- 
 selves on a delightful spot in the "back settlements"; each 
 gentleman was to provide £12^, to work two or three hours a 
 day, to hold any political or religious opinions he liked, and to 
 be free to quit the Commonwealth at any time. The produce 
 of the labour was to be held communistically, and there were 
 to be plenty of books for the improvement of the ample leisure. 
 The twelve ladies were a little difficult to dispose of. The 
 arrangements contemplated were not " Platonic/' in the popular 
 
THE WEST COUNTRY 43 
 
 sense of that word ; for the education of children was carefully 
 provided for. Apparently it was left undecided whether and 
 how matrimonial plans were to be made on a communistic 
 basis. Such ideas grew out of the west country in those days. 
 
 A practical step towards the realization of Pantisocracy was 
 the engagement of Southey and Coleridge respectively to two 
 sisters, Edith and Sarah Fricker, daughters of a Bristol mer- 
 chant. There was a third daughter, Mary Fricker; and she 
 was paired ofif with a third Pantisocrat, Robert Lovell, the son 
 of another Bristol tradesman, a Quaker, who joined Southey in 
 his first volume of verse, and died a year or two after. The 
 community were to start in April, 1795 ; that had been settled 
 during autumn walks in pleasant Somerset and conferences at 
 Southey's aunt's house at Bristol ; but when April came, nobody 
 was ready to start. Coleridge had gone to Cambridge to take 
 his degree, and then to London to write sonnets in the Morning 
 Chronicle, During this time he seemed to forget all about 
 Pantisocracy and Sarah Fricker. In January, Southey dug 
 him out of London and carried him back to Bristol, where his 
 interest in both revived. Southey and he lived together, and 
 with them was another young Pantisocrat, Robert Burnett, son 
 of a Somerset farmer. Cottle, the bookseller, was very amiable 
 and helpful, and there were all sorts of literary and other plans. 
 But the miniimim ;f 125 necessary from each gentleman of the 
 twelve — and where were the twelve ? — was not forthcoming ; 
 and so, when April arrived, no start was made ; and, as the 
 year 1795 grew older, it became evident that no start ever 
 would be made. At close quarters, Southey found Coleridge's 
 wonderful talk a trifle fatiguing ; the Pantisocrats had difficulty 
 in paying even for their Bristol lodgings ; and at last Southey 
 went off to Bath disillusioned as to Pantisocracy, and resolved 
 to follow conventional courses. Poor Coleridge was left lament- 
 ing and grumbling at Bristol. Matrimony was the only solid 
 result of the Pantisocratic negotiations. Before the year was 
 out, Sarah Fricker had become Mrs. Coleridge, and Edith 
 Fricker Mrs. Southey, in St. Mary Redcliffe's Church. 
 
 While Coleridge and Southey were "digging," as modern 
 Oxonians say, together in those summer days at Bristol, what 
 was Wordsworth doing? Wordsworth knew nothing of Cole- 
 ridge or of Southey ; but he too — so Destiny would have it 
 
44 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 — was coming to Bristol and the West country. He had gone 
 straight from Hawkshead to Cam^jridge in 1787, where he 
 passed through the usual course at St. John's College. The 
 University did little that was definitely formative for Words- 
 worth ; it sheltered his growth and supplied his meditative 
 imagination with some themes ; but neither its prescribed 
 studies nor its friendships counted for much in his life. He 
 learned more in vacation rambles ; immeasurably more in 
 London, and on his second and fateful visit to France in 
 1791-2. For Wordsworth the years between 1792 and 1796 
 were very critical. He had been away from Cambridge more 
 than four years ; he had had his stimulating and disturbing 
 time in France ; he was face to face with the imperious neces- 
 sities of bread and butter. He intended, indeed, to be a poet ; 
 but the amount of bread and butter which can be made out of 
 poetry such a.s An Evening- Walk or Descriptive Sketches cannot 
 be very satisfying in any conceivable condition of appetite, 
 either for poetry or for bread and butter. It would have been 
 natural to take Orders, as his brother Christopher afterwards 
 did ; but he did not hear the call, without which he was too 
 conscientious to dare to take such a step. In fact, in those 
 days, though far from the Unitarianism of Coleridge, the 
 Deism, or whatever it may have been, of Southey, though he 
 could never, probably, have been turned into a Pantisocrat, 
 Wordsworth was much of a rebel ; he was ashamed of his 
 country, or at least of the Government of it ; he felt as if his 
 spiritual beliefs were built on the sand. For a time he 
 steadied himself on what the Revolutionists called "Reason," 
 conceived as intelligence acting without disturbance by feeling. 
 Pleasing himself with no childish Utopias such as filled the 
 dreams of Southey and Coleridge, he tried to construct abstract 
 social ideals. He began hy anatomizi7zg the frufne of social life, 
 to use his own phrase ; he questioned and cross-questioned 
 everything, expecting that everything would prove itself; and 
 finding that nothing would, he — 
 
 "Yielded up moral questions in despair." 
 A man in this frame of mind is not fit to take Orders ; nor 
 is he very fit to succeed in anything, unless, indeed, he can 
 identify himself wholly with activities that are entirely practi- 
 cal ; and Wordsworth wanted to be a poet ! 
 
THE WEST COUNTRY 45 
 
 He took refuge in walking-tours and looked out for tutor- 
 ships. In one of the walking-tours, in 1793, ^^ visited the 
 Wye ; and, if we may trust his account of his mood written 
 five years later, he was still quick with the passionate feeling for 
 Nature which had marked his boyhood. He sang in 1798 — 
 
 " I cannot paint 
 What then I was. The sounding cataract 
 Haunted me like a passion : the tall rock, 
 The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, 
 Their colours and their forms, were then to me 
 An appetite." 
 
 In the course of this same expedition he went up the Wye 
 to Goodrich, where, in the courtyard of the castle, he met the 
 "little cottage-girl," whose " beauty made him glad," with whom 
 he chatted, and about whom, in the annus viirabilis^ i/QS, he 
 was to have the lovely afterthought which we know as We are 
 Seven, 1794 was the same loose, desultory kind of year, made 
 up of walking-tours, a little teaching, some poetizing and much 
 meditating, while the future was as uncertain as ever. The 
 deepest cause of the unrest and purposelessness, we may be 
 sure, was the "despair" in which he had "yielded up moral 
 questions." While relations and friends saw only want of 
 openings and slackness of energy, while his sister Dorothy was 
 concerned only about William's want of employment, William 
 was wholly preoccupied with the evolution of the French 
 drama ; he could not dissociate from it that English individuality 
 of his which called out for a career, or at least an income. 
 
 Part of the scepticism which was numbing him came, not 
 from any infection of French atheism, but from loss of faith in 
 the revolutionary movement. The first jar had been given to 
 his nature by the hostility of England to France : soon he was 
 jarred again by the insolent aggressiveness of the French arms. 
 He had rapid fluctuations of feeling. One summer day, in 
 1794, he was walking across the sands which, at low water, 
 make firm footing beyond the mouth of the Leven, between 
 Ulverston and Grange. The sands and shallow waters of the 
 estuary were alive with pleasure-seekers, with guides to keep 
 them from treacherous places ; overhead was the plenitude of 
 summer light in serenest weather. Wordsworth was near the 
 
46 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 scenes of his childhood, and the luxury of pensive reminiscence 
 came on him. In the morning he had stood by ihe grave of 
 his Hawkshead schoolmaster, William Taylor, in Cartm^ell 
 churchyard ; and he reflected with how much pleasure Taylor 
 would have greeted his old pupil as a poet. Suddenly, and by 
 a strange hap, the vast issues of the great world broke in on 
 the sweet egoistic trance. The pedestrian was close to the 
 pleasure-seekers when he heard one of them say, Robespierre is 
 dead ! At the shock of this news Wordsworth's faith in Provi- 
 dence felt strong once more ; and as he walked along he hailed, 
 in not very good blank verse, the coming of " golden times," in 
 which the Revolution, purged of the Terror, would — 
 
 " March firmly towards righteousness and peace." 
 
 And so " interrupted by uneasy bursts of exultation," he went 
 on his way. 
 
 During the months in which Southey and Coleridge were 
 planning their Pantisocracy in the west country, Wordsworth 
 was much among the Lakes. It was good for him to be there ; 
 for nothing, save one other thing, was so restorative to his soul 
 as the northern Paradise. And now that other thing also was 
 his ; for now he had the frequent, almost constant, companion- 
 ship of Dorothy. Since the break-up of the Cockermouth 
 home, she had lived, partly with her cousins, the Rawsons, near 
 Halifax, and much with her mother's brother Canon Cookson 
 at Windsor, and at his living of Forncett in Norfolk. The 
 dream of her life was to live with William. When he was 
 restored to her, after Cambridge and France, she delighted in 
 him as much as she had done when they were children. At the 
 Christmas of 1792 they were together at Forncett, and tasted 
 the joy of a perfect companionship of the kind which only 
 brothers and sisters may know. " I cannot describe," she wrote, 
 " his attention to me. There was no pleasure that he would not 
 have given up with joy for half an hour's conversation with me. 
 Every day, as soon as we rose from dinner, we used to pace the 
 gravel walk in the garden till six o'clock. Nothing but rain or 
 snow prevented our taking this walk. Often have I gone out, 
 when the keenest north wind has been whistling amongst the 
 trees over our head, and have paced that walk in the garden, 
 which will always be dear to me — from the remembrance of 
 
THE WEST COUNTRY 47 
 
 those very long conversations I have had upon it supported by 
 my brother's arm. Ah ! I never thought of the cold when he 
 was with me. I am as heretical as yourself in my opinions 
 concerning love and friendship. I am very sure that love will 
 never bind me closer to any human being than friendship binds 
 me ... to William, my earliest and my dearest male friend." 
 
 During the next two years she was much his companion, 
 often in long walking-tours. In the spring of 1794 — some 
 months before William heard of Robespierre's death on Ulver- 
 ston sands — they made a great tour in the Lake-country, taking 
 walks of portentous length for a girl, reviving childish impres- 
 sions, and adding to them. They paused near Keswick to pay 
 a visit to the Calverts at Windybrow, a farmhouse close to the 
 town. The Calverts were cultivated, simple people, fond of 
 reading, and loving their cottage better than any of the " showy 
 edifices " in the neighbourhood. The head of the family was 
 land-agent to the Duke of Norfolk. The Wordsworths were 
 " paying guests," and had their own sitting-room. With one of 
 the brothers, William Calvert, Wordsworth had been in the Isle 
 of Wight when the guns boomed hostility to France across Spit- 
 head ; and there was another, Raisley, who seemed to be 
 falling into consumption, and whose condition gave Wordsworth 
 great anxiety at this time. Those spring days were very 
 happy ; besides the Calverts at Windybrow, there were the 
 Speddings at Armathwaite, who were to give an eminent son to 
 literature in the coming century. There were wonderful views 
 from the windows ; and the Wordsworths cultivated happiness 
 on an Irish diet of milk and potatoes. 
 
 Even milk and potatoes cost something, and one cannot 
 live upon views. Wordsworth was thinking of what we now 
 call journalism as a possible means of livelihood. Twelve years 
 after the death of Samuel Johnson, journalism was very far 
 from being what it is now ; but the great man had fairly launched 
 it, and a great and permanent career lay before it. Journalism, 
 the art of the periodical, when it is not mere gossip, means two 
 things in chief, literary criticism and political comment, and, in 
 the last decade of the eighteenth century, it was a very spring- 
 tide for both in Britain. For were these not the days of the 
 Romantic Revival, the Renascence of Wonder, in literature ; 
 and did not the air, from end to end of the island, hum and 
 
48 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 buzz with revolutionary ideas, social theories, and the noise of 
 Pitt-and-Fox-ite controversy ? The number of periodicals was 
 still small, and none was perhaps very influential. The natural 
 course for a clever and energetic young man still was to do what 
 Steele and Johnson had done, and start a new one if he had 
 enough money and good auspices ; and, with or without 
 co-adjutors, to make it the vehicle of his thought. Among 
 Wordsworth's Cambridge friends was a certain James Mathews 
 who was pushing his fortune in literary London ; and the two 
 thought that they might together start a monthly " miscellany." 
 It was to be called TJie Philaiithropist, and to be " republican " 
 without being "revolutionary." Wordsworth, in the true 
 eighteenth- century style, was to "communicate critical remarks 
 on poetry, the arts of painting, gardening, etc., besides essays on 
 morals and politics." But neither Wordsworth nor Mathews 
 was a Steele or an Addison ; and The Philanthropist never 
 got beyond the projectors' brains. Should Wordsworth go up 
 to town and try to get work on some daily newspaper .<* An 
 Opposition paper it must, of course be ; Wordsworth's French 
 sympathies might be shaken, but he was as averse as ever from 
 Pitt's war against France. He consulted Mathews about this ; 
 but there is no evidence that Mathews encouraged. Meanwhile 
 something happened. 
 
 Through the winter of 1 794-5 William and Dorothy Words- 
 worth were mostly in the Lake country and much at Windybrow. 
 In those months Raisley Calvert was dying, and Wordsworth 
 spent much of his time by his bedside. Early in 1795 he 
 died ; and it was found that he had left ;^900 to Wordsworth. 
 It was not much ; but it seemed enough to be a poet upon, and 
 it was enough to make Wordsworth give up thoughts of journal- 
 ism for ever. Eleven years later he wrote a sonnet about | 
 this crisis in his life, which reveals to us the very essence of 
 the man. 
 
 " Calvert ! it must not be unheard by them 
 Who may respect my name, that I to thee 
 Owed 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. 
 
THE WEST COUNTRY 49 
 
 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 higher mood, which now I meditate ;— 
 It gladdens me, O worthy, short-lived Youth ! 
 To think how much of this will be thy praise." 
 
 To be "frugal and severe," and "finally" to win "the 
 Muse's diadem " : such was Wordsworth's life, and such its 
 reward. 
 
 Now at last, then, Dorothy's dream could come true, and she 
 and William could begin their joint-life in a more complete 
 home than farmhouse lodgings could supply. But where, in 
 the length and breadth of England ? 
 
 Basil Montagu, who was to become eminent at the Bar and 
 as editor of Bacon, was just Wordsworth's age, and had been at 
 Cambridge with him. He was now in chambers in London, a 
 married man, though not yet called to the Bar. Montagu had 
 a friend at Bristol, a merchant named Pinney, and Pinney had a 
 country-house in Dorset called Racedown Lodge, among the 
 big hills between Crewkerne and Lyme Regis. In the summer 
 of 1795 Wordsworth, looking out for something to help the 
 interest of Raisley Calvert's legacy, consulted Basil Montagu, 
 probably face to face in London. Pinney, of Bristol and Race- 
 down, had a boy of thirteen ; and, on Montagu's advice and 
 with his introduction, Wordsworth went to Bristol to stay with 
 Pinney, possibly as tutor to the boy, certainly to discuss plans 
 with the merchant. The result was the construction of a 
 delightful scheme for the Wordsworths. Pinney was to let 
 them have Racedown Lodge rent-free, on condition that the 
 eldest son of the family should have right of entry and resi- 
 dence for a few weeks each year. Basil Montagu had a son 
 also called Basil, whom he was to board with the Wordsworths 
 at Racedown ; and there was to be a little girl besides, of three 
 and a half (a relation of the Wordsworths'), whom Dorothy was 
 to look after. Such was the projected settlement of 1795 which 
 grew out of Raisley Calvert's bequest and Basil Montagu's 
 friendship. 
 
 Early in September Dorothy wrote all about it to a friend, 
 and told gleefully how they were to live on £^0 or £Zo 
 from all sources, and how she was to join William at Bristol, 
 i E 
 
50 WORDSWORI^H AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 and drive with him fifty miles in a chaise to Racedovvn. Tc 
 Racedown, accordingly, the brother and sister went, and there 
 they remained for the better part of two years, till July, lygyj 
 They were settling in there, when Coleridge — Pantisocrac)) 
 having come to grief — was married at St. Mary Redcliffe's, anc 
 spending his honeymoon in a tiny cottage at Clevedon ; anc 
 they had been settled some time when Southey, also newl} 
 married, set out, without his wife, to spend the winter ii 
 Portuguese sunshine and among the lemon groves and cork 
 trees of Cintra. 
 
 Two wonderful years at Racedown ! — not so much becausf 
 of the poetry Wordsworth wrote there, though that was no 
 without significance, as because of the history of his soul. Fo 
 we cannot, surely, be wrong in attributing to those years th( 
 chief part of that process of recovery of which Wordsworth ha; 
 told us so much, that recovery from the shocks of revolution 
 that restoration of admiration, faith, and love, chastened by th- 
 knowledge of man at his worst, which is the key to his characte 
 and his work. And we certainly need be in no doubt as to th< 
 chief agency by which the recovery was brought about. 
 
 The companionship of the brother and sister, enjoyed inter 
 mittently during long walks in the Lake country and pleasan 
 days in the Calverts' house at Windybrow, was now continuous 
 For the first time in her life Dorothy felt at home; her eagei 
 passionate love of Nature was fed by the beautiful uplan( 
 scenery of Dorset and the Devon border, the bold heights, goldei 
 with broom and furze, and swept by sea-winds ; and she ha- 
 William always with her. They lived a life of perfect simplicit) j 
 reading and writing indoors, walking and gardening withou I 
 Their means were straiter than they had expected, for, some 
 how, little BasU Montagu was their only resident charge. Bu 
 he was a great delight to them. They left him to Nature 
 leading, with a little gentle human discipline superadded. I 
 the first winter, a certain Mary Hutchinson, with whom Williar 
 had played at Penrith, paid them a visit. Perhaps this was th 
 ** nearer view " of his old playmate, of which he was to sing — 
 
 " I saw her upon nearer view, 
 A Spirit, yet a Woman too! 
 Her household motions light and free, 
 And steps of virgin-liberty ; 
 
THE WEST COUNTRY 51 
 
 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." 
 
 Anyhow, Dorothy wrote that they were " as happy as human 
 beings can be, that is, when William is at home ; for you cannot 
 imagine how dull we feel when he is away. . . . He is the life 
 of the whole house." These pleasant things make the outside 
 picture. But it is the inner life at Racedown of which they are 
 the index, which chiefly interests us. Wordsworth himself has 
 admitted us into the inner shrine in that autobiography, so 
 veracious and yet so imaginative, so modest and yet so lofty in 
 its modesty, which we know as The Prelude. The last four 
 books of The Prehtde tell us how the disillusioned Revolutionist 
 was brought to that culmination of his genius — that region of 
 central calm from which his greatest influence came. He tells 
 us how, when he could bear the torment of moral problems no 
 longer, he found a momentary refuge in mathematics, in science 
 so abstract as to appeal to the reasoning faculties alone. Then 
 it was that his sister saved him by showing him his true self, by 
 assuring him that his true self was clouded, but not injured. She 
 reminded him of the high prerogative of a poet, who controls 
 and transfigures circumstance, and is not mastered by it. 
 
 " She whispered still that brightness would return, 
 She, in the midst of all, preserved me still 
 A Poet." 
 
 Nor did Dorothy help her brother only by a ministry which 
 might harden as well as strengthen his self-reliance. She 
 softened and sweetened him as only a woman's influence can 
 soften and sweeten a man. 
 
 [ij " But for thee, dear Friend ! 
 
 My soul, too reckless of mild grace, had stood 
 In her original self too confident. 
 Retained too long a countenance severe ; 
 A rock with torrents roaring, with the clouds 
 Familiar, and a favourite of the stars : 
 But thou didst plant its crevices with flowers, 
 Hang it with shrubs that twinkle in the breeze, 
 And teach the little birds to build their nests 
 And warble in its chambers." 
 
52 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Yet, in Wordsworth's case, no human affection, no humai 
 being could be more than an " under-agent " in such grea 
 operations. Dorothy could take her brother to Nature, coulc 
 show him Nature ; but it was Nature alone who could do thi 
 whole work. Nature was only " assisted " by " all varieties c 
 human love." It was Nature only, the "Being that is in th 
 clouds and air," the Presence that disturbs with the joy q 
 elevated thotights, that could heal, in a nature like Wordsworth'.* 
 the wounds that Man had made. And it was only after he hai 
 been healed that he could understand or love Man again. 
 
 It is not easy, otherwise than by quotation, to set forth th 
 communion which Wordsworth claimed with Nature. Yet i 
 the books of The Prelude referred to above and again an 
 again, if more briefly, elsewhere, he expresses himself on th 
 subject with great fulness. Perhaps the central passage of a 
 is that marvellous conclusion of the fourth book of 77 
 Excursion — " Despondency Corrected," in which the Wandere 
 who stands for Wordsworth healed and restored, exhorts th 
 Solitary, who may be taken to represent Wordsworth j^rrel 
 and wounded. The passage is the more relevant that part (' 
 it was written in the west country, while Wordsworth Wc 
 living with his sister there. It is easy to quote : may or 
 venture to paraphrase ? 
 
 Men, Wordsworth seems to mean, were intended to possess 
 peace which passes all understanding, and of which they oug] 
 not to be deprived. They can possess it by virtue of a faculty 
 iviaginatio7i ; which, whatever it means besides and elsewhere 
 Wordsworth, here means a combination of the reason and tl 
 affections, by which men lay hold of the central fact of tl; 
 universe, which is Love, Truth, and Beauty. In doing thl 
 they are undaunted by the evil and adversity which are ;| 
 prominent ; or, rather, imagination (which may also be calhl 
 faith) sees these hindrances in a light which deprives them \ 
 their terrors. This use of the imagination is more than he' 
 moral (Wordsworth uses the striking phrase " imaginative Will '^ , 
 and it may be described as "Admiration, Hope, and Lovej | 
 The climax of its achievement is to find Love as the active ai . 
 dominant principle of things; and to recognize through Lo; , 
 the kinship of man with man. I | 
 
 And now, what part is played by Nature, in the sense of t!i j 
 
THE WEST COUNTRY 53 
 
 various phenomena of the open air, in this wholesome exercise 
 of human faculty ? How are men helped to such transcendent 
 metaphysical results by'dayspring, moonshine, and the solemnities 
 of starlight ; by smiling flower and waving tree, by the voices of 
 lambs in the meadow, or the wheel of the eagle about some 
 lonely peak ? Wordsworth answers that all these things teach 
 the mind through the affections ; that they touch the affections 
 easily and naturally because they exclude the jarring human 
 problems ; and that the gentler and quieter they are, the more 
 likely they are to do so. When the charm of Nature has been 
 shed abroad in a man, then he is prepared to face even the 
 hardest human problems with the serenity of love. In Words- 
 worth's own words, written probably at Racedown — 
 
 " For the Man who . . . communes with the Forms 
 Of nature, who with understanding heart 
 Both knows and loves such objects as excite 
 No morbid passions, no disquietude, 
 No vengeance and no hatred — needs must feel 
 The joy of that pure principle of love 
 So deeply, that, unsatisfied with aught 
 Less pure and exquisite, he cannot choose 
 But seek for objects of a kindred love 
 In fellow-natures and a kindred joy. 
 Accordingly he' by degrees perceives 
 His feelings of aversion softened down ; 
 A holy tenderness pervade his frame, 
 His sanity of reason not impaired. 
 Say rather, all his thoughts now flowing clear, 
 From a clear fountain flowing, he looks round 
 And seeks for good ; and finds the good he seeks ; 
 Until abhorrence and contempt are things 
 He only knows by name ; and, if he hear 
 From other mouths, the language which they speak. 
 He is compassionate, and has no thought. 
 No feeling, which can overcome his love." 
 
 Nor is this all : Nature is not only a refuge and a teacher ; 
 she is a symbolic system ; and from her phenomena, her laws, 
 we may and ought to learn the laws of human obligation. " So 
 build we up," he concludes — 
 
 " The Being that we are ; 
 Thus deeply drinking-in the soul of things, 
 We shall be wise perforce. . . . Whate'er we see 
 
54 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Or feel, shall tend to quicken and refine ; 
 Shall fix, in calmer seats of moral strength 
 Earthly desires ; and raise, to loftier heights 
 Of divine love, our intellectual soul." 
 
 The time at Racedown was not very productive. Words- 
 worth was learning rather than teaching ; he was gaining his 
 life's poise, and his poetic efforts were tentative. He tried his 
 hand at translating Juvenal ; he worked hard at that most 
 undramatic of dramas, The Borderers, which hardly the most 
 enthusiastic Wordsworthian now reads, but which the greatest 
 critic of his age spoke of as '* absolutely wonderful," and which, 
 he seemed to imply, put Wordsworth above Shakespeare in 
 knowledge of the heart. One essay, however, he made of lasting 
 importance. As he walked about Dorset he heard the story of 
 desertion, the story of the ruined cottage and Margaret, which 
 forms the second half of the first book of The Excursion ; and 
 all that story he wrote there, with one or two other passages 
 afterwards to form part of the same long poem. 
 
 In 1796 the three remarkable inhabitants of the west 
 country, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, were to meet, 
 with consequences momentous to English literature. Coleridge, 
 in the first year of his married life, was fussily busy and 
 ambulatory, but essentially unhappy and desultory. His head- 
 quarters were at Redcliffe Hill, close to Bristol. He was 
 writing and publishing poetry ; but his chief occupation was 
 trying to start a periodical somewhat on the lines of Words- 
 worth's abortive Philmtthropist. It was to be called The 
 Watchman. Coleridge wandered over England in the early 
 months of 1796 in search of subscribers, preaching in Unitarian 
 chapels on the Sundays. Of course The Watchman soon dropped 
 into limbo ; and so did scheme after scheme of this unhappy 
 young man. His wife kept going such home as he had at 
 Bristol ; and there, this same year, his eldest son, David Hartley, 
 was born. 
 
 Southey returned from Portugal to Bristol and his wife in 
 May of this year, intending to leave his Edith no more, and to 
 prepare for the dogged pursuit of law in the winter. His 
 relations with Coleridge were still rather strained, though there 
 was no open quarrel ; and they were often together. Somehow, 
 Wordsworth got to know of the " two extraordinary youths," as 
 
THE WEST COUNTRY 55 
 
 he called them, and went to see them at Bristol. There is no 
 evidence that the acquaintance with Southey went much further 
 at this stage ; but the Wordsworths took greatly to Coleridge, 
 and there were several interchanges of visits between Racedown 
 and Bristol. The Wordsworths never forgot the way in which 
 Coleridge at Racedown leapt a fence and came across a field 
 instead of walking on the highroad. Dorothy was immensely 
 interested in the new friend, in his talk, and his good temper. 
 She thought him plain : he was tall and thin, and it was hard 
 to get over the wide mouth with its indifferent teeth ; but when 
 the gray eyes lighted up ! — it was indeed a " fine frenzy " that 
 one saw in them. There was evidently a rushing together 
 of spirits here from which great things might come. 
 
 In 1797 the Wordsworths left breezy Racedown, and came 
 into Somerset to be near the Coleridges. When you pass 
 out of Bridgwater to continue the journey westward, you are 
 soon among pleasant new red sandstone uplands well supplied 
 with the characteristic features of English scenery, villages, 
 country seats, comfortable farmsteads. In front, growing into 
 greater clearness as your wheels or horses' feet bear you onwards, 
 is the long line of hills which you are told are the Quantocks, 
 not high, except here and there, and showing much woodland 
 and many folds and creases when you are near enough to make 
 them out. Some miles from Bridgwater you pause on a summit, 
 for the Quantocks are near enough to be scrutinized, and 
 between you and them there is a breadth of low country with a 
 tall church tower, and near, but not close to it, a village of 
 some size. It is Nether Stowey ; and in a few minutes more 
 you are in the gently climbing street with the market-cross, and 
 the runlet of water by the side of the roadway. Making still 
 for the Quantocks, you pause again by the last house on the 
 left-hand side of the street. For there is a tablet let into the 
 wall which tells the world that Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived 
 here. 
 
 Coleridge drifted to Nether Stowey with his wife and baby 
 Hartley at the Christmastide of 1796-7. What brought him 
 there ? 
 
 At Nether Stowey lived in those days a certain Thomas 
 Poole, one of the west-country folk on whose modest shoulders 
 Providence laid some of the weight of the literary destinies 
 
56 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 of England. Poole was only a tanner by trade ; but circum- 
 stances and kindness of heart made him a kind of Maecenas or 
 Monckton Milnes in his place and day. His people were of 
 Somerset for generations ; and Tom Poole's tanning-business 
 was hereditary. He took to it with much intelligence if not 
 with very hearty liking, and settled down at twenty-five in the 
 substantial house at Nether Stowey as assistant and successor 
 to his father. He was a man of quite remarkable impression- 
 ableness and amiability ; and, though he had no educational 
 advantages, he soon showed himself an essentially well-educated 
 man, intellectual, well informed, benevolent and just. Un- 
 happily for his social peace, if fortunately for his individual 
 development, his sympathies were with the early French 
 Revolution ; and this liberalism greatly disturbed his excellent 
 father, other relations of his, and the conservative notions of 
 Somerset generally. He spent many hours daily in reading ; 
 and among his favourite books there were (so it was thought) 
 the works of too many French philosophers. But the French 
 fever passed ; and it was not as a revolutionary, but rather as a 
 most law-abiding and religious citizen,'that Tom Poole endeared 
 himself at and about Nether Stowey. One influence that may 
 have helped to keep him straight was that of his cousin John 
 Poole, an Oxford man, a Fellow of Oriel, and a clergyman, 
 whose home was near. The two men had much to do with the 
 foundation of a book club at Nether Stowey ; and J. Poole 
 of Oriel kept a sharp eye on any work of an '* infidel " tendency 
 which his " democratic " cousin might introduce. 
 
 In 1794, when Coleridge was twenty-two, Tom Poole was 
 twenty-nine, and still absorbingly interested in social and political 
 questions and reforms. It was the year of Robespierre's death ; 
 of Wordsworth's wanderings with his sister ; of Coleridge's 
 introduction to Southey at Oxford, and their subsequent 
 negotiations about Pantisocracy at Bristol and in its neigh- 
 bourhood. In the autumn they, with Lovell and Burnett, were, 
 as we remember, recruiting in the highways and bye-ways 
 of Somerset for the Pantisocratic scheme : what more inevitable 
 than that they should go to Nether Stowey, and what more 
 natural than that they should call on Tom Poole ? They did 
 call on him ; he was immensely interested ; and took them 
 one August day, to see Cousin John, who was much shocked 
 
THE WEST COUNTRY 5T 
 
 by the opinions of the young strangers. " Each of them," he 
 records in his Latin diary, "was shamefully hot with Democratic 
 rage as regards politics, and both were Infidel as to religion " 
 (uterque vero rabie Democratica, quoad Politiam ; et Infidelis 
 quoad Religionem spectat, turpiter fervet). Tom's point of 
 view was different ; and though he lamented over the nature 
 of at least Southey's religion, he described the scheme with 
 much sympathetic detail. 
 
 The acquaintance thus made between Coleridge and Poole 
 ripened with time. Poole's intellectual tastes steadily grew, 
 and were fed by wise reading in English, French, and Latin, 
 and the collection of a good library. Poole had an enthusiastic 
 belief in Coleridge and his probable career ; and the Poole 
 house at Nether Stowey, with the tanyard behind and the 
 sloping garden, and the eagerly sympathetic Thomas among 
 his books within, became a recognized resort of the wandering 
 S. T. C. On one occasion he took his young wife, and stayed 
 a considerable time. The substantial Poole gave a tangible 
 proof of his friendship by collecting £41 towards the Watchman 
 project ; and Coleridge replied in words of impassioned gratitude. 
 He himself refused to regard the matter as mere gratitude. 
 "The strong and timnixed affection^' he wrote, "which I bear 
 to you, seems to exclude all emotions of gratittcde, and renders 
 even the principle of esteem latent and inert. . , . God bless you, 
 my dear, very dear friend." 
 
 Towards the close of 1796 Coleridge's desultoriness was a 
 source of real misery to him, and he turned to Nether Stowey 
 and Poole as to a stronghold. Could he but get a house near 
 the village, where he might settle down, write poetry, work in 
 the garden, and perhaps dabble in farming ! He certainly 
 needed all that the proximity of Poole's strong character could 
 do for him, for he was neuralgic that autumn ; and alas ! alas ! 
 he tried the effect of drops of laudanum on the pain. He was 
 worried, he was restless. Was there no simple cottage that 
 Poole could recommend ? He called at the Bristol post-office 
 daily in search of an encouraging letter from Stowey. At last 
 one came ; but it was not very encouraging after all. There 
 was a cottage, Poole wrote, but surely it would hardly do ! It 
 was in the street ; it was tiny ; it was ugly. But its garden was 
 close to Poole's garden ; the Coleridges admitted it was not 
 
58 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 beautiful, but of course they would take it and try it for a year ; 
 they would keep one servant, and Coleridge himself would 
 teach her how to cook. 
 
 Dearly as Poole loved Coleridge, he may have, must have, 
 had his doubts about the amount of happiness which this migra- 
 tion of the impecunious monsieiw, madame, et bibe to within 
 speaking distance would bring to himself and his relatives. All 
 that was unselfish in him also — and how much that was ! — rose 
 up to warn Coleridge against such self-burial in a remote village 
 of a young writer who ought to be nearer the centre of things, i 
 at Bristol, if not in London. This prudence kindled Coleridge | 
 into foolish passion. He wrote in the accents of a thwarted 
 lover, and as if he thought Poole wished him evil. In decency, 
 therefore, the amiable Poole could protest no more ; the house 
 was taken, and Coleridge, with his face " monstrously swollen," 
 a sore throat, and rheumatism in head and shoulders, prepared ' 
 to walk to Stowey, and apparently carried out his plan. Shortly 
 after his wife followed, with a new friend, Charles Lloyd, a 
 young Birmingham banker of poetic gifts and exceedingly 
 shaky nerves, whose acquaintance Coleridge had made on one 
 of his many journeys. On one of the last days of the " depart- 
 ing year," 1796, which Coleridge was immortalizing in song, 
 the singular household entered on occupancy of the cottage by 
 which the traveller pauses for a moment, curiously and reverently. 
 Coleridge " farmed " his one-and-a-half-acre garden, read, wrote, 
 walked, meditated, and associated with Charles Lloyd and the 
 Pooles. Sometimes he did bits of genuine nursing. "You 
 would smile," he writes to a friend, " to see my eye rolling up , 
 to the ceiling in a lyric fury, and on my knee baby clothes 11 
 pinned to warm ! " 
 
 It was between Nether Stowey and Racedown that the most 
 fateful exchange of visits between Coleridge and Wordsworth 
 took place. For Coleridge, possessing something which might 
 be called a home, felt that he could invite people ; and in July, 
 1797, the Wordsworths came to see him. Having once come 
 to the Quantocks, they had a mind to stay. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 "THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 
 
 THE Wordsworths' visit to Nether Stowey, in July, 1797, 
 was a great event. In June, Coleridge had been at 
 Racedovvn, reading his tragedy, afterwards published as Re- 
 morse to Wordsworth, and forming his very high opinion of 
 Wordsworth's Borde^'ers. So the intercourse had not had 
 time to cool when the return visit was paid. Modest as were 
 the requirements of the poet and his sister, it must have been 
 something of a strain on the Coleridges* accommodation and 
 cookery to have the Wordsworths for a fortnight. True, Charles 
 Lloyd, Coleridge's now constant housemate, was away, at his 
 native Birmingham ; but, on the other hand, during part of the 
 visit, there was another guest in the Nether Stowey cottage, a 
 very important guest indeed. 
 
 One of the " Blues " with Coleridge at Christ's Hospital was 
 a boy three years his junior, called Char!es Lamb, the son of 
 John Lamb, a scrivener, who lived in the Temple and acted as 
 a kind oi factotum to a Bencher of the Inner Temple, named 
 Samuel Salt. John Lamb had married the daughter of a Hert- 
 fordshire yeoman, whose wife was housekeeper at the Plumers* 
 mansion of Blakesware, near Widford. It was thus from humble 
 surroundings and antecedents that Charles Lamb came ; and, 
 when he went to Christ's Hospital, in 1782, he went as one of a 
 family of three children (there had been seven), whom his father 
 "found it difficult to maintain and educate without some assist- 
 ance." He was a timid, reserved boy, with a bad stammer ; but 
 full of sensibility and disposed to hero-worship. He has told us 
 how Coleridge seemed to him then, " Logician, metaphysician, 
 bard " in embryo ; abnormal, uncouth, even in boyhood, yet, 
 even in boyhood, so fascinating, so wonderful. " How have I 
 
 59 
 
60 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 seen the casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, entranced 
 with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between 
 the speech and \}lI'& garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee 
 unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of 
 Jamblichus, or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst 
 not pale at such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in 
 his Greek or Pindar — while the walls of the old Grey Friars 
 re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charity-boy ! " 
 
 The friendship begun at Christ's was prolonged into man- 
 hood. There was no Cambridge or Oxford for Lamb ; from 
 Christ's Hospital he passed, after a short interval, to the brief 
 tenure of a clerkship in the South Sea House, to be followed by 
 that clerkship in the East India House, which he held for most 
 of his life. Never was there a more constant or contented 
 Londoner than Lamb ; his only outlet was to the not-far-distant 
 Herts, where lovers of Elia know what he found at "Blakes- 
 moor '* (Blakesware), and " Mackery End." But the peripatetic 
 Coleridge, as confirmed a wanderer as Lamb was a stay-at-home, 
 used to turn up in London in his Cambridge vacations, and later ; 
 and the two old school-fellows met at the " Salutation and Cat," 
 just opposite Christ's, and spent long evenings together in an 
 atmosphere of tobacco, philosophy, and poetry. The principal 
 colloquies took place in December, 1794, in the winter after 
 Coleridge had first met Southey, and while Southey, at Bristol, 
 was lamenting over Coleridge's absence and indifference both to 
 Pantisocracy and his fiancee, Sarah Fricker. Soon after, as we 
 know, Southey carried Coleridge off to the west country ; and 
 for a long time he and Lamb never met. Lamb had a love- 
 story to occupy him, a romance which left nothing but a pale 
 sad moonlight on his life and writings. He lived now in Little 
 Queen Street, Holborn, with his disabled father, his mother, , 
 and his sister Mary, eleven years older than himself. Would t 
 that nothing worse than disappointed love had been his lot ! 
 
 In the spring of 1796 he began to write to Coleridge letters 
 which are among the most priceless epistolary treasures in the 
 English language, and which, by an astonishing and happy 
 Providence, the casual S.T.C. was led to preserve. Two of 
 those letters in that year convey, the one with a sweet humour, 
 the other with tragic self-restraint, two pieces of dark news. 
 In May Lamb wrote : — " Coleridge, I know not what suffering 
 
"THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL^' 61 
 
 scenes you have gone through at Bristol. My life has been 
 somewhat diversified of late. The six weeks that finished last 
 year and began this, your very humble servant spent very 
 agreeably in a madhouse, at Hoxton. I am got somewhat 
 rational now, and don't bite any one. But mad I was." In 
 September there was worse news. Lamb had to write of " the 
 terrible calamities that have fallen on our family. . . . My poor 
 dear, dearest sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of 
 her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch 
 the knife out of her grasp. She is at present in a madhouse. 
 . . . God has preserved to me my senses ; I eat, and drink, and 
 sleep, and have my judgment, I believe, very sound." Coleridge's 
 reply was singularly noble : let us hear a few sentences of it, 
 lest we should fail to realize the clear depths of a nature in 
 which there was so much foolish admixture. " 1 look upon you 
 as a man called by sorrow and anguish and a strange desolation 
 of hopes into quietness, and a soul set apart and made peculiar 
 to God ; we cannot arrive at any portion of heavenly bliss 
 without in some measure imitating Christ. And they arrive at 
 the largest inheritance who imitate the most difficult parts of 
 His character, and, bowed down and crushed underfoot, cry 
 in fulness of faith, * Father, Thy will be done.' I wish above 
 measure to have you for a little while here — no visitants shall 
 blow on the nakedness of your feelings — you shall be quiet, 
 and your spirit may be healed. ... I charge you, my dearest 
 friend, not to dare to encourage gloom or despair — you are 
 a temporary sharer in human miseries that you may be an 
 eternal partaker of the Divine nature. I charge you, if by any 
 means it be possible, come to me." 
 
 Lamb's demeanour, in circumstances so awful, was as nearly 
 faultless as that of a human being could be. He rallied and 
 steadied himself ; he did not falter in daily duty ; he cultivated 
 his marvellous literary gift ; he kept his poor alienated sister 
 close to his heart. He wrote very often to Coleridge : they had 
 many literary matters to discuss, for Coleridge had published his 
 first volume of miscellaneous poems in the spring ; and Lamb 
 also meant to be a poet. He criticized Coleridge's early efforts 
 with that combination of inwardness and minuteness by virtue 
 of which he stands alone among English literary critics ; and 
 though only twenty-one, and so appreciably Coleridge's junior, 
 
62 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 he showed, without a trace of priggishness, an unmistakable 
 moral superiority to his drifting and groping friend. What 
 could be better for Coleridge, in the days when he v. as feverishly 
 reaching his arms towards Nether Stowey and Thomas Poole, 
 than to get a letter beginning thus : " My dearest Friend,— I 
 grieve from my very soul to observe you, in your plans of life, 
 veering about from this hope to the other, and settling nowhere. 
 Is it an untoward fatality (speaking humanly) that does this for 
 you — a stubborn irresistible concurrence of events ? or lies the 
 fault, as I fear it does, in your own mind ? You seem to be 
 taking up splendid schemes of fortune only to lay them down 
 again ; and your fortunes are an ig7tis faUius that has been 
 conducting you, in thought, from Lancaster Court, Strand, to 
 somewhere near Matlock ; then jumping across to Dr. Some- 
 body's, whose son's tutor you were likely to be ; and would to 
 God the dancing demon may conduct you at last, in peace and 
 comfort, to the * life and labours of a cottager.' " 
 
 Well, in July, 1797, the "life and labours of a cottager" had 
 been six months in progress, and Charles Lamb was in the 
 Bridgwater coach on his way to Nether Stowey to see what 
 they were like, and how Coleridge was getting on. He had a 
 week's holiday from the India House ; we can fancy how sweet 
 must have been the summer air and how soothing the fields as 
 he sped to the west country. And Lamb needed stimulus as 
 well as soothing, for his London life was monotonous and lonely. 
 On June 24 he had written : " I see nobody. I sit and read, 
 or walk alone, and hear nothing. I am quite lost to conversa- 
 tion from disuse ; and out of the sphere of my little family 
 ... I see no face that brightens up at my approach." And a 
 little later : " I long, I yearn, with all the longings of a child do 
 I desire to see you — to see the young philosopher, to thank 
 Sara for her last year's invitation in person — to read your 
 tragedy — to read over together our little book — to breathe fresh 
 air — to revive in me vivid images of * SahUation Scenery.' " 
 
 So Lamb and the Wordsworths met under Coleridge's roof, 
 and happy hours flowed in the meadows and among the coombs 
 of Ouantock. One drawback there was. Some kind of slight 
 accident befel Coleridge at the beginning of the visit, and dis- 
 abled his leg so that he could not form one of the walking- 
 parties. One evening while the rest were out, he sat in his little 
 
"THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 63 
 
 garden under a spreading lime — heavy-sweet with blossom it 
 must have been — and put the situation into blank verse. 
 
 " Well, they are gone, and here must I remain, 
 This lime-tree bower my prison ! I have lost 
 Beauties and feelings, such as would have been 
 Most sweet to my remembrance even when age 
 Had dimmed mine eyes to blindness! They meanwhile, 
 Friends, whom I nevermore may meet again, 
 On springy heath, along the hill-top edge, 
 Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance, 
 To that still roaring dell, of which I told ; 
 The roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep, 
 And only speckled by the mid-day sun ; 
 Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock 
 Flings arching like a bridge . . . 
 . . . Now, my friends emerge 
 Beneath the wide wide Heaven — and view again 
 The many-steepled tract magnificent 
 Of hilly fields, and meadows and the sea, 
 With some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up 
 The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two isles 
 Of purple shadow ! Yes ! they wander on 
 In gladness all ; but thou, methinks, most glad, 
 My gentle-hearted Charles ! for thou hast pined 
 And hungered after Nature, many a year, 
 In the great City pent, winning thy way 
 With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain 
 And strange calamity ! Ah ! — slowly sink 
 Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun ! 
 Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb. 
 Ye purple heath-flowers ! richlier burn, ye clouds ! 
 Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves ! 
 And kindle, thou blue Ocean ! So my friend, 
 Struck with deep joy, may stand, as I have stood. . . . 
 
 Nor in this bower. 
 This little lime-tree bower, have I not marked 
 Much that has soothed me. . . . Henceforth I shall know 
 That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure ; 
 No plot so narrow, be but Nature there, 
 No waste so vacant, but may well employ 
 Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart 
 Awake to Love and Beauty ! . . . 
 My gentle-hearted Charles ! when the last rook 
 Beat its straight path along the dusky air 
 Homewards, I blest it! deeming, its black wing 
 
64 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Had cross'd the mighty orb's dilated glory, 
 While thou stood'st gazing ; or when all was still, 
 Flew creaking o'er thy head, and had a charm 
 For thee, my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom 
 No sound is dissonant which tells of Life." 
 
 For some reason Charles Lamb, when he read the poem on 
 its publication some years later, quite seriously resented the 
 epithet " gentle-hearted." " Please . . . substitute," he wrote, 
 "drunken dog, ragged head, seld-shaven, odd-eyed, stuttering, 
 or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the 
 gentleman in question." It is difficult to understand why Lamb 
 should have felt so strongly ; perhaps the reiteration was annoy- 
 ing ; perhaps, as has been suggested, the words seemed to 
 express something of patronage which the younger man may 
 have felt in his friend's attitude. In itself, it is surely an epithet 
 which the bravest man might be proud to deserve ; and, as 
 Wordsworth knew, it was one which surely fitted Charles Lamb. 
 
 " Lamb, the frolic and the gentle, 
 Has vanished from his lonely hearth," 
 
 he was to write in 1835. 
 
 Coleridge's poem renders faithfully the Stowey scenery. 
 Dorothy Wordsworth was charmed with the country. " There 
 is everything here," she wrote, " sea, woods wild as fancy ever 
 painted, brooks clear and pebbly as in Cumberland, villages so 
 romantic. The woods are as fine as those at Lowther, and the 
 country more romantic ; it has the character of the less grand 
 parts of the neighbourhood of the lakes.'* One spot in particular 
 struck her fancy. " William and I, in a wander by ourselves, 
 found out a sequestered waterfall in a dell formed by steep hills 
 covered with full-grown timber trees." Was it the place of 
 which Coleridge had sung — 
 
 " That still roaring dell, of which I told " ? 
 
 Anyhow, it is for the Wordsworthian a haunted place, and " a 
 spirit in his feet " guides him thither when he is in the west 
 country. 
 
 Making for the hills, he soon leaves Nether Stowey hidden 
 by a turn of the road, and mounts gently, and, on the whole, 
 continuously. Soon he is actually among the Quantocks ; they 
 fill up the range of his left-hand vision ; on the right he has the 
 
 i 
 
•'THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 65 
 
 not very distant Bristol Channel. At last, when he has passed 
 the " Castle of Comfort," once an inn, now a lodging-house, in 
 its leafy recess by the roadside, the hills are all about him, and 
 are everything in the landscape — ferny knolls ablaze with gorse ; 
 delicious coombs dark with dwarfish oak and spreading holly ; 
 quarries of dark red Devonian sandstone. As the road turns 
 seaward he finds himself in woods of the kind which suggest 
 the proximity of a country house. Yet there is no house, no 
 entrance-gate to be seen. There is, however, a little woodland 
 village with its church and inn and a stream bickering through 
 it. Its name is Holford ; and here the Wordsworthian leaves 
 the highroad, crosses the stream, and follows it further into the 
 recesses of the wood. After some windings he comes to the 
 expected gate, and enters on a long avenue, with woods on 
 either side, having much undergrowth of shaggy holly, and the 
 bickering stream always on his right. Before he scrambles 
 down to pry into the stream's secrets, he must go on to see 
 whither the avenue is leading him. It is leading him, he finds, 
 to a fine many-windowed old mansion. There is a garden in 
 front and by the side, but the entrance-door is on the other 
 side of the house, looking out on a delightful concave of the 
 Quantocks, ferny and shaggy, where deer are browsing. It is 
 Alfoxden, or, more strictly, Alfoxton, House, owned, in 1797, 
 by the St. Albyns. 
 
 To the house the enthusiast will return presently ; but the 
 spirit in his feet will not rest till it has taken him down to the 
 deep bed of the stream, where there is a rude bridge, and 
 the water whirls and eddies round an islanded rock, making 
 quite a little cascade. It is — it must be — Dorothy's place of 
 the " sequestered waterfall in a dell." But the spot has more 
 .definite and memorable associations than these. It is the spot 
 I which became a "chosen resort" of Wordsworth; the spot 
 I which was the birthplace of a new philosophy, a new poetry, of 
 ! Nature and Man. It was here that the lines came into being — 
 
 " I heard a thousand blended notes," etc. 
 
 The domestic arrangements of the Coleridges and Words- 
 worths were, in those days at least, so like a fairy-tale, that 
 we are not much surprised by anything that happened. We 
 know that they had Racedown for nothing from Mr. Pinney 
 
66 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 of Bristol. To such casual nomads it was the most natural 
 thing in the world to leave Racedown for a fortnight's visit and 
 never return to it ! Dorothy and her brother wandered along 
 the Holford brook until they saw Alfoxden House, and though 
 they never thought of living in so fine a mansion, and only 
 longed for some cottage near by, the fairies presented them with 
 the mansion itself. It was to be let, and let upon terms 
 preternatural surely, even in 1797. In the absence of the 
 owners the tenant of the house-farm, John Bartholomew, made 
 an agreement with William Wordsworth to let to him Alfoxden 
 House, furniture, gardens, stables, and coach-house, and to put 
 him in immediate possession for one year from the preceding 
 midsummer (the date of the agreement being July 14) for 
 £2^, free of rates and taxes. And apparently Wordsworth was 
 to be allowed to remain on indefinitely, if he desired to do so, at 
 the same rent ! 
 
 And so, when the Stowey fortnight was over, when the 
 walks and the readings in and talks about poetry in Coleridge's 
 cottage had come to an end, when Charles Lamb had gone 
 back to London "feeling improvement in the recollection of 
 many a casual conversation," and with Wordsworth's lines 
 ringing in his ears — 
 
 " Nay, traveller, rest ! This lonely yew-tree stands," etc. 
 
 Wordsworth and his sister went on to take up house at 
 Alfoxden. We may suppose that the maid was sent for, orj 
 even possibly fetched, from Racedown, bringing little Basil 
 Montagu in her charge. The settling into the furnished house! 
 was an easy process for such birds of the air as William andj 
 Dorothy ; and by August 14 Dorothy was writing : *' Here 
 we are in a large mansion, in a large park with seventjl 
 head of deer around us. . . . It was a month yesterday sinc<j 
 we came. There is furniture enough for a dozen families lik<j 
 ours. There is a very excellent garden, well stocked witl 
 vegetables and fruit. ... In front is a little court, with gras 
 plot, gravel walk, and shrubs ; the moss roses were in ful 
 beauty a month ago. The front of the house is to the south 
 but it is screened from the sun by a high hill. . . . From th' 
 end of the house we have a view of the sea . . . and exactl 
 opposite the window where I now sit is an immense woo( 
 
"THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 67 
 
 whose round top from this point has exactly the appearance of 
 a mighty dome. . . . Wherever we turn we have woods, smooth 
 downs, and valleys with small brooks running down them. . . . 
 The hills that cradle these valleys are either covered with fern 
 or bilberries, or oak woods. . . . The Tor of Glastonbury is 
 before our eyes during more than half of our walk to Stowey ; 
 and in the park wherever we go, keeping about fifteen yards 
 above the house, it makes a part of our prospect." 
 
 All those things the visitor can see to-day, in a primitive 
 solitude, untouched as yet by modern inventions and adapta- 
 tions. 
 
 ** Our principal inducement," Dorothy wrote, " was Cole- 
 ridge's society." The inner significance of the Alfoxden life of 
 the Words worths, which lasted just a year, is the association 
 with Coleridge. It was so close and constant, and the genius of 
 the three was so glowing with early fire, that it was a real 
 • creative fusion, like the welding of metals. "We are three 
 : people," said Coleridge, "but only one soul." And the first 
 tangible result was Lyrical BalladSy which changed the face 
 of English literature. 
 
 The comings and goings between Nether Stowey and 
 
 Alfoxden were incessant. Almost immediately after the 
 
 Wordsworths entered on possession Coleridge went to stay at 
 
 Alfoxden, and he was followed next morning in time for 
 
 ■ breakfast by Mrs. Coleridge, who brought with her an interesting 
 
 ,ci. guest. John Thelwall, born in 1764, and therefore a good deal 
 
 lasii older than Wordsworth and Coleridge, the son of a Bristol 
 
 )ust I tradesman, was one of the recruits whom the west country 
 
 and supplied to the revolutionary liberalism of the time. He 
 
 iersi became an attorney, then a radical journalist; then a follower 
 
 entjiof Home Tooke, and one of the Society of the Friends of the 
 
 iiflCij People ; with Home Tooke he went to prison in 1794, an early 
 
 lifc victim of the repressive policy in England, which followed the 
 
 wit [execution of King Louis XVI. in France. He was now sobering 
 
 Tiasidown, drifting about in search of country quarters, and soon 
 
 fiiifto settle at Llyswen on the Upper Wye. He had come to see 
 
 Coleridge on the strength of supposed political sympathy ; and 
 
 Coleridge, though he repudiated most of Thelwall's opinions, 
 
 liked the man, and was glad to introduce him to Wordsworth. 
 
 So " Citizen John," as he was called in the cant revolutionary 
 
 ffOflC 
 
68 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 parlance, was one of the little house-party at Alfoxden in July, 
 1797 ; wandering among the woods and hills with the two poets, 
 making acquaintance with the dell and its waterfall, and dis- 
 cussing all things in heaven and earth. The maid from Race- 
 down, if she ever came, had not yet arrived ; an old woman 
 from an adjoining cottage did what was necessary in the house. 
 Thelwall wrote in raptures to his wife about the place and the 
 visit, and especially about the dell with the waterfall. As the 
 party were sitting there one day, Coleridge said to Thelwall : 
 " Citizen John, this is a fine place to talk treason in ! " and Thel- 
 wall replied, " Nay ! Citizen Samuel, it is rather a place to 
 make a man forget that there is any necessity for treason."* 
 Political orthodoxy in the neighbourhood, as represented by 
 the Pooles, was much scandalized by the intimacy with the 
 ex-prisoner ; and, as we shall see, the Wordsworths had to 
 rue it. 
 
 Five important sources exist as to the Alfoxden life. The 
 most vivid is a journal kept by Dorothy Wordsworth in 1798, in 
 which the daily life of the " three persons with one soul " is 
 faithfully and artlessly mirrored. Another is some lines of 
 reminiscence by Wordsworth himself in the last book of The 
 Prelude. Thirdly, there is Coleridge's poem, TJie Nightingale, 
 written in April, 1798. Fourthly, there are Wordsworth's and 
 Coleridge's prose accounts of the origin of the Lyrical Ballads. 
 Lastly, and best of all, there is the totality of the work of the 
 two poets which originated at Nether Stowey and Alfoxden. 
 
 Dorothy Wordsworth's Alfoxden journal gives good earnest 
 of her wonderful journal of the Wordsworths' tour in Scotland in 
 1803, which, when first published in its fulness more than thirty 
 years ago, revealed to the world the dimensions of her genius 
 There is not a sentence of the Alfoxden entries which does nol 
 testify to originality and individuality ; to the seeing eye, the 
 understanding heart, and the power of choosing in expression the 
 smiting, revealing, unforgettable word. The very artlessness o 
 the writing, and the tameness (as the majority would estimate 
 it) of the experiences, make the fragment the more precious 
 Sentences, phrases, taken at random, are enough to show what i 
 companion for poets was this girl. " After the wet, dark days 
 
 * So, substantially, the anecdote appears in Coleridge's *' Table-Talk." Words 
 worth tells it differently in his notes on the poem Afi Anecdote for Fathers, 
 
 U 
 
"THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 69 
 
 the country seems more populous. It peoples itself in the sun- 
 li,|j beams." " Moss cups more proper than acorns for fairy goblets.'' 
 " The sound of the sea distinctly heard on the tops of the hills, 
 which we could never hear in summer. We attribute this partly 
 to the bareness of the trees, but chiefly to the absence of 
 the singing of birds, the hum of insects, that noiseless noise 
 which lives in the summer air." " The half-dead sound of the 
 near sheep-bell." " The shapes of the mist, slowly moving 
 along, exquisitely beautiful ; passing over the sheep they almost 
 ei-j seemed to have more of life than those quiet creatures." One 
 toi; might go on quoting without limit. What other English prose 
 "*' of the sort, so careful, so loving, so imaginative, is there to be 
 by found at that epoch > 
 
 One or two of the entries point curiously beyond themselves. 
 
 Here, for example, is an entry for March 7. "William and 
 
 I drank tea at Coleridge's. . . . Observed nothing particularly 
 
 • interesting. . . . One only leaf upon the top of a tree — the sole 
 
 : remaining leaf — danced round and round like a rag blown by 
 
 i: the wind." Surely they must have talked of that leaf at 
 
 Coleridge's tea-table, or had Coleridge a sight of the entry 
 
 afterwards ? For who does not know the stanza of Christahelf 
 
 " The night is chill ; the forest bare ; 
 
 iiiij , Is it the wind that moaneth bleak ? 
 
 fM There is not wind enough in the air 
 
 .J To move away the ringlet curl 
 
 From the lovely lady's cheek — 
 There is not wind enough to twirl 
 The one red leaf, the last of its clan, 
 That dances as often as dance it can, 
 Hanging so light, and hanging so high 
 On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky." 
 
 Again, is this only a coincidence? "January 31. When 
 we left home the moon immensely large, the sky scattered over 
 with clouds. These soon closed in, contracting the dimensions 
 of the moon without concealing her." So far Dorothy. Now 
 hear Coleridge — 
 
 '* Is the night chilly and dark ? 
 The night is chilly, but not dark, 
 The thin gray cloud is spread on high, 
 It covers but not hides the sky. 
 ^••,[^ The moon is behind, and at the full ; 
 
 And yet she looks both small and dull." 
 
70 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Naturally, there are several links between the Journal and ii - 
 Wordsworth's poems written at this time. E.g.^ hear Dorothy : — " - 
 *' Went to Poole's after tea. The sky spread over with one 
 continuous cloud, whitened by the light of the moon, which, 
 though her dim shape was seen, did not throw forth so 
 strong a light as to chequer the earth with shadows. At 
 once the clouds seemed to cleave asunder, and left her in 
 the centre of a black-blue vault. She sailed along, followed 
 by multitudes of stars, small and bright and sharp. Their 
 brightness seemed concentrated." And now hear William's 
 blank verse : — 
 
 " The sky is overcast 
 With a continuous cloud of texture close, 
 Heavy and wan, all whitened by the Moon, 
 Which through that veil is indistinctly seen, 
 A dull, contracted circle, yielding light 
 So feebly spread, that not a shadow falls. 
 Chequering the ground — from rock, plant, tree, or tower. 
 At length a pleasant instantaneous gleam 
 Startles the pensive traveller while he treads 
 His lonesome path with unobserving eye 
 Bent earthwards ; he looks up — the clouds are split 
 Asunder, — and above his head he sees 
 The clear Moon, and the glory of the heavens. 
 There, in a black-blue vault, she sails along, 
 Followed by multitudes of stars, that, small, 
 And sharp, and bright, along the dark abyss 
 Drive as she drives ! how fast they wheel away. 
 Yet vanish not ! — the wind is in the tree. 
 But they are silent ; — still they roll along 
 Immeasurably distant ; and the vault, 
 Built round by those white clouds, enormous clouds, 
 Still deepens its unfathomable depth. 
 At length the Vision closes ; and the mind ; 
 Not undisturbed by the delight it feels. 
 Which slowly settles into peaceful calm, 
 Is left to muse upon the solemn scene." 
 
 Here, it is evident, there is more than resemblance or sug- 
 gestion ; there is joint composition of a very interesting kind. 
 In a note to the poem, Wordsworth tells us that it was'^ 
 composed extempore on the road as he walked along, and 
 one cannot doubt the correctness of his memory. Between J 
 the extemporaneous versifier and the artless journal-writer 
 
"THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 71 
 
 there could be no question of plagiarism or ^?/^^?-plagiarism. 
 How, then, are we to explain the relations between Dorothy 
 Wordsworth's Journal and the contemporaneous poems of her 
 brother and of Coleridge ? 
 
 In all the instances which have been here brought forward 
 there is either close paraphrase or actual identity in expression. 
 Dorothy's " one only leaf upon the top of a tree — the sole 
 remaining leaf — danced round and round like a rag " appears 
 in Coleridge's version as — 
 
 " The one red leaf, the last of its clan, 
 That dances as often as dance it can. 
 Hanging so light, and hanging so high." 
 
 Dorothy's " clouds soon closed in, contracting the dimensions 
 of the moon without concealing her," is vititatis mutandis, 
 Coleridge's — 
 
 " The thin gray cloud is spread on high. 
 The moon is behind and at the full, 
 And yet she looks both small and dull." 
 
 In the third instance, that of Wordsworth's Night Piece^ 
 there is actual identity, in many cases, of phrases and epithets. 
 " A continuous cloud," " whitened by the moon," ** chequering 
 the ground," "the black-blue vault," above all the wonderful 
 trinity of epithets for the stars, "small, and bright, and sharpy^ 
 are as nearly as possible identical. How are we to suppose 
 that the work of expression was divided ? 
 
 Wordsworth, he has told us, composed his Night Piece as he 
 walked ; and, therefore, he cannot have got his phrases from 
 his sister's journal. On the other hand, Coleridge does not 
 seem to have been with Dorothy when she saw the dancing 
 red leaf and the moon contracted in dimensions " by the gray 
 cloud '* ; and, therefore, he would seem to have learned of them 
 from her. 
 
 I think there is a strong presumption that, in all those cases, 
 the close observer, and possibly the originator of the distinctive 
 phrases and epithets, was Dorothy. We know of similar 
 instances of adoption from one another among the members 
 of the Wordsworths' circle. The lines from The Ancient 
 Mariner — 
 
 " And thou art long and lank and brown 
 As is the ribb'd sea-sand," 
 
72 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 were presented to Coleridge by Wordsworth. Wordsworth's 
 phrase in his Da;ffodiis, — " That inward eye which is the bh'ss 
 of solitude" was given him by his wife. Wordswvirth said 
 of his sister in well-known lines : She gave me eyes. And 
 Coleridge wrote of her in her goings out and in at Alfoxden — 
 
 ". . . A most gentle Maid 
 
 at latest eve 
 
 (Even like a lady vowed and dedicate 
 
 To something more than Nature in the grove) 
 
 Glides through the pathways ; she knows all their notes, 
 
 That gentle Maid ! " 
 
 Is it too much to suppose that to both her two poet 
 companions Dorothy may have supplied much of the minute 
 observation, which Nature-poetry requires, and that imaginative 
 insight into detail which is expressed by perfect epithet and 
 incisive phrase ? May we not feel sure that Coleridge's im- 
 mortal pictures of dancing leaf and clouded moon were really 
 hers, and that they got only their final touch of magic from him ? 
 Can we not hear the Night Piece coming into being between 
 brother and sister on the Stowey road — his the rhythm, hers 
 the wording at critical and cardinal points ; wholly his the 
 characteristic introspection at the end — 
 
 " At length the vision closes ; and the mind, 
 Not undisturbed by the delight itfeels^ 
 Which slowly settles into peaceful calm, 
 Is left to muse upon the solemn scene "? 
 
 In fact, neither the poetry of Coleridge nor that of Words- 
 worth is characterized by the careful — though always purely 
 aesthetic — registration of natural effects which we find in the 
 Alfoxden Journal. It was the dower of the gentle maid who 
 glided along the wild-wood paths and knew all the nightingale's 
 notes. 
 
 To the constant and complete companionship of the trio, 
 Dorothy's Journal bears ample testimony. "With Coleridge" 
 is a constant entry ; with Coleridge on the Stowey road in 
 early spring days, "the midges or small flies spinning in the 
 sunshine ; " with Coleridge over the hills, " the sea at first 
 obscured by vapour. ... I never saw such a union of earth, 
 sky and sea ; " with Coleridge gathering sticks in the wood ; 
 with Coleridge listening to redbreasts in dripping February 
 
 ft::: 
 ir. 
 
"THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 73 
 
 snow, or on May evenings seeing the glow-worm and listening 
 to the nightingale. 
 
 In the last book of TJie Prelude, Wordsworth refers to this 
 idyllic time in lines of grave and affectionate reminiscence. It 
 was^^still the time, let us never forget, of the healing of his soul 
 which he attributed in so large measure to Dorothy. He has, 
 therefore, much to say of her, of her planting of flowers in the 
 crevices of his nature ; of her breath going before his steps like 
 gentler spring in spring. But much of his recovery and 
 adornment he traces to Coleridge, and his kindred influence. 
 The result must have been marvellous, for it finds marvellous 
 expression — 
 
 " Thus fear relaxed 
 Her overweening grasp ; thus thoughts and things 
 In the self-haunting spirit learned to take 
 More rational proportions ; mystery, 
 The incumbent mystery of sense and soul. 
 Of life and death, time and eternity, 
 Admitted more habitually a mild 
 Interposition — a serene delight 
 In closelier gathering cares, such as become 
 A human creature, howsoe'er endowed. 
 Poet, or destined for a humbler name ; 
 And so the deep enthusiastic joy, 
 The rapture of the hallelujah sent 
 From all that breathes and is, was chastened, stemmed 
 And balanced by pathetic truth, by trust 
 In hopeful reason, leaning on the stay 
 Of Providence ; and in reverence for duty. 
 Here, if need be, struggHng with storms, and there 
 Strewing in peace Hfe's humblest ground with herbs, 
 iie| At every season green, sweet at all hours." 
 
 ho 
 
 yj In particular, there stood out in Wordsworth's memory one 
 
 " Isummer. Internal evidence shows that it was the second half- 
 
 ummer spent at Alfoxden, that of 1798, the year of Lyrical 
 
 Ballads. 
 
 " That summer, under whose indulgent skies. 
 Upon smooth Quantock's airy ridge we roved, 
 Unchecked, or loitered 'mid her sylvan coombs, 
 Thou, in bewitching words, with happy heart. 
 Didst chaunt the vision of that Ancient Man, 
 The bright-eyed Mariner, and rueful woes 
 Didst utter of the Lady Christabel ; 
 
74 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 And I, associate with such labour, steeped 
 
 In soft forgetfuhiess the livelong hours, 
 
 Murmuring of him who, joyous hap, was foun'l, 
 
 After the perils of his moonlight ride, 
 
 Near the loud waterfall ; or her who sate 
 
 In misery near the miserable Thorn — 
 
 When thou dost to that summer turn thy thoughts, 
 
 And hast before thee all which then we were, 
 
 To thee, in memory of that happiness, 
 
 It will be known, by thee at least, my Friend ! 
 
 Felt, that the history of a Poet's mind 
 
 Is labour not unworthy of regard." 
 
 Coleridge's poem, The Nighthtgale, is in a lighter vein, bu 
 equally inspired by the time, the place, and the companionship 
 The poem is very interesting, and full of beauty, though (a 
 was often the case with Coleridge), unequal in style. Its mail 
 interest lies in its treatment of Nature ; in the revelation i 
 gives of Coleridge's individual attitude towards the non-huma 
 natural world. That attitude is at once Wordsworthian and no 
 The trio are sitting, in a moonless night — every trace of sunse 
 faded, and dim stars overhead — on a bridge over a soundles 
 stream. The poet blames Milton's phrase about the nightingal 
 most viiisical, most melancJioly ! which he holds to be vitiated b 
 what Ruskin called the " pathetic fallacy," the transference < 
 human feeling — in this case morbid — to natural objects. In a 
 essentially Wordsworthian strain, he calls on the poet wt 
 would know Nature aright to forget her moods and yield hin 
 self to her. Let him stretch his limbs — 
 
 " Beside a brook in mossy forest-dell, 
 By sun or moonlight, to the influxes 
 Of shapes and sounds and shifting elements 
 Surrendering his whole spirit, of his song 
 And of his fame forgetful ! so his fame 
 Should share in Nature's immortality, 
 A venerable thing ! And so his song 
 Should make all Nature lovelier, and itself 
 Be loved like Nature ! " 
 
 He goes on to translate the nightingale's singing into^i 
 strain too romantic, with too much of the jewellery of magic, : r 
 Wordsworth — 
 
 •' 'Tis the merry Nightingale 
 That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates 
 
"THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 75 
 
 With fast thick warble his delicious notes, 
 As he were fearful that an April night 
 Would be too short for him to utter forth 
 His love-chant, and disburthen his full soul 
 Of all its music ! " 
 
 Alfoxden and Dorothy follow, both lifted into the world of 
 faery — 
 
 " And I know a grove 
 
 Of large extent, hard by a castle huge, 
 
 Which the great lord inhabits not ; and so 
 
 This grove is wild with tangling underwood, 
 
 And the trim walks are broken up, and grass, 
 V Thin grass and king-cups grow within the paths. 
 
 But never elsewhere in one place I knew 
 
 So many nightingales ; and far and near, 
 ^^ In wood and thicket, over the wide grove, 
 
 They answer and provoke each other's songs. 
 
 With skirmish and capricious passagings, 
 
 And murmurs musical and swift jug-jug. 
 
 And one low piping sound more sweet than all — 
 
 Stirring the air with such an harmony. 
 
 That should you close your eyes, you might almost 
 
 Forget it was not day ! On moonlight bushes, 
 dll Whose dewy leaflets are but half-disclosed, 
 
 (.g I You may perchance behold them on the twigs, 
 
 Their bright, bright eyes, their eyes both bright and full, 
 
 Glistening, while many a glow-worm in the shade 
 
 Lights up her love-torch." 
 
 And now comes Dorothy, in words some of which we have 
 heard before ; with a tribute to her insight into Nature. 
 
 "A most gentle Maid 
 Who dwelleth in her hospitable home 
 Hard by the castle, and at latest eve 
 (Even like a Lady vowed and dedicate 
 To something more than Nature in the grove) 
 Glides through the pathways ; she knows all their notes. 
 That gentle Maid ! and oft, a moment's space. 
 What time the moon was lost behind a cloud, 
 Hath heard a pause of silence ; till the moon 
 Emerging, hath awakened earth and sky 
 With one sensation, and those wakeful birds 
 Have all burst forth in choral minstrelsy. 
 As if some sudden gale had swept at once 
 A hundred airy harps ! And she hath watched 
 
76 AVORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Many a nightingale perch giddily 
 On blossomy twig still swinging from the breeze, 
 And to that motion time his wanton song 
 Like tipsy joy that reels with tossing head." 
 
 Such nights were these at Alfoxden ! And then the break 
 up, typical of almost nightly breaks-up — L 
 
 " Farewell, O Warbler ! till to-morrow eve, l!i^' 
 
 And you, my friends, farewell, a short farewell ! 
 We have been loitering long, and pleasantly, 
 And now for our dear homes." 
 
 And, after a pretty story about how one of his baby's 
 " night-fears " was banished by his father's taking him out and 
 showing him the moon in the orchard — 
 
 " Once more, farewell, 
 Sweet Nightingale ! once more, my friends ! farewell." ^'^ 
 
 Coleridge's Nightmgale was one of the Lyrical Ballads ; and 
 it is time now to speak of them, and what their makers meantlZ 
 by them and said about them. For it was to them that all this 
 Quantock life led up. 
 
 Joint ventures in poetry were common in those days : Lovell 
 and Southey co-operated ; so did Lamb and Charles Lloyd 
 Coleridge and Wordsworth very seriously intended to be poets 
 and as they walked about they made not only poetry, but plans 
 One hardly serious idea was a prose-poem called the Wander 
 ings of CaiUy to consist of three cantos, of which Wordswortl 
 was to write the first, and Coleridge the second. Whichever hac 
 first finished his task was to do the third. The whole worl 
 was to be completed in one night ! Such tours de force wer 
 not in Wordsworth's line ; and when Coleridge brought hi 
 canto, he found his colleague gazing with a " look of humorou, 
 despondency" at an almost blank sheet of paper. Coleridge' 
 canto may still be read, with a characteristically melodiou 
 fragment of verse, the first instalment of what was to hav! 
 been a poem on the same theme. 
 
 " Encinctured with a twine of leaves. 
 That leafy twine his only dress ! fl;^ 
 
 A lovely Boy was plucking fruits, ■. 
 
 By moonlight, in a wilderness." 
 
 Another plan was ambitious and grandiose. In the mincij 
 
 t: :. 
 
"THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 77 
 
 Df both men the underlying interest was the interrelations of 
 Man, Society", and Nature ; the distant roar of French affairs 
 A^as still in their ears, and mixed itself with the sounds of 
 )reeze and bird and stream in Somerset. While Wordsworth, 
 It ease in the Alfoxden dell, looked at the sweet fellowship of 
 )rimrose and periwinkle on the steep banks, he thought with 
 )ain of the "madding passions, mutually inflamed," of 
 lumanity — 
 
 " Much it grieved my heart to think 
 What man has made of man." 
 
 \s Coleridge walked on the high table-lands of Quantock and 
 imong its sloping coombs, and looked at streamlets rising 
 imong "yellow-red moss" and "conical glass-shaped tufts of 
 )ent," becoming audible in little water-breaks, and working 
 heir way on and down, by lonely barn and sheepfold, to 
 lamlet and village and then to sea-port and sea, he saw in 
 hem types of human society, on which a great poem might be 
 )uilt. Wordsworth's imagination, as we shall find, was to work 
 owards the same end. But not yet ; and meanwhile a simpler 
 )lan suggested itself. 
 
 In November, 1797, the trio set out on a longer expedition 
 han usual. They were to round Quantock at the seaward end 
 )y Watchet, and make their way along the grand coast to 
 -.ynmouth, Lynton, and the Valley of Rocks. It was to be all 
 one on foot ; but there were inevitable expenses, and these 
 ere to be defrayed by a joint-poem, which they hoped would 
 ring in £s. As they walked along under November skies, 
 d before Watchet was reached, Coleridge told of a dream 
 hich had befallen a friend of his, about a skeleton ship with 
 igures in it. Coleridge made a story out of the dream ; and 
 A^ordsworth suggested a moral. He had been reading in 
 5helvocke's Voj/ag-es about the albatrosses which abound near 
 ;^ape Horn. Let us make the navigators wantonly destroy one 
 )f these birds, he suggested, and be punished by their tutelary 
 pirits. So the plan developed, Wordsworth contributing the 
 dea of the ship's being navigated by dead men, but nothing 
 Ise towards its structure. The same evening they began to 
 /rite, the lead being taken by Coleridge, but Wordsworth 
 ontributing some lines. 
 
t- 
 
 78 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 It was the Rime of the Ancient Mariner which had its origin 
 that day. As a joint-composition it failed as completely as the 
 Wanderings of Cain, From first to last, in conception and 
 execution, in general scheme and in details, it bore Coleridge's 
 unmistakable and inalienable sign-manual. Wordsworth soon 
 gave up the completion of the Old Navigator's story into his 
 friend's hands ; and it is improbable that much more of it was 
 written during the November walking-tour. The project of s 
 poem to pay expenses was given up, and the joint plans of the 
 popts took a wider shape. 
 
 '^^sln their Stowey and Alfoxden intercourse, Wordsworth anc 
 Coleridge had many discussions about the theory of poetry 
 and the functions of that faculty of imagination from whicl* 
 what is greatest in poetry comes. Each was occupied in th< 
 making of poems instinct with the individuality of powerfu 
 young genius ; so theory and practice suggested one another '\\ 
 the most natural manner, and poetry and the criticism of poetn 
 went hand in hand. Standing on the edge of the Romanti 
 Revival, both poets were deeply conscious of two things 
 namely, that poetry ought to give pleasure by the surprise c 
 novelty ; and that, since Milton, it had relied too much on arti 
 ficial magniloquence and violent improbability for that purpostjo.-: 
 There must, they agreed, be a " return to Nature," if the powe ijfc 
 and charm of poetry were to be legitimate ; and that retur 
 could only be made by the stern avoidance of artificiality anftr:: 
 conventionality in expression, and the production of novelty b tn 
 the spontaneous exercise of imagination. The proper subjec 
 of poetry were natural, and in that sense ordinary ; but the 
 must be made extraordinary, surprising, novel, by the poet 
 imaginative treatment, as a common landscape is transfigure 
 by a sudden gush of sunset or moonlight. And now, tw 
 difi"erent methods of treatment suggested themselves. Poeti 
 must be true to fact, true to the realities of human nature ; bi 
 it need not reject the preternatural. Introduce a preternatur 
 machinery if you will ; but only on condition that it someho 
 helps the presentment of the natural. Present the illusory, 
 you will ; but only if thereby you may the better stimula 
 emotion which captures and holds, not by its unreality but tB^: 
 its intense reality. But then, on the other hand, the poet migl 
 dispense with the preternatural or even with the explicit 
 
 ■5: 
 
 t 
 
joi 
 
 "THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 79 
 
 omantic, and, without suffering imagination to abdicate any of 
 ts functions, might find, in the persons, scenes, and incidents 
 f ordinary experience, the novelty and surprise which poetry 
 equires, until the natural should seem preternatural/V 
 
 A series of poems was to be written illustrating^ these two 
 
 lethods. Coleridge, who affected the preternatural more than 
 
 vajVords worth, Coleridge who had taken the lead in the Ancient 
 
 /[ariner, was to choose preternatural and " romantic " themes ; 
 
 th Vordsworth was to exhibit the romance of every-day ex- 
 
 erience. 
 
 an Accordingly, through the second Alfoxden half year, in the 
 
 pring and summer of 1798, the double task proceeded, but in a 
 
 lid lost unequal manner. Coleridge had appropriated the com- 
 
 tlii letion of the A ncient Mariner ; but Wordsworth outran his 
 
 rfii esultory colleague in the preparation of Lyrical Ballads. 
 
 Coleridge finished the Mariner, and wrote also the first part of 
 
 ett] ^hristabely and a fragment called the Dark Ladie ; but neither 
 
 iDti '\hristabel, nor the Dark Ladie appeared in the joint-volume. 
 
 'he Mariner was the sole representative of the preternatural 
 
 foetry ; and Coleridge added to it only the Nightingale poem, 
 
 i rhich we know already, and one or two dramatic fragments. 
 
 303 Vordsworth on the other hand, worked industriously at his 
 
 o\v( bject, viz. " to give the charm of novelty to things of every 
 
 ;tui ay " ; and produced, as he tells us. The Idiot Boy ; the lines 
 
 -an eginning, Her Eyes are Wild ; We are Seven ; The Thorn ; and 
 
 yl thers. 
 
 )p The friendly Joseph Cottle was of course to be the publisher. 
 thde went to see the poets in May, staying for a week at 
 )oe( Llfoxden with Wordsworth. The authors and the publisher 
 7Ut( pnferred about the volume ; they made another expedition to 
 trl-ynton and the Valley of Rocks. The volume was to be called 
 oet: lyrical Ballads ; it was to be published forthwith ; and Cottle 
 bvas to give thirty guineas for the copyright. The proofs 
 ,..jf,|^ere corrected in the course of the summer, and the book 
 \b^ ppeared in September. It was a small volume, of two hundred 
 ,^- .ipjd ten pages. 
 
 ,ylji Such is the external history of a book which initiated the 
 y^tigher Romanticism in England and brought Wordsworth into 
 ^jjijlie front rank of English poetry. So slight was Coleridge's 
 [jjjji hare in it that the work was essentially Wordsworth's ; and by 
 
80 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 it alone we may almost say that Wordsworth stands or falls. 
 Here is his characteristic strength, here his characteristic weak- 
 ness ; here, born among the Alfoxden hollies and the ferny 
 coombs of Quantock, is that poetry of Nature, that philosophy 
 of common life, which has been a religion or a mockery to 
 succeeding generations. 
 
 It is, first of all, as the outcome of a gentle open-air life, 
 the life reflected in Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal, that these 
 poems interest us. The Wordsworthian visitor to the west 
 country, as he journeys piously between Alfoxden and Nether 
 Stowey, sees the Lyrical Ballads written large everywhere. In 
 the green meadow outside the Alfoxden gate, is the place which 
 held the cottage of "Simon Lee" the old huntsman, whom 
 Wordsworth places in " the sweet shire of Cardigan," but whc 
 was really huntsman to the Alfoxden squires, the old mar 
 whom the poet, with his strong sinews, once helped to uneartl 
 the stump of a tree, and who poured forth thanks and praise.' 
 in such abundance that Wordsworth thought, " They neve , 
 would have done." At the door of Alfoxden House stood the 
 tall larch on which the redbreast sang that '' first mild day o 
 March " which will live, we may predict, till time shall be n' 
 longer. At the same spot, and at the same jocund seasor 
 Wordsworth put little Basil Montagu into the ethical difficult; 
 from which only the Alfoxden weathercock could extricat 
 him. Once more, it was in front of Alfoxden House (with th 
 usual mystification as to persons and places) that the brace c 
 dialogues known as Expostulation and Reply and The Tabk 
 Tnrjied was made, in which the simplest verse is made t 
 express the deepest Wordsworthian thought. In the Alfoxde 
 groves walking up and down, the poet bethought him of th 
 little girl he had talked to at Goodrich five years before, th 
 girl who would not admit that death had really remove 
 any of her dear ones. Beginning his verses with the child 
 impregnable phrase, " Nay, we are Seven ! " Wordsworl 
 made the poem we know, and took it in to read it ' 
 Dorothy and Coleridge. As it stood it began with tl 
 second stanza — 
 
 " I met a little cottage girl ; " 
 and Wordsworth felt that it needed an introductory verse. ' 
 
"THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL^' 81 
 
 want to make one before tea," he said ; whereupon Coleridge 
 suggested the line — 
 
 " A simple child, dear brother Jem," etc. 
 
 (" Dear brother Jem " was a common friend, and the allusion was 
 a freak). Wordsworth adopted the line promptly ; and, though 
 dear brother Jem himself objected, the line remained the first 
 of We are Seven in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, The 
 \Thorn grew on the Ouantocks, and Wordsworth fitted a legend 
 to it. The Last of the Flock was a Holford story. The Idiot 
 '■ Boy, the mark of so many satiric shafts, was made on foot 
 among the Alfoxden hollies, on a theme supplied by Thomas 
 Poole, viz. the idiot's phrase in the last stanza — 
 
 " The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo, 
 And the sun did shine so cold ! " 
 
 The Alfoxden poetry of Wordsworth is not all to be found 
 between the boards of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. 
 Peter Bell also was written within those groves, though not 
 published until 1819 ; and the greater part of The Old Cumber- 
 lajtd Beggar. 
 
 What is the inner significance of it all } The criticism, 
 
 favourable and unfavourable, passed on Wordsworth's early 
 
 poetry by his contemporaries is full of interest and importance ; 
 
 but the interest and importance belong to the history of criticism 
 
 rather than to the history of poetry. As readers of poetry, what 
 
 jitwe now ask is not what Southey or Jeffrey or Charles Lamb 
 
 {(thought of the Lyrical Ballads, but what we ourselves think and 
 
 if [feel about them, we ourselves, remembering what went before 
 
 tit them, and what has come after, and dowered at least with the 
 
 tit sure intuition of posterity, that intuition which nothing short 
 
 of genius can confer on the contemporary reviewer. What is it, 
 
 then, that we think and feel ? 
 
 With regard to the West-country poetry of both Coleridge 
 and Wordsworth, we realize, to begin with, that it stretches far 
 beyond the bounds of the plan on which much of it was under- 
 taken. We ought to judge it relatively to that plan ; but we 
 ought also to judge it absolutely. In so far as the plan was a 
 I joint one, we have already seen that it at once broke down. 
 Wordsworth not only avoided the preternatural ; he theoretically 
 
82 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 despised it. This is clearly set forth in the prologue to Peter 
 Bell. 
 
 Again, as regards his own particular object, the operation of 
 imagination on lowly themes, expressed in ordinary language, 
 Wordsworth, even thus early, attained a far more than merely 
 controversial success. He really contributed richly to the 
 poetry of common life, and did not merely illustrate argumenta- 
 tive assertions about it. He really understood and interpreted 
 Nature, and did not merely show how it ought to be interpreted 
 and understood. He took his place in a trinity, of which the 
 other two members were Blake and Burns, a trinity of reformers 
 indeed, but also of absolutely great poets. Burns met his 
 unhappy fate two years and a half before Lyrical Ballads, In 
 July, 1796, when poetic life was opening for Wordsworth at 
 Racedown, Burns, on the Solway flats, was pleading, like the 
 dying Goethe, for " more light." *' Let him shine," he said to 
 the friend whose kind hand would have warded off from his eyes 
 the level rays of the low sun sinking to the Galloway hills ; " Let 
 him shine ; he'll not shine long for me." Wordsworth knew 
 one of the great things that Burns had done for British poetry, 
 and felt the blow of his death. " I mourned," he was to write 
 afterwards — 
 
 " I mourned with thousands, but as one 
 More deeply grieved, for He was gone 
 Whose light I hailed when first it shone. 
 
 And showed my youth 
 How verse may build a princely throne 
 On humble truth." 
 
 And the force of the Lyrical Ballads is less fully conveyed by 
 any of Wordsworth's or Coleridge's apologiae, than, by anticipa 
 tion, in the stanzas in which Burns commemorates his own call 
 and consecration to the poet's mission, when Coila, the Muse 
 told him how she had watched his early development. 
 
 It is interesting to notice that so far was Burns from looking 
 on himself as a great reformer, that he felt hopeless of rivalling 
 the excellence of those eighteenth-century poets, Thomson 
 Shenstone, Gray, whom we hardly read, and whom Wordsworth 
 would hardly deign to commend. 
 
 In Blake there are many tones not to be heard in Words- 
 worth ; but the Songs of Innocence had been ten years befon 
 
 "i 
 
 r 
 
 ■^. 
 
 :r 
 
 i: 
 
 
 of 
 
"THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" ' 83 
 
 the world when the Lyrical Ballads appeared ; and they came 
 from the self-same fount — 
 
 " And I plucked a hollow reed, 
 And I made a rural pen, 
 And I stained the water clear, 
 And I wrote my happy songs 
 Every child may joy to hear." 
 
 To htild a princely thro7ie on hitmble truth. That, as Words- 
 ivorth truly divined, was Burns' ideal, and it was, even in the 
 Lyrical Ballads, his own striking achievement. The humility 
 Df the truth all readers will be ready to admit ; but there will be 
 ijuestion as to the princeliness of the throne. In spite of the poet's 
 omprehensive and repeated repudiations of preternaturalism, 
 The Thorn is as instinct with the preternatural as any old-world 
 Dallad or as Christabel itself. The power of uncanny suggestion 
 s freely used in it. Wordsworth's object was to invent a story 
 A ivhich should express the genius of a stunted thorn as he saw it 
 ei :ormented by storm on the Quantocks. By the thorn there was 
 muddy pond, and not far off a mossy mound, enchanting in 
 •een and vermilion. From the beginning these three objects 
 re treated with an intensity which requires suggestion for its 
 ealization. The lichens and mosses on the thorn are malign 
 :hings : they are bent — 
 
 " With plain and manifest intent 
 To drag it to the ground ; 
 And all have joined in one endeavour 
 To bury this poor thorn for ever." 
 
 The muddy pond calls out for a dead body. " The heap of 
 J iarth o'ergrown with moss," " so fresh in all its beauteous dyes," 
 s so like an infant's grave that an infant must somehow be 
 juried there. And so we are brought to a woman in a scarlet 
 ^^[:loak crying mysteriously by day and by night, 
 
 \\[ " Oh misery ! oh miser}^ ! 
 
 Oh woe is me ! oh misery ! " 
 
 ,113^: 
 
 iOO, 
 
 orti 
 
 [The cause of her misery no man may know for certain. " They 
 i5ay " this and " They say " that about it. There was a seduc- 
 :ion, of course ; a desertion, and a child. Yet stay ; was there 
 ^x child ? 
 
84 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 " No earthly tongue could ever tell." But some there are 
 who maintain that cries come on winter nights from the place 
 where the thorn grows ; and some will " swear " that among the 
 cries are voices of the dead. Did the mother hang her baby on 
 the tree or drown it in the pond ? Anyhow one thing is 
 certain ; if there was a baby it is buried under the lovely mound. 
 Some say the vermilion cups are drops of infant's blood ; others 
 that a baby's face looks up at you from the face of the pond. 
 Others relate that when justice, suspecting murder, was about 
 to dig for infant's bones, the hill of moss plainly moved, and the 
 grass all round was alive with shudderings ! As to all this the 
 poet knows nothing. Only the tree remains, the tree he saw, 
 with the figure he imagined : — 
 
 " I cannot tell how this may be, 
 But plain it is the Thorn is bound 
 With heavy tufts of moss that strive 
 To drag it to the ground ; 
 And this I know, full many a time, 
 When she was on the mountain high, 
 By day, and in the silent night. 
 When all the stars shone clear and bright. 
 That I have heard her cry, 
 Oh misery ! oh misery ! 
 Oh woe is me ! oh misery ! " 
 
 Preternaturalism, however, plays a small part in this earl} 
 poetry of Wordsworth. The deepest burden of the Lyrica 
 Ballads is the characteristic Wordsworthian philosophy o 
 Nature and Man which appears in them. In its most profoundly 
 suggestive form, that philosophy is expressed in some of th 
 slightest of the poems. In the Lines written in Early Spring, 
 for example, the primroses and periwinkles of the Alfoxde 
 dell, the budding twigs and " twinkling " birds, suggest wha 
 seems a mere play of fancy, but is, in Wordsworth, an interpre 
 tation of the Universe. To the poet, as he lay in that swee 
 place, there came the conviction, not only of life, all round hin 
 not only of beauty, but of sentient pleasure. 
 
 " Through primrose tufts, in that sweet bower 
 
 The periwinkle trailed its wreaths, j 
 
 And 'tis my faith that every flower 
 Enjoys the air it breathes. 
 
"THREE PEOPLE. ONE SOUL" 85 
 
 The budding twigs spread forth their fan 
 
 To catch the breezy air. 
 And I must think, do all I can, 
 
 That there was pleasure there." 
 
 And the belief in Nature as happily, beautifully, and even self- 
 consciously, alive, immediately suggests the contrasted picture 
 of humanity. 
 
 "If this belief from Heaven be sent, 
 If such be Nature's holy plan. 
 Have I not reason to lament 
 What man has made of man ? " 
 
 
 Again in the poems called Expostulation and Reply^ and The 
 Tables Ttirned^ as well as in the lines beginning — 
 
 " It is the first mild day of March," 
 
 the spiritual activities of Nature are indicated with startling 
 freshness. 
 
 " Love, now a universal birth 
 
 From heart to heart is stealing. 
 From earth to man, from man to earth : 
 It is the hour of feeling. 
 
 "And from the blessed power that rolls 
 About, below, above, 
 We'll frame the measure of our souls. 
 They shall be tuned to love." 
 
 " Nor less I deem that there are Powers 
 Which of themselves our minds impress ; 
 That we can feed this mind of ours 
 In a wise passiveness." 
 
 1% 
 
 " Let Nature be your teacher. 
 She has a world of ready wealth, 
 jjfj* Our minds and hearts to bless, 
 
 u I Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health. 
 
 Truth breathed by cheerfulness. 
 
 ;rplt! 
 
 ^ye^ I " One impulse from a vernal wood 
 
 May teach you more of man. 
 Of moral evil and of good, 
 Than all the sages can." 
 
 The Alfoxden poetry of Wordsworth stands out as a poetry 
 of humble life. In reading it we may forget the poet's theoretic 
 
86 VVUHUbWUltin AINU Jtllb LlUUJLHi 
 
 claim for peasants and their language, and enjoy (or otherwise) 
 the poetry as poetry. Does it justify itself? Such a poetry 
 has three incontestable claims. It may plead the oneness of 
 the human nature common to all men, with its potentialities of 
 grandeur and tragedy ; it lends itself to pathos ; and it lends 
 itself to humour. Which of these claims is satisfied by the first 
 edition of Lyrical Ballads^ or by any of the west country poetry 
 outside the limits of that edition t 
 
 In this early work Wordsworth as yet hardly touches the 
 tragic or sublime in human life. Her Eyes are Wild is tragedy 
 passionate tragedy. The tragedy in The Thorn and TJie Forsaken 
 Indian Woman is purely artificial. Perhaps the dignity of the 
 peasant is most worthily shown in TJie Old Cumberland Beggar 
 with its beautiful pendant, -^^/w^?:/ Tranquillity and Decay. The 
 political economy indeed of the former is dubious : on that side 
 the poem is a plea for mendicancy as against the workhouse 
 But it is also a plea for something very different, for th( 
 
 greatness of man as man. \ 
 
 I 
 
 '' 'Tis Nature's law j 
 
 That none, the meanest of created things, j 
 
 Or forms created the most vile and brute, j 
 
 The dullest or most noxious, should exist 
 Divorced from good — a spirit and pulse of good, 
 A life and soul, to every mode of being j 
 
 Inseparably linked. Then be assured j 
 
 That least of all can aught that ever owned • 
 
 The heaven-regarding eye and front sublime 
 Which man is born to — sink, howe'er depressed. 
 So low as to be scorned without a sin." '■ 
 
 And the sunset of humble life shines grandly in the pendar 
 lines — 
 
 *' The little hedgerow birds 
 That peck along the roads, regard him not. 
 He travels on, and in his face, his step, 
 His gait, is one expression ; every limb, 
 His look and bending figure, all bespeak 
 A man who does not move with pain, but moves 
 With thought. He is insensibly subdued 
 To settled quiet ; he is one by whom ' 
 
 All effort seems forgotten ; one to whom I 
 
 Long patience hath such mild composure given | 
 
Ddi 
 
 "THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL'' 87 
 
 That patience now doth seem a thing of which 
 He hath no need. He is by nature led 
 To peace so perfect that the young behold 
 With envy, what the old man hardly feels." 
 
 m 
 
 In one or two of the poems, Wordsworth shows that incon- 
 stant sense of dignity which has been one of the chief stumbling- 
 blocks to his admirers. The humble, as he recognized to the 
 blessing of the world, is a fit theme of poetry ; the trivial, he was 
 apt to forget, is not. Simon Lee, in spite of beautiful phrases, 
 beautiful lines, in spite of its delicate poetic appreciativeness, is 
 trivial in many places, and is dangerously near triviality through- 
 Dut. But perhaps The Last of the Flock sins most seriously 
 r against the great law of dignity. The poet meets a man on the 
 ,., public road near Holford, a man in tears, carrying a lamb in his 
 larms. 
 
 " He saw me, and he turned aside, 
 As if he wished himself to hide ; 
 And with his coat did then essay 
 To wipe those briny tears away. 
 I followed him, and said, ' My friend, 
 What ails you ? Wherefore weep you so ? ' 
 * Shame on me, sir ! this lusty lamb. 
 He makes my tears to flow. 
 To-day I fetched him from the rock ; 
 He is the last of all my flock.' " 
 
 This lachrymose person is another victim of the dismal 
 science. He started life with a capital of one ewe, from which 
 Ihe raised fifty sheep. We are given a most incomplete account 
 lof the flockmaster's circumstances ; but, apparently, he could not 
 iafjsupport his six children on his income. He therefore applied 
 for parish relief, and was told that he must use up his capital 
 jbefore he could be entitled to receive it. This, with much 
 •natural agitation, he proceeded to do. Quite naturally also — 
 
 " Every week and every day, 
 My flock it seemed [why seemed ?] to melt away. 
 They dwindled, Sir, sad sight to see ! 
 From ten to five, from five to three, 
 A lamb, a wether, and a ewe ; — 
 And then at last from three to two ; 
 And of my fifty, yesterday 
 I had but only one : 
 
88 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 And here it lies upon my arm, 
 Alas ! and I have none ; — 
 To-day I fetched it from the rock ; 
 It is the last of all my flock." 
 
 In this poem the pathos is nullified by the obscurity and 
 doubtful ethics of the situation, and the unmanly nervelessness 
 of the hero. From such art, we feel, the dignity of the humble ^ 
 can gain nothing. 
 
 It may seem paradoxical to say so, but it is surely true, that 
 a large part of the significance, and the significance for good, of 
 the Alfoxden poetry depends upon that quality with which 
 Wordsworth was so slenderly endowed, viz. humour. Words 
 worth's humour was a relatively small element in his constitu 
 tion ; but it was there, and it was genuine, and of the first 
 Lyrical Ballads and of Peter Bell it is a main inspiration. The 
 failure to recognize it explains and condemns much of the 
 ridicule with which Wordsworth's early poetry was greeted. 
 Goody Blake, The Idiot Boy, and Peter Bell are essentially 
 humorous poems, and, realized as such, there seems no reason 
 why they should seem ridiculous or other than successful and 
 delightful. Goody Blake is a ballad-idyll of peasant life, in 
 which a delicate sprinkling of preternatural suggestion is laid 
 on a basis of verisimilitude in incident, the excellence of the 
 lyrical style being secured by the humour of the treatment 
 Contrast it in this respect with The Last of the Flock, where 
 there is no humour. 
 
 The flockmaster is poor — 
 
 ** Six Children, Sir ! had I to feed ; 
 Hard labour in a time of need ! 
 My pride was tamed, and in our grief 
 I of the Parish asked relief. 
 They said, I was a wealthy man ; 
 My sheep upon the uplands fed, 
 And it was fit that thence I took 
 Whereof to buy us bread. 
 Do this ; how can we give to you. 
 They cried, what to the poor is due ? " 
 
 There is no charm of lyrical style there. 
 Goody Blake is poor — 
 
 r: 
 
 ~. 
 
 " O joy for her ! whene'er in winter 
 The winds at night had made a rout ; 
 
 ; 
 
''THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 89 
 
 And scattered many a lusty splinter 
 And many a rotten bough about, 
 Yet never had she, well or sick, 
 As every man who knew her says, 
 A pile beforehand, turf or stick, 
 Enough to warm her for three days. 
 
 u Now, when the frost was past enduring, 
 
 And made her poor old bones to ache, 
 Could anything be more alluring 
 Than an old hedge to Goody Blake ? 
 And, now and then, it must be said. 
 When her old bones were cold and chill, 
 She left her fire, or left her bed. 
 To seek the hedge of Harry Gill." 
 
 Here there is unmistakable and undeniable charm, and it is 
 the charm of humour. 
 
 As for Tke Idiot Boy, about which a great many foolish things 
 have been said, it is really as humorous as John Gilpin, and 
 seems to stand as little in need of apology. The intrinsic 
 dignity of the two situations seems about equal ; and if the 
 fun of The Idiot Boy is less apparent and less rollicking than 
 that of John Gilpin, its atmosphere and local colouring are 
 more poetic, and it counts for much as a rendering of life and 
 TJj landscape. It is one of Wordsworth's most inspired and inevi- 
 table poems ; it is built on a hearsay phrase, and it was poured 
 forth extemporaneously as the poet walked in the Alfoxden 
 groves. There may be too much of it ; but if it is not true and 
 delightful poetry, one knows not where true and delightful 
 poetry is to be found. 
 
 It is the same with Peter Bell, only the charm is deeper. It 
 is the charm (the paradox must be repeated) of humour ; it is 
 the charm (another paradox) of style. Style, like humour, is 
 one of the qualities the possession of which is most often denied 
 to Wordsworth. It is indeed true that his style was uncertain 
 and variable, as his sense of humour was inconstant. But the 
 Alfoxden poetry as a whole is no exception to the law that 
 good verse is never written in a bad style — in other words, that 
 one can hardly in the criticism of poetry separate the thought 
 from the expression. Wordsworth's power at its strongest is 
 demonstrably a power of verbal distinction, a power of phrase, 
 a power of noble rhythm. This is made abundantly clear in 
 Lyrical Ballads and in Peter Bell. 
 
90 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 The connection of Coleridge and Wordsworth with the 
 Quantock country carried within it the cause of its own disso- 
 lution. The poets had been drawn thither largely by revolu- 
 tionary sympathies, and for revolutionary sympathies they were 
 to be driven from it. By 1798 both Coleridge and Wordsworth 
 had moved far from the ideals of any section of revolutionists in 
 England or France. But the orthodox conservatism of Somerset 
 took no heed of fine distinctions ; even Thomas Poole had been 
 suspect ; and the queer Wordsworth in particular, living, with 
 his wild-eyed sister, in a place so much too big for them and 
 their means, wandering and muttering, and not afraid of con- 
 sorting with John Thelwall himself, was it desirable that he 
 should continue to have Alfoxden on such easy terms ; nay, 
 was it altogether safe to let him go about unwatched ? The 
 St. Albyn family began to have qualms. There seems in- 
 contestable authority for stating that a spy was sent down by 
 government to look after the poets ; and Southey told his 
 brother, seven years later, that "The fellow, after trying to 
 tempt the country people to tell lies, could collect nothing more 
 than that the gentlemen used to walk a good deal upon the 
 coast, and that they were what they called poets. He got 
 drunk at the inn, and told his whole errand and history." 
 
 Wordsworth was blissfully unconscious of the espionage, and 
 stoutly maintained that nobody annoyed him or made difficul- 
 ties about his staying on at Alfoxden. But his memory must 
 have played him false, or he must have been " blissfully havened " 
 from the facts. As early as September, 1797, Tom Poole, 
 taking full responsibility for introducing Wordsworth as a tenant, 
 wrote to Mrs. St. Albyn with the view of reassuring her as to 
 his respectability. He believed him " to be in every respect a 
 gentleman." He referred to his uncle. Canon Cookson of 
 Windsor, as in himself a sufficient warranty. "But I am 
 informed," Poole proceeded, " you have heard that Mr. W. does 
 keep company, and on this head I fear the most infamous false- 
 hoods have reached your ears. Mr. W. is a man fond of retire- 
 ment — fond of reading and writing — and has never had above, 
 two gentlemen at a time with him." John Thelwall had come 
 to see Coleridge one day, and had turned up unexpectedly at 
 Alfoxden. Could ordinary hospitality have been refused him ? 
 And would not anybody wish to see so interesting a man as 
 
DOROTHY WORDSWORTH 
 
 BY W. CROWBENT 
 
"THREE PEOPLE: ONE SOUL" 91 
 
 Thelwall ? " Be assured, and I speak it from my own know- 
 ledge, that Mr. W., of all men alive, is the last who will give 
 any one cause to complain of his opinions, his conduct, or his 
 disturbing the peace of any one." 
 
 In spite of all, the happy spring and early summer days 
 were spent in the knowledge that the Wordsworths were going 
 in a few months. In March, Wordsworth wrote to a friend, 
 saying that they were "obliged" to quit at midsummer, and 
 announcing a " delightful scheme " of going with the Coleridges 
 to Germany for a time. And so it came about. The Words- 
 worths left Alfoxden on June 26, 1798 ; they lingered in various 
 places (one of them being Bristol, to superintend the printing of 
 Lyrical Ballads), and in September they set sail with Coleridge 
 for Hamburg. 
 
 One poem in Lyrical Ballads, the last and greatest in the 
 volume, perhaps the most characteristic breathing of the most 
 characteristic Wordsworth spirit, was made after the Quantocks 
 had been left for ever.* It would be tedious to transcribe it, and 
 profane to mutilate it. It must be read as a whole, and pondered 
 until it is known and loved by heart. The brother and sister 
 stayed with Coleridge for a week at Nether Stowey ; then they 
 went to the Wye. Wordsworth had been there five years before ; 
 the whole region, and especially Tintern Abbey, was for him 
 alive with pensive reminiscence, and prophetic of deep spiritual 
 change. As he stood there on that July day of 1798, he felt 
 within him the drama of his soul ; the boyhood of animal enjoy- 
 ment ; the youth of rapture in the sights and sounds of Nature ; 
 the jarring shock of humanity ; the restoration of faith and love ; 
 the unspeakable sense of God. And to the great drama was 
 added a wonderful epilogue, where the brother, finding himself 
 in the sister, dedicates her to his own glorious fate. 
 
 * Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, 
 
CHAPTER V 
 ROBERT SOUTHEY 
 
 
 :oler, 
 ohi: 
 liao ' 
 
 ookec 
 
 OF the many eminent men who knew Wordsworth, or were \^ 
 in any way associated with him, it is perhaps hardest b 
 to define accurately the place of Southey in the Wordsworthian r: 
 circle. He was in it, yet not of it, just as he is, and yet is not, a je; 
 classic of English literature. No great English writer calls more It:. 
 urgently for reconsideration than Southey. He is hardly read 
 nowadays ; to few is he much more than a name ; yet he filled Ic: 
 a large space in his time ; no man ever worked harder or, in a t 
 sense, more successfully ; he stands out as typical, both of his 
 own age and of the purely and overwhelmingly literary tem- 
 perament. There is about him and his career something un- 
 explained, a touch of paradox, a trace of the injustice of fame, 
 which makes him interesting. 
 
 If Southey was not quite in Wordsworth's circle, it was not 
 for want of excellent opportunities, and it was in spite of near jck: 
 neighbourhood. Wordsworth settled at Grasmere in 1799, and r. : 
 Southey went to Greta Hall, close to Keswick, in 1803 ; from i at l 
 that year until the cold March day in 1843, when the aged Words- les: ;• 
 worth came over the hills to his friend's burial in Crosthwaite ad t. 
 churchyard, the two poets, the most home-keeping of men, U 
 lived not more than fifteen miles from one another, Southey 
 was only four years Wordsworth's junior ; they were bound ;,.. 
 together by their common interest in the Coleridges (Southey 
 and Coleridge, we must not forget, married sisters) ; they began 
 as revolutionary idealists, and they became — moving at much }k 
 the same pace — unbending, alarmist, Church-and-State con- a: 
 servatives ; they were, by design and devotion, poets — poets 
 daring, original, independent, romantic ; they felt for one 
 another sincere admiration ; no personal disagreement ever 
 
 92 
 
 [vr; 
 
 ^C. 
 
 t. 
 
ROBERT SOUTHEY 93 
 
 rose to cloud their relationship. Yet they somehow belong 
 different worlds, and their separateness cannot be wholly 
 xplained by Wordsworth's unapproachable elevation. Words- 
 /•orth, as we have seen, was not closely akin to any of his 
 ompeers ; but Southey was much less akin to him than 
 "oleridge or Charles Lamb, or De Quincey, much less akin 
 him than Walter Scott. He was even less akin to him 
 lan those younger romantic poets, on whom Wordsworth 
 Doked with so cold a regard, than Shelley and Keats. In 
 pite of his brilliant and versatile gifts, in spite of his being 
 o excellent a poet and so admirably skilled in all literary 
 
 • Iraftsmanship, Southey perhaps never entered Wordsworth's 
 : eal world at any point. Yet it is none the less interesting to 
 ; tudy the relationships of the two men, their attractions and 
 
 • |heir repulsions. 
 
 ; . The criticism under whose lash they both winced, the 
 : riticism whose discipline fashioned the Romantic Revival, put 
 : (hem unhesitatingly into the same class. In the judgment of 
 : ,'effrey and those like-minded with him, Southey, with Words- 
 rarth and Coleridge, made up a sect, the sect to be known as 
 he " Lake School." Reviewing Thalaba, the Edinburgh said : 
 The author . . . belongs to a sect of poets, that has 
 stablished itself in this country within these ten or twelve ^ 
 '•ears, and is looked upon, we believe, as one of its chief 
 hampions and apostles." At best, this statement is only 
 rery partially true. In so far as there was any sectarian pact 
 it all, it was made between Coleridge and Wordsworth in the 
 vest country*in 1797-8, when Lyrical Ballads came into being; 
 md we know to what a very small extent, after all, even 
 Lyrical Ballads was a party-manifesto. Between 1795 and 1803 
 jouthey was working on wholly independent lines, and far from 
 he theories to be unfolded in Wordsworth's Prefaces and in 
 Biographia Literaria. He made two journeys to Portugal, 
 vhich had a decisive influence on his genius, giving colour to 
 lis fancy, disposing him to Spanish and Portuguese learning, 
 md opening a rich and unworked vein to his wonderful 
 iterary industry. He was producing poetry during those 
 rears, more assiduously and abundantly than Wordsworth and 
 Coleridge, and with quite as much enthusiasm, though with 
 different inspiration. Four practical enterprises belong to that 
 
94 WORDSAVORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 time : a long epic called Joan of Arc ; a mass of short miscel- 
 laneous ballads, metrical tales and eclogues ; the romantic 
 narrative poem called Thalaba the Destroyer, published in 
 1801 ; and the equally romantic Madoc, written before Thalaba, 
 though not published until 1805. Through Joan of Arc, con- 
 ceived and partly written while Southey was still a Balliol 
 undergraduate, at the time, that is, when he was closely 
 associated with Coleridge, he came nearest, perhaps, to enrol- 
 ment in the new brotherhood of song. Coleridge was not only 
 deeply interested in the venture, but himself contributed to 
 its pages a long insertion in the second book, afterwards with- 
 drawn, and republished as The Destiny of Nations. Charles 
 Lamb, who, if the world had not appropriated him, might be 
 claimed as the great critic among the brotherhood, hailed 
 Southey's first epic with a shout which we can still hear. 
 Writing to Coleridge in the summer of 1796 he says, " With 
 Joan of Arc I have been delighted, amazed. . . . Why, the 
 poem is alone sufficient to redeem the character of the age we 
 live in from the imputation of degenerating in Poetry, were 
 there no such beings extant as Burns [it was a month before 
 
 Burns's death] and Bowles, Cowper, and ; fill up the blank 
 
 how you please; I say nothing. ... On the whole, I expect 
 Southey one day to rival Milton : I already deem him equal to 
 Cowper, and superior to all living poets besides." If we ignore 
 chronology, and reflect on where Southey stands now in the 
 temple of fame, we shall be disposed to find a sly jest in the 
 last sentence. But there is no jest about it ; there were no 
 Lyrical Ballads as yet, no Ancient Mariner, and no Christabel, 
 and Lamb meant every word he said. And indeed Joan made 
 an epoch ; it is a spirited narrative poem, of almost epic 
 dimensions — really the first serious epic since Paradise Regained ; 
 on a noble theme and written in correct and spirited blank 
 verse. How could even Charles Lamb know just what was 
 going to happen, and how the currents were to set ? 
 
 Southey's preface to Joan of Arc shows all the brisk self- 
 consciousness of the innovator or restorer. Not less interesting 
 in their promise and animation were some of the shorter poems 
 which he was composing while Wordsworth and Coleridge were 
 busy in the Quantocks. These show a clear, but distant, 
 cousinly relationship to the Lyrical Ballads and their like. 
 
 
 ■Xietr, 
 
 
 'tit! 
 
ROBERT SOUTHEY 95 
 
 First, there are the ballads, of some of which, and especially of 
 The Battle of Blenheim and Mary^ the Maid of the Inn, one is 
 :ired of hearing that they are the only things of Southey's that 
 ive. They are, indeed, excellent specimens of the balladist's 
 irt, rapid and interesting in narrative movement, clear in mean- 
 ing, fascinating in metre, touched here and there with true 
 Dathos, true horror, and true humour. Many of them, e.g. The 
 Old Woman of Berkeley^ are, of course, artificial, they are imita- 
 ;ions of an old form, rather than like the Aftciejtt Mariner or 
 Christahely new creations in a restored form. None of them is 
 imaginative in the sense in which Coleridge and Wordsworth 
 intended to be imaginative in their joint endeavours. Yet their 
 simplicity, their lucidity, their vivacity, their first-rate style 
 make them worthy instances of Romanticism, in so far as 
 Romanticism means the restoration to poetry of spontaneity, of 
 simplicity, of " natural " as opposed to " poetic " diction. 
 
 One section of Southey's miscellaneous poems, the English 
 Eclogues^ stand in a class by themselves. They are an experi- 
 ment, deliberately and self-consciously made, in imitation of 
 German models, and in a form which Southey believed to be 
 tvithout precedent in English. They are a contribution to 
 pastoral poetry in the widest sense of that comprehensive term 
 j— poetry, that is, like the Bucolics of Virgil, expressed in the 
 'psissima verba of simple folk talking among themselves about 
 :he simple concerns of a country neighbourhood. In these 
 ittempts of Southey's the cousinly likeness to Wordsworth- 
 anism is very marked. They are not very successful, for much 
 he same reason, perhaps, that Wordsworth was not always 
 uccessful ; simplicity is pursued at the expense, sometimes, of 
 he dignity and beauty without which verse is not poetry. 
 
 " When the Doctor sent him 
 Abroad to try the air, it made me certain 
 That all was over. There's but little hope, 
 Methinks, that foreign parts can help a man 
 When his own mother-country will not do." 
 
 There is a great deal of this kind of thing in Southey's 
 Eclogues. Yet Charles Lamb liked some of them " mightily," 
 or their " pictures " and ** realities." The last word, we feel, is 
 veil chosen. It is by their realism that they count ; and 
 ealism was one of the triumphs of the Romantic Revival. 
 
96 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 For high success in the pure lyric of self-revelation and 
 self-relief, Southey had not enough tenderness, not enough 
 humanity. Nor, though he was a master of expression in 
 verse, and had a fine gift of phrasing, had he the unfailing 
 taste and felicity which such poetry requires. Thus, in The 
 Dead Friend, a lyric which just falls short of being beautiful 
 and yet has no throb of real pain, the same poet who writes — 
 
 " Not to the grave, not to the grave, my soul, 
 Follow thy friend beloved. 
 The spirit is not there ! " 
 
 which is at least as good as Longfellow at his best, is capable o; 
 writing — 
 
 " How sweet it were with powers 
 Such as the Cherubim 
 To view the depth of Heaven ! " 
 
 which even Longfellow would hardly have allowed himself t< 
 put down. 
 
 The Edinburgh Review^ then, misconceived Southey whei 
 it made him the champion and apostle of the Lake School ii 
 so far as that school consisted of Wordsworth and Coleridge 
 co-operating for the reform of English poetry. In 1809, Byroi 
 entered the field of the poetry and criticism of the Romanti" 
 Revival with his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, Tw( 
 years before he had published his juvenile Hotcrs of Idleness 
 and had been soundly punished for it by the Edinburgh, 
 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers was his rejoinder ; and ; 
 very interesting rejoinder it is. Throughout his clever satire 
 Byron, with the egotistic malevolence which always haunteij 
 him, runs with the hare and hunts with the hounds. Himself ijl I: 
 true product of Romanticism, he attacks the best phases o^^ 
 Romanticism with all Jeffrey's aversion and a thousand time 
 Jeffrey's spite. First of all, Walter Scott, who yielded after 
 wards with such sweet grace to the glaringly popular Byron Cx 
 Childe Harold, Scott, whose Lay of the Last Minstrel aniia 
 Mar7nion will be read and loved, we may safely predict. Ion. 
 after the Giaour and Lara are forgotten, is consigned to limbt 
 This is how Byron treats the noble Marmion — 
 
 " Next view in state, proud prancing on his roan, 
 The golden-crested haughty Marmion, 
 
 i 
 
ROBERT SOUTHEY 97 
 
 Now forging scrolls, now foremost in the fight 
 
 Not quite a felon, yet but half a knight, 
 
 The gibbet or the field prepared to grace ; 
 
 A mighty mixture of the great and base. 
 
 And think'st thou, Scott ! by vain conceit perchance, 
 
 On public taste to foist thy stale romance ? 
 
 No ! when the sons of song descend to trade, 
 Their bays are sear, their former laurels fade. 
 Let such forgo the poet's sacred name, 
 Who rack their brains for lucre, not for fame ; 
 Still for stern Mammon may they toil in vain ! 
 And sadly gaze on gold they cannot gain ! 
 
 For this we spurn Apollo's venal son, 
 And bid a long ' good night to Marmion.' " 
 
 Then comes Southey's turn. He is a " ballad-monger," who 
 pours forth spurious epics, which claim to be on a level with 
 the work of Homer, Virgil, Milton, and Tasso. Thalaba, as a 
 hero, is the rival of Tom Thumb. Madoc is a tissue of 
 travellers' tales. Byron deprecates the coming Curse of 
 KeJiama^ in which Southey's poetic power culminated — 
 
 " Oh ! Southey ! Southey ! cease thy varied song ! 
 A bard may chant too often and too long : 
 As thou art strong in verse, in mercy spare ! 
 A fourth, alas ! were more than we could bear. 
 But if, in spite of all the world can say, 
 Thou still wilt verseward plod thy weary way ; 
 If still in Berkeley ballads most uncivil. 
 Thou wilt devote old women to the devil, 
 The babe unborn thy dread intent may rue ; 
 God help thee, Southey, and thy readers too." 
 
 In 1 8 13, Southey was made Poet Laureate, his only rival 
 being Scott, who, of course, worked for Southey rather than for 
 [limself. His success in this respect did not sweeten towards 
 tiim the jealous soul of Byron. In 18 18, Byron dedicated to 
 the Laureate the first instalment of Don yuan. He still 
 regarded Southey as a "Laker/' and lumped him up with 
 Coleridge and Wordsworth in the old uncritical way — 
 
 " And now, my Epic Renegade ! what are ye at ? 
 With all the Lakers, in and out of place ? 
 A nest of tuneful persons, to my eye 
 Like four-and-twenty blackbirds in a pye." 
 
98 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 1 
 
 " You— Gentlemen ! by dint of long seclusion I 
 
 From better company, have kept your own 
 
 At Keswick, and, through still continued fusion 
 Of one another's minds, at last have groNvn 
 
 To deem, as a most logical conclusion. 
 That Poesy has wreaths for you alone ; 
 
 There is a narrowness in such a notion, 
 
 Which makes me wish you'd change your lakes for ocean." 
 
 it: ;: ' 
 
 fiiic;' 
 
 fc 
 
 K.K 
 
 t'eer; 
 
 Coleridge knew better ; and he, at least, was a great critic 
 
 with no envy in his heart. In his BiograpJda Literaria he finds: 
 
 in their treatment of Southey one of the chief condemnations 01^ 
 
 the critics. He ridicules the notion that the Lakists were ir 
 
 any real sense a mutual admiration society. He shows thai; 
 
 the critics condemned Southey by the easy process, before^ 
 
 which no poetry could stand, of exhibiting its weaker sidej 
 
 only. *' He who tells me that there are defects in a new work 
 
 tells me nothing which I should not have taken for granteci 
 
 without his information. But he who points out and elucidatejjrw >> 
 
 the beauties of an original work, does indeed give me interesting 
 
 information, such as experience would not have authorized me 
 
 in anticipating." The latter was by no means the method Oj 
 
 Jeffrey and the rest. What should we have learned from thenri 
 
 of "the pastoral claims and wild streaming lights of Thalaba^ 
 
 of the "full blaze of the Kehama (a gallery of finished pici 
 
 tares in one splendid fancy piece, in which, notwithstanding 
 
 the moral grandeur rises gradually above the brilliance of th<' 
 
 colouring and the boldness and novelty of the machinery);'; 
 
 the " more sober beauties " of Madoc ; what of the Roderick, " ii] 
 
 which, retaining all his former excellencies of a poet eminently 
 
 inventive and picturesque, he has surpassed himself in language 
 
 and metre, in the construction of the whole, and in the splen; 
 
 dour of particular passages"? Such is Coleridge's estimate, 
 
 in which it is impossible not to feel some of the generous over 
 
 praise of kindness. But he arrives at a general conclusioi- 
 
 which twentieth-century readers of Southey will be slow t 
 
 quarrel with. "His prose is always intelligible and alway 
 
 entertaining. In poetry he has attempted almost every specie 
 
 of composition known before, and he has added new ones ; anc' \ 
 
 if we except the highest lyric (in which how few, how very fev; i 
 
 even of the greatest minds have been fortunate), he ha; j 
 
 attempted every species successfully." 
 
ROBERT SOUTHEY 99 
 
 Men of high intelligence in a later generation, men like 
 Cardinal Newman and Dean Stanley, knew the worth of 
 Southey's poetry ; and even Carlyle knew it, though he was 
 wont to praise his verse-making contemporaries with a grudge. 
 But it remained the correct thing to dispraise Southey. When 
 Macaulay brought up his tremendous reinforcements to the 
 Edmbii?'gk, he had occasion to review there Southey's Colloquies 
 in 1830. Southey's Colloquies concern social and political 
 matters; and in 1830 Southey was a tenacious and uncom- 
 promising Tory, while Macaulay was alive with the Whiggism 
 which was to carry the first Reform Bill. His quarrel with 
 ; Southey is therefore only partly literary ; and, indeed, when he 
 comes face to face with the characterization of his poetry, he 
 has to mingle praise with blame and honour with contempt. 
 " His longer poems, though full of faults, are nevertheless very 
 ; extraordinary productions. We doubt greatly whether they 
 • will be read fifty years hence ; but that, if they are read, they 
 [ will be admired, we have no doubt whatever." 
 
 There are many points of resemblance between the literary 
 ' careers of Southey and Walter Scott. Both men were prodigies 
 of literary industry and miscellaneous literary ability. Both 
 ' were laid hold of in youth by the fires of the Romantic move- 
 ment; both won their first reputation as brilliant poets; both 
 were Quarterly Reviewers ; both forsook poetry for prose. 
 The differences between the men help us to understand 
 Southey's comparative failure. So far as the mere manage- 
 ; ment of prose, the mere general mechanism of expression, is 
 » concerned, Southey was a much better writer than Scott. His 
 ■ English is much more terse, more nervous, more oligosyllabic, 
 than Scott's. But this superiority, as we know, is but dust in 
 the balance compared with Scott's achievement as a writer of 
 fiction, by virtue of which he sits for ever in the front rank on a 
 golden throne. "All is great in the Waverley Novels," said 
 Goethe ; " material, effects, characters, execution ; " and in the 
 ! sense of such greatness, the sense of Scott's deficiencies in style 
 disappears, and we see how low is Southey's stature beside his. 
 In poetry the disparity is less great. Both Southey and Scott 
 ' are in a rank below the highest in nineteenth-century poetry ; 
 this was maintained, much too emphatically, in their lifetime ; 
 , it is amply recognized still. Both were narrative poets ; both 
 
100 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CHICLE 
 
 were successful balladists ; both were poets of romantic incident.'^ 
 In many respects Scott's poetry is inferior to Southey's : it 
 shows less metrical and stylistic resource ; it is much less 
 learned, less complex, less artistic. Yet for those very reasons 
 it was more popular when it appeared, and for those reasons it 
 still lives, while Southey's needs to be revived. Its life lies in 
 its spontaneity, its simplicity, its gush and flow, its reliance on 
 the essential, and sempiternal interest of romance. In a word 
 it is human and natural poetry, while Southey's is, to a large 
 extent, preterhuman and artificial. 
 
 And indeed the deficiency of Southey's poetry was also a 
 deficiency of his personality — a deficiency in the human and 
 natural. Through excellent portraits and ample autobiographical 
 and biographical evidence, we can reach that personality, and 
 get to pretty close quarters with it. Let us try to do so now. 
 
 A tall spare man, with dark complexion, dark curling hair, 
 and the hazel eyes which so often go with that colouring, is, by 
 general consent, the Southey of authentic portraits and con- 
 temporary descriptions. A bold fine face it must have been, 
 striking rather than winning, with strongly pencilled eyebrows, 
 aquiline nose, and full lips, the eyes keen, not sweet, and the 
 head habitually carried high, with the chin forwards. It would 
 be difficult to imagine a physiognomy more unlike that of his 
 house-mate, Coleridge, with his " heaven-eyes " and flabby 
 irresoluteness of mien. Southey's manner seems to have im- 
 pressed observers by its combination of agreeableness and 
 reserve. Two acute critics and picturesque describers of person- 
 ality, De Ouincey and Carlyle, have transmitted their im- 
 pressions. De Ouincey first saw him at Greta Hall, in 1807, 
 when Southey had not been many years settled there, and was 
 thirty-three. De Quincey, like all men and women who wield 
 picturesque pens, was apt to detract, even in describing his 
 heroes ; but he does not write detractingly of Southey. The 
 carriage of his head suggested to De Quincey that he con- 
 templated abstractions, and was an aspiring man. There was 
 "a serene and gentle pride" in his face, chastened by manifest 
 modesty and reverence. His bearing was courteous ; and yet he 
 was hardly genial. " The point in which Southey's manner failed 
 the most in conciliating regard, was, perhaps, in what related to 
 the external expressions of friendliness. . . . There was an air 
 
ROBERT SOUTHEY IX 179S 
 
 FROM THE DRAWING BY HANCOCK IN THE NATIOXAI. PORTRAIT GALLERY 
 

ROBERT SOUTHEY 101 
 
 of distance and reserve about him — the reserve of a lofty, self- 
 respecting mind, but, perhaps, a little too freezing, in his treat- 
 I ment of all persons who were not amongst the corps of his 
 I ancient fireside friends." Nothing in later and frequent inter- 
 ' course changed De Quincey's first impression of Southey. 
 There remained the sense of his amiability and serenity ; of his 
 j rectitude, of his courtesy in speech, and gentleness in judgment ; 
 and there remained also the sense of chilling reserve. There 
 remained, above all, the sense of his extraordinary hookishness^ 
 I his literary industry and literary preoccupation. Although De 
 Quincey, in personal intercourse, thought him, in some respects, 
 : Wordsworth's moral superior, less monopolizing in conversation, 
 i less self-complacent and intolerant, more charitable, considerate, 
 and chivalrous, he felt that the bookishness of his interests and 
 talk made him a less comfortable companion. His library, De 
 Quincey alleged, was his wife, his true love which had his heart. 
 Besides, he was not so expansive a talker as Wordsworth ; he 
 was more epigrammatic, more aphoristic, and therefore apt to 
 make his interlocutor often feel that the conversational account 
 was closed. 
 
 Carlyle's record of Southey is more interesting than De 
 Quincey's. His praise is quite as cordial ; and somewhat rare 
 was Carlyle's cordial praise of a contemporary, especially a' 
 contemporary man of letters. His gift for character-sketching 
 was greater and more fascinating than De Quincey's. De 
 Quincey, too, as himself a Lakist, might be expected to be 
 hampered, in writing about a Lake poet, by some of the 
 trammels of artificial brotherhood. But Carlyle's representa- 
 tions in this matter, were wholly " without prejudice," except 
 that it was his cue to belittle all versifiers of his own day. 
 I Carlyle first encountered Southey in the early days of his 
 London life in the thirties, before and after his French Revolu- 
 tion came out, when Southey was in his sixties, and nearing the 
 end of the journey. The two men met at the house of Henry 
 Taylor, author of Philip Van Artevelde, that noble link between 
 two generations of English letters. Carlyle was doubly interested 
 in Southey. As a young Radical, he had sympathized in the 
 outcry against the poet as a renegade from his early republican 
 principles. Later, when that phase of opinion had passed away 
 'or ever, Carlyle got to know Southey's poetry, and to think of 
 
102 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 it with the admiration it deserves. " I much recognize," wrote 
 Carlyle in his deh'ghtful idiom, "the piety, the gentle deep 
 affection, the reverence for God and man, which reigned in these 
 pieces : full of soft pity, like the wailings of a mother, and yet 
 with a clang of chivalrous valour finely audible too." Carlyle 
 went to Henry Taylor's in the evening, when he and Southey 
 had finished a tete-a-tete dinner, and were taking their wine in a 
 ground-floor room " somewhere near Downing Street, and look- 
 ing into St. James's Park." " Southey was a man towards well 
 up in the fifties [he must have been really over sixty] ; hair grey, 
 not yet hoary, well setting off his fine clear brown complexion ; 
 head and face both smallish, as indeed the figure was while 
 seated ; features finely cut ; eyes, brow, mouth good in their 
 kind — expressive all, and even vehemently so, but betokening 
 rather keenness than depth either of intellect or character ; a 
 serious, human, honest, but sharp almost fierce-looking thin 
 man, with very much of the militant in his aspect, — in the eyes 
 especially was visible a mixture of sorrow and of anger, or of 
 angry contempt, as if his indignant fight with the world had not 
 yet ended in victory, but also never should \sic\ in defeat." In 
 the course of this first conversation Southey quoted Praed — a 
 fact which Carlyle (whom Praed had not the good fortune tc 
 please) thought *' tragic." When Southey rose from his chair 
 Carlyle first realized that he was tall. He was "all legs, ir 
 shape and stature like a pair of tongs." Subsequent meetings 
 and conversations made Carlyle like Southey more and more 
 and he was especially gratified by his unexpected approval oi 
 his French Revolution. In those later talks Carlyle noticec 
 Southey's careworn anxious look, and how his eyes " were a; 
 if filled with gloomy bewilderment and incurable sorrows." Onc( ^-.^r. 
 he called on Carlyle at Cheyne Row — Miss Isabella Fenwicl 
 (of whom we shall hear later as a friend of Wordsworth), a con 
 nection of Sir Henry Taylor, and very fond of men of letters 
 coming with him. It was an unfortunate moment for a digni 
 fied visit ; Mrs. Carlyle was marmalade-making over the parlou 
 fire, which was " brisker " than that in the kitchen, when suddenl; 
 the big brass pan boiled over, and the chimney caught fire i: 
 the blaze. We can fancy the scene : Mrs. Carlyle heroicall 
 snatching the pan off the fire, and Carlyle himself, hastily sumji 
 moned from his writing-table, "letting down the grate valv< 
 
ROBERT SOUTHEY 103 
 
 and cutting quite off the supply of oxygen or atmosphere/* 
 when there sounded, with a voice of thunder, Southey's and 
 Miss Fenwick's knock at the street door ! Carlyle remembered 
 " how daintily " his wife " made the salutations, brief quizzical 
 bit of explanation, got the wreck to vanish ; and sat down as 
 member of our little party." The two men talked of Shelley, 
 with a great deal of admirable morality at his expense, but 
 apparently concurring in a total lack of insight into his intellec- 
 tual and literary worth. 
 
 One final interview there was, icte-d-tcte in the evening, at 
 Henry Taylor's. They sat on a sofa, and bewailed the strides 
 
 I of democracy, persuading themselves apparently that they — the 
 sombre, conventional Tory and the paradoxical, hero-worship- 
 
 ; ping humorist, Radical, essentially, in every fibre — had the same 
 point of view. Then they exchanged their last farewell. 
 
 It is impossible to resist quoting almost verbatim Carlyle's 
 summing-up of Southey : " I used to construe him to myself as 
 a man of slight build, but of sound and elegant ; with consider- 
 able genius in him, considerable faculty of speech and rhythmic 
 insight, and with a morality that shone distinguished among his 
 contemporaries." Carlyle had noticed how the colour came and 
 went on Southey's dark face. " I reckoned him (with those 
 blue blushes and those red) to be the perhaps excitablest of all 
 men ; and that a deep mute monition of conscience had spoken 
 
 I to him, ' You are capable of running mad, if you don't take 
 
 \ care. Acquire habitudes ; stick firm as adamant to them at all 
 times, and work, continually work ! ' This, for thirty or forty 
 
 ; years, he had punctually and impetuously done ; no man so 
 
 ; habitual, we were told ; gave up his poetry at a given hour, on 
 stroke of the clock, and took to prose, etc., etc. ; and, as to 
 
 i diligence and velocity, employed his very walking hours, walked 
 with a book in his hand ; and by these methods of his, had got 
 
 [ through perhaps a greater amount of work, counting quantity 
 and quality, than any other man whatever in those years of his ; 
 till all suddenly ended. I likened him to one of those huge 
 
 ; sandstone grinding cylinders which I had seen at Manchester, 
 turning with inconceivable velocity. . . . screaming harshly, and 
 shooting out each of them its sheet of fire . . . beautiful sheets 
 of fire . . . when you look from rearward. For many years 
 these stones grind so, at such a rate, till at last (in some cases) 
 
104 WORDS^VORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 comes a moment when the stone's cohesion is quite worn out, 
 overcome by the stupendous velocity long continued ; and while 
 grinding its fastest, it flies off altogether, and settlrs some yards 
 from you, a grinding-stone no longer, but a cartload of quiet sand." 
 There can be no doubt that much in this bright sketch is 
 true to the real Southey, and it is in full agreement with the 
 lazy traditional second or third hand estimate of him. Yet it 
 does not satisfy the inquirer. The mere regularity, for example ; 
 why should it always be quoted as being vaguely to Southey's 
 discredit } There is, after all, no demerit in stopping one's work 
 when the clock strikes, even if the work should chance to be 
 poetry. It is not self-evident that poetry ought to be composed 
 in a trance or amid chaos. The implication, of course, is that 
 Southey's output was inferior ; that the incessant grinding, 
 the monotonous regularity, produced nothing equivalent to the 
 effort. But inferiority is relative ; it was not easy to be the 
 contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge. There is always 
 some absurdity in being Poet Laureate when other men are 
 producing immeasurably better poetry than you are yourself. 
 But it is nothing to posterity that Southey happened to be 
 Laureate ; what posterity wants is to ascertain his absolute 
 rank. 
 
 Carlyle's version of Southey's industry, at all events, is true. 
 Southey's characteristic life and life-work began with his 
 settlement at Greta Hall in 1803, when he was thirty. It 
 was just nine years since the romantic revolutionary had made 
 Coleridge's acquaintance at Oxford ; just eight since he and 
 Coleridge had married respectively Edith and Sarah Fricker 
 at Bristol. His youth was over ; his intellectual wild oats 
 were sown ; Portugal and things Portuguese and Spanish had 
 made their mark on him ; he was apart, he was dedicated, 
 pledged, to the literary life, pure and simple. Therefore, when 
 Coleridge, who had made Greta Hall at least his wife's home, 
 asked the Southeys to come and share the quiet mansion on 
 its knoll under Skiddaw, and in sound of Greta and Derwent, 
 Southey felt that the call must be obeyed. It was indeed a 
 potent call ! For, once settled at Greta Hall, Southey never 
 left it until he was carried, forty years after, to his grave in 
 Crosthwaite churchyard, hardly a mile off. 
 
 Those were the forty years of the industry which has 
 
 fcc 
 
 e;: 
 
 ^:: 
 
ROBERT SOUTHEY 105 
 
 become a proverb. "Imagine me," he wrote once, "in this 
 great study of mine from breakfast till dinner, from dinner 
 till tea, and from tea till supper, in my old black coat, my 
 corduroys alternately with the long worsted pantaloons and 
 gaiters in one, and the green shade, and sitting at my desk, 
 and you have my picture and my history." It was never 
 different. All that has to be added is the leisurely walk in 
 fine weather, book in hand, always with full enjoyment of the 
 scenery. "I have seen a sight," he wrote in February, 1804, 
 "more dreamy and wonderful than fancy ever yet devised for 
 fairyland. We had walked down to the lake side ; it was a 
 delightful day, the sun shining, and a few white clouds hanging 
 motionless in the sky. . . . The surface of the lake was so 
 perfectly still, that it became one great mirror and all its 
 waters disappeared. ... As I stood on the shore, heaven 
 and the clouds seemed lying under me ; I was looking down 
 into the sky ... it seemed like an abyss of sky before me, 
 not fog and clouds from a mountain, but the blue heaven 
 spotted with a few fleecy pillows of cloud, that looked placed 
 there for angels to rest upon them." In such things Southey 
 took daily delight. 
 
 If Southey's library was his wife ; though he loved books 
 with such devotion that when, before the end, the power of 
 reading forsook him, he would take down his volumes from 
 the shelves and kiss them, we must not forget that he was 
 a domestic man in the fullest sense of the word. He was twice 
 married ; he had children of his own, through whom he had 
 keen happiness and keen pain ; and the Coleridges, Hartley, 
 Derwent, and Sara, spent their childhood and youth at Greta 
 Hall. Southey's letters, not letters of genius like Charles 
 Lamb's, and without the delicate flavour and odour of Cowper's, 
 show, with a perfect transparency, the depths of a life as happy 
 in its play as it was strenuous in its industry, and faultless in 
 its regularity. Southey's humour was hardly so abundant as 
 to overflow into his writings ; but it was genuine enough to 
 make his home a happy place for his children, and even for 
 himself. Southey was not a constitutionally happy man. Carlyle 
 noticed the sorrow and anger in his eyes, and the shiftings of 
 colour on his face even on the threshold of old age ; and he 
 shrewdly reckoned that behind and beneath the chill reserve 
 
106 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CHICLE 
 
 of manner, perilously unstable nerves were on the tremble. 
 Throughout his life Southey suffered the drawbacks of a neurotic 
 temperament. In his youth he had dreams, unfed with any 
 opium, which were almost worthy to rank with De Quincey's ; 
 and which help to explain the unearthly scenery and metrical 
 excitements of Thalaba. He had an ever recurring fight with 
 "hay-fever," and other indications of nervous weakness. Yet 
 in his incessant toil and cheerful family-life, set in the midst 
 of scenery so exquisite, he found such happiness as his nature 
 could feel. At fifty-one he could say, "my literary employ- 
 ments have never, in the slightest degree, injured my health." 
 He denied that he had ever been a close student, in any 
 unwholesome sense of the words. There was nothing irksome 
 or anxious in his work, carried on as it was so far from the 
 central machinery ; he was master, he said, of his time and of i 
 himself. If the daily walk was ever intermitted it was not from j 
 indisposition for exercise, and it was very seldom. He loved 
 it ; and in winter would often take it with some of his young 
 folks before breakfast, " for the sake of getting the first sunshine; i 
 on the mountains." His mild humour found an outlet in a 
 love of cats and kittens. In his sixtieth year he could write 
 to a contemporary : " Alas, Grosvenor, this day poor oldi 
 Rumpel was found dead, after as long and happy a life as catj 
 could wish for, if cats form wishes on that subject. His full 
 titles were : — ' The Most Noble the Archduke Rumpelstiltzchen 
 Earl Tomlemagne, Baron Raticide, Waowhler, and Skaratch. 
 There should be a court mourning in Catland. ... As we have 
 no catacombs here, he is to be decently interred in the orchard 
 and cat-mint planted on his grave." 
 
 Southey -had to bear the anguish of losing two children 
 a son and daughter, and of having to put away his first wife, a: 
 a mental invalid, from his home. Long before those thing: 
 happened, he felt the sombreness of advancing life. At fort} 
 he was talking like an old man, about the sere and yellow leal 
 and the decline of his poetic powers. Yet we cannot avoid th< 
 conclusion that he was predominantly happy. " When I ceasi, 
 to be cheerful," he said of himself when he was thirty -two, " i 
 is only to become contemplative, to feel at times a wish that 
 was in that state of existence which passes not away ; and thi 
 always ends in a new impulse to proceed.'* 
 
ROBERT SOUTHEY 107 
 
 Those who think about Southey at all seem to have made 
 up their minds that he was more eminent as a prose-writer 
 than as a poet. Yet this judgment apparently rests on little 
 besides the fact that his excellent lives of Nelson and Wesley are 
 well written, still readable, and often reprinted ; while his 
 poetry, except one or two ballads and lyrics, is hardly known. 
 As a matter of fact, however, the great bulk of Southey*s prose 
 — the main product of those years of portentous industry, — 
 lies in a darker limbo than that which hides his verse. It falls 
 into three classes, with each of which time has dealt unkindly. 
 In the first are the laborious histories^ the History of Brazil and 
 the History of the Peninsular War^ which are entirely forgotten. 
 The History of Portugal^ which was to be exhaustive and 
 epoch-making, was never finished. In the second class are the 
 innumerable contributions to the Quarterly Revieiv and other 
 periodicals ; reviews literary, political, ecclesiastical, economic ; 
 articles of admirable learning, excellent judgment, faultless 
 morals, and unbending conservatism, which have no message 
 for posterity. Into the third class fall Southey *s chief efforts at 
 imaginative and humorous prose, the Colloqtiies on Societyy and 
 that interminable farrago^ The Doctor. The former, one may 
 predict, will be remembered as long as Macaulay's essays are 
 read, and no longer. The Doctor is dead for want of humour, 
 where humour alone could preserve life. 
 
 After all, then, it would seem that it is by his poetry that 
 Southey must live if he is to live at all. There is, sometimes, 
 a possible resurrection for poetry, when there is none for 
 prose. Can Southey's rise again } 
 
 That the chief part of it — those poems to the making of which 
 there went so much pathetic devotion, so much genuine inspira- 
 tion, — has the look of death, there is no doubt. And no wonder ! 
 For, in the first place, they are narrative poems, and very long ; 
 and for such poetry the chance of immortality is very precarious. 
 If narrative poetry attains to epic rank, if it is poetry like the 
 j^neid^ Paradise Lost^ even The Faerie Qiieene^ its immortality 
 will depend on its workmanship : the dignity, the interest, of its 
 themes, is not likely ever to suffer loss. But where epic rank is 
 wanting, where the narrative lacks the religious or historico- 
 traditional basis of true epic, where it depends for its interest 
 on purely human incident and character, varied, perhaps, by 
 
108 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 some preternatural by-play, or recommended by great novelty 
 of subject, the chance of life is much more doubtful. And the 
 doubt increases with the length of the poem. Length is in 
 itself a drawback, a stumbling-block, even to the keen lover of 
 poetry, much more to the average reader of it. And this for a 
 profound reason. Poetry cannot be enjoyed as it ought to be 
 enjoyed, any more than it can be made, without excitement ; 
 and excitement, if it is to be pleasurable and beneficial, must 
 not be unduly protracted. It is the difficulty in narrative 
 poetry of maintaining emotion at the pitch necessary for poetic 
 success, whether for the poet or his reader, which explains the 
 small proportion of extended narrative poetry to be found 
 among classics that are loved. The lyric with its inevitableness, 
 its brevity ; the drama, with its intensity and its conventional 
 limitations, are the more natural vehicles of inspiration, the 
 surer messengers between heart and heart. 
 
 True, narrative poetry never had a better opportunity than 
 in the days of the Romantic Revival, and especially before 
 1 8 14, when the Waverley Novels began to be poured forth. 
 The imaginative sympathies of the public were astir, and there 
 was as yet no wealth of prose fiction to gratify them. The 
 taste for didactic and argumentative poetry had died away. 
 There was an opening for narrative poetry, for fiction in verse ; 
 and poetry of that kind, admirable and dazzlingly popular 
 poetry, was produced abundantly. The popularity of Scott's 
 poetry in this kind was only eclipsed by the popularity of 
 Byron's. Readers who would now spend hours over novels, 
 spent hours over Marmion^ Lara, and The Bride of Abydos, 
 
 Neither Scott nor Byron is dead ; but Byron's purely 
 narrative poetry has but a faint pulse ; and Scott, as a poet, is 
 far from being to us what he was to our forefathers. Still, The 
 Lady of the Lake and Marmion will always, we may believe, 
 find delighted readers, because of Scott's admirable mastery of 
 the metres he used, and because of the deep roots struck by 
 those poems into national scenery and life. They are not far 
 from the epic place. 
 
 Southey had definite aims in poetry, and he aimed with 
 intelligence and skill. He made his plans in his revolutionary 
 boyhood, in entire freedom from " classical " tradition. Romantic 
 medisevalism laid hold of him ; his most juvenile ambition was 
 
ROBERT SOUTHEY 109 
 
 to complete the Faerie Qiieene. His lyrical and idyllic and 
 balladist's efforts were episodic and occasional ; he meant to be 
 an epic poet, and he succeeded in being at least a narrative one. 
 For him poetry was to be no recreation from the labours of 
 learning, no water of Lethe in which the student might forget 
 himself On the contrary, it was to be one aspect of the most 
 recondite learning ; he was to make a series of epics on the great 
 mythologies of the world. Such was the ideal : the realization 
 is in Thalaba and The Curse of Kehama, Southey modestly 
 repudiated all comparison with Milton ; but he quite soberly 
 ranked himself with Tasso, with Virgil, with Homer. Yet, 
 with such grandiose conceptions and ambitious self-judgment, 
 he had a keen sense, born of the new criticism, of the in- 
 admissibility, in the best poetry, of grandiosity in expression ; 
 of pompous diction, rhetoric, elaborate ornamentation. The 
 heroic in poetry meant, in Southey's estimation, no abnegation 
 of spontaneity, simplicity, and passion. " That poetry," he said 
 once (and he was speaking of heroic narrative), " which would 
 reach the heart, must go straight to the mark like an arrow. 
 Away with all trickery and ornaments when pure beauty is to 
 be represented . . . away with drapery when you would display 
 muscular strength." " I am a Puritan in language," he asserted 
 when he was writing Madoc. He would not luxuriate in 
 archaisms ; learned as he was, he kept the impulse to neologize, 
 sternly in check. Yet he had the true romantic belief in novelty 
 .as essential to poetic success. 
 
 ' Southey's method of attaining novelty was twofold : by 
 strangeness of theme on the one hand, and careful metrical 
 skill on the other. Only in Thalaba and Kehama, where the 
 twofold method is fully employed, does Southey realize himself 
 as a poet. His long blank verse poems, Madoc, Roderick^ and 
 others, were much admired by his contemporaries ; they are 
 still readable when the reader has a great deal of leisure, and 
 has nothing else to read. But the curse of mere narrative 
 poetry is on them, and they are too undistinguished to be 
 everlasting. It is by the combination, in Thalaba and Kehainay 
 • of sheer cutlandishness of theme with lucid refined expression 
 and fascinating metrical movement, that Southey lives and 
 deserves to live. Both parts of the combination are essential. 
 ' Without the distinction of style the strangeness of theme would 
 
110 AVORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 have been a fatal stumbling-block ; to popularity it was a 
 hindrance even as it was. Readers could stand the picturesque 
 orientalism of Byron and Moore, but the learned orientalism of 
 Southey was too strong for them. Charles Lamb gave voice 
 to a great deal of contemporary criticism when he wrote as he 
 did of Kehaina, " My imagination goes sinking and floundering 
 in the vast spaces of unopened-before systems and faiths ; I am 
 put out of the pale of my old sympathies ; my moral sense is 
 almost outraged .... Jove, and his brotherhood of gods, 
 tottering with the giant assailings, I can bear, for the soul's 
 hopes are not struck at in such contests ; but your Oriental 
 almighties are too much types of the intangible prototype to be 
 meddled with without shuddering." Yet what attractiveness 
 there is in the scenery, and in the beings, human and preter- 
 human, that flit across it ! How in Thalaba we are soothed by 
 the vast desert solitudes ; how in Kehaina we breathe the 
 heavy sweet air of Hindostan ! 
 
 But it is true that we could not stand much of either if we 
 were not detained by the style. As to style in general, whether^ 
 in prose or verse, Southey held what is the best practical; 
 conviction about it, namely, that one ought to express one's selij 
 as perspicuously, concisely, and impressively as possible, and! 
 otherwise think about the matter not at all. But about metre*' 
 he thought very much, and in Thalaba and Kehama he attained 
 to a diction which poets seldom achieve without much artistic 
 self- consciousness. The rhymelessness of Thalaba (whicLi 
 Southey borrowed from the Norwich poet, Sayers), and itf 
 rhythmical originality are potent to overcome the drawbacks oji 
 its length and the abstruseness of its theme, to make it th( 
 interesting reading which it undoubtedly is. For the emphasi 
 of rhyme Southey substitutes another emphasis, that of thi 
 repetition of phrase which every reader of Thalaba knows S( 
 well — 
 
 " Who at this untimely hour 
 Vv^anders o'er the desert sands ? 
 
 No station is in view, 
 Nor palm-grove, islanded amid the waste. 
 
 The mother and her child. 
 The widow'd mother and the fatherless boy, 
 
 They at this untimely hour 
 Wander o'er the desert sands^ 
 
 \a 
 
ROBERT SOUTHEY 111 
 
 The delicacy and careful simplicity of Southey's diction is 
 very unlike the rhetorical tumidity of most second-rate poets — 
 
 " But then the wrinkling smile 
 Forsook Mohareb's cheek, 
 And darker feelings settled on his brow. 
 * Now by my soul,' quoth he, ' and I believe. 
 
 Idiot ! that I have led 
 Some camel-knee'd prayer-monger through the cave ! 
 What brings thee hither ? Thou shouldst have a hut 
 By some Saint's grave beside the public way, 
 There to less-knowing fools 
 Retail thy Koran-scraps, 
 And in thy turn die civet-like at last, 
 In the dung-perfume of thy sanctity ! ' " 
 
 Tennyson might have written the last four lines. 
 
 The rapid narrative movement, the enchanting clearness of 
 detail which we feel in The Ancient Mariner ^ are not wanting 
 here — 
 
 "All waste ! no sign of life 
 But the track of the wolf and the bear ! 
 
 No sound but the wild, wild wind. 
 And the snow crunching under his feet ! 
 Night is come ; neither moon nor stars, 
 
 Only the light of the snow ! 
 But behold a fire in the cave of the hill, 
 
 A heart-reviving fire ; 
 And thither with strength renew'd 
 
 Thalaba presses on. 
 
 He found a Woman in the cave, 
 
 A solitary Woman, 
 Who by the fire was spinning. 
 
 And singing as she spun. 
 The pine boughs were cheerfully blazing. 
 And her face was bright with the flame ; 
 Her face was as a Damsel's face, 
 
 And yet her hair was grey. 
 She bade him welcome with a smile, 
 
 And still continued spinning, 
 And singing as she spun. 
 
 The thread she spun it gleam'd like gold 
 In the light of the odorous fire. 
 Yet was it so wondrously thin, 
 That, save when it shone in the light, 
 You might look for it closely in vain. 
 
112 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 The youth sate watching it, 
 And she observed his wonder, 
 
 And then again she spake, 
 
 And still her speech was song ; 
 Now twine it round thy hands I say, 
 Now twine it round thy hands I pray ! 
 My thread is small, my thread is fine. 
 But he must be 
 A stronger than thee P 
 
 Who can break this thread of mine ! " 
 
 Nor, in the phantasmagoria of the preternatural, is the 
 natural thrill never felt. Even the magic ** Green Bird of 
 Paradise " falls short of the magic that is abroad in an English 
 spring — 
 
 " Her voice was soft and sweet, 
 It rose not with the blackbird's thrill, 
 Nor warbled like that dearest bird that holds 
 
 The solitary man 
 A loiterer in his thoughtful walk at eve." 
 
 Nothing, certainly, but clarity of style and metrical resource 
 could make the reader feel at home among the outlandish com 
 plications of Kehama. And yet those gifts are so conspicuous 
 and the narrative is made so beguiling by its constant breaks 
 that the reader who begins the poem fairly will hardly wish to 
 stop before he has finished it. If the human interest is slight 
 the adventures are most winningly described — 
 
 " Behold them wandering on their hopeless way, 
 
 Unknowing where they stray, 
 Yet sure where'er they stop to find no rest. 
 
 The evening gale is blowing, 
 
 It plays among the trees ; 
 Like plumes upon a warrior's crest, 
 They see yon cocos tossing to the breeze. 
 Ladurlad views them with impatient mind, 
 
 Impatiently he hears 
 
 The gale of evening blowing. 
 The sound of waters flowing, 
 As if all sights and sounds combined 
 
 To mock his irremediable woe ; 
 For not for him the blessed waters flow, 
 For not for him the gales of evening blow, 
 
 A fire is in his heart and brain, 
 And Nature hath no healing for his pain." 
 
 
ROBERT SOUTHEY 113 
 
 Wordsworth hit on a good criticism of Southey when he 
 complained of his lack of ideality. In composing a poem, 
 Wordsworth said, Southey was content with choosing a subject, 
 and then reading up about it carefully : he did not, as the 
 great poet must, conceive and passionately hold fast a central 
 idea of which the poem is the exposition. Hence he failed "to 
 give anything which impresses the mind strongly, and is recol- 
 lected in solitude." 
 
 This is true, and it is final. Southey's best poetry is tho- 
 roughly good^ nay, in a sense it is first-rate, the cunning admir- 
 able work of a thoroughly competent craftsman ; and, as such, 
 it ought never to be deposed from the high place which by right 
 it holds in English literature. But it is poetry of erudition and 
 skill, not poetry of passion or prophecy. It is the work of one 
 neither intoxicated with the beauty of things, nor testifying of 
 those supreme realities in which the beautiful and the true are 
 indistinguishable. And therefore all the labour has an in- 
 adequate result. Southey gave nothing "which impresses the 
 mind strongly, and is recollected in solitude." 
 
 The two principal achievements of Southey as Laureate, the 
 Carmen Niiptiale on the marriage of Princess Charlotte, and the 
 unlucky Vision of Jndgment on the death of George III., add 
 nothing to his best reputation. Yet the scorn which they pro- 
 voked at the time was political rather than literary. Hazlitt 
 brought down a quite disproportionately heavy mass of dis- 
 approbation on the Carmen Nnptiale, not because the poem was 
 bad, but because Southey, the renegade republican, was now a 
 court official. The same feeling, mixed with personal jealousy 
 and resentment, inspired Byron's reply to The Vision of Judg- 
 ment. The Vision is, as poetry, as bad as Southey's worst 
 enemy could have desired : it is an attempt, in bad hexameters, 
 at the Dantesque sublime, which, for sheer lack of humour and 
 impotence of imagination, bears off the palm, even among such 
 pieces de circonstance, Byron might have spared himself the 
 trouble of writing his cowntQV- Vision, which, as poetry, is not 
 much better than Southey's, and is, in effect, hardly more 
 blasphemous. But in the preface to his Vision, Southey had 
 attacked Byron, without naming him, as the founder of a 
 " Satanic school '* of poetry (he was thinking of Beppo and the 
 early part of Don Jttan) ; and it was in self-defence, as much as 
 
114 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 in virtuous condemnation of George III., that Byron lashed out 
 with his sting. 
 
 Some strong literary friendships added to the happiness of 
 Southey's life. The friendship with Coleridge was spoiled by 
 the family complications. That with Charles Lamb tended 
 towards a kind of death by slow petrifaction. De Quincey 
 Southey came to dislike actively as time went on. His intel- 
 lectual sympathies were with a different type among his con- 
 temporaries, and especially with Walter Savage Landor and 
 Sir Henry Taylor. 
 
 To Wordsworth Southey was splendidly and consistently 
 loyal. For constant intercourse they were rather inconveniently 
 situated : they were too near to correspond by letter, and too 
 far apart, and Southey was too busy, for even such excellent 
 pedestrians to meet constantly. There seems never to have 
 been any cloud between the two men. There were, no doubt, 
 certain influences which made for estrangement. As long as 
 Coleridge was in the Lake country at all, he hung upon the 
 Wordsworths, and Southey, at Greta Hall, was identified with 
 the opposite camp, that composed of Mrs. Coleridge and the 
 children. Against increasing warmth of friendship there 
 worked temperament : Wordsworth and Southey agreed in 
 politics and in devotion to literature ; but both were exceedingly 
 reserved, and neither had enough humour to overcome the 
 reserve ; with each the envelope of self-contained domesticity 
 had a shell-like hardness. Wordsworth cared passionately for 
 none of his friends ; and Southey was not a man for whom 
 anybody could care passionately. Intellectually, Wordsworth 
 regarded him with cold approbation ; he approved this and 
 that in his poems, but found them all wanting in the essentials. 
 Still, the relations bore well the strain of time. Forty years 
 the poets were neighbours ; and " loving friends " they may 
 without much straining of words be said to have been. "In ^_ 
 every relation of life, and every point of view, Wordsworth is 
 a truly exemplary and admirable man." So Southey wrote of »;c. 
 him after twenty years' proximity. Sometimes they would i 5 
 exchange visits of a few days. Sometimes the Greta Hall 
 and Rydal folks would have long summer outings together and 
 picnic here and there. One great expedition signalized H^ -. 
 Waterloo year. A bonfire was to be lit on Skiddaw, and onB^v 
 
ROBERT SOUTHEY 115 
 
 August 21, the Southeys, Wordsworths (the poet and his wife, 
 Dorothy and the boy John), with other friends (among whom was 
 a son of Johnson's Boswell), climbed the mountain to make the 
 celebration. They set out about four in the afternoon ; roasted 
 beef and boiled plum-pudding on the summit ; sang " God 
 save the King" round flaming tar-barrels; fired cannon; and 
 rolled blazing balls of tow and turpentine down the sides of the 
 hill. Never, surely, was timeless Skiddaw disturbed by such a 
 tumult of the children of time ! The only mishap was of 
 Wordsworth's making. When boiling-water was wanted for 
 punch it was found that somebody " with a red cloak on " had 
 overturned the kettle. The red cloak was brought home to 
 Wordsworth ; he had thrown one of Mrs. Southey's round his 
 shoulders. " He thought to slink off undiscovered," wrote 
 Southey ; " but I punished him by singing a parody which they 
 all joined in ! * 'Twas yo2c that kicked the kettle down ! 'twas 
 you. Sir, you ! ' " The water-drinking poet had done more harm 
 than he realized. Some of the party had to take their rum 
 stronger than otherwise they would have done (how far we 
 have travelled in less than a hundred years !) ; and the descent 
 of Skiddaw was made towards midnight in a rather scandalous 
 manner. 
 
 None of Wordsworth's contemporary critics was quite as 
 deliberately and steadily admiring as Southey. The most solid 
 and solemn expression of his judgment was given in 1829. 
 It is important as containing the maximum of his dispraise. 
 "A greater poet than Wordsworth there never has been, nor 
 ever will be. I could point out some of his pieces which seem 
 to me good for nothing, and not a few faulty passages, but 
 I know of no poet in any language who has written so much 
 that is good." In 18 14 (the year when The Exacrsion appeared) 
 he had written : " I speak not from the partiality of friend- 
 ship, nor because we have been so absurdly held up as both 
 writing upon one concerted system of poetry, but with the 
 most deUberate exercise of impartial judgment whereof I 
 am capable, when I declare my full conviction that posterity 
 will rank him with Milton." 
 
 Southey's sun declined and set in a murky west. His 
 first wife, the mother of his children, had to be taken from 
 her home in 1834, and in 1837 she died without having recovered 
 
116 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 her mental health. A week or two before the end Southey 
 wrote : " The worst has long been past, and when our sharp 
 grief is over, we shall be thankful for her deliverance from the 
 body of this death." 
 
 To a man of sixty-four widowerhood may be an intolerable 
 burden. Southey was to survive his wife not much more than 
 five years, and they were not happy years. He went on with 
 his work ; he saw friends ; he travelled ; but it was evident 
 that he was broken irrecoverably. It was no sign to the 
 contrary that in this condition he suddenly married again. At 
 Lymington in Hampshire there lived a minor poetess called 
 Caroline Bowles, in whose works Southey had long taken an 
 interest, and with whom he had often corresponded. She was 
 twelve years his junior. On his way back from the Continent 
 he visited her at Lymington, and in 1839 they were married. 
 It was a pity ; but there is no power to prevent such unseemly 
 things. The marriage did not even arrest Southey's decline ; 
 the fire and strength had gone from his face ; he was languid and 
 torpid. Power of work, power of memory ebbed away. At 
 last he could only look at his books with the old hunger, kiss 
 them with the old passion. 
 
 Even in 1840, three years before his death, he did not at 
 first recognize Wordsworth when he went once to see him. 
 " Then his eyes flashed for a moment with their former bright- 
 ness, but he sank into the state in which I had found him, 
 patting with both hands his books affectionately like a child." 
 Further and further into the shadow he passed ; until, in March, 
 1843, what had long been oblivion deepened into death. 
 
 "All in the wild March morning," Wordsworth and 
 Quillinan, his son-in-law, came to the funeral. The grave is 
 conspicuous in Crosthwaite churchyard ; and in the church 
 there is a recumbent figure inscribed with Wordworth's lines. 
 They are true to the man they commemorate. 
 
 " Ye vales and hills, whose beauty hither drew 
 The poet's steps, and fixed him here ; on you 
 His eyes have closed ; and ye loved books, no more 
 Shall Southey feed upon your precious lore. 
 To works that ne'er shall forfeit their renown 
 Adding immortal labours of his own, — ; 
 Whether he traced historic truth with zeal 
 For the state's guidance or the church's weal. 
 
 I 
 
ROBERT SOUTHEY 117 
 
 Or fancy disciplined by curious art 
 Informed his pen, or wisdom of the heart, 
 Or judgments sanctioned in the patriot's mind 
 By reverence for the rights of all mankind. 
 Wide were his aims, yet in no human breast 
 Could private feelings meet in holier rest. 
 His joys — his griefs — have vanished like a cloud 
 From Skiddaw's top ; but he to Heaven was vowed 
 Through a life long and pure, and steadfast faith 
 Calm'd in his soul the fear of change and death." 
 
 It was Wordsworth who remarked on the accurate self- 
 portraiture of Southey's well-known lyric, written in 1818 — 
 
 " My days among the Dead are past ; 
 
 Around me I behold, 
 Where'er these casual eyes are cast. 
 
 The mighty minds of old ; 
 My never-failing friends are they. 
 With whom I converse day by day. 
 
 " With them I take delight in weal 
 And seek relief in woe ; 
 And while I understand and feel 
 
 How much to them I owe, 
 My cheeks have often been bedew'd 
 With tears of thoughtful gratitude. 
 
 " My thoughts are with the Dead, with them 
 I live in long-past years. 
 Their virtues love, their faults condemn, 
 
 Partake their hopes and fears. 
 And from their lessons seek and find 
 Instruction with an humble niind. 
 
 ' My hopes are with the Dead, anon 
 My place with them will be, 
 And I with them will travel on 
 
 Through all Futurity ; 
 Yet leaving here a name, I trust, 
 
 That will not perish in the dust." 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 GRASMERE 
 
 WORDSWORTH'S winter in Germany in 1798-9 left no 
 permanent mark on his life. Had Wordsworth been a 
 rather different man, the result might have been very different. 
 To a poet of his temperament and at his age, nothing more 
 stimulating might have happened than a visit to the Germany 
 of those days. For Wordsworth was an innovator, a literary 
 reformer, a Romanticist ; and the land in which he sojourned 
 was in the blaze of its Aufkldrtmg, in the stir of a Romantic 
 movement more many-sided than that in Britain, and, in its 
 results, perhaps, even more solidly constructive. When Words- 
 worth and his sister, with Coleridge, landed at Hamburg in 
 September, 1798, German literature was ending its first modern 
 half-century of genuine native vigour, and several imperishable 
 monuments of its thought were already there, plain to see. 
 Among them, Lessing the critic, and Klopstock and Wieland 
 the poets, had broken the spell of French influence, and had 
 claimed a large place in the world for the inborn Teutonic l'^-- 
 spirit ; and, though the poets were to survive as little more than ^~:: 
 names, Lessing was to live as one of the greatest of modern 
 critics. For more than thirty years The Soi-rows of Wej'ther 
 and Gotz von Berlichingen, pure types respectively of sentimental 
 and picturesque Romanticism, had been before the world. 
 They were the work of Goethe ; and, by 1798, Goethe had done 
 much of his greater work, beside which Gdtz and Werther have 
 a merely curious and historic interest — work like the lyrics, the 
 first part oi Faust, and Wilhelm Meister — which far transcends 'ijiit: 
 any petty antithesis of "classical" and "romantic." And Ger- ' 3 t> 
 man philosophy was well in line with German literature. For 
 in that same year, 1798, German thought had been powerfully 
 
 118 
 
 be:: 
 
 la.-::, 
 iiev; 
 
 a:i: 
 
 re::: 
 
 'j:- 
 
 \:r. 
 
 I 
 
GRASMERE 119 
 
 influenced for seventeen years by the mature philosophy of 
 Immanuel Kant. In all respects the intellectual fascination of 
 Germany was strong and might have been overpowering. 
 There was, no doubt, another side to the picture. The want 
 of political unity in Germany was reflected in German intel- 
 lectual life ; as patriotism was local rather than national, much 
 of literature was a thing of coteries and cliques, and its 
 national import might easily miss being realized. Yet there 
 was enough, both in prose and verse, one would have thought, 
 to arrest a mind Hke Wordsworth's, and give it a powerful 
 bent. 
 
 And was not Coleridge his companion, Coleridge the critic 
 on a level with Lessing, Coleridge the close student of con- 
 temporary philosophy, who well knew Kant and his importance, 
 and was to be identified more nearly than with anything else, 
 with the triumphs and mysteries of German idealism ? The 
 companionship, we must notice, soon broke down. The poets 
 parted at Hamburg, Coleridge going to Ratzeburg, from which 
 he afterwards migrated to Gottingen ; and the Wordsworths 
 taking up their quarters at Goslar, south of Brunswick, near the 
 Harz mountains. Coleridge took his German visit seriously ; 
 he worked hard at the language ; matriculated at the University 
 of Gottingen, and collected materials for a life of Lessing. The 
 Wordsworths' sojourn, on the other hand, was very nearly a 
 failure. Goslar was as dull as ditchwater ; the climate was cold, 
 and it was the hardest winter of the century ; the Wordsworths 
 were not good at making friends ; Wordsworth detested tobacco ; 
 from the social point of view in Germany, Dorothy was an 
 encumbrance to her brother. They made small progress in 
 Germany, and the months flowed on drearily. Before parting 
 from Coleridge they met Klopstock's brother at Hamburg, and 
 saw Klopstock himself, from whom they got a very garbled 
 account of the state of German literature. Wieland was repre- 
 sented as more important than Goethe. Kant, Klopstock found 
 " utterly incomprehensible " ; " Kant," Wordsworth represented 
 him as saying, " had appeared ambitious to be the founder of 
 a sect ; he had succeeded ; but the Germans were now coming 
 to their senses again." 
 
 This kind of thing fitted in with Wordsworth's prejudices. 
 He was intensely insular. He could feel the beating of the 
 
120 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 universal heart, but not easily through books ; it must com- 
 municate itself to him through the mountains and the groves, 
 the changing clouds and frolicking lambs of his native land. 
 Goethe was too non-moral to be even tolerable lo him ; he 
 hated him to the end of his life. Wordsworth was a philosopher, 
 indeed, and an idealist ; but his philosophy was his own : he 
 was no student, and would never have had patience or docility 
 enough to enrich his thought with the systematic thought of the 
 Germans, expressed in their difficult tongue. 
 
 And so, though he was by no means idle at Goslar, his 
 energy was the energy of reminiscence. He neither studied 
 Kant nor read Goethe ; he was nearly frozen to death in his 
 bedroom over an unceiled passage in a draper's house ; he was 
 not fortunately situated with respect to the attainment of his 
 main object, a knowledge of the language. Nor was he well : 
 he was weakly, and suffered from pain in the side. While he 
 walked in the freezing days in the ghost-haunted imperial town, 
 his spirit wandered still in lakeland or among the Alfoxden 
 hollies, and the serene purpose of the lonely English poet lost 
 no whit of its individuality. It may be too much to say, as 
 Mr. Myers has said, that " the four months spent at Goslar were 
 the very bloom of Wordsworth's poetic career ; " but it is not 
 too much to say that they were no interruption to that career, 
 that, on the contrary, they forwarded it by a kind of force of 
 antagonism. He composed his verses by Dorothy's side, or 
 " with no companion but a kingfisher " glancing by him, as he 
 walked in the public gardens. In his exile, he felt himself like 
 a half-dead fly he saw crawling back to life in the warmth of 
 the dreary un-English stove as he toiled over his German. He 
 hated the look of the heraldic Brunswick horse on the stove. 
 
 " A plague on your languages, German and Norse ! 
 Let me have the song of the kettle ; 
 And the tongs and the poker, instead of that horse, 
 That gallops away with such fury and force 
 On this dreary dull plate of black metal. 
 
 " See that Fly, — a disconsolate creature ! 
 perhaps 
 A child of the field or the grove ; 
 And, sorrow for him ! the dull treacherous heat 
 Has seduced the poor fool from his winter retreat, 
 And he creeps to the edge of my stove." 
 
GRASMERE 121 
 
 Could but the fly be saved till the summer ; could but the 
 oet be restored to the places he loved ! 
 " God is my witness, thou small helpless thing ! 
 Thy life I would gladly sustain 
 Till summer come up from the south, and with crowds 
 Of thy brethren a march thou shouldst sound through the clouds, 
 And back to the forests again ! " 
 
 But at least the poet could dream of home scenes and 
 Dlk. It was at Goslar that he wrote Nuttiitg, that record of 
 piritual progress at Hawkshead that we already know. Here, 
 DO, he recalled the deathbed of Taylor, the Hawkshead head- 
 laster, in an " address " to the Hawkshead scholars. 
 
 " I kissed his cheek before he died ; 
 And when his breath was fled, 
 I raised, while kneeling by his side, 
 His hand : — it dropped like lead. 
 Your hands, dear little ones, do all 
 That can be done, will never fall 
 Like his till they are dead." 
 
 It was at Goslar that he wrote Ltccy Gray and Riith — Lucy 
 7rayf founded on an incident near Halifax, told him by 
 Dorothy, an experiment in the Wordsworthian spiritualization 
 )f " things common " ; Ruth, a ballad of 
 
 " An innocent life, yet far astray ! " 
 vhlch grew out of a west country story. 
 
 " That oaten pipe of hers is mute. 
 Or thrown away ; but with a flute 
 Her loneliness she cheers ; 
 This flute, made of a hemlock stalk, 
 At evening in his homeward walk 
 The Ouantock woodman hears." 
 
 To Goslar, too, belong the L^icy poems, that strange little 
 ovely group, which breathe a passion unfamiliar to Words- 
 worth, and about which he — so ready to talk about the genesis 
 of his poems — has told us nothing. Was it pure idealization ? 
 Why not ? Or was it idealization started by some fugitive 
 fancy } Or was there something deeper at the base, unspoken 
 and unspeakable } Does it matter ? Let a poet keep some of 
 his secrets : we need not grudge him the privacy when the 
 poetry is as beautiful as this ; when there is such celebration of 
 girlhood, love, and death. Who does not know, who can too 
 
122 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 often hear about, the girl whom Nature trained with her own 
 hand ? In the strange spaces of the Harz Forest, Wordsworth 
 saw and described the training. 
 
 " Three years she grew in sun and shower 
 Then Nature said, ' A lovelier flower 
 On earth was never sown ; 
 This Child I to myself will take ; 
 She shall be mine, and I will make 
 A Lady of my own. 
 
 " ' Myself will to my darling be 
 
 Both law and impulse : and with me 
 
 The Girl, in rock and plain, 
 
 In earth and heaven, in glade and bower. 
 
 Shall feel an overseeing power 
 
 To kindle or restrain. 
 " ' She shall be sportive as the fawn 
 
 That wild with glee across the lawn 
 
 Or up the mountain springs ; 
 
 And hers shall be the breathing balm, 
 
 And hers the silence and the calm 
 
 Of mute insensate things. 
 
 " * The floating clouds their state shall lend 
 To her ; for her the willow bend ; 
 Nor shall she fail to see 
 Even in the motions of the Storm 
 Grace that shall mould the Maiden's form 
 By silent sympathy. 
 
 "'The Stars of midnight shall be dear 
 To her ; and she shall lean her ear 
 In many a secret place 
 Where rivulets dance their wayward round, 
 And beauty born of murmuring sound 
 Shall pass into her face. 
 
 ** ' And vital feelings of delight 
 
 Shall rear her form to stately height 
 Her virgin bosom swell ; 
 Such thoughts to Lucy I will give 
 While she and I together live 
 Here in the happy dell.' 
 
 " Thus Nature spake — The work was done — 
 How soon my Lucy's race was run ! 
 She died, and left to me 
 This heath, this calm, and quiet scene ; 
 The memory of what has been. 
 And never more will be." 
 
 Tbt 
 
 Hf 
 
 
GRASMERE 123 
 
 The thought of Lucy added bitterness to the separation 
 
 •om England. 
 
 '' I travelled among unknown men, 
 In lands beyond the sea ; 
 Nor, England ! did I know till then 
 What love I bore to thee." 
 
 He will not again go abroad, for — 
 
 " She I cherished turned her wheel 
 Beside an English fire." 
 
 Who and what was she ? 
 
 " She dwelt among the untrodden ways 
 Beside the springs of Dove ; 
 A Maid whom there were none to praise, 
 And very few to love : 
 
 " A violet by a mossy stone 
 Half hidden from the eye ! 
 — Fair as a star, when only one 
 Is shining in the sky." 
 
 She died — after Nature's blessed work was done, indeed ; 
 md before she had lost her girlhood. 
 
 " She is in her grave, and, oh, 
 The difference to me ! " 
 
 The poet's sense of loss is sublime in its utter simplicity. 
 He finds harmony rather than harshness in the contrast between 
 ;he illusion of love and the fact of death. 
 
 " A slumber did my spirit seal ; 
 I had no human fears ; 
 She seemed a thing that could not feel 
 The touch of earthly years. 
 
 " No motion has she now, no force ; 
 She neither hears nor sees ; 
 Rolled round in earth's diurnal course 
 With rock, and stones, and trees." 
 
 At Goslar, Wordsworth wrote the spirited apologia for poetry 
 called A Poet's Epitaph, But the energy of reminiscence and 
 verse-making brought about greater results than any of these. 
 
 The idea which had haunted him at Alfoxden, the idea of a 
 great poem on the relations of Man and Nature, haunted him 
 still. This was to be his life-work, his epic, his product which 
 
124 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE ■ 
 
 " posterity would not willingly let die." At Goslar, as we have 
 seen, he meditated much on his Hawkshead schooldays ; and 
 more and more his subject presented itself to him in an auto- 
 biographical shape. No better introduction, he felt, could be 
 found for a poem on Man and the World, than a poem on the 
 growth of his own mind, a poetic record of the process by which 
 he and Nature won each other — the "spousal verse" of that 
 particular " consummation." % 
 
 Accordingly, when the happy moment arrived of release 
 from imperial, frosty, dreary Goslar, as he drove towards 
 Gottingen and Coleridge, Wordsworth began T/ie Prelude. He 
 felt like a bird freed from a cage. " O there is blessing," he 
 
 sang, as the horses' feet carried him along — 
 
 % 
 " O there is blessing in this gentle breeze, "' 
 
 A visitant that while it fans my cheek ;>] 
 
 Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings." '' 
 
 To the breeze without, there was an answering stir of the 
 poet's spirit ; within as without, there was the sense of the 
 break-up of a long frost. The poet was free once more ; free;;! 
 to settle where he would, to do what he would. It was another 
 crisis, like the crisis of the morning after the ball. And it was! 
 met in the same spirit. 
 
 " To the open fields I told 
 A prophecy : poetic numbers came 
 Spontaneously to clothe in priestly robe 
 A renovated spirit singled out, 
 Such hope was mine, for holy services." 
 
 As one reads on in T/ie Prelude, one passes without a 
 break — so the poet idealized the facts — from the departure from 
 Goslar to the settlement at Grasmere. And, indeed, ever 
 biography has little to say about the intervening months. Aftei 
 paying a good long visit to Coleridge at Gottingen, William 
 and Dorothy returned to England in the spring of 1799 
 There was no possibility of going back to Alfoxden, and the> 
 at once made for the North, going to stay with the Hutchinsons 
 at Sockburn-on-Tees, on the borders of Durham and Yorkshire! 
 That was their headquarters through the summer and autumn. 
 It was the North, the land of mountain and flood ; but it wai 
 not the Lake Country. Hardly yet had Wordsworth, th«!i 
 
 , 
 
:p 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
 t. 
 
GRASMERE 125 
 
 Dckermouth child, the Hawkshead schoolboy, familiar with 
 sthwaite and Windermere, penetrated into the central Paradise, 
 je was to do so now ; he was to occupy it, to take possession 
 it, for ever. 
 
 In September, he walked over into Westmorland with his 
 ilor brother John and Coleridge. They entered the Paradise 
 )m Ambleside. As we think of them let us join ourselves to 
 eir shades, and go with them, as they advance to this immortal 
 nquest. Two of our companions, we know, are good company, 
 hat of John Wordsworth, the sailor ? Alas ! we shall hear 
 uch of him in the next chapter. Meanwhile, take a beautiful 
 ntence about him, written by Coleridge to Dorothy. "Your 
 'Other John is one of you ; a man who hath solitary usings of 
 s own intellect, deep in feeling, with a subtle tact, a swift 
 stinct of truth and beauty." 
 
 The most natural road by which to leave Ambleside is that 
 hich follows at some distance the course of the Rothay. It is 
 •oad, level, and shady ; rich woods fringe the lower slopes of 
 oughrigg on the left ; sweet meadows lie along the stream ; 
 e park-land of Rydal Hall, with noble trees and verdant 
 eads, is on the right. But the magnet which draws the traveller 
 
 the mountain mass ahead of him, the fascination of the 
 oudy blue heights of Fairfield, which he sees, and the know- 
 dge that greater Helvellyn rises beyond, out of sight. Bright 
 reams, Scandale beck, Rydal beck, come down from the right 
 
 add their waters to the Rothay. Rydal Hall seems to 
 Dminate the valley, with Fairfield and his tributary. Nab Scar, 
 ►weringjust behind. What will the road do when it gets under 
 le hills ? Will it take Rydal Hall by storm and be carried over 
 le mountains ? The road, followed closely by our ghostly band, 
 /oids Rydal and gently carries us to the left, till we find that 
 e are in a valley running north-westward, with Nab Scar rising 
 :eeply on the right, gentler Loughrigg opposite, and the love- 
 est of lakes opening before us. It is Rydal lake, out of which 
 le Rothay has come, and the road takes us for about a mile and 
 half along its whole length. At its further extremity we are 
 Dnfronted by a shoulder of hill which must be either surmounted 
 r circumvented. The modern highroad circumvents it, round- 
 ig the lake, and keeping close to the Rothay, which is here, 
 gain, murmuring in a woody gorge. But for us ghosts of 1799 
 
U6 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 there is no such road : we climb straight forward, keeping t( 
 what was then the only coach-road, or we may, if we will, anc 
 if we know exactly what we are making for, keep to the right 
 following bridle-paths over the moss and the rocks. In th( ' 
 thirties, Dr. Arnold of Rugby christened the three ways fronij.' 
 Rydal to Grasmere — beginning with the rough path furthest t(|i; 
 the right — Old Corruption, Bit-by -hit Reform^ and Radical 
 Reform, To-day let us keep to the Bit-by-bit Reform road t 
 it is wild enough for anybody ; the heather is still aglow ; thi t. 
 bright moss is wet with trickling streamlets ; there is scarle 
 lichen on the rocks ; though only the creamy, starfish-lik 
 rosettes of the butterwort leaves are to be seen, and there is n; iv 
 chance now of finding even a late specimen of the pink " mealy tt; 
 primrose, there is plenty of the beautiful grass of Parnassus i jc; 
 the boggy places. We have not gone far before we realize th? 
 the road is bearing us to the right, and then, suddenly, we loo 
 down on a new lake, and we are in Grasmere Vale. 
 
 Grasmere Vale, with its long oval lake, and the scattere 
 hamlet with the simple church at its further or north-western en« 
 was to be Wordsworth's home for thirteen years. It is more tru 
 and vitally, biographically and spiritually as well as scenically ar 
 physically, the centre of the Lake District than even Amblesid»i 
 from above which we first took stock of the neighbourhooil. 
 Endowed with the utmost beauty granted to the region, as beau ' 
 ful, essentially, as UUswater or Derwentwater, it has a repose, j_ 
 inwardness, a perfect tranquillity, which are all its own. aA 
 these things it had even more completely when Wordswon 
 dwelt within it. For now, though no railway-sounds insult , 
 the coach-road from Ambleside to Keswick follows closely i; 
 north-eastern shore, and carries a constant stream of pleasut- 
 seeking traffic through its very heart. Wordsworth lived to s; 
 the construction of that road, and to lament it with the indulgl 
 querulousness of a spoilt poet. But, when he was most identifi 1 
 with the vale, the road ran high above the lake and at sor2 
 distance back from it, and only a rough path, fit for poe;, 
 anglers, or lovers, lay between the broad expanse and s 
 girdling mountains. 
 
 " A narrow girdle of rough stones and crags, 
 A rude and natural causeway, interposed 
 
i:atteo 
 
 Dretm 
 
 ;iily 
 
 iblesiii 
 
 ourhoo 
 
 ibeaii 
 
 GRASMERE 127 
 
 Between the water and a winding slope 
 ffill, a Of copse and thicket, leaves the eastern shore 
 
 Of Grasmere safe in its own privacy." 
 
 ^^' The character of shy inwardness is given to Grasmere by the 
 
 'fo it that it lies almost at right angles to Rydal and not in line 
 
 ^^t th it, so that the traveller has, as it were, to seek for it ere he 
 
 ds it. And when he does find it, and his eye rests on its 
 fo^ iet church-tower, and on the mountains that rise behind the 
 
 urch and the village, he feels that no more central citadel is to 
 icar! ; won. 
 
 jWi As a schoolboy, Wordsworth had looked into this sweet and 
 i^i >ly place on a summer's day, and had hoped it might be his 
 
 t to live and die there. The centre of his Lakeland, it became 
 
 e centre of his own affections and genius. Ke thought of it 
 ^stlten ; and the place became — 
 
 " As beautiful to thought, as it had been 
 When present, to the bodily sense ; a haunt 
 Of pure affections, shedding upon joy 
 A brighter joy ; and through such damp and gloom 
 Of the gay mind as ofttimes splenetic youth 
 Mistakes for sorrow, darting beams of light 
 That no self-cherished sadness could withstand." 
 
 And now, in September, 1799, ^^^ poet, in his thirtieth year, 
 looking down on the lake again. With his companions, he 
 id climbed from Rydal, like Benjamin the Waggoner whom he 
 Ai as to celebrate — 
 
 " Now he leaves the lower ground. 
 And up the craggy hill ascending 
 Many a stop and stay he makes, 
 Many a breathing-fit he takes ;— 
 T'^p Steep the way and wearisome " 
 
 niulgJrat all events for a waggon-team and a thirsty driver ! After 
 
 - le " wishing-gate " is passed, the road descends upon the lake 
 
 ; „.:;ivel, which it reaches close to the head of the lake, and a short 
 
 f podalf-mile from the church. Just above the level, on the right- 
 
 judjand side of the road, there stood, in Wordsworth's childhood, 
 
 ■ whitewashed public-house, the "Dove and Olive Bough,'* 
 
 l/hich — 
 
 " Offered a greeting of good ale 
 To all who entered Grasmere Vale ; " 
 
128 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 but now, when he descends the hill with Coleridge and brothei 
 John, the sign is gone and the house is empty. 
 
 The travellers stayed some days at Grasmere, and John lef 
 his brother and Coleridge there. Both were delighted with th< 
 place in spite of bad weather ; and Wordsworth had what h( 
 was afraid Dorothy would consider a " mad " idea of building j 
 house by the lake. If that was a mad idea, what about the ok 
 " Dove and Olive Bough," the empty cottage at " Town End, 
 by the side of the Ambleside road } Might that not do for j 
 home ? On his return to Sockburn Wordsworth talked ove 
 the matter with Dorothy, and the end of it was that the empt; 
 cottage at Town End was taken, to be the home first of th 
 brother and sister and then of the brother's wife as well, for nin 
 years, and to be famous as " Dove Cottage" for evermore. 
 
 It was on one of the last days of the year, St. Thomas' Da) 
 1799, that the "flitting" from Yorkshire was made. The tW' 
 companions did it on foot, coming by Askrigg, and throug 
 Wensleydale (where they heard the story of " Hart Leap Well * 
 to Kendal, and so on into the vale. " On Nature's invitation 
 he sang afterwards : — 
 
 " On Nature's invitation do I come, 
 By Reason sanctioned." 
 
 " Bleak was it," he went on : — 
 
 " Bleak season was it, turbulent and bleak, 
 When hitherward we journeyed side by side 
 Through burst of sunshine and through flying showers ; 
 
 Stern was the face of Nature ; we rejoiced 
 
 In that stern countenance, for our souls thence drew 
 
 A feeling of their strength. The naked trees, 
 
 The icy brooks, as on we passed, appeared 
 
 To question us. ' Whence come ye, to what end ? ' 
 
 They seemed to say, ' What would ye?' 
 
 Said the shower, 
 ' Wild Wanderers, whither through my dark domain ? ' 
 The sunbeam said, ' Be happy.' When this vale 
 We entered, bright and solemn was the sky 
 That faced us with a passionate welcoming. 
 And led us to our threshold." 
 
 at-' 
 is fee 
 aflc ''^ 
 
 Alfcx- 
 the:: 
 rit^:- 
 bee:.t 
 
 The Grasmere years, thus entered upon, are, beyond questio 
 the central period of Wordsworth's poetic life. That life beai 
 
 , 
 
^broi 
 
 GRASMERE 129 
 
 'M 
 
 at its strongest under the humble roof of Dove Cottage, and 
 
 is fed to its richest results, by the scenes and the folk, the hills 
 
 and the wild vales of that narrow place. For one thing — 
 
 ^ji 'Iperhaps for chief thing — the blessing of Windybrow, Racedown, 
 
 Alfoxden, and Goslar was continued to the poet : he there had 
 
 ^ -the companionship of Dorothy, and he had it for a year or two 
 
 i^^ ^ without the distraction of new family love. As his sister had 
 
 been to him on the banks of Wye, so she was on the shores 
 
 of Grasmere. As he thinks of her, he asks his very heart to 
 
 pause on the thought. 
 
 :t!ie 
 ciofof 
 
 Well 
 
 " Pause upon that and let the breathing frame 
 No longer breathe, but all be satisfied. 
 
 . 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 this loved abode, was there 
 Or not far off. Where'er my footsteps turned 
 Her voice was like a hidden Bird that sang, 
 The thought of her was like a flash of light 
 Or an unseen companionship, a breath 
 Of fragrance independent of the Wind." 
 
 In the fragment of T/ie Recluse from which these lines are 
 taken, Wordsworth gives his version of the setting of his new 
 home. 
 
 " 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." 
 
130 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 All the sights and sounds of beautiful country are here, but 
 at Grasnaere there is something beyond these. 
 
 " These have we, and a thousand nooks of earth 
 Have also these, but nowhere else is found 
 The one sensation that is here ; 'tis here, 
 Here as it found its way into my heart 
 In childhood, here as it abides by day, 
 By night, here only ; or in chosen minds 
 That take it with them hence, where'er they go. 
 — 'Tis, but I cannot name it, 'ds the sense 
 Of majesty, and beauty, and repose, 
 A blended holiness of earth and sky, 
 Something that makes this individual spot, 
 This small abiding-place of many men, 
 A termination, and a last retreat, 
 A centre, come from wheresoe'er you will. 
 A whole without dependence or defect, 
 Made for itself, and happy in itself. 
 Perfect contentment. Unity entire." 
 
 Thanks to the poetry and patriotism of an eminent English- 
 man, himself a poet and a richly endowed critic, Dove Cottage 
 is now national property, kept as Wordsworth made it, and 
 accessible to every reverent foot and eye. Let us enter, then, 
 and look round. 
 
 Behind the cottage the hill rises steeply, so steeply and so 
 immediately that the garden and orchard with which Words- 
 worth's verse has made us so familiar must be a veritable 
 hanging garden. For between the house and the road there is 
 no room for pleasure ground of any kind ; you could drop a 
 stone sheer from the latticed windows on the road below. The 
 pretty diamond panes give charm to the plain white front of the 
 house, up which creepers climb. When De Quincey first saw it 
 two yew trees broke the " glare " of the white walls. There is a 
 little gate in the rough stone wall, and the door opens at the end 
 and not in the front of the house. What De Quincey calls 
 " a little semi-vestibule " brings you to the principal ground-floor 
 room (the only room on the ground floor, in fact, except 
 Dorothy's bedroom and the kitchen). It is a quaint little 
 living-room, with a most serviceable and kitchen-like fireplace, 
 and De Quincey, who knew it so well, shall describe it. " An 
 oblong square not above eight and a half feet high, sixteen feet 
 
 I 
 
:tage 
 and 
 ieo, 
 
 jdso 
 ordy 
 
 :ere 
 rop 
 
 The 
 of the 
 ^w 
 re is a 
 leend 
 
 calls 
 i.3oof 
 ;xcept 
 
 little 
 
 fij 
 
 ■sfeet^ 
 
 i 
 
 GRASMERE 131 
 
 long, and twelve broad ; very prettily wainscoted 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 every 
 season of the year with roses ; and, in the summer and autumn, 
 with a profusion of jasmine and other fragrant shrubs. From 
 the exuberant luxuriance of the vegetation around it, and from 
 the dark hue of the wainscoting, this window, though tolerably 
 large, did not furnish a very powerful light." This was the 
 essential family-room, the dining-room of the Wordsworths. A 
 modest staircase of fourteen steps (so De Quincey had counted) 
 brings one to the corresponding two rooms above, a little 
 drawing-room over the dining-room, and Wordsworth's bedroom 
 over Dorothy's. In the drawing-room, too, the fireplace is 
 kitchen-like ; the room has old-fashioned high-backed chairs 
 with Dorothy's work on the seats ; and it was Wordsworth's 
 study, " for in a small recess " there are bookshelves, and in 
 those bookshelves reposed the library of the most unbookish of 
 poets, a collection of " perhaps three hundred volumes." There 
 are two other small rooms upstairs : one specially tiny one 
 without a fireplace the Wordsworths built, and Dorothy papered 
 it, and the tiny passage leading to it, with newspapers. 
 
 De Ouincey did not see Dove Cottage until 1807. When 
 the Wordsworths took it there were no creepers on the walb, 
 but the new tenants at once set about planting roses and 
 honeysuckle, and in their first year had a bright show of scarlet 
 runner against the whitewash. Come out now through a back- 
 door into the steep garden and orchard behind ; for here 
 probably more Wordsworthianism came to the birth than 
 within any of the walls. The rough stone steps leading up the 
 incline are there as Wordsworth laid them ; there are such 
 flowers as he planted, and the well he made ; there are the 
 apple-trees which justify the word " orchard " ; there, at the top 
 of the steep little enclosure, is the view-point, and there was the 
 moss-hut in the old days. There were then no stifling houses, 
 no prosaic chimney-tops between the cottage and the lake ; 
 there was no big modern hotel ; there were no crowds of 
 pleasure-seekers. Nothing disturbed the feeling of " termina- 
 tion " and of " last retreat." In his delightful pamphlet about 
 Dove Cottage, Mr. Stopford Brooke has said all that needs to be 
 
132 AVORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 said or can be said about the garden and orchard in their vital 
 relation to Wordsworth's poetry. But indeed we need not go 
 beyond the limits of that poetry, supplemented by Dorothy's 
 prose, to be able to feel our way about the little enclosure as 
 well as out beyond it. Here was the hedge-sparrow's nest with 
 the "bright blue eggs" which recalled a similar one in the 
 Cockermouth garden. 
 
 " On me the chance-discovered sight 
 Gleamed like a vision of delight. 
 I started — seeming to espy 
 The home and sheltered bed, 
 The sparrow's dwelling, which, hard by 
 My Father's house, in wet or dry 
 My sister Emmeline and I 
 Together visited." 
 
 [" Emmeline" is, of course, conventional-poetical for Dorothy] — 
 
 " She looked at it and seemed to fear it ; 
 Dreading, tho' wishing, to be near it ; 
 Such heart was in her, being then 
 A little Prattler among men. 
 The Blessing of my later years 
 Was with me when a boy : 
 She gave me eyes, she gave me ears ; 
 A heart, the fountain of sweet tears ; 
 And love, and thought, and joy." 
 
 It was from the orchard that the cuckoo was heard— 
 
 " While I am lying on the grass 
 Thy twofold shout I hear. 
 
 And I can listen to thee yet ; 
 
 Can lie upon the plain. 
 And listen, till I do beget 
 
 That golden time again." 
 
 Here, in and out of this apple or pear tree, flashed the green 
 linnet, the "Brother of the dancing leaves," whose song, "poured 
 forth in gushes," is so unrealistically described. Here on the 
 turf shone the celandine and the daisy, to the former of which 
 Wordsworth sang two songs, and to the latter three. Here the 9 
 robin was scolded for chasing a butterfly — 
 
 -> 
 
 t'-- 
 
 J 
 
^eas 
 
 GRASMERE 133 
 
 " Would'st thou be happy in thy nest, 
 
 pious Bird, whom man loves best, 
 Love him, or leave him alone ! " 
 
 Here the butterfly itself was apostrophized — 
 
 " I've watched you now a full half-hour. 
 Self-poised upon that yellow flower ; 
 And, little Butterfly ! indeed 
 
 1 know not if you sleep or feed. 
 How motionless ! — not frozen seas 
 More motionless ! and then 
 What joy awaits you, when the breeze 
 Hath found you out among the trees, 
 And calls you forth again ! 
 
 " This plot of orchard-ground is ours ; 
 My trees they are, my Sister's flowers ; 
 Here rest your wings when they are weary ; 
 Here lodge as in a sanctuary ! 
 Come often to us, fear no wrong ; 
 Sit near us on the bough ! 
 We'll talk of sunshine and of song. 
 And summer days, when we were young ; 
 Sweet childish days, that were as long 
 As twenty days are now." 
 
 Here is the " rocky Well " beside which were planted the 
 globe-flowers and marsh-marigolds from the lake-side. Here 
 on the grass lay Coleridge in the early Grasmere days, and 
 here Wordsworth looked at him and sang of him that mysterious 
 song so hard to interpret — the Stanzas written in my Pocket- 
 Copy of Thomson's Castle of Indolence. Who is who in that 
 poem.? * This, anyhow, must be Coleridge — 
 
 " Ah ! piteous sight it was to see this Man 
 When he came back to us, a withered flower, — 
 Or, like a sinful creature, pale and wan. 
 Down would he sit ; and without strength or power 
 Look at the common grass from hour to hour : 
 And oftentimes, how long I fear to say. 
 Where apple-trees in blossom made a bower. 
 Retired in that sunshiny shade he lay ; 
 gjjfed And, like a naked Indian, slept himself away." 
 
 D IDS * I myself incline to the belief that the second character — the "noticeable Man 
 
 jcbidl with large grey eyes " — is neither Coleridge nor Wordsworth but some one else, very 
 ^ ,ij likely, as has been conjectured, William Calvert, Raisley Calvert's brother. But no 
 
 theory removes all the difficulties. See Mr. Knight's notes on the poem, " Knight's 
 
 Wordsworth," II. 307-9, and Appendix. 
 
 ineeJ 
 
J 
 
 134 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Beyond the limits of the garden and the orchard, up on the 
 heights above the old Ambleside road, and round the crescent 
 at the head of the lake — Easedale opening on the other side, 
 and Dunmail Raise rising up behind — how full was the tide of 
 poetry between 1800 and 1808 ! Hammer Scar and the Helm 
 and Silver How, there they all are ; down Easedale yonder, 
 runs the rivulet by which the poet roamed " in the confusion of 
 his heart " one April morning ; the rivulet which — 
 
 " Sent forth such sallies of glad sound, that all 
 Which I till then had heard, appeared the voice 
 Of common pleasure : beast and bird, the lamb, 
 The shepherd's dog, the linnet and the thrush 
 Vied with this waterfall, and made a song, 
 Which, while I listened, seemed like the wild growth 
 Or hke some natural produce of the air, 
 That could not cease to be." 
 
 Very different associations cling to " the boisterous brook of 
 Greenhead Ghyll " which tumbles down through a wild chink 
 in the hills that rise on the right about half a mile out of 
 Grasmere as you mount the Raise northwards ; for there is the 
 ** unfinished sheepfold," and there (as Wordsworth arranged 
 certain facts) the tragedy of MicJiael was accomplished. Up 
 the Raise road to Wythburn and Thirlmere, toiled the 
 Waggoner's horses. Stone-Arthur is on the right, the ^* Eminence 
 of these our hills " — which can 7iot be seen from the Dove 
 Cottage orchard, though it suited the poet to say that it could — 
 the hill which, as William and Dorothy walked on the road, 
 seemed to restore their hearts with its " deep quiet " ; in 
 truth— 
 
 " The loneliest place we have among the clouds." 
 
 Dorothy named it after her brother — 
 
 " She who dwells with me, whom I have loved 
 With such communion that no place on earth 
 
 Can ever be a solitude to me, , , 
 
 Hath to this lonely summit given my Name." '',, 7--'' 
 
 Was that the mountain-top upon which the star listened to 
 the voices of earth on that September evening in 1806, when 
 the poet had *'just read in a newspaper that the dissolution of 
 Mr. Fox was hourly expected " ? What an evening for such a 
 
 
GRASMERE 135 
 
 poet to realize that such a man was passing "to breathless 
 Nature's dark abyss ! " Wordsworth had loved Fox because he 
 loved French liberty ; for him he was both good and great. 
 
 " Loud is the Vale ! the Voice is up 
 With which she speaks when storms are gone, 
 A mighty unison of streams ! 
 Of all her Voices, One ! 
 
 " Loud is the Vale ;— this inland Depth 
 In peace is roaring like the Sea ; 
 Yon star upon the mountain-top 
 Is listening quietly. 
 
 When the great and good depart 
 What is it more than this — 
 
 "That Man, who is from God sent forth, 
 Doth yet again to God return ?" 
 
 Up towards the wild V^hite-moss, across which comes the 
 highest route from Rydal, and quite near the Town End 
 Cottage, there are at least two spots sacred to genius. There 
 is the "stately Fir grove," which was *'a favourite haunt with 
 us all," and which offered a grateful shelter in the snowy days 
 of the first winter at Grasmere. It was — 
 
 " A cloistral place 
 Of refuge, with an unencumbered floor. 
 Here, in soft covert, on the shallow snow, 
 And sometimes, on a speck of visible earth, 
 The redbreast near me hopped." 
 
 Here would come stray sheep, "stragglers from some 
 mountain-flock," surveying the pacing poet "with suspicious 
 stare "— 
 
 " Huddling together from two fears— the fear 
 Of me and of the storm." 
 
 And, as we shall find in the next chapter, the place had 
 deeper and dearer associations. In that direction, too, a few 
 hundred yards from the cottage, one autumn day in 1800, 
 Wordsworth met the hero of Resolution and Independence, an 
 old leech-gatherer bent double, with an apron and a night-cap, 
 who was on his way to Carlisle to try to make a living by 
 selling "godly books." He told him his story, and the poet 
 afterwards placed him in a different setting of scenery. It 
 
 I 
 
136 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 was not at Grasmere but on Barton Fell, near the north- 
 eastern end of Ullswater, that Wordsworth walked one morning 
 after a night of wind and rain — 
 
 " There was a roaring in the wind all night ; 
 The rain came heavily and fell in floods ; 
 But now the sun is rising calm and bright ; 
 The birds are singing in the distant woods ; 
 Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods ; 
 The Jay makes answer as the Magpie chatters ; 
 And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters. 
 
 " All things that love the sun are out of doors ; 
 The sky rejoices in the morning's birth ; 
 The grass is bright with rain-drops ; — on the moors 
 The hare is running races in her mirth ; 
 And with her feet she from the plashy earth 
 Raises a mist, that, glittering in the sun, 
 Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run." 
 
 It was there and then that the poet fell into despondency ; 
 that— • 
 
 " Fears and fancies thick upon me came ; 
 Dim sadness — and blind thoughts, I knew not, nor could name." 
 
 He felt himself little better than an idler: he thought of 
 Chatterton, of Burns ; he was in Burns's mood when he sang — 
 
 "All in this mottie, misty clime, 
 I backward mus'd on wasted time. 
 How I had spent my youthfu' prime, 
 
 And done nae-thing, 
 But stringin' blethers up in rhyme, ^ 
 
 For fools to sing." v 
 
 Recollecting the emotion in tranquillity, he associated with 
 his walk on Barton Fell, the leech-gatherer he met near Dove , 
 Cottage ; he placed him at his trade by a lonely pool ; the old .; 
 man stood out before his memory, before his imagination, 
 a completely idealized figure, " not all alive, nor dead," reveal- 
 ing himself in simile after simile — 
 
 " As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie * 
 
 Couched on the bald top of an eminence ; I 
 Wonder to all who do the same espy. 
 
 By what means it could thither come, and whence ; i 
 
 So that it seems a thing endued with sense : i 
 
 Eo y 
 
 rli:: 
 
GRASMERE 137 
 
 Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf 
 Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself. 
 
 Upon the margin of that moorish flood 
 Motionless as a cloud the old Man stood, 
 Jj That heareth not the loud winds when they call 
 
 And moveth all together, if it move at all." 
 
 m0 
 
 As he stirred the pool in an almost hopeless task, and for 
 a pittance which it were mockery to call a livelihood, and yet 
 kept his cheerfulness and dignity, his "rights of a man," he 
 became for the poet the permanent symbol of resolution and 
 independence ; so that he — 
 
 \ 
 
 Could have laughed himself to scorn to find 
 In that decrepit Man so firm a mind." 
 
 iency 
 
 !?ht 
 
 By the side of the middle road, and overlooking the lake, 
 stands the " Wishing-Gate," near which Wordsworth met " The 
 Sailor's Mother." Further on, on the Rydal side of the hill, 
 where the three roads into Grasmere diverge, were The Beggars 
 about whom Dorothy told her brother. 
 
 In 1802, not much more than two years after the brother 
 and sister came to Grasmere, they went across the mountains 
 into Yorkshire to fetch William's bride, Mary Hutchinson. 
 Before starting, William wrote A Farewell to his home, of 
 which the whole may well be quoted, not only for its beauty, 
 but because of its clear showing of their life in the place — 
 
 " Farewell, thou little Nook of mountain ground, 
 Thou rocky corner in the lowest stair 
 Of that magnificent temple which doth bound 
 One side of one whole vale with grandeur rare ; 
 Sweet garden-orchard, eminently fair, 
 The loveliest spot that man hath ever found, 
 Farewell ! — we leave thee to Heaven's peaceful care. 
 Thee, and the Cottage which thou dost surround. 
 
 " Our boat is safely anchored by the shore. 
 And there will safely ride when we are gone ; 
 The flowering shrubs that deck our humble door 
 Will prosper, though untended and alone : 
 Fields, goods, and far-off chattels we have none : 
 These narrow bounds contain our private store 
 Of things earth makes, and sun doth shine upon ; 
 Here are they in our sight — we have no more. 
 
A- 
 
 138 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 " Sunshine and shower be with you, bud and bell ! 
 For two months now in vain we shall be sought ; 
 We leave you here in solitude to dwell 
 With these our latest gifts of tender thought ; 
 Thou, like the morning, in thy saffron coat, 
 Bright gowan, and marsh-marigold, farewell ! 
 Whom from the borders of the Lake we brought, 
 And placed together near our rocky Well. ^^ ■ 
 
 " 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 ! i 
 
 — A gentle Maid, whose heart is lowly bred, ji:. 
 
 Whose pleasures are in wild fields gathered, 
 With joyousness, and with a thoughtful cheer, 
 Will come to you ; to you herself will wed ; 
 And love the blessed life that we lead here. ^' 
 
 lEC 
 
 " Dear spot ! which we have watched with tender heed, ^'^■ 
 
 Bringing thee chosen plants and blossoms blown 
 Among the distant mountains, flower and weed. 
 Which thou hast taken to thee as thy own, 
 Making all kindness registered and known ; 
 Thou for our sakes, though Nature's child indeed, 
 Fair in thyself and beautiful alone. 
 Hast taken gifts which thou dost little need. 
 
 " And O most constant, yet most fickle Place, 
 That hast thy wayward moods, as thou dost show 
 To them who look not daily on thy face. ; 
 Who, being loved, in love no bounds dost know. 
 And say'st, when we forsake thee, ' Let them go ! ' 
 Thou easy-hearted Thing, with Thy wild race 
 Of weeds and flowers, till we return be slow, 
 And travel with the year at a soft pace. 
 
 " Help us to tell Her tales of years gone by, 
 And this sweet spring, the best beloved and best ; 
 Joy will be flown in its mortality ; 
 Something must stay to tell us of the rest. 
 Here, thronged with primroses, the steep rock's breast 
 Glittered at evening like a starry sky ; 
 And in this bush our Sparrow built her nest, 
 Of which I sang one song that will not die. 
 
 " O happy Garden ! whose seclusion deep 
 Hath been so friendly to industrious hours ; 
 And to soft slumbers, that did gently steep 
 Our spirits, canying with them dreams of flowers, 
 
GRASMERE 139 
 
 And wild notes warbled among leafy bowers ; 
 Two burning months let summer overleap, 
 And, coming back with Her who will be ours, 
 Into thy bosom we again shall creep." 
 
 After Wordsworth's descriptive and allusive Grasmere 
 oetry, the next best original authorities for the Grasmere life 
 re Dorothy's Journals, and Wordsworth's central poetry, which 
 vais, in its fulness, planned and carried out there, at Dove 
 Cottage up to 1808 ; then, from 1808 to 181 1, at Allan Bank, 
 ound the head of the lake ; and at Grasmere Parsonage, from 
 811 to 1813. 
 
 One side of the life, its daily character, its occupations, joys, 
 md trials, is faithfully mirrored in Dorothy's Journals. If by a 
 )oetic life is meant a life of " plain living and high thinking," 
 )f simplicity and communion with Nature, surely no life more 
 )oetic than this one was ever lived. And, as in the west 
 ountry, so now here among the Lakes, the part played by 
 Dorothy was as important, as significant, as the part played by 
 W"illiam — 
 
 " She gave me eyes, she gave me ears, 
 A heart, the fountain of sweet tears, 
 And love and thought and joy." 
 
 If that was true in the garden of childhood by the Derwent, 
 f it was true among the coombs of Quantock and in the groves 
 )f Alfoxden, it was equally true in the holy place of Grasmere. 
 If William was the interpreter of Nature, Dorothy was its ^ 
 registrar. And, as at Alfoxden her observation and registration 
 were those of a poet and not of a naturalist, so was it at Gras- 
 mere. " More than half a poet " she records that she felt in 
 one moment of special rapture ; but indeed she was wholly, if 
 but potentially, a poet at all times. There is, in the later as in 
 the earlier Journals, in the utterance of maturest womanhood 
 as in the effervescence of a girl's enthusiasm, the same devotion 
 to the beautiful; the same spontaneity and orginality of 
 expression ; the same charm of phrase ; the same startling 
 vigour, at once realistic and imaginative, of epithet and simile. 
 Her observation has an artist's minuteness ; it gives material 
 for a thousand pictures. The commonest things are seen 
 afresh, and invested with undying interest. Is it the old moon 
 in the new moon's arms ? " On Friday evening the moon hung 
 
lii!: 
 
 ina:.; 
 
 140 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 over the northern side of the highest point of Silver How, like \^^- 
 a gold ring snapped in two, and shaven off at the ends. Within '^'' 
 this ring lay the circle of the round moon, as distinctly to be 
 seen as ever the enlightened moon is. William had observed 
 the same appearance at Keswick." Is it a birch tree in a 
 strong October wind ? " It was yielding to the gusty windj'^ 
 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 stem and branches, but it was like a spirit of water. . . . The}|"^'- 
 other birch trees that were near it looked bright and cheerful, 
 but it was a creature by its own self among them." What effects' 
 on the water she saw ; what mi7inticB and mysteries of colour !| is*' 
 " Rydal was very beautiful, with spear-shaped streaks of polished j!"^^ 
 steel." "The moon shone like herrings in the water." "We 
 walked round Rydal lake, rich, calm, streaked, very beautiful." 
 " We amused ourselves for a long time in watching the breezes, 
 some as if they came from the bottom of the lake, spread in a 
 circle, brushing along the surface of the water, and growing more 
 delicate [and] as it were thinner, and of a paler colour till they 
 died away." " We walked before tea by Bainriggs to observe 
 the many-coloured foliage. The oaks dark green with yellow 
 leaves, the birches generally still green, some near the waterf-"- - 
 yellowish, the sycamore crimson and crimson-tufted, the mountain 
 ash a deep orange, the common ash lemon-colour, but many 
 ashes still fresh in their peculiar green, those that were dis- 
 coloured near the water." What intimacy with moon and stars ! 
 " The moon shone upon the waters below Silver How, and 
 above it hung (combining with Silver How on one side) a bowl-i 
 shaped moon, the curve downwards ; the white fields ; glittering 
 roof of Thomas Ashburner's house ; the dark yew tree ; the^ 
 white fields, gay and beautiful. William lay with his curtains 
 open that he might see it." " O, the unutterable darkness of 
 the sky, and the earth below the moon, and the glorious bright-, 
 ness of the moon itself! There was a vivid sparkling streak of 
 light at this end of Rydal Water, but the rest was very dark, 
 and Loughrigg Fell and Silver How were white and bright, aS' 
 if they were covered with hoar frost. The moon retired again,' 
 and appeared and disappeared several times before I reached 
 home." "A sober starlight evening. The stars not shiningj^r.:^ 
 as it were with all their brightness when they were visible, and 
 
 ec.:.: 
 
 (fu. 
 
 iiG :.. 
 f.c:. 
 
taatiful, 
 breezes! 
 
 I GRASMERE 141 
 
 lometimes hiding themselves behind small greying clouds, that 
 lassed soberly along." "Jupiter was very glorious above the 
 i^mbleside hills, and one large star hung over the corner of the 
 tills on the opposite side of Rydal Water." " When we returned 
 lany stars were out, the clouds were moveless. . . . Jupiter 
 ehind. Jupiter at least we call him, but William says we always 
 all the largest star Jupiter." 
 
 As at Alfoxden, so here, Dorothy entered deeply into her 
 
 rother's work. Yet the Journals do not show that she gave 
 
 im much direct help except that of an amanuensis — which, 
 
 ideed, in the case of one so marvellously averse from writing 
 
 s Wordsworth, was no small benefit. She was aware of each 
 
 xliilie#iece of his work, and intensely, lovingly, sympathetic with him 
 
 "W 3 it all. Sometimes one feels as if the sympathy were too 
 
 sminine and sentimental to be invigorating. After the manner 
 
 f poets, Wordsworth was fastidious, neurotic, and moody in his 
 
 e-iinft^ork ; and one feels, at times, that it would have been good if 
 
 :7[iior( is sister had scolded or laughed at him. " We sat by the fire, 
 
 [ithej md did not walk, but read The Pedlar ^ thinking it done; but 
 
 osem A/", could find fault with one part of it. It was uninteresting, 
 
 nd must be altered. Poor William ! " " We read the first 
 
 )art and were delighted with it, but William afterwards got to 
 
 yjp,taii ome ugly place, and went to bed tired out." Writing The 
 
 Uech Gatherer " tired " him " to death." " William worked at The ^ 
 
 Leech GatJierer almost incessantly from morning till tea-time. 
 
 . . I was oppressed and sick at heart, for he wearied himself 
 
 o death. After tea he wrote two stanzas in the manner of 
 
 Thomson's Castle of Indolence, and was tired out." " William did 
 
 lot sleep till three o'clock." " William very nervous. After he 
 
 ...jtliivas in bed, haunted with altering The Rainbow'^ There is a 
 
 rtaiiii frequent recurrence of this kind of thing. We feel that it tends 
 
 ^g5S( to discredit the plain living and high thinking at Dove Cottage, 
 
 .jjjigli and that Dorothy took it too seriously. 
 
 ^( If William's moods and difficulties were a trouble, and 
 jyjjji sometimes an unreasonable trouble, to Dorothy's peace, a 
 Ujj,j ieeper and more real trouble came to her sensitive emotional 
 jjgji nature through Coleridge. Ever since the fateful moment in 
 ^ch( '79^ when she had seen him leap the fence at Racedown, and 
 jjjjjji, had wondered at his talk and eyes, Coleridge had furnished its 
 yj^j, most powerful human element to Dorothy's life and her brother's. 
 
 velloi 
 
 ■.: man' 
 zi di: 
 ■its 
 ';•", ani 
 I'm 
 ■.irterici 
 
 I 
 
142 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 It was Coleridge, we remember, Coleridge at Nether Stowey, 
 that drew the Wordsworths into Somerset ; and who could 
 forget the trinity that they made there ; the haunted stretch of 
 road between Nether Stowey and Alfoxden ; th^i mysterious 
 intellectual commerce between Coleridge and Dorothy, invest- 
 ing some of the choicest phraseology of The Ancient Mariner 
 and Christabel with a doubtful parentage ; who could forget 
 the November walk to Lynton, and what came of it ? Cole- 
 ridge seemed to have gained no moral strength from his 
 sojourn in Germany. He was now nearing thirty, but he 
 was not improving in character. Impecuniousness, irresolu- 
 tion, desultoriness, and vagrancy, concerted demons of one 
 injurious brood, had possession of him and would not let go ; 
 and his wonderful genius only quickened their baleful activity. 
 When the Wordsworths settled at Grasmere, Coleridge had 
 been five years a married man, and the second of his two sons, 
 Derwent was born during their first summer at Dove Cottage. 
 Yet the marriage, for some reason, was a failure ; it seemed to ji 
 share the blight which had fallen on the Pantisocracy scheme ;| 
 of which it had originally formed part. Mrs. Coleridge was theji 
 mother of Coleridge's children ; but she was little besides to 
 him. The dangerous habit of finding his pleasures and com- 
 panionships elsewhere than at home he had indulged from the 
 beginning, and it grew upon him. We remember how, like a 
 hungry-hearted lover, he wrote to Thomas Poole about his 
 coming to Stowey. Two anchors, indeed, and two anchors 
 only held the poor drifting creature : his feeling for Poole, and u 
 his feeling for the Wordsworths. By the Wordsworths he was 
 held the more firmly; and in the summer of 1800 he settled' 
 (if any alighting of his could be called settling) at Greta Hall, 
 Thereafter for many years, though with intervals of varyingj 
 length, he was constantly with the Wordsworths, delighting 
 them, grieving them, enriching them, preying on them. Hej 
 might turn up any stormy night, wet with the driving rain onl 
 the Raise or on a shoulder of Helvellyn, and when would he gcj 
 away again ? The dutiful Wordsworth loved him and lamented' 
 over him — 
 
 " Never sun on living creature shone 
 Who more devout enjoyment with us took : 
 Here on his hours he hung as on a book, 
 
AMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 
 
 BY WASHINGTON AI LSTON IN 1814 
 
 \ 
 
Dor:: 
 
 is::: 
 ten. 
 
 k.:L' 
 
 KC:: : 
 
 
GRASMERE 143 
 
 On his own time here would he float away, 
 
 As doth a fly upon a summer brook ; 
 
 But go to-morrow, or beHke to-day, 
 
 Seek for him, — he is fled ; and whither none can say." 
 
 " Thus often would he leave our pleasant home, 
 
 d why not, pray ? Had he not a home of his own, a wife 
 I three children, and quite a " position," all the neighbours 
 dngpaid their respects at Greta Hall ?] 
 
 And find elsewhere his business or delight ; 
 
 Out of our Valley's limits did he roam ; 
 
 Full many a time, upon a stormy night, 
 
 His voice came to us from the neighbouring height : 
 
 Oft could we see him driving full in view 
 
 At mid-day when the sun was shining bright ; 
 
 What ill was on him, what he had to do, 
 
 A mighty wonder bred among our quiet crew." 
 
 Dorothy's Journal is full of Coleridge, full of the old afifec- 
 ►nate appreciation, full also of a keener pain. If Coleridge 
 IS not at Dove Cottage, or the Wordsworths were not at 
 ■eta Hall, there were long letters — letters which gave trouble 
 d sometimes took away sleep. " At eleven o'clock Coleridge 
 me " [this was August 29, 1800], " when I was walking in the 
 11 clear moonshine in the garden. He came over Helvellyn. 
 illiam was gone to bed, and John also, worn out with his ride 
 und Coniston. We sate and chatted till half-past three . . , 
 Dleridge reading a part of ChristabeL Talked much about the 
 ountains, etc., etc." A few days later on the night of Grasmere 
 air : " It was a lovely moonlight night. The moonlight shone 
 ily upon the village. It did not eclipse the village lights, and 
 le sound of dancing and merriment came along the still air. 
 walked with Coleridge and William up the lane, and by the 
 lurch, and there lingered with Coleridge in the garden. John 
 id William were both gone to bed and all the lights out." 
 aturday, October, 4 : " Coleridge came in while we were at 
 "inner, very wet. We talked till twelve o'clock." Next morning : 
 Coleridge read Christabel a second time ; we had increasing 
 leasure. A delicious morning. . . . Coleridge and I walked to 
 .mbleside after dark." On some of these occasions "Sara" 
 Virs. Coleridge] formed one of the happy group, and there 
 
144 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 seemed no separate feeling. But it was far*' from being I 
 happiness. Once, after a little visit to Keswick, Dorothy wrot : 
 " Every sight and every sound reminded me of Coleridge — de.; 
 dear fellow, of his many talks to us, by day and by night, of 1 
 dear things. I was melancholy, and could not talk, but at 1 t 
 I cured my heart by weeping. . . . O ! how many, may 
 reasons have I to be anxious for him." What were they, ai 
 why was Dorothy so distressed? Surely we know enough )f 
 Coleridge to know what they were. Were not all the proble.s 
 about him summed up in the question which, according o 
 Wordsworth, was constantly put by the "quiet crew" at D« e 
 Cottage — 
 
 " What ill was on him, what he had to do " ? 
 
 W/iat ill ivas on him ? For one thing, he had bad heal . ; 
 he was rheumatic and neuralgic ; he sometimes had inflammat n 
 of the eyes. His irregular ways, his long walks in wind rd 
 rain, were not the best regimen for such a case. Did Doro ly 
 and her brother know that he often fought pain and discom!rt 
 with doses of opium ? Probably they either knew or suspect d. 
 Anyhow, they knew that Sara was little, and increasingly lite, 
 to Coleridge, and that Greta Hall was no home. That was lid 
 enough. Then what Coleridge "had to do " ; that was anotsr 
 tormenting problem. The second part of Christabel was ill 
 very well ; it was nearly as beautiful, if not so magical, so 
 entrancing, as the first part ; but it left the poem a tantali2ig 
 fragment, and what next.'* Nay, even Christabel brought in 
 nothing; it was not published until i8i6, when Lord Byra's 
 insight and kindness drew it from its obscurity. Desultorinis, 
 irresolution, vagrancy, reinforced more and more by wik 
 health, opium, and unhappiness, or something very near it in 
 married life — they were ruining Coleridge, and his genius ccld 
 do hardly anything to stop them. At thirty what Carlyle ;id 
 of him at nearly sixty was already painfully true : " To the rin 
 himself Nature had given, in high measure, the seeds of a ncde 
 endowment ; and to unfold it had been forbidden him. A 
 subtle lynx-eyed intellect, tremulous pious sensibility to all 
 good and all beautiful ; truly a ray of empyrean light ;— lut 
 imbedded in such weak laxity of character, in such indoleites 
 and esuriences as had made strange work with it. Once mre, 
 the tragic story of a high endowment with an insufficient wi j' 
 
JGRASMERE 145 
 
 How could such a spectacle, going on under their eyes, fail 
 'to grieve the Wordsworths ? How, especially, could it fail to 
 .■ harrow Dorothy's sensitive soul ? It is impossible to read the 
 . Grasmere Journals without realizing how vital was the com- 
 gj^ " ' panionship between Dorothy Wordsworth and Coleridge, and 
 ' ^''' how mutual was their sympathy. It was the most natural 
 ^ , thing in the world, and, of course, the most irreproachable 
 »• ^ ! thing in the world. Yet it was dangerous, perhaps ; dangerous 
 '^' to Dorothy's peace and to Coleridge's ; and if gossip said that 
 Mrs. Coleridge was jealous, can we wonder ? 
 
 In April, 1802, Coleridge, looking from Greta Hall at the 
 spring sunset, and the new moon in a yellow-green west across 
 ' Derwentwater, groaned out his heart-sickness in his famous 
 • :aiiiealij Dejection ode. Never did the devil of despondency speak in 
 vjami more unmistakable tones ; yet how through a poet's lips the 
 ill wind i accent;s come! Here is still the incommunicable magic of the 
 DidDorol Ancient Mariner and of Christahel. He sees the dim circle 
 "idiscoinl within the curve of the crescent moon, and he is haunted by a 
 :r suspect wild and ominous stanza from Sir Patrick Spens — 
 
 enoogl I 
 'Probb 
 
 li'l^lylit 
 frit was 
 
 ■ brought 
 ,:rj Byn 
 lesultoritt 
 .by 
 ; oear it, 
 
 ; of a DO 
 
 " Well ! If the Bard was weather-wise, who made 
 The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence, 
 
 Wi anot This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence 
 
 \>l was Unroused by winds, that ply a busier trade 
 
 Than those which mould yon cloud in lazy flakes, 
 Or the dull sobbing draft, that moans and rakes 
 Upon the strings of this ^Eolian lute 
 
 Which better far were mute. 
 For lo ! the New-moon winter-bright ! 
 And overspread with phantom light, 
 (With swimming phantom-light o'erspread 
 
 But rimmed and circled by a silver thread) 
 I see the old Moon in her lap, foretelling 
 ^^^^^ The coming-on of rain and squally blast." 
 
 " . I, O that the omen might be fulfilled, that the tempest would 
 burst : perhaps it might stir his stagnant gloom ! When was 
 such gloom more sternly portrayed ? — 
 
 " A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, 
 j,,jj(.J A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, 
 
 '^ ' Which finds no natural outlet, no relief, 
 
 In word, or sigh, or tear." 
 
 indolei 
 Once ID' 
 ■out ffil 
 
 Tranquil Nature, the aspect of Nature of which he had 
 
146 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 sung in his Nightingale poem, can do nothing for him. It is of 
 Wordsworth that he thinks as he looks at the beauty of this 
 western sky, and it is to Wordsworth (literary fictions notwith- 
 standing) that he makes his sad complaint : — 
 
 " In wan and heartless mood 
 Have I been gazing on the western sky 
 
 And still I gaze — and with how blank an eye 
 And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars, 
 
 That give away their motion to the stars ; 
 Those stars, that glide behind them or between, 
 
 Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen ; 
 Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew 
 
 In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue ; 
 I see them all so excellently fair, 
 
 I see, not feel, how beautiful they are ! " 
 
 It is joy that he lacks, the joy that makes beauty, and must 
 be within as well as without. 
 
 " And I must think, do all I can ^ 
 
 That there was pleasure there," 
 
 Wordsworth had written, as he lounged in the Alfoxden grove 
 in springtime ; but now Coleridge was telling him that the sad 
 heart cannot feel the pleasure — c> 
 
 " I may not hope from outward forms to win 
 The passion and the life, whose fountains are within." 
 
 As we read on, we feel that *'joy," with its riotous schoolboy 
 associations, is hardly the right word for the inward heaven 
 which Coleridge has lost. " O pure of heart " he cries to his 
 brother poet — 
 
 " O pure of heart ! thou need'st not ask of me 
 What this strong music in the soul may be ! 
 What, and wherein it doth exist, 
 This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist, 
 This beautiful and beauty-making power.'^ 
 
 If we must call it joy, it is at least 
 
 " Joy that ne'er was given. 
 
 Save to the pure, and in their purest hour, H i 
 
 Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower. | . 
 
GRASMERE 147 
 
 Joy ... is the spirit and the power, 
 Which wedding Nature gives to us in dower, 
 A new Earth and new Heaven, 
 Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud — 
 Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud — 
 
 We in ourselves rejoice ! 
 And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, 
 All melodies the echoes of that voice, 
 All colours a suffusion from that light." 
 
 As we go on, we find that it is indeed more than joy, in any 
 vulgar sense of that word, that he has lost — 
 
 " Afflictions bow me down to earth ; 
 Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth ; 
 
 But oh ! each visitation 
 Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, 
 
 My shaping spirit of Imagination." 
 
 jdnnijl Imagination ! Let us think what that word stood for to the 
 
 two poets and critics, and then realize what it was for Coleridge 
 to feel that it was growing powerless within him ! 
 
 At last the prediction of the lunar omen is fulfilled : the 
 wind comes with its voices, and makes play in the strings of 
 the ^olian harp. Like Browning in James Lees Wife^ he 
 
 mesa^ tries to interpret the wind's messages; then his sleepless mind 
 travels to Dove Cottage, and asks a blessing for its inmates. 
 He prays that his friend's **joy" may never fail — 
 
 " 'Tis midnight, but small thoughts have I of sleep : 
 Full seldom may my friend such vigils keep ! 
 
 Visit him [so we ought to read it] gentle Sleep ! with wings of healing, 
 And may this storm be but a mountain-birth, 
 May all the stars hang bright above his dwelling, 
 Silent as though they watched the sleeping Earth ! 
 With light heart may he rise, 
 Gay fancy, cheerful eyes, 
 Joy lift his spirit, joy attune his voice ; 
 To him may all things live, from pole to pole, 
 
 Their life the eddying of his living soul ! 
 O simple spirit, guided from above, 
 Dear William, friend devoutest of my choice, 
 Thus mayest thou ever, evermore rejoice." 
 
 Five years later, in another self-pouring, Coleridge told 
 what the Wordsworths had been in his life. He had just heard 
 
148 WORDSAVORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Wordsworth read through The Prelude, dedicated to himself, and 
 was moved to fresh admiration — admiration at once strengthened 
 and embittered by self-pity and self-contempt. He saw Words- 
 worth seated — 
 
 " In the choir 
 Of ever enduring men." 
 
 His song was immortal — 
 
 " Dear shall it be to every human heart, 
 To me how more than dearest ! me on whom 
 Comfort from thee, and utterance of thy love. 
 Came with such heights and depths of harmony, 
 Such sense of wings uplifting, that its might 
 Scatter'd and quell'd me, till my thoughts became 
 A bodily tumult ; and thy faithful hopes, 
 Thy hopes of me, dear friend, by me unfelt I 
 Were troublous to me, almost as a voice, 
 Famihar once, and more than musical ; 
 As a dear woman's voice to one cast forth, 
 A wanderer with a worn-out heart forlorn. 
 Mid strangers pining with untended wounds. 
 O Friend, too well thou know'st, of what sad years 
 The long suppression had benumb'd my soul, 
 That, even as life returns upon the drown'd. 
 The unusual joy awoke a throng of pains — 
 Keen pangs of Love, awakening, as a babe 
 Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart ! 
 And fears self-will'd that shunn'd the eye of Hope ; 
 And Hope that scarce would know itself from Fear ; 
 Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain, 
 And genius given, and knowledge, won in vain, 
 And all, which I had cuU'd in wood-walks wild, 
 And all which patient toil had rear'd, and all 
 
 Commune with Thee had opened out — but flowers w 1 j? 
 
 Strew'd on my corse, and burnt upon my bier, ; 
 
 In the same coffin, for the self-same grave ! " ; 
 
 ■I 
 
 He must break off this egoistic wailing — Byronic, almost, in * i' 
 
 its last phrasing, but removed from Byronism by its reality 
 and intense sincerity — and think of his generous friend — 
 
 " That way no more ! — and ill beseems it me, 
 Who came a welcomer, in herald's guise, 
 Singing of glory and futurity, 
 To wander back on such unhealthful road 
 Plucking the poisons of self-harm ! Thou, too, Friend, 
 
GRASMERE 149 
 
 Impair not thou the memory of that hour 
 Of thy communion with my nobler mind 
 By pity or grief, already felt too long ! " 
 
 Readers of The Prelude remember how the connection with 
 Coleridge runs through it like a golden thread. With this 
 mournful echo of Coleridge's self-blame in our ears, we ought 
 to listen to Wordsworth's words, which are equally sincere. 
 ** Of thee," he cries — 
 
 " Of thee, 
 Shall I be silent ? O capacious Soul ! " 
 
 When Wordsworth's spirit was wounded and shattered, Cole- 
 ridge helped to comfort and build it up — 
 
 " Placed on this earth to love and understand, 
 And from thy presence shed the light of love, 
 Shall I be mute, ere thou be spoken of ? 
 Thy kindred influence [kindred, he means, with Dorothy's, 
 
 of which he had been speaking before] 
 Thy kindred influence to my heart of hearts 
 Did also find its way." 
 
 Nay, in this his sincerest moment, he could speak of Cole- 
 ridge's as a " useful " life, and look forward to its triumph — 
 
 " Oh ! yet a few short years of useful life, 
 And all will be complete, thy race be run. 
 Thy monument of glory will be raised." 
 
 We can imagine what it must have been for Coleridge to 
 hear The Prelude read through from beginning to end. The 
 Prelude and The Excursion — in reality, surely, as well in their 
 author's purpose, the central works of his genius and his life — 
 are as truly a product of Grasmere as the shorter poems which 
 reflect its lighter phases. The Prelude^ begun, as we remember, 
 at the end of the Goslar winter, was completed at Dove Cottage ; 
 The Excursion, begun, in a sense, at Racedown, was proceeded 
 with at Dove Cottage, though mainly written at Allan Bank. 
 The Grasmere years were a period, not of desultory composition, 
 but of careful logical planning, coherent theories, and acute criti- 
 cism. Of the criticism we shall hear something in a later 
 chapter; the fruit of all the rest was gathered during the 
 Grasmere years. 
 
 Wordsworth's claim to be a philosophical poet rests, not on 
 
150 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 this or that passage, this or that attitude of mind, but on his 
 ever present, ever operative sense of the Universe, of the whole 
 of things, as, in his judgment, the fitting theme of poetry. It 
 was the Universe that he meant when he spoke of Man of 
 Nature, and of Htunan Life; and we misconceive him, we do 
 him injustice, if we forget this, and think of him as a narrow, 
 limited, local poet. Yet the misconception is most natural — 
 natural by reason alike of his success and his failure. He was 
 limited and local both by deliberate design and by imperfection, 
 the imperfection that waits on the most aspiring genius, the 
 most all-embracing design. 
 
 When Wordsworth locked himself in the recesses of Gras- 
 mere, he meant to do a large poetic work for the good of his 
 fellows. He was conscious, as he said, that " an internal bright- 
 ness " had been granted to him, which he was bound to keep 
 alive ; that he had something which might be imparted by 
 power and effort. In boyhood, and beyond it, his ambition 
 had been the ordinary youthful one — 
 
 "to fill 
 The heroic trumpet with the Muse's breath ! " 
 
 in other words, he meditated an epic of the traditional character, 
 a pageant of heroes, a paraphernalia of battle and conquest, 
 a show of garments rolled in blood. But when in his maturity 
 he came to Dove Cottage, deliberate self-knowledge told him 
 to look elsewhere for immediate subject-matter. A voice 
 seemed to say — 
 
 " Be mild, and cleave to gentle things, 
 Thy glory and thy happiness be there ! " 
 
 There was to be deliberate and systematic limitation ; the 
 gentle things were the pastoral places and folk of Grasmere ; 
 but in the limitation there was to be no loss, no depression of 
 purpose, no pettiness of result. There would still be the epic 
 postulates, aspirations, foes, victory — ; 
 
 " Bounds to be leapt, darkness to be explored." 
 
 "The love, 
 The longing, the contempt, the undaunted quest, 
 All shall survive, though changed their office, all 
 Shall live, it is not in their power to die." 
 
 Nor wa? it only epic grandeur that could be made out oi 
 
GRASMERE 151 
 
 Grasmere; but here also, by cottage doors, bare hills, and 
 tumbling brooks, was the source of those tremendous abstrac- 
 tions in which the human sense of the Universal expresses itself. 
 Here came the '* affecting thoughts " and " dear remembrances " 
 — the "disturbance," as Wordsworth was fond of calling it — 
 which signify that the mind is feeling its way towards " the glory 
 of the sum of things." Here, among lonely shepherds, were the 
 tracks 
 
 " Of Truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, Love, and Hope, 
 
 And melancholy Fear subdued by Faith ; 
 
 Of blessed consolations in distress ; 
 ;' Of moral strength, and intellectual Power ; 
 
 Of joy in widest commonalty spread." 
 
 Here were individuality, conscience, beauty : here, in a word, 
 were Nature and Human Nature interacting, not less, but more 
 sublimely because the human beings were unsophisticated by 
 a complex civilization. Here, folded in this limited actual, was 
 the boundless ideal ; here — 
 
 " A simple produce of the common day," 
 
 were Paradise, Elysian Groves, Fortunate Fields, and all the 
 conventional delights of poesy. It was to be this poet's mission 
 by simple words, free from " poetic diction," " words — 
 
 " Which speak of nothing more than what we are," 
 
 and what the humblest of us are, to win some of the highest 
 triumphs of art ; to 
 
 " Arouse the sensual from their sleep 
 Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain 
 To noble raptures." 
 
 So far, then, we realize the place of the common in Words- 
 worth's design ; and so far we see nothing debasing to the 
 highest, or impoverishing to the richest, conception of poetry. 
 Yet again and again the reader of Wordsworth feels the limita- 
 tion as narrowness, the commonness as triviality. He is aware 
 of prejudice and partiality ; of austerity where there might 
 without offence be more licence ; of severity where there might 
 be indulgence ; of bareness where he would fain see tracery and 
 foliage. Beautiful, lovable, fascinating, as is that lakeland 
 from which he makes his ascent towards the Empyrean, with 
 
152 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 the emerald of its hillsides quickened by abundance of rain, its 
 wind-swept heaths and majestic cloud-scenery, he longs some- 
 times for more glowing heat and mellower moons, for nightingale- 
 haunted thickets and a fuller human pulse. And there are 
 moments even when Wordsworth's Universal seems not wholly 
 free from either the illusory or the conventional ; when the 
 reader doubts whether it is quite true that the primrose of the 
 rock is a moral agent, and is surprised that a poet so often 
 "disturbed by the joy of elevated thoughts " should be also the 
 poet of some of the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, and a contented 
 supporter of Lord Liverpool and Lord Eldon. 
 
 The plan on which Wordsworth was to work out his great i 
 results was a simple one. He was to compose a large poem ' 
 called The Rechise, expounding the sensations and opinions ofjr 
 a poet living in retirement. This poem was to be preceded by 
 an autobiographical poem, The Prelude, showing how the 
 "Recluse" grew out of the child and the boy. With thej 
 exception of the First Book, printed in recent editions of 
 Wordsworth, The Excursion is all of The Recluse that the poet t 
 accomplished. The two works were figured by Wordsworth 
 himself as an ante-chapel leading to a Gothic church. But in 
 the design the smaller poems were by no means left out. They 
 had " such connection with the main work as gave them claim 
 to be likened to the little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses, 
 primarily included in those edifices." 
 
 To begin with the ante-chapel. The fourteen books of The% K 
 Prehtde deal with Wordsworth's development as a poet to thejd j^ 
 stage recorded for us in the conclusion of his Ode on Intimations\v \ " 
 of Immortality, In the last book he portrays the kind of victory,' 
 the kind of power, to which through all trials he had been led. 
 He calls it the " power of a majestic intellect " ; he calls it 
 *' love " ; he calls it " liberty." He compares it, as it masters 
 the darkness of things, to the light of a full moon flooding all c 
 landscape, such as he had once seen from the top of Snowdon 
 after climbing in the moonless part of the night. He calh. 
 himself 1 |l 
 
 " A meditative oft a suffering man " ; f ,* 
 
 yet his lofty, and perhaps slightly over-complacent, self-respect 
 is the dominant note. To this complacency his education lee 
 him ; and how he was led appears in the preceding books. The 
 
 
Jere ars 
 
 "■••3 k 
 
 GRASMERE 153 
 
 ' '^itj iexternals, the mere sources, of influence were school ; Cambridge ; 
 "■'^^- some London life ; France and her Revolution ; the ministra- 
 "'^aie- jtion of Dorothy. But the education itself, as unfolded, e.£^. in 
 Book VIII., Retrospect^ was the great matter. Wordsworth's 
 phrase describes its essence: Love of Nature leading to Love of 
 Man, He tells us first how Nature, as apart from Man, was all 
 in all to him ; and how, as time went on, Humanity also became 
 a source of joy. And when that had fully happened, the work 
 ' '"■ was accomplished, the victory won. 
 
 The Excursion is the record, in unrelieved blank verse, of a 
 
 .long walk made by Wordsworth himself in his own neighbour- 
 
 "'^?re^f:,hood, in company with a humble but intellectual and religious 
 
 ^':e iweii man whom he calls The Wanderer. The Wanderer represents 
 
 two most Words worthian things — the sober, tranquil joy in the 
 
 contemplation of Nature and Man which the poet himself had 
 
 ; reached ; and, secondly, that unsophisticated peasant's view of 
 
 '"iii 'k the world which Wordsworth considered to be so important and 
 
 i.DODS o( so true. In the course of their walk through the Lake country, 
 
 : the poet 1 the poet and his companion discuss the incidents, the simple 
 
 :Tijworti and homely incidents, which they encounter : the history of a 
 
 1 Botiii: ruined cottage; a humble funeral; talks in Grasmere church- 
 
 :l Thej | yard with the parson ; the parson at home ; sunset on the lake. 
 
 -.eniclaiii As the Wanderer stands for the typical natural man according 
 
 ! recesses,; to Wordsworthian ideas, so the whole poem rests on the assump- 
 
 j tion that simple country life and society in a remote but beautiful 
 
 .;t of 1]% I neighbourhood is a proper theme for a great poem, because it is 
 
 '^\\i\ the surface of profound philosophic depths. 
 
 The antithesis in the early books between the Wanderer and 
 
 the " Solitary " is full of significance. For the Wanderer is 
 
 ^ ^-, Wordsworth, the early, and also the healed, restored, Words- 
 
 „ ^^|i5 1 j worth. On the Wanderer, as on Wordsworth, the spirit of Nature 
 
 • early fell. Like Wordsworth, the Wanderer early found out 
 
 that Nature is alive. Through the sense of her power, he was 
 
 led to realize the Love shown forth in her, and from vague awe 
 
 ■■ ^ji; ; he went on to something very near worship. Nowhere in Words- 
 
 ; worth is the intercourse between Man and Nature more fully 
 
 I and characteristically expressed than in the following lines : — 
 
 "He had felt the power 
 Of Nature, and already was prepared, 
 
 m 
 
 -riu j By his intense conceptions, to receive 
 
154 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Deeply the lesson deep of love which he, 
 Whom Nature, by whatever means, has taught 
 To feel intensely, cannot but receive. 
 
 " Such was the Boy — but for the growing Youth 
 What soul was his, when, from the naked top 
 Of some bold headland, he beheld the sun 
 Rise up, and bathe the world in light ! He looked — 
 Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth 
 And ocean's liquid mass, in gladness lay 
 Beneath him : — Far and wide the clouds were touched, 
 And in their silent faces could he read 
 Unutterable love. Sound needed none, 
 Nor any voice of joy ; his spirit drank 
 The spectacle : sensation, soul, and form 
 All melted into him ; they swallowed up 
 His animal being ; in them did he live. 
 And by them did he live ; they were his hfe. 
 In such access of mind, in such high hour 
 Of visitation from the living God, 
 Thought was not ; in enjoyment it expired. 
 No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request ; 
 Rapt into still communion that transcends 
 The imperfect offices of prayer and praise, 
 His mind was a thanksgiving to the power 
 That made him ; it was blessedness and love ! " 
 
 But now, on the other hand, the sceptical, pessimistic 
 Solitary also is Wordsworth, in the second stage of his spiritua 
 experience ; Wordsworth shocked, marred, wounded by the spec 
 tacle of humanity astray. Read Book III., called Despondency 
 and you find the story of a man first delighted, then disgusted 
 with the French Revolution, and left with no faith either i: 
 religion or in virtue. Read Book IV., called Despondenc 
 Corrected, and you find the healed and restored Wordswort 
 arguing with the marred and wounded Wordsworth. 
 
 The two books called The Churchyard among tJie Motmtain 
 are a direct attempt to make the graves of Grasmere churchyar« 
 yield up some of the deepest secrets of universal human nature. 
 
 In the last book, and especially at the beginning of it, w 
 get some of the Wanderer's and Wordsworth's philosophy whicl 
 we could ill afford to do without. We hear of the Universe a 
 active, as alive with hope, desire, and effort ; we hear of Mai 
 apparently the crown and flower of the Universe, as quick wit 
 divine movement which unites childhood with age — 
 

GRASMERE 155 
 
 " Ah ! why in age 
 Do we revert so fondly to the walks 
 Of childhood — but that there the Soul discerns 
 The near memorial footsteps unimpaired 
 Of her own native vigour ; thence can hear 
 Reverberations ; . . . 
 
 " Do not think 
 That good and wise ever will be allowed, 
 Though strength decay, to breathe in such estate 
 As shall divide them wholly from the stir 
 Of hopeful nature." 
 
 Put beside this two other Grasmere poems, the sum and 
 hnax of Wordsworth's poetical achievement there, the lines 
 ^ginning, " My heart leaps up when I behold," and the Ode on 
 itimations of Immortality^ and our image of Wordsworth at his 
 reatest is complete. 
 
T' 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 A SHIPWRECK 
 
 COLERIDGE, though the most important by far of tV. 
 spirits who sojourned with the Words worths at Gra, ^- 
 mere, was not their only guest, even in early days. Sometime 
 Coleridge brought with him a friend of whom he was vei 
 proud, and who h&csimQ persona grata at Town End — Humph 
 Davy, fast becoming recognized as the greatest living chemis 
 ^aAQ^ born in 1778, was some years younger than Wordswor 
 and Coleridge, and was a prodigy of scientific genius. 
 Cornishman, he was educated at Penzance and Truro. Th< 
 his bent was discovered ; and, before he carried his tale 
 on the inevitable journey of all talents, to London, he was, 
 twenty, made Director of Dr. Beddoes' Pneumatic Institution 
 Bristol. Coleridge got to know Davy after his return frol 
 Germany; and in 1807 he was writing: "I was much wi 
 Davey — almost all day." He thought him the most extil 
 ordinary young man he had ever met. Davy used to go 
 Greta Hall to stay with Coleridge, and was, of course, tak^ll 
 over the hills to see the Wordsworths. 
 
 Then there were the Clarksons, husband and wife, of whc| 
 the former was an impassioned opponent of the slave-trade, a 
 may share with Wilberforce the credit of its eventual overthr 
 "Clarkson!" Wordsworth sang in 1807, when the Bill ]| 
 Abolition became law — 
 
 " Clarkson ! it was an obstinate hill to climb : 
 How toilsome — nay, how dire — it was, by thee 
 Is known ; by none, perhaps, so feelingly : 
 But thou, who, starting in thy fervent prime, 
 Didst first lead forth that enterprise sublime, 
 Hast heard the constant Voice its charge repeat, 
 Which, out of thy young heart's oracular seat, 
 First roused thee. — Otrue yoke-fellow of Time, 
 156 
 
A SHIPWRECK 157 
 
 Duty's intrepid liegeman, see, the palm 
 
 Is won, and by all Nations shall be worn ! 
 
 The blood-stained Writing is for ever torn ; 
 
 And thou henceforth wilt have a good man's calm, 
 
 A great man's happiness ; thy zeal shall find 
 
 Repose at length, firm friend of human kind ! " 
 
 Clarkson had a farm near Ullswater on which he had built 
 house; and there were frequent meetings with the Words- 
 )rths, evenings with a quiet game of cards, or rides about 
 ije misty hills, Clarkson on his little galloway. Charles Lloyd, 
 lar of tUbleridge's and Lamb's Birmingham friend, who had settled 
 ■j at Graiwn as a " Laker," lived at Brathay, under Loughrigg, and was 
 >:3eti[ii!tten at Dove Cottage. 
 
 -j In 1803, Coleridge took to the Cottage Sir George Beau- 
 -...ipliitont, of Coleorton in Leicestershire, a descendant of the 
 ::^dieniyamatist, and a painter of some repute, a noble and generous 
 iVordswoiljan, if not a great artist ; and a lifelong friendship began 
 genius, iiich has left deep marks both on Wordsworth's biography 
 m. Md poetry. Beaumont was born in 1753, and was thus fifty 
 his taleoifien he made Wordsworth's acquaintance. He came to the 
 ke was, lakes for their beauty's sake, and was often at Grasmere 
 .Station iitween 1803 and 1806. He loved both Coleridge and Words- 
 rttiirn fro orth, and was eager to promote their friendship and mutual 
 mbwililpfulness. With these things in view, he bought a small 
 -ostextrtate at Applethwaite, near Greta Hall, on which he wished 
 si to go e Wordsworths to live. Though they never did so, Words- 
 oiirse,takforth kept the estate, making it over to his daughter Dora. 
 
 The friendship with this gracious, wealthy, and gifted man 
 
 id his like-minded wife was one of Wordsworth's best posses- 
 
 ^yeaions. Coleorton, four miles south-east of Ashby-de-la-Zouche, 
 
 overthrows a pleasant resort of men of letters and artists. In 1806 
 
 ^ gill lid 1807 Beaumont was building a new house and laying out 
 
 w grounds. He occupied a farmhouse on the estate, and 
 
 lis house he lent to the Wordsworths in the winter of 1806-7, 
 
 leir family having increased beyond the possibilities of com- 
 
 rtable housing at Dove Cottage. Wordsworth was an adept 
 
 : landscape-gardening ; and at Coleorton he not only walked 
 
 p and down composing poetry as usual, but gave advice as 
 
 ) walks, summer-houses, and the like. He wrote to Lady 
 
 eaumont of the spring-days of 1807 — 
 
 ifiofwho 
 
158 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 " Lady ! the sonj,s of spring were in the grove 
 While I was shaping beds for winter flowers, 
 While I was planting green unfading bowers, 
 And shrubs to hang upon the warm alcove, jj 
 
 And sheltering wall ; and still, as fancy wove |j 
 
 The dream, to time and nature's blended powers ' 
 
 I gain this paradise for winter hours, 
 A labyrinth, lady ! which your feet shall rove. 
 Yes ! when the sun of life more feebly shines, 
 Becoming thoughts, I trust, of solemn gloom 
 Or of high gladness you shall hither bring ; 
 And these perennial bowers and murmuring pines 
 Be gracious as the music and the bloom 
 And all the mighty ravishment of spring." 
 
 Beaumont lived till 1827. He was not a great painter, bi 
 he was a great patron of art, for from his collection and h 
 generosity sprang the National Gallery. 
 
 But of all the guests, the dearest and the most sacred w; 
 the earliest, the sailor-brother John, who first walked over in' 
 Grasmere with Wordsworth and Coleridge, and who stayed wii 
 William and Dorothy at Dove Cottage until he had to go 
 join his ship on September 29, 1800. Those nine months- 
 " eight blessed months," his brother afterwards called them- 
 were long enough to make him a permanent feature of the ne 
 life ; they were long enough to endear Grasmere to one wh 
 albeit a brave and competent sailor, had a poet's sensibility ar 
 a poet's heart. Dorothy's Journal tells a good deal of Johr 
 share in the happy summer life, of the walkings and bathini 
 and fishings that went on. It tells also of the moment of partii 
 " in sight of UUswater " : " John left us ... It was a fine da 
 showery, but with sunshine and fine clouds. Poor fellow, n 
 heart was right sad ! I could not help thinking we should s 
 him again, because he was only going to Penrith." 
 
 When John was alone, he specially cared to walk in a fi 
 plantation behind and above the Cottage—that fir-plantati( 
 towards White-moss which all three liked so well. After 1 
 was gone the others realized how much he had paced the 
 alone, when the wind teased beyond the shelter ; they found 
 path, a quarter-deck path, which could have been worn by nor 
 other than his sailor's feet. Now that he had gone back to tl 
 ocean, that silent track seemed eloquent of him and consecrate 
 to his memory ; reminiscence was bringing affection within sig 
 
 1 
 
A SHIPWRECK 159 
 
 of the limits of passion. Emotion was not only " recollected," 
 but born " in tranquillity " ; imagination and idealization were 
 at work. While the brothers were living together, they were 
 affectionate brothers, but no more ; when one was gone his 
 image came " more moving-delicate and full of life " than 
 when they were under the same roof. In the fir-wood — hence- 
 forward " John's Grove " — William began to realize his brother 
 in idealizing him. He seemed the poet, though inarticulate ; 
 the man of finer sensibility. 
 
 " In the shady grove 
 Pleasant conviction flashed upon my mind 
 That, to this opportune recess allured. 
 He had surveyed it with a finer eye, 
 A heart more wakeful ; and had worn the track 
 By pacing here, unwearied and alone. 
 In that habitual restlessness of foot 
 That haunts the Sailor measuring o'er and o'er 
 His short domain upon the vessel's deck. 
 
 fithiD 
 
 When thou had'st quitted Esthwaite's pleasant shore 
 
 Year followed year, my Brother ! and we two 
 
 Conversing not, knew little in what mould 
 
 Each other's mind was fashioned ; and at length, 
 
 When once again we met in Grasmere Vale, 
 
 Between us there was little other bond 
 
 Than common feelings of fraternal love. 
 
 But thou, a Schoolboy, to the sea hadst carried 
 
 Undying recollections ! Nature there 
 
 Was with thee ; she, who loved us both, she still 
 
 Was with thee ; and even so didst thou become 
 
 A silent Poet ; from the solitude 
 
 Of the vast sea didst bring a watchful heart 
 
 Still couchant, an inevitable ear, 
 
 And an eye practis'd like a blind man's touch. 
 
 Back to the joyless Ocean thou art gone ; 
 
 Nor from this vestige of thy musing hours 
 
 Could I withhold thy honour'd name, — and now 
 
 I love the fir-grove with a perfect love." 
 
 A wireless telegraphy of love seemed to play between the 
 fir-grove and the ship at sea. 
 
 ♦' While I gaze . . . 
 
 I think on thee 
 My Brother, and on all which thou hast lost. 
 
160 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Nor seldom, if I lightly guess, while Thou, 
 Muttering the verses which I muttered first 
 Among the mountains, through the midnight watch 
 Art pacing thoughtfully the vessel's deck 
 In some far region, here, while o'er my head, 
 At every impulse of the moving breeze, 
 The fir-grove murmurs with a sea-like sound, 
 Alone I tread this path ; — for aught I know, 
 Timing my steps to thine : and with a store 
 Of undistinguishable sympathies, 
 Mingling most earnest wishes for the day 
 When we, and others whom we love, shall meet 
 A second time, in Grasmere's happy Vale." 
 
 These earnest wishes were for something more than a mere 
 brief sailor's visit. It was John's purpose to leave the sea as | 
 soon as he had made a competence, to bid it farewell, and to 
 settle at Grasmere, adding his means to the slender capital of 
 William and Dorothy. Meanwhile, after the parting on > 
 Michaelmas Day, 1800, his sea life ran smoothly. He joined 
 the Earl of Abergaveujiy, East Indiaman — ''The finest ship 
 in the fleet," he wrote to his sister ; but much of his heart was 
 left at Grasmere. Just before he sailed in the spring of 1801, 
 Wordsworth brought out the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. 
 In this, and in his brother's poetry in general, John was deeply 
 interested ; he was sensitive to its unpopularity, and confident 
 of its essential merit and ultimate success. " Few people," he 
 wrote, " read poetry ; they buy it for the name, read about 
 twenty lines, and if the language is very fine, they are content 
 with praising the whole. Most of William's poetry hnproves 
 upon the second, third, or fourth reading. Now, people in general 
 are not sufficiently interested to try a second reading." And 
 again, " The poems will become popular in time, but it will be 
 by degrees^ " My brother's poetry has a great deal to struggle 
 against ; but I hope it will overcome all : it is certain ly/^?/;2^(^^ 
 ttpon Nature, and that is the best foimdationy And finally, 
 " I do not give myself the smallest concern about them {^Lyrical 
 Ballads']. I am certain they must sell." 
 
 Between 1801 and 1804 the Earl of Abergavenny made 
 two successful voyages to the far East, and before a third was 
 entered on John Wordsworth was put in command of her. 
 William saw him once in London, but there was never time for 
 
 r::^ 
 
 r : 
 
 ElL 
 
 It:: *: 
 be 
 
 'Cl: 
 
A SHIPWRECK 161 
 
 John to go to Westmorland. On one early day in February, 
 the Abergavenny left Portsmouth on what the brothers hoped 
 would have been John's last voyage. It was ; but not as they 
 hoped. On the way down Channel an unskilful pilot was on 
 board ; and in the afternoon of February 5 the ship went 
 aground off Portland Bill. In a few hours she was a total 
 wreck, the greater part of the crew being drowned, and Captain 
 Wordsworth going down " with apparent cheerfulness," " in the 
 very place and point where his duty stationed him." 
 
 In the dark February days the burden of these heavy 
 tidings fell on the little household at Grasmere. There is a 
 soul of goodness in things evil ; and the Wordsworths' loss was 
 the world's gain. For this tragedy drew from Wordsworth, not 
 only two or three of his most beautiful poems, but a note of 
 passion deeper and more thrilling than that evoked by any- 
 thing else in his life — even marriage, even his love for Dorothy. 
 The passion is felt, not only in the verse, but in the intensity of 
 the mourning, which gives a passing eloquence to his frigid and 
 sapless epistolary style. In that year 1805, when the blow 
 came, Wordsworth was in the most perfect maturity of his 
 genius. He had finished The Prelude^ he had finished the 
 Immortality Ode ; it was the year of the Ode to DtUy^ of The 
 Waggoner ; he had just completed some of his most beautiful 
 Grasmere work, and his first series of great sonnets. The 
 feeling of a great poet at the height of his powers was stirred 
 to its deepest depths ; imagination kindled every spark of 
 reminiscence into a glowing flame. 
 
 Dorothy wrote to a friend — " It does me good to weep for 
 
 ^f^[^ jiim. . . . My consolations come to me ... in gusts of feei- 
 ng. ... I know it will not always be so. The time will come 
 -vhen the light of the setting sun upon these mountain-tops 
 
 ostnigs* yjii Ijg ^g heretofore, a pure joy; not the sa,me gladness — that 
 :an never be — but yet a joy even more tender. . . . Pure he 
 vas, and innocent as a child. . . . The stars and moon were 
 us chief delight. He made of them his companions when he 
 /as at sea, and was never tired of those thoughts which the 
 'ilence of the night fed in him." "My poor sister," Words- 
 vorth wrote to Sir George Beaumont, " and my wife, who loved 
 lim almost as we did . . . are in miserable affliction, which 
 do all in my power to alleviate ; but Heaven knows I want 
 
 I M 
 
 ': iea as 
 
 dtc 
 
 •::::a! d 
 
 01 
 
 ]o:nd 
 
 t shij 
 
 -^rt wa 
 
 iSoi 
 
 'M 
 
 li :eeplj 
 
 c:nndei] 
 
 ii aboii 
 
 ; CODteS 
 
 
162 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 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." 
 
 " I shall never forget him," he wrote, some days later, " never 
 lose sight of him. There is a bond between us yet, the same as 
 if he were living, nay, far more sacred, calling upon me to do 
 my utmost, as he to the last did his utmost, to live in honour 
 and worthiness. . . . Do not think our grief unreasonable. Of 
 all human beings whom I ever knew, he was the man of the 
 most rational desires, the most sedate habits, and the most 
 perfect self-command. He was modest and gentle, and shy 
 even to disease ; but this was wearing off. In everything his 
 judgments were sound and original ; his taste in all the arts, 
 music and poetry in particular . . . was exquisite ; and his eye 
 for the beauties of Nature was as fine and delicate as ever poet 
 or painter was gifted with, in some discriminations, owing to his 
 education and way of life, far superior to any person's I ever 
 knew. But alas ! what avails it ? It was the will of God that 
 he should be taken away. ... A thousand times have I asked 
 myself . . . why was he taken away? . . . Why have we a 
 choice and a will, and a notion of justice and injustice enabling 
 us to be moral agents ? Why have we sympathies that make 
 the best of us so afraid of inflicting pain and sorrow, which yet 
 we see dealt about so lavishly by the supreme Governor ? . . . 
 Would it not be blasphemy to say that, upon the supposition of 
 the thinking principle being destroyed by death, however inferior 
 we may be to the great Cause and Ruler of things, we have 
 more of love in our nature than He has? ... As to my departed 
 brother, who leads our minds at present to these reflections, he 
 walked all his life pure among many impure. . . . In prudence, 
 in meekness, in self-denial, in fortitude, in just desires and 
 elegant and refined enjoyments, with an entire simplicity of 
 manners, life, and habit, he was all that could be wished for in 
 man ; strong in health, and of a noble person, with every hope 
 about him that could render life dear, thinking of, and living 
 only for, others — and we see what has been his end ! So good 
 must be better ; so high must be destined to be higher." 
 
 Two more sentences, and we may take leave of these 
 
 
 ^':^ 
 
 
 Ills 
 
 
 feVLt 
 
ever, 
 ^now 
 
 mee 
 and 
 
 neve: 
 
 to do 
 •onoui 
 e. 01 
 iik 
 most 
 ;: shy 
 
 le art^ 
 
 :: poe! 
 
 ; eva 
 : thai 
 
 ik\ 
 
 ;ve 
 
 ■iblinj 
 :inal!' 
 
 a J 
 
 laon 
 
 inferii 
 
 i-e hai 
 
 eparti 
 
 ions,l 
 
 udeDC 
 
 res an 
 
 :icity 
 
 :ior 
 
 . J'- 
 
 A SHIPWRECK 163 
 
 elegiacs in prose. " For myself," he wrote, more than a month 
 after the catastrophe, " I feel that there is something cut out of 
 my life that cannot be restored. . . . But let me stop ! I will 
 not be cast down ; were it only for his sake, I will not be 
 dejected. I have much yet to do, and pray God to give me 
 strength and power : his [John's] part of the agreement between 
 us is brought to an end, mine continues ; and I hope, when I 
 shall be able to think of him with a calmer mind, that the 
 remembrance of him dead will even animate me more than the 
 joy which I had in him living." 
 
 The poetry born of the tragedy is as various as it is 
 beautiful. First of all, memory went back to the parting on 
 Michaelmas Day, 1800, the parting "in sight of UUswater" 
 commemorated in Dorothy's Journal. The exact spot was near 
 Grisdale Tarn, out of which the Grisdale stream flows down 
 north-eastward to Patterdale and UUswater among the wild 
 hills between Fairfield and Helvellyn. The ground is high 
 enough to be covered with the bright green leaves and pink 
 and white flowers of Silene acaulis, the moss campion. Full of 
 his sorrow, Wordsworth went back to the place while the plant 
 was in flower. At a shepherd's whistle, a buzzard sailed into 
 the air ; " could it but have lent its wings," he thought pas- 
 sionately, " to save those sailors ! " Then from the bird with 
 its strong and free flight, he turned to the earth-clinging plant,^ 
 and found in it a type of the calmness he needed. His mind 
 travelled back over the five years — 
 
 " Here did we stop; and here looked round 
 While each into himself descends 
 For that last thought of parting Friends 
 That is not to be found. 
 Hidden was Grasmere Vale from sight, 
 Our home and his, his heart's delight, 
 His quiet heart's selected home. 
 But time before him melts away, 
 And he hath feeling of a day 
 Of blessedness to come." 
 
 The next thought was of the shock of the bad news — 
 
 " Full soon in sorrow did I weep, 
 Taught that the mutual hope was dust, 
 In sorrow, but for higher trust, 
 How miserably deep ! 
 
164 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 All vanished in a single word, 
 
 A breath, a sound, and scarcely heard ; 
 
 Sea — Ship — drowned — Shipwreck — so it came, 
 
 The meek, the brave, the good, was gone ; 
 
 He who had been our living John 
 
 Was nothing but a name." 
 
 Well, and what comes out of it all ? Only the kind of con- 
 solation, so sober and so reasonable, which Wordsworth alone - 
 has made known to us — the kind of consolation which Shelley, i 
 too, felt when he spoke of Adonais as " made one with Nature." 
 The very plant at his feet, humble, beautiful, calm^ comforts ] 
 him — 
 
 " From many a humble source, to pains 
 
 Like these, there comes a mild release ; 
 
 Even here I feel it, even this Plant 
 
 Is in its beauty ministrant 
 
 To comfort and to peace. 
 
 " He would have loved thy modest grace, 
 Meek Flower ! " 
 
 Such "blessed consolations in distress" cannot be ex- 
 plained, cannot be even justified, to a carping and sneering 
 scepticism. It is enough that they may be felt by those who 
 are pure enough and serene enough to feel them. 
 
 With his beloved daisy, too, he must needs link the thought 
 of his sorrow, the very narrative of his loss. 
 
 If John would have loved the moss campion, he had loved 
 the daisy. And now the daisies grow on his grave at Wyke 
 Regis ! — 
 
 " He who was on land, at sea, 
 My Brother, too, in loving thee, 
 Although he loved more silently, 
 Sleeps by his native shore." 
 
 The successful cruises were made ; in the intervals the sailor 
 rejoiced in English grass and flowers — 
 
 " But, when a third time from the land 
 They parted, sorrow was at hand 
 For Him and for his crew. 
 
 " Six weeks beneath the moving sea 
 He lay in slumbe quietly ; 
 Unforced by wind or wave 
 
 te:: 
 
beei- 
 
 A SHIPWRECK 165 
 
 To quit the Ship for which he died, 
 (All claims of duty satisfied ;) 
 And there they found him at her side ; 
 And bore him to the grave. 
 
 " Vain service ! yet not vainly done 
 For this, if other end were none 
 That He, who had been cast 
 Upon a way of life unmeet 
 For such a gentle soul and sweet, 
 Should find an undisturbed retreat 
 Near what he loved, at last — 
 
 " That neighbourhood of grove and field 
 To Him a resting-place should yield, 
 A meek man and a brave ! 
 The birds shall sing and ocean make 
 A mournful murmur for his sake ; 
 And Thou, sweet Flower, shalt sleep and wake, 
 Upon his senseless grave." 
 
 A yet deeper note was struck out of association with one of 
 Sir George Beaumont's pictures. It was of Peel Castle in the 
 meerinllsle of Man, painted as in a storm. Wordsworth, as a boy, had 
 ^ win spent a summer month close to the castle, but had seen it only 
 in calm weather. Looking at the turbulent picture, and con- 
 thougl trasting it with his own recollections, he, after his fashion, 
 extends and moralizes the contrast. It was a contrast never 
 lilova far from his central thought, the contrast between the un- 
 tWyk| thinking, non-human estimate of life and Nature on the one 
 hand, and the reflective estimate on the other, made when the 
 worst of human ill has been faced. It was present to him in 
 the grove at Alfoxden ; at Tintern Abbey ; it is the under-note 
 Df all The Prelude. The picture of Peel Castle in a storm 
 orings it sharply out. The death of John Wordsworth, in cir- 
 ■:umstances so tragic — the first keen personal grief in William's 
 [experience — was fresh "sad music of humanity," only this time 
 jiot "still," but shrill and keen, "wild with all regret." It 
 jnade an epoch ; never again could the poet be what he was 
 !)efore. Yet in his poem he is hardly egoistic ; the poem is one 
 i)f art rather than of ethics or autobiography. For art's sake 
 brimarily, he is thankful that the impression of his childhood, 
 inade more vivid by illusion — "the light that never was on 
 
 iesaau 
 
166 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 imposed on the world as final symbolic truth. " A sea that coulc 
 not cease to smile," "a sky of bliss" — how partial a truth, how 
 inadequate to the deepest fact, the deepest beauty, of things 
 Yet had Wordsworth himself been the painter before his 
 sorrows, before this last sorrow, he would have uttered thij 
 lying half-truth — 
 
 "Thou shouldst have seemed a treasure-house divine 
 Of peaceful years ; a chronicle of heaven ; — 
 Of all the sunbeams that did ever shine 
 The very sweetest had to thee been given. 
 
 "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." 
 
 But the actual painter's hand has been guided to the true 
 picture. The poet hails the symbolism with passionate 
 acclamation — 
 
 " This work of thine I blame not, but commend ; 
 This sea in anger, and that dismal shore." 
 
 As the moss campion, carpeting the heights by Grisdah 
 Tarn had been to the bereaved man a type of restored calm 
 the castle was a type of the indefeasible, the impregnable b> 
 adversity, by " the fierce confederate storm of sorrow " — 
 
 " 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." 
 
 Yet the note on which the poem dies away is far from being 
 one of stoical defiance. It is not because the picture show.' 
 mere unflinching resistance to the blows of fate that it is sc 
 much to Wordsworth. It is because it shows what Humanit} 
 adds to Nature, and how from the utmost human pain there u 
 release. 
 
 " Welcome each rebuff 
 That turns earth's smoothness rough ! " 
 
 was Browning's cheery, brusque exclamation. Wordsworth's 'u 
 deeper and more passionate, if more restrained ; and, though 
 apparently at war with optimism, not less alive with faith — 
 
A SHIPWRECK 167 
 
 *' 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." 
 
 In October, 1805, Nelson died at Trafalgar; and in the 
 next year Wordsworth was moved to put something of his 
 character into verse. The conception of " a happy warrior," of 
 a fighting man who might yet realize himself at his best, and 
 be a kind of philosopher or saint in armour, filled the poet's 
 mind and occupied his imagination. But though, as he reflected 
 and imagined, he thought much of Nelson, he thought more of 
 his brother John. Nelson's private life was too much blurred 
 for a poet like Wordsworth to idealize the man completely. 
 The philosopher in action was more nearly realized by John, 
 who had a warrior's heart, and would fain have fought his 
 country's battles. And so, thinking mainly of his brother, the 
 poet puts his great question — 
 
 " Who is the happy Warrior ? Who is he 
 That every man in arms should wish to be ? " 
 
 and proceeds to answer it so nobly, so sonorously, and with such 
 unity and close sequence of thought, that one must quote the 
 whole — 
 
 " It is the generous spirit, who, when brought 
 Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought 
 Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought : 
 Whose high endeavours are an inward light 
 That makes the path before him always bright : 
 Who, with a natural instinct to discern 
 What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn ; 
 Abides by this resolve, and stops not there, 
 But makes his moral being his prime care ; 
 Who, doomed to go in company with Pain, 
 And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train ! 
 Turns his necessity to glorious gain ; 
 In face of these doth exercise a power 
 Which is our human nature's highest dower ; 
 
168 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Controls them, and subdues, transmutes, bereaves 
 
 Of their bad influence, and their good receives : 
 
 By objects, which might force the soul to abate 
 
 Her feeling, rendered more compassionate ; 
 
 Is placable — because occasions rise 
 
 So often that demand such sacrifice ; 
 
 More skilful in self-knowledge, even more pure, 
 
 As tempted more ; more able to endure, 
 
 As more exposed to suffering and distress ; 
 
 Thence, also, more alive to tenderness. 
 
 — 'Tis he whose law is reason ; who depends 
 
 Upon that law as on the best of friends ; 
 
 Whence, in a state where men are tempted still 
 
 To evil for a guard against worse ill, 
 
 And what in quality or act is best 
 
 Doth seldom on a right foundation rest, 
 
 He labours good on good to fix, and owes 
 
 To virtue every triumph that he knows : 
 
 — Who, if he rise to station of command, 
 
 Rises by open means ; and there will stand 
 
 On honourable terms, or else retire, 
 
 And in himself possess his own desire; 
 
 Who comprehends his trust, and to the same 
 
 Keeps faithful with a singleness of aim ; 
 
 And therefore does not stoop, nor lie in wait 
 
 For wealth, or honours, or for worldly state ; 
 
 Whom they must follow ; on whose head must fall, 
 
 Like showers of manna, if they come at all : 
 
 Whose powers shed round him in the common strife, 
 
 Or mild concerns of ordinary life, 
 
 A constant influence, a peculiar grace; 
 
 But who, if he be called upon to face 
 
 Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined 
 
 Great issues, good or bad for human kind, 
 
 Is happy as a Lover ; and attired 
 
 With sudden brightness, like a Man inspired ; 
 
 And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law 
 
 In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw ; 
 
 Or if an unexpected call succeed, 
 
 Come when it will, is equal to the need : 
 
 — He who, though thus endued as with a sense 
 
 And faculty for storm and turbulence, 
 
 Is yet a soul whose master-bias leans 
 
 To home-felt pleasures and to gentle scenes ; 
 
 Sweet images ! which, wheresoe'er he be, 
 
 Are at his heart ; and such fidelity 
 
 It is his darling passion to approve ; 
 
 More brave for this, that he hath much to love ! — 
 
A SHIPWRECK 169 
 
 Tis, finally, the Man, who, lifted high, 
 Conspicuous object in a Nation's eye, 
 Or left unthought-of in obscurity, — 
 Who, with a toward or untoward lot, 
 Prosperous or adverse, to his wish or not, — 
 Plays, in the many games of life, that one 
 Where what he most doth value may be won : 
 Whom neither shape of danger can dismay, 
 Nor thought of tender happiness betray ; 
 Who, not content that former worth stand fast, 
 Looks forward, persevering to the last, 
 From well to better, daily self-surpast : 
 Who, whether praise of him must walk the earth 
 For ever, and to noble deeds give birth, 
 Or he must fall, to sleep without his fame, 
 And leave a dead unprofitable name, — 
 Finds comfort in himself, and in his cause ; 
 And, while the mortal mist is gathering, draws 
 His breath in confidence of Heaven's applause : 
 This is the happy Warrior ; this is He 
 That every Man in arms should wish to be." 
 
 m 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 THE POET AS CRITIC AND POLITICIAN 
 
 IT was to Dove Cottage that Wordsworth brought his wife, 
 Mary Hutchinson, in October, 1802. We remember how 
 William and Dorothy went over into Yorkshire to fetch her, and 
 the Farewell to beloved Grasmere which William wrote before 
 they started. There was more romance in the Farewell than in 
 the marriage. A cool temperature brooded over the admirable 
 arrangement by which Wordsworth, at thirty-two, made his 
 Penrith playmate and affectionate lifelong friend into his wife 
 and other self. The brother and sister started on their journey 
 in July; and between their departure and the wedding came 
 their memorable visit to Calais, — memorable, because, as we, 
 shall see before this chapter is finished, it stirred Wordsworth 
 into a poetry of society and politics, as great, in its way, as any 
 of his poetry of Nature. After a little supplementary touring 
 by William and Dorothy about England, the marriage took 
 place in Brompton Church, near the Hutchinsons' home at 
 Gallow Hill in Yorkshire, between Scarborough and Pickering. 
 Dorothy seems to have been the only member of the Words- 
 worth family who was there, and even she was not present at 
 the quiet wedding before breakfast. She contented herself 
 with looking from her bedroom window at the party going 
 down the avenue to church, and falling on her beloved William's 
 bosom when he came back, a married man. One is reminded 
 of the Carlyles' wedding-journey, and of the indispensableness 
 of " brother John's " company to the bridegroom's happiness,' 
 when one reads that Dorothy accompanied her brother and his 
 wife in the first drive of the honeymoon towards Grasmere." 
 They made a placid and happy trio, rolling along through 
 "sunshine and showers, pleasant talk, love and cheerfulness." 
 
 170 
 
lisdi 
 
 THE POET AS CRITIC AND POLITICIAN 171 
 
 They walked about, still a trio, during the halt for luncheon ; 
 j walked in the churchyard at Kirby, " and read the gravestones." 
 And so on, through the three days, by Helmsley, and Hawes 
 and Garsdale, to Kendal and home. "We arrived at Gras- 
 mere," Dorothy writes in her journal, " at about six o'clock on 
 Wednesday evening, the 6th of October, 1802. I cannot describe 
 what I felt. We went by candle light into the garden, and were 
 astonished at the growth of the brooms, Portugal laurels, etc. 
 The next day, we unpacked the boxes. On Friday 8, Mary 
 and I walked first upon the hillside, and then in John's Grove, 
 then in view of Rydal, the first walk that I had taken with my 
 sister." 
 
 It is a homely and temperate story ; but happy marriage, 
 fortunately, requires neither romance nor fever. And happy 
 marriage William and Mary Wordsworth assuredly achieved. 
 Romance or no, the husband of three years' standing who can 
 sing of 'his wife as Wordsworth did of his, and with an accent 
 of sincerity so clear through the lovely words, is a happy man. 
 
 " She was a phantom of delight : " we need not quote the 
 rest. Other poems have much the same burden. In The 
 Prelude the poet recurs to the ideas and words of the lyric just 
 cited, and thinks of his wife's presence as no ignis fatuiis^ but 
 an abiding glow, lighting up the heart. 
 
 " She came, no more a phantom to adorn 
 A moment, but an inmate of the heart, 
 And yet a spirit there for me enshrined 
 To penetrate the lofty and the low ; 
 Even as one essence of pervading light 
 Shines in the brightest of ten thousand stars, 
 And the meek worm that finds her lonely lamp 
 Couched in the dewy grass." 
 
 Dedicating to her The White Doe of Rylstone many years 
 later in Spenserian stanzas, he recalls happy evenings of 
 companionship at Dove Cottage when the three (for Dorothy 
 was always there) read Spenser together, and commemorates 
 his wife's love of The Doe as its story was unfolded. Nor did 
 the deep and tranquil poetry of married life lose itself in the 
 marshes of habit or the dry wastes of age. Wordsworth's most 
 beautiful lines about his wife were written when he was between 
 fifty and sixty, and had been more than twenty years married. 
 
172 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 The following holds high rank in the anthology of wedded 
 love — 
 
 " O dearer far than light and life are dear, 
 Full oft our human foresight I deplore ; 
 Trembling, through my unworthiness, with fear, 
 
 That friends, by death disjoined, may meet no more ! 
 
 "Misgivings, hard to vanquish or control, 
 
 Mix with the day, and cross the hour of rest ; 
 While all the future, for thy purer soul, 
 With * sober certainties ' of love is blest. 
 
 " That sigh of thine, not meant for human ear, 
 Tells that these words thy humbleness offend ; 
 Yet bear me up — else faltering in the rear 
 Of a steep march : support me to the end. 
 
 " Peace settles where the intellect is meek, 
 And Love is dutiful in thought and deed ; 
 Through thee communion with that Love I seek : 
 The faith Heaven strengthens where he moulds the Creed." 
 
 Mrs. Wordsworth was supposed not to be beautiful, nor did 
 even her husband claim perfection for her. 
 
 " Heed not tho' none should call thee fair " 
 
 he exhorted her ; and he bid her rejoice that she was not 
 angelic. In an atrabilious mood, Carlyle, who saw her when 
 she was growing an old woman, wrote of her as " a small, 
 withered, puckered, winking lady." When she was elderly, 
 and already, in her close-set cap, looked old, her portrait 
 was painted by Margaret Gillies. The picture is a beautiful 
 one ; the eyes that look up under thick brows are gentle and 
 modest ; the mouth, prematurely sunken, has a comforting 
 sweetness. At first the picture was a trial to Wordsworth, 
 who would fain have had the likeness of her youth. 
 
 " Tis a fruitless task to paint for me 
 
 Who, yielding not to changes Time has made, 
 By the habitual light of memory see 
 
 Eyes unbedimmed, see bloom that cannot fade, 
 And smiles that from their birthplace ne'er shall flee, 
 Into the land where ghosts and phantoms be." 
 
 In time, however, he was able to reach a better construction 
 
MRS. WORDSWORTH 
 
 BY MARGARET GILLIES 
 
 I 
 
^ OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF . 
 
THE POET AS CRITIC AND POLITICIAN 173 
 
 I of the facts, and to realize that his love was poised on nothing 
 i so frail as mere youth. 
 
 " O, my Beloved, I have done thee wrong, 
 Conscious of blessedness, but, whence it sprung, 
 Even too heedless, as I now perceive ; 
 Morn into noon did pass, noon into eve, 
 And the old day was welcome as the young. 
 As welcome and as beautiful — in sooth 
 More beautiful, as being a thing more holy ; 
 Thanks to thy virtues, to the eternal youth 
 Of all thy goodness, never melancholy ; 
 To thy large heart and humble mind, that cast 
 Into one vision, future, present, past." 
 
 De Quincey's well-known impressions of Mrs. Wordsworth in 
 
 ;i807 must be given for what they are worth. They agree with 
 
 jail that we know and can infer from other sources. Standing in 
 
 jthe kitchen-parlour at Dove Cottage, De Quincey saw two 
 
 jladies enter the room. " The foremost, a tallish young woman, 
 
 I with the most winning expression of benignity on her features ; 
 
 advanced to me, presenting her hand with so frank an air, that 
 
 all embarrassment must have fled in a moment before the 
 
 Jnative goodness of her manner. This was Mrs. Wordsworth. 
 
 '. . . She furnished a remarkable proof how possible it is for a 
 
 I woman neither handsome nor even comely ... to exercise. 
 
 all the practical fascination of beauty, through the mere com- 
 
 ipensatory charms of sweetness all but angelic, of simplicity the 
 
 most entire, womanly self-respect and purity of heart speaking 
 
 ;:hrough all her looks, acts, and movements. Words, I was going 
 
 i':o have added ; but her words were few. In reality, she talked 
 
 50 little, that Mr. Slave-Trade Clarkson used to allege against 
 
 ler, that she could only say, * God bless yoti ! ' Certainly, her 
 
 ntellect was not of an active order ; but in a quiescent, reposing, 
 
 neditative way, she appeared always to have a genial enjoyment 
 
 irom her own thoughts ; and it would have been strange indeed 
 
 I If she, who enjoyed such eminent advantages of training, from 
 
 I he daily society of her husband and his sister, failed to acquire 
 
 lome power of judging for herself, and putting forth some 
 
 I unctions of activity. But undoubtedly that was not her element : 
 
 o feel and to enjoy in a luxurious repose of mind — there was 
 
 jier forte and her peculiar privilege. . . . Her figure was 
 
174 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 tolerably good. 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." Even a 
 slight squint, De Quincey tells us, was no deformity in her face. 
 " AH faults, had they been ten times more and greater, would 
 have been neutralized by that supreme expression of her 
 features, to the unity of which every lineament in the fixed 
 parts, and every undulation in the moving parts of her counte 
 nance, concurred, viz. a sunny benignity — a radiant graciousness 
 — such as in this world I never saw surpassed." 
 
 The Words worths' union was perfected by children, all five 
 of whom were born at Grasmere. There were three sons and 
 two daughters, who came in the following order : — 
 
 John, June i8, 1803. 
 Dorothy (Dora), August 16, 1804. 
 Thomas, June 16, 1806. 
 Catharine, September 6, 1808. 
 William, May 12, 18 10. 
 
 Only the first two and the youngest lived to grow up: 
 Catharine and Thomas both died in 18 12, their loss darkening 
 the last year at Grasmere. Katy was drooping in 181 1, and a 
 family journey in search of reviving air was made from Gras 
 mere Rectory, into which the Wordsworths had just moved, tc 
 Bootle, on the Cumbrian coast. Wordsworth has described 
 the journey in his Epistle to Sir George Beatimo?it. Katy was 
 much loved, and was one of her father's many studies in the 
 poetry of childhood. He wrote of her in the Bootle year : — 
 
 " Loving she is, and tractable, though wild ; 
 And Innocence hath privilege in her 
 To dignify arch looks and laughing eyes, 
 And feats of cunning ; and the pretty round 
 Of trespasses, affected to provoke 
 Mock-chastisement and partnership in play. 
 And, as a faggot sparkles on the hearth, 
 Not less if unattended and alone 
 Than when both young and old sit gathered round 
 And take delight in its activity ; 
 Even so this happy Creature of herself 
 Is all-sufficient, solitude to her 
 Is blithe society, who fills the air 
 With gladness and involuntary songs." 
 
 
 8:.: 
 it::.: 
 
 te;: 
 
THE POET AS CRITIC AND POLITICIAN 175 
 
 ^ was 
 ••skin, 
 
 ^vena 
 irfact 
 ■ would 
 
 nxed 
 
 ".jiinte. 
 
 The visit to Bootle did little good : Katy was marked for 
 death ; and in June, 1812, death took her. Six months later, 
 struck down by the seqiielcB of measles, went her little brother 
 Tom, who, in the autumn, used to sweep the leaves from Katy's 
 grave. The following year the Wordsworths left Grasmere. 
 
 A sonnet, curiously reminiscent of his little dead daughter, 
 and one of the finest of his rare outbreaks of passionate feeling, 
 was written by Wordsworth years after. In a lapse of memory 
 —a momentary trance of keen emotion — he felt himself turning 
 i^aess for sympathy to Katy, so long " earth in earth " by Grasmere 
 Church. What a lapse, what a treachery of love ! 
 
 all five 
 "joand 
 
 \ 
 
 iii;- 
 
 Surprised by joy — impatient as the Wind 
 
 I turned to share the transport — Oh ! with whom 
 
 But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb, 
 
 That spot which no vicissitude can find ? 
 
 Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind — 
 
 But how could I forget thee ? Through what power, 
 
 Even for the least division of an hour, 
 
 Have I been so beguiled as to be blind 
 
 To my most grievous loss ? — That thought's return 
 
 Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore. 
 
 Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn, 
 
 Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more ; 
 
 That neither present time, nor years unborn. 
 
 Could to my sight that heavenly face restore." 
 
 :x up 
 
 i:keQiii| 
 and 
 
 TiGras 
 
 ijved,! 
 
 cicrik 1*^0 phases of Wordsworth's Grasmere life remain for more 
 
 ^itywJ leed than we have yet given to them. 
 ^^ I. Wordsworth, we already realize, was a literary critic, and 
 L literary critic of no small importance. By his criticism, quite 
 IS much as by his poetry — and more, perhaps, than by any 
 )ersonal association — he was in touch with others, a member of 
 circle. For the Romantic Revival had its criticism as well as 
 ts poetry — criticism with which it justified and fortified itself, 
 is well as criticism which it provoked, and which tried to hinder 
 L It was a criticism rich and various, a criticism of different 
 )arentages and different phases, of splendid individuality as 
 ivell as of loyalty to tradition. 
 
 \ The last word of true eighteenth-century criticism — the 
 riticism which began its maturity in Dryden — was spoken in 
 ohxison's Lives of the Poets. One may call it on the whole a 
 riticism of appraisement according to tradition : writers, writings, 
 
 
176 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 
 were judged from a superior standpoint, and were acquitted oi 
 condemned by standards set, or supposed to be set, by Aristotle 
 and an orthodox succession descending from him. There were, 
 of course, modifications of the prevalent tone. The two most 
 eminent critics of the school, Dryden and Johnson, diluted 
 tradition by large wholesome draughts of common sense. Ir 
 the mid-time of the school's vogue critics appeared like the 
 Wartons, who tried to base judgment on admiration rathei 
 than approval. Addison's criticism was not as wholly " based 
 on convention " as Matthew Arnold taught us it was. But even 
 the Lives of the Poets, wonderful as is their catholicity, admir 
 able their conscientiousness, and unfailing their reasonableness, 
 ^x^ judicial — a collection of verdicts and sentences; and the'' 
 time had come for a new criticism based on appreciation, a 
 criticism living, like humanity itself, "by admiration, hopej*-'" 
 and love." 
 
 Such a criticism was supplied, most conspicuously, by 
 Charles Lamb and Coleridge. Both those great critics showed 
 themselves wholly free from conventional trammels and 
 " Augustan " models, and rediscovered the true classics of 
 English literature. They refused to date English poetry from; " 
 the close of the Elizabethan age ; they refused to make any ^'^ '■ 
 kind of apologies for Shakespeare. Charles Lamb rediscoveredr^-" 
 the Elizabethans, felt the human heart beating through them, 
 made them speak for themselves afresh to English readers. 
 Coleridge brought to the interpretation of Shakespeare — and of 
 how many besides! — the opulent resources of his subtle and 
 original mind. Nor, standing not very far from these giants, 
 ought William Hazlitt to be overlooked. It is often from the 
 lesser men who represent a movement that we learn most 
 about the movement itself. And Hazlitt was no petty critic 
 or writer ; he was more a critic by profession than Lamb or 
 Coleridge ; he brought to his work a whole-hearted devotion, 
 and, when his thought was not deflected by petulant moods and 
 party-spirit, a broad rational appreciativeness, a fearless candour, 
 a wealth of eloquent expression, which are an honour to letters. 
 
 Much of the new criticism might have been called, and was 
 considered, mere " mutual admiration." According to that 
 other school of critics associated with the Edinburgh, the 
 Quarterly, and to some extent with Blackivood, the best criticism 
 
'■'■^ DIOS 
 
 ^' ral 
 ■"base 
 i:teve 
 ', admii 
 
 THE POET AS CRITIC AND POLITICIAN 177 
 
 which England had yet produced was only the self-advertise- 
 ment of a clique of incompetent and tiresome poets. The 
 criticism of Jeffrey and the rest was not without its merit ; but 
 it was, like the characteristic eighteenth-century criticism, 
 delivered de haut en bas ; it was criticism of approval or dis- 
 approval, not of sympathy and reverence ; and it was spoiled 
 by the bad standard of a misused tradition. The " mutual 
 admiration " of the other critics, who appreciated Wordsworth 
 without prejudice and without flattery, who admired him 
 generously without losing sight of any of his short-comings, was 
 an insight which posterity has fully ratified. 
 
 The solitary and self-involved Wordsworth had nothing to 
 
 ^jtjldo with mutual admiration. His criticism, partly apologetic, 
 
 r^k partly revolutionary, dealt with abstract principles rather than 
 with particular works or particular writers. It falls into rank 
 with the critical work of Coleridge, but of Coleridge the literary 
 
 .Q5ly jj theorist rather than Coleridge the literary critic proper. Indeed, 
 |,3^^j as we have already seen, Coleridge's philosophy of poetry, his 
 body of poetic theory, in great measure owes its origin to 
 Wordsworth's influence, an influence often antagonistic. 
 
 Wordsworth's criticism was the fruit of a nature essentially 
 and constitutionally philosophic. He was no keen natural lover 
 of books like Lamb or Hazlitt, but an intense believer in the 
 unity of apparently divergent things, and acutely jealous for the 
 honour of poesy, his own art. It is to be found chiefly in 
 the preface to the second issue of Lyrical Ballads in 1800; in 
 an appendix-note on Poetic Diction to the third issue in 1802 ; 
 and in the preface to the first collected edition of the poems 
 
 rfrwntl '^^ ^^^5* '^^^ last-named has a Supplementary Essay of the 
 same date. 
 
 The first preface is the true critical counterpart of Words- 
 
 :ei as 
 
 fissicsi 
 
 Jdryfroi 
 
 sake 
 
 ikovere 
 
 :;hthe[ 
 
 \ reade 
 
 ft-and 
 
 nbdea 
 
 ocgiaDi 
 
 xtty cni 
 liinbl wo^^^'s strongest young poetry. He meant the two to be 
 
 complementary : the poetry was to exemplify the theory, and 
 the theory to explain the poetry. The specific objects of the 
 800 preface were two : (i) to defend the style of Lyrical 
 Ballads ; (2) to define and defend poetry. 
 
 (i) The defence oi Lyrical Ballads resolves itself into the de- 
 fence of that extremely plain diction which so scandalized the 
 
 \}t0 
 
 ooodsai^ 
 
 ..toiette 
 '.■•At 
 
 :r- 
 
 jworld. We already know the main lines of the argument : the 
 oet chose themes taken from ordinary life and simple humanity, 
 
 ^cfitici- ^ 
 
178 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 and dealt with them in language formed out of the ordinary 
 speech of men and women. The resultant poetry was to be 
 coloured by imagination only, and surcharged with emotion. 
 Why this choice and method ? Why does the poet go, why 
 ought he to go, to common, and especially to rural, life for his 
 material and his medium? Because, he maintains, men and 
 Nature there are in their interrelation simpler and less sophisti- 
 cated than when they have undergone elaborate civilization. 
 And the central principle of his art has been Wi-dX feeling should 
 ^^ give importance to" action and situation, and not vice versd. 
 
 This principle deserve*; a moment's consideration. Accord- 
 ing to Wordsworth, the poet has for his characteristic endow- 
 ment and ^ower feeling, i.e. thought prompted and accompanied 
 by emotion, so prompted by emotion as at times to seem 
 posterior to it in time — 
 
 " In such high hour 
 Of visitation from the living God 
 Thought was not ; " 
 
 so Wordsworth himself sang of a moment before thought was 
 born. Thus endowed, the poet takes the Universe for his 
 province ; but he holds it as God holds it, with an equality of 
 regard which transcends all ordinary human notions of size and 
 degree. 
 
 " Say not ' a small event ! ' Why * small ' ? 
 
 Costs it more pain that this, ye call 
 
 A * great event,' should come to pass. 
 
 Than that ? Untwine me from the mass 
 
 Of deeds which make up life, one deed 
 
 Power shall fall short in or exceed ! " 
 
 Browning's words seem to catch and fix Wordsworth's mean- 
 ing. It is by virtue of this transcendent, godlike, equalizing 
 power of " feeling," that the poet attains to creative imagination, 
 that highest potentiality of achievement which all men recognize 
 in him, but for which inferior people are apt to mistake the 
 sensationalism and grandiosity of writers who lash their dull 
 minds into activity which they miscall feeling, and their language 
 into diction which they miscall poetic, by stimulants in the shape 
 of " great events/' distinguished personages, and sentiments in 
 full dress. 
 
 (2) Wordsworth defines poetry; or, rather, he discourses on the 
 
THE POET AS CRITIC AND POLITICIAN 179 
 
 mission and methods of true poetry. He always considers the 
 poet, in spite of the feeling which he claims for him, as a 
 philosophic thinker, who recollects, reflects, and selects, and 
 who, though his work may indeed be described as a spontaneous 
 overflow of feeling, and though his immediate aim is to give 
 pleasure, is always more or less directly conscious of aiming at 
 trtitJu In this Wordsworth feels no permanent antithesis : 
 Truth, he holds, is Beauty (the source of pleasure) ; the poet is 
 the philosopher. Similarly, the common is the nearer manifesta- 
 tion of the Divine ; tranquillity is the purest source of emotion. 
 In his most appreciative gush, the p(^^t is much of- an egoist ; 
 when he is most an egoist, he is most truly worshipping his 
 Creator. 
 
 I Poetry takes its origin, Wordsworth held, from emotion 
 recollected in tranquillity. The poet is he who deliberately calls 
 up in tranquillity impassioned ideas and situations, and who can 
 find no better language to express the result than the ordinary 
 speech of men. In doing this with pleasure and for pleasure, 
 the poet does nothing beneath the dignity of a high mission. 
 For " the native and naked dignity of man " is in no ascetic 
 antithesis to pleasure, but is in fact one with it. The pleasure 
 which the poet has and gives is philosophic as well as poetic ; 
 it arises from his contemplation, his reflective contemplation, of 
 the Universe. Nothing in the Universe is alien from him ; not 
 even the minuticB of science ; " Poetry is the breath and finer 
 spirit of all knowledge^ 
 
 But as to the poet, let Wordsworth speak for himself : " Let 
 me ask, what is meant by the word * Poet * ? What is a Poet ? 
 To whom does he address himself? and what language is to be 
 expected from him ? He is a man speaking to men ; a man, it 
 is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm 
 and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, 
 and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be 
 common among mankind ; a man pleased with his own passions 
 i and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the 
 spirit of life that is in him ; delighting to contemplate similar 
 \ volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the 
 Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does 
 not find them. To these qualities he has added a disposition 
 to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they 
 
180 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 were present ; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, 
 which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by 
 real events, yet (especially in those parts of the general sympathy 
 which are pleasing and delightful) do more nearly resemble the 
 passions produced by real events, than anything which, from 
 the motions of their own minds merely, other men are accus- 
 tomed to feel in themselves : whence, and from practice, 
 he has acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing 
 what he thinks and feels, and especially those thoughts and 
 feelings which, by his own choice, or from the structure of his 
 own mind, arise in him without immediate external excitement." 
 
 Where, in this conception, is the place for metre and 
 rhyme, the formal differenticE of poetry ? Wordsworth's defence, 
 so to call it, of metre and rhyme is subtle and interesting. If 
 the poet is to feel, think, and write only as a specially intense 
 ordinary person, and to express himself in language which is 
 essentially identical with the language of prose, why should he 
 hamper or artificialize himself by what makes his expression 
 specifically different from that of prose ? 
 
 Wordsworth gives three reasons. Firsts the somewhat 
 surprising one that verse is a restraint on the vagaries and 
 possible excesses of passion. This sounds paradoxical ; for we 
 are accustomed to think of verse as the specifically appropriate 
 medium of impassioned feeling, and as chosen for the very 
 reason that it is free from the fetters of prose. But, says 
 Wordsworth, passionate feelitig and the excitement which is 
 inseparable from the design of poetry are kept within bounds by 
 the regularity of metre. And this is not all. Metre not only 
 gives regularity to language, but *' divests language, in a certain 
 degree, of its reality," and throws " a sort of half-consciousness 
 of unsubstantial existence over the whole composition." This 
 touch of unreal glamour given by verse enables us to bear, e,g.^ 
 pathos, which would be intolerable in the hard everyday truth- 
 fulness of prose. " This opinion," Wordsworth holds, " may be 
 illustrated by appealing to the reader's own experience of the 
 reluctance with which he comes to the re-perusal of the dis- 
 tressful parts of Clarissa Harlowe or the Gamester ; while 
 Shakespeare's writings, in the most pathetic scenes, never act 
 upon us, as pathetic, beyond the bounds of pleasure — an effect 
 which, in a much greater degree than might be imagined, is to 
 
THE POET AS CRITIC AND POLITICIAN 181 
 
 be ascribed to small, but continual and regular impulses of 
 pleasurable surprise from the metrical arrangement." Surely this 
 distinction between the " pain " with which we shut Clarissa^ 
 and the "pleasure" with which we see the curtain fall on Lear 
 or Othello is, to say the least of it, disputable ; but the important 
 point is to realize how much stress is laid by the austere Words- 
 worth on pleasure as the end of poetry ; and this association 
 between metre and pleasure is to be regarded as the second line 
 of his defence. 
 
 The third line of defence is equally subtle, and Wordsworth 
 does little more than hint at it. Metre and rhyme are of value, 
 he says, because one element of the " pleasure " given by poetry 
 is the sense of unity in diversity which is conveyed by the verse- 
 form. Wordsworth, in fact, seems to regard the world of emotion 
 and passion which confronts the poet as so imperfectly cosmic 
 that he must impose upon it the forms of his own mind — forms 
 expressed in the " regularities " of verse, if he is to " enjoy " it, 
 as a poet may and should. 
 
 In all this Wordsworth seems to be feeling after a theory of 
 imagination such as he expounded in the preface and essay of 
 1815. That theory we may briefly notice here, before parting 
 with Wordsworth the critic. 
 
 Imagination is one of the hardest words in the language ; 
 but all literary and artistic critics seem to understand by it that 
 intellectual faculty by which for artistic purposes the data of 
 perception and recollection are arbitrarily modified or changed 
 by the percipient or recollecting individual. It is the individtc- 
 ality as well as the artistic end of the faculty, which distinguishes 
 imagination from mere knowledge, as Kant thought of know- 
 ledge ; and it is the arbitrariness of its method which makes 
 men speak of imagination as creative. 
 
 As creative, and therefore Divine, Wordsworth constantly 
 spoke of imagination in his poetry. In his Preface of 18 15, he 
 grapples the matter in prose. Imagination, with which he 
 conjoins "fancy," is one of the poet's faculties — the faculty- 
 which " modifies," " creates," and " associates " ; and it is dis- 
 tinguished from " invention," which " composes " characters out 
 of the data of observation and introspection. The modifying 
 energy of imagination (which he elsewhere calls an " endowing " 
 power) is governed " by fixed laws " ; but Wordsworth does not 
 
182 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 tell us what they are. He prefers to give instances of the 
 energy. When Shakespeare speaks of the samphire-gatherer 
 " hanging " on the cliff, or when Milton speaks of a far-off fleet 
 seen " hanging " in the clouds, or again, when Wordsworth himself 
 speaks of the stock-dove "brooding" over his own voice, or 
 suggests that the cuckoo is a voice rather than a bird, the poet 
 in each case is exercising imagination as a modifying power. 
 A plain man would say that all these were instances simply of 
 happy or beautiful metaphor. And again, in the noble images 
 which expound the leech-gatherer's figure in ResohUion and 
 Independence : — 
 
 " As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie 
 Couched on the bald top of an eminence, 
 
 Like a sea-beast crawled forth, which on a shelf 
 Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun himself, 
 Such seemed this man ; 
 
 Motionless as a cloud the old man stood. 
 
 That heareth not the loud winds when they call ; " 
 
 the plain man is content to find a series of admirable similes. 
 But Wordsworth explains that " in these images, the conferring, 
 the abstracting, and the modifying powers of the Imagination, 
 immediately and mediately acting, are all brought into conjunc- 
 tion." The Imagination takes life from the sea-beast and gives 
 it to the stone ; while the leech-gatherer himself is half-killed 
 so as to make him seem almost as dead as the stone. 
 
 Imagination, says Wordsworth, creates in innumerable ways ; 
 chiefly, perhaps, by "consolidating numbers into unity, and 
 dissolving and separating unity into number." Thus in 
 Milton's lines about the Messiah — 
 
 " Attended by ten thousand thousand Saints 
 He onward came : far off his coming shone," 
 
 Wordsworth finds that the retinue of saints, and the Person 
 of the Messiah Himself, are lost almost and merged in the 
 splendour of that indefinite abstraction, " His coming ! " Here 
 the critic is perhaps not quite so convincing as when he quotes 
 without analysis from King Lear the two lines — 
 
 *' I tax not you, ye Elements, with unkindness, 
 I never gave you kingdoms, call'd you daughters ! " 
 
THE POET AS CRITIC AND POLITICIAN 183 
 
 as an instance of "human and dramatic Imagination." And 
 indeed, in his whole treatment of imagination Wordsworth 
 is disappointing ; he undertakes more than he carries out ; 
 his analysis breaks down and falls short. By the idea of 
 " Fancy " he seems less overcome ; though he is perhaps less 
 lucid in his account of it. He compares and contrasts it with 
 imagination ; and the substance of his meaning apparently 
 is that fancy, unlike imagination, cannot change^ except by 
 slight superficial modification, the data given to her ; their 
 substance, so to call it, remains unalterable by so slight and 
 tricksy a power ; yet she can move her data about like puppets, 
 and can play upon them with capricious and surprising lights 
 which have an effect that may be almost creative. Moreover, 
 fancy "ambitiously aims at a rivalship with imagination, and 
 imagination stoops to work with the materials of fancy." 
 Such proceedings and interchanges, the plain man feels, are too 
 complicated, are at once too definitely and indefinitely con- 
 ceived, to help the critic or reader very far along his way. 
 
 Wordsworth's best friends and most sympathetic expounders 
 found much to object to in his theories. Coleridge, who loved 
 psychological jargon, fell foul of both the "poetic diction" and 
 the fancy-and-imagination doctrines. So did Hazlitt and 
 Leigh Hunt from different points of view ; while De Quincey 
 had no difficulty in showing that Wordsworth's attitude towards 
 the " diction " of verse was too polemical to be quite sound. 
 
 2. The other capital interest of Wordsworth in the Grasmere 
 days was the condition of English and European politics. We 
 remember how in his youth his whole nature was played upon 
 like a musical instrument by the French Revolution, and how 
 he was thrown into moral paralysis and practical altruism by 
 his country's active hostihty to France in 1793. Sir John Seeley 
 has pointed out that we make a mistake when we regard the 
 brief Peace of Amiens in 1802-3 as a mere interruption in a 
 single and homogeneous war. He has reminded us that 
 between 1793 and 181 5 England and Europe were in arms 
 against two quite different revolutions : first, the French 
 Revolution ; and, secondly, the Napoleonic Revolution. Roughly 
 speaking, the French Revolution was attacked between 1793 
 and 1802; and the Napoleonic between 1803 and 181 5. If, in 
 one sense. Napoleon was the product of the French Revolution, 
 
184 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 in another sense he was its enemy and destroyer ; and it 
 was thus quite logically justifiable to wish well to the French 
 Revolution and afterwards to breathe out threatenings and 
 slaughter against Napoleon. This, at all events, was what 
 demonstrably happened in Wordsworth's case. There was a 
 very real sense in which his sympathy with France, struggling 
 against aristocratic and clerical abuses, was one with his 
 sympathy with Europe, struggling against Napoleon. In both 
 struggles the battle-cry was liberty ; and for liberty Words- 
 worth, between Trafalgar and Waterloo, lost some of his passion. 
 Those who think of him as Browning's Lost Leader, who think 
 of him as " breaking from the van and the freemen " " and sink- 
 ing to the rear and the slaves," think of him — to say the least of 
 it — inaccurately. He did something very different. 
 
 The anti-Napoleonic struggle itself was not homogeneous. 
 It was partly a resistance of governments to a destroying and 
 usurping government ; partly a passionate assertion of national 
 independence. It was national independence — or, as men 
 since Wordsworth's day have taken to calling it, " nationality " 
 — that asserted itself in those Spanish and German uprisings 
 which, more than any diplomacies or coalitions, brought 
 Napoleon at last to his knees. To Wordsworth Napoleon 
 appeared chiefly as a robber of independence. He has vividly 
 painted for us his horror and anger as the significance of the 
 First Consul and French Emperor became clear to him — 
 
 " When, finally to close 
 And seal up all the gains of France, a Pope 
 Was summoned in to crown an Emperor ; " 
 
 and when indignation had to serve instead of hope. But 
 his anti-Napoleonic passion was not fully kindled until the 
 tyrant ravished Switzerland of her freedom. Thenceforward 
 he was to Wordsworth a criminal rather than a conqueror. 
 
 A curiously vital link binds Wordsworth's politics with his 
 poetry. At Dove Cottage one May afternoon in 1802, Dorothy 
 read Milton's sonnets to her brother. He had long known 
 them, but had never before realized their power, their " dignified 
 simplicity and majestic harmony." He at once "took fire," 
 and, before he slept that night, had written two or three sonnets. 
 If they were not his first, they were the first that were more 
 
THE POET AS CRITIC AND POLITICIAN 185 
 
 ! than experiments. Of these, only one survives ; but it is a 
 : memorable one. It was the turning-point of the struggle ; the 
 : Treaty of Amiens had been two months signed ; Bonaparte 
 ; had been three years First Consul and was becoming a portent 
 a in men's minds. Wordsworth was beginning to speculate 
 : about him, beginning to fear him ; but he had not yet made 
 ;; up his mind about him. He dedicated to him his first 
 : tentative sonnet. 
 
 ■ I grieved for Bonaparte, with a vain 
 And an unthinking grief ! The tenderest mood 
 Of that Man's mind — what can it be ? what food 
 Fed his first hopes ? What knowledge could he gain ? 
 'Tis not in battles that from youth we train 
 The Governor who must be wise and good. 
 And temper with the sternness of the brain 
 Thoughts motherly, and meek as womanhood. 
 Wisdom doth live with children round her knees : 
 Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk 
 Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk 
 Of the mind's business : these are the degrees 
 By which true Sway doth mount ; this is the stalk 
 True Power doth grow on : and her rights are these." 
 
 Already, in this somewhat irregular piece, Wordsworth 
 
 llyf^howed what he was to be as a sonneteer ; here already are the 
 
 inassiveness, the unity, the seriousness, the sense of climax and 
 
 inish, — above all, the pregnant suggestiveness of immortal 
 
 )hrase, which make the sonnet what at its best it is. But, 
 
 notwithstanding the Miltonic fire which he felt burning within 
 
 lim, he can have had no prevision of the great place which his 
 
 onnets were to hold in the sum of his work. Nor can he have 
 
 ealized the significance of the coincidence which made Napoleon 
 
 he theme of his first efforts. His appreciativeness of the sonnet 
 
 nd his sense of its fitness to some, at least, of his poetic moods, 
 
 re expressed in the two sonnets on the sonnet which are too 
 
 imiliar for quotation ; that which speaks of the form's narrow 
 
 'ounds as indeed "no prison," and of himself as finding therein 
 
 brief solace" under "the weight of too much liberty;" and 
 
 :iat other, composed much later, in a walk by Rydal lake, in 
 
 ^hich Wordsworth defends the sonnet on the ground of its 
 
 lorious history — the sonnet of Petrarch, Tasso, Camoens, 
 
 )ante ; of Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton. He was to use it, 
 
186 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 exquisitely and nobly, for various purposes ; for delicate lane 
 scape-painting and for intimate lyrical out-breathings ; bi 
 chiefly for poetry of historical sense and social, ecclesiastica 
 and political conviction ; above all, for the passion of libert 
 and national independence. Therefore it was not " idle " the 
 his first sonnets were about Napoleon. 
 
 It was the Peace of Amiens that made it possible for th 
 Wordsworths to cross to Calais in the summer of 1802, befoi 
 William's marriage. The poet's mind was full of internation; 
 politics and aglow with patriotism ; and he used his newl 
 discovered sonnet-medium freely. Looking westward at tt 
 setting Venus over England, he sounds greatly the note ( 
 patriotism, daring to take the glorious star for type of h 
 country's glory — 
 
 " Fair star of evening, splendour of the west, 
 Star of my Country ! on the horizon's brink 
 Thou hangest, stooping, as might seem, to sink 
 On England's bosom ; yet well pleased to rest, 
 Meanwhile, and be to her a glorious crest 
 Conspicuous to the Nations. Thou, I think, 
 Should'st be my Country's emblem ; and should'st wink. 
 Bright star ! with laughter on her banners, dress'd 
 In thy fresh beauty. There ! that dusky spot 
 Beneath thee, that is England ; there she lies. 
 Blessings be on you both ! one hope, one lot, 
 One life, one glory ! — I, with many a fear 
 For my dear Country, many heartfelt sighs, 
 Among men who do not love her, linger here." 
 
 It was the first time he had been in France since 1792 ; ar 
 in the ten years the changes there had been greater than ar 
 changes in his own mind or sympathies. He despised tl 
 servility of the fickle French towards the First Consul. W/i 
 hardship had it been to wait an hour f he puts it to them ; havii 
 destroyed monarchy by so terrible a stroke, could they n 
 have given " equality " a longer trial, so that if there was to 1 
 monarchy again, it should at least be monarchy rooting deep i 
 in well-tried affections } About Calais the people seemt : 
 indifferent to the mushroom-monarch. 
 
 " I have bent my way ' 
 
 To the sea-coast, noting that each man frames 
 His business as he likes," 
 
THE POET AS CRITIC AND POLITICIAN 187 
 
 ;hough it was the First Consul's birthday, and France was 
 lolding high festival. The memories of the Revolution in 
 vhich the young poet so passionately believed, had dwindled 
 :o mocking echoes. He remembered how, in 1790, he had 
 leard and seen the hailing of Liberty near Calais — 
 
 " From hour to hour the antiquated Earth 
 Beat like the heart of Man : songs, garlands, mirth, 
 Banners, and happy faces, far and nigh ! " 
 
 Now, in 1802 — 
 
 " Sole register that these things were. 
 Two solitary greetings have I heard, 
 Good-morrow, Citize7i ! a hollow word, 
 As if a dead man spake it ! " 
 
 The Corsican was the slayer of liberty everywhere. Four 
 'ears previously he had seized the proud Republic of Venice 
 ,s a conqueror, and had handed her over to Austria. Words- 
 worth sang her dirge in the great sonnet which commemorated 
 er as " the eldest child of Liberty." And now Bonaparte was 
 howing himself the abettor of slavery in its vulgarest form — 
 he buying and selling of the African negro. The heroic 
 Toussaint I'Ouverture" had cleared the horror out of Hayti, 
 lid won San Domingo for libertarian France. At the Peace 
 f Amiens Napoleon re-imposed slavery on San Domingo, and 
 ^oussaint, resisting the edict, was seized and thrown into a 
 'rench dungeon even after he had at last yielded. Words- 
 worth, not knowing the place of his fate, but only that the 
 ly^rant's foot was on his neck, bids him to " wear a cheerful 
 TOW " in his chains, and to live in the greatness of his soul. 
 
 " Thou hast left behind 
 Powers that will work for thee : air, earth, and skies ; 
 There's not a breathing of the common wind 
 That will forget thee ; thou hast great allies ; 
 Thy friends are exultations, agonies. 
 And love, and man's unconquerable mind." 
 
 More and more clearly his own country stood out in the 
 loet's imagination as the symbol and exemplar of the liberty 
 hich was passing away from France and the Continent. And 
 was a liberty of genuine morality ; the freedom of the self- 
 ossessed and self-possessing soul. But was the soul sound ? 
 /hen Wordsworth re-crossed the Channel and contrasted the 
 
188 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 ''vanity and parade" of London and other English towns wi 
 the look of quiet and desolation in France, he trembled ev( 
 for England. Was not the canker of plutocracy already eatii 
 at her heart ? 
 
 " The wealthiest man among us is the best. 
 Plain hving and high thinking are no more." 
 
 It was now, in this moment of deep indignation and anxio 
 fear, that he wrote sonnets — three of which are perhaps f 
 greatest even he ever wrote — sonnets of commemoration a; 
 challenge, not without echo surely in the thunders of Trafalg 
 and Waterloo, which are too great to be omitted or curtail 
 in any book that would show Wordsworth as he was. 
 
 " Milton ! thou should'st be living at this hour : 
 England hath need of thee : she is a fen 
 Of stagnant waters : altar, sword, and pen, 
 Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, 
 Have forfeited their ancient English dower 
 Of inward happiness. We are selfish men ; 
 Oh ! raise us up, return to us again ; 
 And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. 
 Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart : 
 Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea : 
 Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, 
 So didst thou travel on life's common way, 
 In cheerful godliness ; and yet thy heart 
 The lowliest duties on herself did lay." 
 
 " It is not to be thought of that the Flood 
 Of British freedom, which, to the open sea 
 Of the world's praise, from dark antiquity 
 Hath flowed, *with pomp of waters, unwithstood. 
 Roused though it be full often to a mood 
 Which spurns the check of salutary bands. 
 That this most famous Stream in bogs and sands 
 Should perish ; and to evil and to good 
 Be lost for ever. In our halls is hung 
 Armoury of the invincible Knights of old : 
 We must be free or die, who speak the tongue 
 That Shakespeare spake ; the faith and morals hold 
 Which Milton held. — In every thing we are sprung 
 Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifold." 
 
 " When I have borne in memory what has tamed 
 Great Nations, how ennobling thoughts depart 
 When men change swords for ledgers, and desert 
 
THE POET AS CRITIC AND POLITICIAN 189 
 
 The student's bower for gold, some fears unnamed 
 
 I had, my Country ! — am I to be blamed ? 
 
 Now, when I think of thee, and what thou art, 
 
 Verily, in the bottom of my heart. 
 
 Of those unfilial fears I am ashamed. 
 
 For dearly must we prize thee ; we who find 
 
 In thee a bulwark for the cause of men ; 
 
 And I by my affection was beguiled : 
 
 What wonder if a Poet now and then, 
 
 Among the many movements of his mind, 
 
 Felt for thee as a lover or a child ! " 
 
 It is easy to understand how Wordsworth greeted the 
 ipanish national uprising in which at last the sotil of Europe 
 egan to revive, and how he hailed England's intervention in 
 le Peninsula. The great year was 1808 ; Wordsworth moved 
 •cm the too narrow bounds of Dove Cottage into the more 
 pacious Allan Bank in June ; and there, in his inland dale he 
 :ood, eagerly watching the sunrise of liberty. The newspaper 
 as brought from Keswick : the poet would often go to meet 
 |; at the top of the Raise at two in the morning. In August 
 'imeiro was fought ; but, as the autumn deepened, the prospect 
 rew clouded. Wordsworth felt that the ministries of Nature 
 bout him in Westmorland made his political insight clear. 
 
 ^* Not 'mid the world's vain objects that enslave 
 The free-born Soul— that World whose vaunted skill 
 In selfish interest perverts the will. 
 Whose factions lead astray the wise and brave — 
 Not there ; but in dark wood and rocky cave, 
 And hollow vale which foaming torrents fill 
 With omnipresent murmur as they rave 
 Down their steep beds, that never shall be still : 
 Here, mighty Nature ! in this school sublime 
 I weigh the hopes and fears of suffering Spain ; 
 For her consult the auguries of time, 
 And through the human heart explore my way ; 
 And look and listen — gathering, whence I may, 
 Triumph, and thoughts no bondage can restrain." 
 
 Ls he listened to the raving of the autumnal wind, the poet, 
 'ke Shelley afterwards, heard in it not only a dirge, but a 
 romise and a prophecy, telling of *' bright calms" that 
 lould succeed. 
 He wrote not sonnets only that autumn and winter at Allan 
 
190 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Bank. The splendid beginning of British intervention in the 
 Peninsula, marked by the battle of Vimeiro, was spoiled by th 
 so-called Convention of Cintra, by which the French werr 
 conducted scathless out of Portugal at British expense. Th 
 English nation was astonished and indignant at such apparen 
 pusillanimity, and a court of inquiry was held. Wordsworth 
 as he wrote to Southey, was filled with detestation and abhor 
 rence of the Convention. The authors of it showed their failun 
 to understand the essential novelty of the situation — namely, th( 
 substitution of national for merely governmental opposition t( 
 Napoleon. Napoleon himself, naturally enough, '* had committee 
 a capital blunder in supposing that when he had intimidatec 
 the Sovereigns of Europe he had conquered the several nations. 
 But it was disgraceful that a " child of Liberty " like Englam 
 should make the same mistake. " As far as those men [th< 
 authors of the Convention of Cintra] could, they put an extin 
 guisher upon the star which was then rising." 
 
 In these winter months Wordsworth relieved his mind b] 
 writing a pamphlet, which was published in the spring o 
 1809. It had one of the interminable titles beloved of seriou;' 
 and solid persons in those days, which in this case is wortl' 
 citing, because it summarizes the substance of the essay 
 " Concerning the relations of Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal* ^ 
 to each other, and to the common enemy at this crisis, anc'' 
 specifically as affected by the Convention of Cintra ; th(*v 
 whole brought to the test of those principles by which alon('| 
 the independence and freedom of nations can be preserved 01' t 
 recovered." ^1 
 
 " TJie independence and freedom of nations : " the essay glow.'*} 
 with this theme like a fire fed with rich fuel. Wordswortll 
 knew that he must seem inconsistent : in 1793 he had beer'f 
 shaken and soured by the hostility of England to France \ 
 why was he now so eager to push hostility to France beyonc'^ 
 the limits of humanity and worldly policy } Because, he 
 answered, in the second war the persons were changed, but the 
 struggle, the enemy, were the same in both conflicts. The'r 
 struggle was for liberty ; the enemy was " the spirit of selfish 
 tyranny and lawless ambition." Napoleon was not really 
 France ; the French government, even the French army, was 
 not the French people. Napoleon's power, though parading- [^ 
 
 !: 
 
THE POET AS CRITIC AND POLITICIAN 191 
 
 5 that of the nation, was as evil a thing, wherever it 
 stablished itself, as any monarchical or aristocratic abuse 
 f the ancien regime. 
 
 Wordsworth's horror at the Convention of Cintra was thus 
 Dt only consistent, but homogeneous, with his horror at the 
 ar which began in 1793 ; and his nature was as passionately 
 ;;irred in the one case as in the other. Only in his anti- 
 japoleonic crusade he was full of wholesome hope, and felt 
 imself supported by the best sentiment of his fellow-citizens, 
 'e was, as he expressed it, drawing out "to open day the 
 luth from its recesses " in their minds. He was standing for 
 'moral " against "mechanic" power; for soul against body; for 
 *:he purest hopes " against '' purblind calculation " ; for the 
 f nighty engines of Nature" against the "base and puny tools 
 ad implements of policy." And seldom has a finer hymn of 
 utionality been sung than in these prose sentences : " There 
 ino middle course : two masters cannot be served ! Justice must 
 t;her be enthroned above might, and the moral law take place 
 C: the edicts of selfish passion ; or the heart of the people, 
 yiich alone can sustain the efforts of the people, will languish ; 
 teir desires will not spread beyond the plough and the loom, 
 te field and the fireside ; the sword will appear to them an 
 eiblem of no promise ; an instrument of no hope ; an object 
 c indifference, or disgust, or fear. Was there ever — since the 
 erliest actions of men which have been transmitted by affec- 
 ti'uate tradition, or recorded by faithful history, or sung to the 
 impassioned harp of poetry — was there ever a people who 
 p2sented themselves to the reason and the imagination, as 
 uder more holy influences than the dwellers upon the Southern 
 Iininsula ; as roused more instantaneously from a deadly 
 s ep to a more hopeful wakefulness ; as a mass fluctuates 
 vi;h one motion under the breath of a mightier wind ; as 
 biaking themselves up, and settling into several bodies, in more 
 hrmonious order ; as reunited and embattled under a standard 
 wich was reared to the sun with more authentic assurance of 
 fill victory ? Let the fire, which is never wholly to be extin- 
 g shed, break out afresh ; let but the human creature be 
 nised ; whether he have lain heedless and torpid in religious or 
 ciil slavery — have languished under a thraldom, domestic or 
 fceign, or under both these alternately — or have drifted about 
 
192 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 a helpless member of a class of disjointed and feeble barbarian 
 — let him rise and act ; and his domineering imagination, b 
 which from childhood he has been betrayed, and the debasin 
 affections which it has imposed upon him, -"vill from tha 
 moment participate the dignity of the newly ennobled bein 
 whom they will now acknowledge for their master. . . . Sti 
 more inevitable and momentous are the results, when the ind 
 vidual knows that the fire ... is not less living in the breasts ( 
 his associates ; and sees the signs and testimonies of his ow 
 power, incorporated with those of a growing multitude, and nc 
 to be distinguished from them, accompany him wherever h 
 moves. ... If the object contended for be worthy and trul 
 great ... if cruelties have been committed upon an ancient an 
 venerable people, which 'shake the human frame with horror 
 if not alone the life which is sustained by the bread of th 
 mouth, but that — without which there is no life — the life in th 
 soul, has been directly and mortally warred against . . . the 
 does intense passion, consecrated by a sudden revelation ^ 
 justice, give birth to those higher and better wonders which 
 have described ; and exhibit true miracles to the eyes of me 
 and the noblest which can be seen." Before the poet's imagin. 
 tion hung the vision of the Spanish Power in two hemisphere 
 poised, in an awful instant of destiny, and with one hope . 
 salvation, between an effete monarchy and a new tyrann 
 England to the rescue, could but England be true to hersel 
 " Reflect upon what was the temper and condition of t\ 
 Southern Peninsula of Europe — the noble temper of the peop 
 of this mighty island, sovereigns of the all-embracing ocear 
 think also of the condition of so vast a region in the Westei 
 continent and its islands ; and we shall have cause to fear th 
 ages may pass away before a conjunction of things, so marve 
 lously adapted to ensure prosperity to virtue, shall present itse 
 again. It could scarcely be spoken of as being to the wishes ^ 
 men — it was so far beyond their hopes. The government whic 
 had been exercised under the name of the old Monarchy ^ 
 Spain — this government, imbecile even to dotage, whose ver 
 selfishness was destitute of vigour, had been removed ; take 
 laboriously and foolishly by the plotting Corsican to his ow 
 bosom ; in order that the world might see ... to what degn 
 a man of bad principles is despicable- though of great power- 
 
THE POET AS CRITIC AND POLITICIAN 193 
 
 working blindly against his own purposes." The opportunity 
 for beneficent intervention was made as much by the stupidity as 
 by the genius of the tyranny. " It was a high satisfaction to 
 behold demonstrated ... to what a narrow domain of know- 
 ledge the intellect of a Tyrant must be confined ; that, if the gate 
 by which wisdom enters has never been opened, that of policy 
 will surely find moments when it will shut itself against its 
 pretended master imperiously and obstinately. To the eyes of 
 the very peasant in the field, this sublime truth was laid open — 
 not only that a Tyrant's domain of knowledge is narrow, but 
 melancholy as narrow ; inasmuch as — from all that is lovely, 
 dignified, or exhilarating in the prospect of human nature — he 
 is inexorably cut off ; and therefore he is inwardly helpless 
 .1 and forlorn." 
 
 In all this there is surely no " reaction " ; there is nothing 
 
 ^vhich the most modern *' Liberalism " need disavow. Two 
 
 ^ears after the Convention of Cintra, while Wellington was 
 
 plodding on through the Peninsular campaigns, with the issue 
 
 ioubtful and opposition keen, an eminent " Jingo " of his day, 
 
 sir Charles Pasley, of the Royal Engineers, wrote a pamphlet 
 
 )n Military Policy and Instittitions of the British Empirey 
 
 1, vhich moved Wordsworth to a rejoinder. Pasley maintained 
 
 hat Britain, if she was to overthrow Napoleon, ought to follow 
 
 lis example by winning a basis of power on the Continent. 
 
 Against this view Wordsworth raised again his standard of 
 
 atipnal independence, of popular self-government. He rested 
 
 is hopes, he wrote to Pasley, "with respect to the emancipa- 
 
 on of Europe, upon moral influence, and the wishes and opinions 
 
 f the respective nations." " You treat," he went on, " of conquest 
 
 ^-^f conquest could in itself, nakedly and abstractedly con- 
 
 dered, confer rights. If we once admit this proposition, all 
 
 lorality is driven out of the world. ... I think there is nothing 
 
 e unfortunate for Europe than the condition of Germany 
 
 d Italy in these respects [their divided state]. Could the 
 
 riers be dissolved which have divided the one nation into 
 
 eapolitans, Tuscans, Venetians, etc., and the other into 
 
 ssians, Hanoverians, etc., and could they once be taught to 
 
 1 their strength, the French would be driven back into their 
 
 land immediately. I wish to see Spain, Italy, France, Ger- 
 
 ny formed into independent nations. . . . England requires 
 
 o 
 
 
 ■ 
 
194 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 as you have shown so eloquently and ably, a new system 
 of martial policy ; but England, as well as the rest of Europe, 
 requires what is more difficult to give it, — a new course of 
 education, a higher tone of moral feeling, more of the grandeur 
 of the imaginative faculties, and less of the petty processes that 
 would manage the concerns of nations in the same calculating 
 spirit with which it would set about building a house." 
 
 Two sonnets, both written in 1811, may fix for us more per- 
 manently than any prose extracts the key of Wordsworth's 
 politics in this, their anti-Napoleonic strain. 
 
 "The power of Armies is a visible thing, 
 Formal, and circumscribed in time and space ; 
 But who the Hmits of that power shall trace 
 Which a brave People into light can bring 
 Or hide, at will, — for freedom combating 
 By just revenge inflamed ? No foot may chase, 
 No eye can follow, to a fatal place 
 That power, that spirit, whether on the wing 
 Like the strong wind, or sleeping like the wind 
 Within its awful caves. — From year to year 
 Springs this indigenous produce far and near ; 
 No craft this subtle element can bind. 
 Rising like water from the soil, to find 
 In every nook a lip that it may cheer." 
 
 " Here pause : the poet claims at least this praise, : 
 
 That virtuous Liberty hath been the scope 
 Of his pure song, which did not shrink from hope 
 In the worst moment of these evil days ; 
 From hope, the paramount dicty that Heaven lays, 
 For its own honour, on man's suffering heart. 
 Never may from our souls one truth depart — 
 That an accursed thing it is to gaze 
 On prosperous tyrants with a dazzled eye ; 
 Nor — touched with due abhorrence of their guilt 
 For whose dire ends tears flow, and blood is spilt. 
 And justice labours in extremity — 
 Forget thy weakness, upon which is built, 
 O wretched man, the throne of tyranny ! " 
 
 If political reaction came, if Wordsworth ever became i 
 any sense a " lost leader," it was in a later chapter of his life. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 WORDSWORTH'S tract on the Convention of Cintra was 
 revised and prepared for the press by a young man of 
 letters whom he had not known very long, but whose gifts he 
 already rated very highly. Thomas de Quincey is, and must 
 always remain, one of the most vivid and remarkable of all the 
 members of Wordsworth's circle, though it seems doubtful where 
 he may ultimately stand among English prose classics. As to 
 his early discipleship of Wordsworth, at all events, and his 
 competence to understand him and to mediate between him and 
 intellectual England, there can be no doubt. De Quincey, a 
 strange, delicate, wayward, clever, well-read boy, with precocious 
 skill in Greek, came across Lyrical Ballads in 1799, at Bath. Two 
 years later, when he was sixteen, he read Ruth in a London 
 newspaper, into which it had been copied ; and these first 
 tastings of the new poetry were an intoxication. In 1803 he 
 went up to Worcester College, Oxford, at the ordinary age of 
 eighteen, and had already received a precious letter from Words- 
 worth, a letter of kindly sympathy in reply to the enthusiastic 
 and irrepressible outpourings of an admiring reader. During 
 the extraordinary years before De Quincey's matriculation, the 
 three years at Manchester Grammar School, ending with the 
 picturesque flight in the sunlit silence of an early July morning 
 so well known to all readers of the Opium-Eater ; the wander- 
 ings in Wales ; the squalid months in rat-haunted London 
 rooms, and among the perils of nocturnal Oxford Street ; 
 mixing strangely with the earliest pleasures of opium, there 
 was burning and growing in the boy's nature a pure intellectual 
 passion, a ** nympholepsy," as he called it, in his pedantic way, 
 of which Wordsworth — Wordsworth idealized among his 
 
 195 
 
196 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 mountains — was the source and the object. In his first long 
 walk from Manchester to Chester, the runaway was full of Ruth. 
 With "an elaborate and pompous sunset" in front of him 
 hanging over the mountains of North Wales, he thought of the 
 American lake described to Ruth by her lover — 
 
 " With all its fairy crowds 
 Of islands that together lie 
 As quietly as spots of sky 
 Among the evening clouds." 
 
 At that moment, as he somewhat theatrically puts it, he 
 alone " in all Europe " was quoting from Wordsworth. That 
 might be rather difficult to prove, but, at least, it seems certain 
 that he alone, or all but alone — for was not " Christopher North," 
 albeit somewhat doubtingly, with him ? — among Wordsworthian 
 readers and critics was intellectually in love with Wordsworth, 
 smitten and subdued and modified by the mere charm of his 
 verse. The poet was to him a hero to be looked at, a god to 
 be sought and worshipped. Among the kindnesses in Words- 
 worth's first letters was a frank invitation to visit him at Gras- 
 mere, and the boy was at once eager and afraid to go. Before 
 he had written to Wordsworth, when he was planning his escape 
 from Manchester, he had thought of making for the Lakes, 
 drawn thither by "a secret fascination, subtle, sweet, fantastic, 
 and spiritually strong." As a Manchester child, he had always 
 been near them, and his imagination had been introduced to 
 them by Mrs. Radcliffe. Then came the Wordsworthian engoiie- 
 ment. But that very engouement restrained as much as it 
 impelled the impecunious fugitive from school. " The very 
 depth of the impressions which had been made upon me, either 
 as regarded the poetry or the scenery, was too solemn and 
 (unaffectedly I may say it) too spiritual, to clothe itself in any 
 hasty or chance movement as at all adequately expressing its 
 strength, or reflecting its hallowed character. If you, reader, 
 were a devout Mahometan, throwing gazes of mystical awe 
 daily towards Mecca, or were a Christian devotee looking with ' 
 the same rapt adoration to St. Peter's at Rome, or to El Kodah 
 — the Holy City of Jerusalem — (so called even amongst the. 
 Arabs, who hate both Christian and Jew), how painfully would 
 it jar upon your sensibilities, if some friend, sweeping past you 
 upon a high road, with a train (according to the circumstances) 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 197 
 
 of dromedaries or of wheel carriages, should suddenly pull up, 
 and say, * Come, old fellow, jump up alongside of me, I'm off for 
 the Red Sea, and here's a spare dromedary ;' or * off for Rome, 
 and here's a well-cushioned barouche ; ' seasonable and con- 
 venient it might happen that the invitation were ; but still it 
 would shock you that a journey which, with or without your 
 consent, could not hit assume the character eventually of a 
 saintly pilgrimage, should arise and take its initial movement 
 upon a casual summons, or upon a vulgar opening of momentary 
 convenience." If he could ever dare to present himself to 
 Wordsworth, it must be in circumstances very different from 
 those in which he was running away from school, without money, 
 and in disgrace. His first crop of wild oats once sown, however, 
 once a member of the University of Oxford and Commoner of 
 Worcester, De Quincey was respectable enough to bethink him- 
 self of entering any presence. Nor did his interest in the 
 Romantic Revival, and his passionate feeling for Wordsworth 
 and the Lakes diminish while he was at Oxford, On the 
 contrary, his desultory studies there were largely in English 
 literature ; and, such was his critical discernment, that English 
 literature meant for him not only Chaucer, Spenser, Shake- 
 esispeare, Milton, but, beyond all cavil or question, Wordsworth 
 til and Coleridge also. And as for the Wordsworthian engotiement^ 
 there was no sign of its diminishing. "Extinguished such a 
 passion could not be. . . . The very names of the ancient hills 
 — Fairfield, Seat Sandal, Helvellyn, Blencathara, Glaramara ; 
 the names of the sequestered glens — such as Borrowdale, Martin- 
 ei| dale, Mardale, Wastdale, and Ennerdale ; but, above all, the 
 shy pastoral recesses . . . Grasmere, for instance, the lonely 
 abode of the poet himself, solitary, and yet sowed, as it were, 
 with a thin diffusion of humble dwellings — here a scattering, 
 and there a clustering, as in the starry heavens , . . these were 
 so many local spells upon me, equally poetic and elevating with 
 the Miltonic names of Valdarno and Vallombrosa." And under 
 (filjthese spells, strengthening rather than weakening, that most 
 ^ unusual of undergraduates walked about the Oxford streets and 
 the Worcester college gardens. 
 
 In the course of vacation-rambles, De Quincey twice got as 
 near Grasmere as Coniston ; but as yet he got no further. 
 "Once I absolutely went forwards from Coniston to the very 
 
 k 
 
198 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 gorge of Hammerscar, from which the whole Vale of Grasmere 
 suddenly breaks upon the view . . . with its lovely valley 
 stretching before the eye in the distance, the lake lying imme- 
 diately below, with its solemn ark-like island . . . seemingly 
 floating on its surface. ... In one quarter, a little wood . . . 
 more directly in opposition to the spectator, a few green fields ; 
 and beyond them, just two bowshots 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. . . . Catching one hasty glimpse of this 
 loveliest of landscapes, I retreated like a guilty thing, for fear 
 I might be surprised by Wordsworth, and then returned, faint- 
 heartedly, to Coniston, and so to Oxford, re infectdr 
 
 De Quincey crowned his academic queerness by absconding 
 in the middle of the examination for his degree. That may 
 have been in 1807, though there is no certainty about the matter. 
 Certain it is, however, that in 1807 he first saw Wordsworth. 
 Earlier in the same year he first saw Coleridge, and it was 
 through Coleridge that he came eye to eye with Coleridge's 
 great collaborator in Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge, indeed, shared 
 the hero-worship he bestowed on Wordsworth, not only because 
 of his poetry, but also because of his addiction to German philo- 
 sophy, one of De Ouincey's miscellaneous pursuits. Coleridge, 
 De Quincey seems to have been readier to face than Words- 
 worth ; and he was much disappointed that he was away in 
 Malta from April, 1804, to August, 1806. He even had thoughts 
 of going to Malta to gratify his longing, but he decided to wait. 
 In 1807 Coleridge was in the west country. From Bristol to 
 Bridgwater went De Quincey one summer day, bound for Tom 
 Poole's at Nether Stowey. Poole he found, and was delighted 
 with the *' stout, plain-looking farmer," in his " rustic, old- 
 fashioned house," with its splendid library ; but the incalculable 
 S. T. C. was away on a visit. De Quincey stayed with Poole 
 a day or two " until his [Coleridge's] motions should be ascer- 
 tained " — always a difficult matter. For days they were un- 
 ascertainable. Then De Quincey went over to Bridgwater to 
 see whether he could find his prize ; and there, sure enough, 
 under an archway in the main street, stood the man. " In 
 height he might seem to be about five feet eight (he was, in 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 199 
 
 reality, about an inch and a half taller, but his figure was of an 
 order which drowns the height) ; his person was broad and full, 
 and tended even to corpulence ; his complexion was fair, though 
 not what painters technically style fair, because it was associated 
 with black hair ; his eyes were large and soft inl their expres- 
 sion ; and it was from the peculiar appearance of haze or 
 dreaminess which mixed with their light that I recognized my 
 object." 
 
 In the autumn, De Quincey met Coleridge at Bristol, heard 
 from him that he was to be lecturing in London in the follow- 
 ing winter, and offered to escort his wife and family to Keswick 
 to their winter quarters at Greta Hall. The fateful moment 
 had arrived. The escort was accepted ; and in October the 
 party — Mrs. Coleridge, Hartley, aged nine, Derwent, two years 
 younger, and Sara, two years younger still — set out with De 
 Quincey, aged twenty-two, in a post-chaise, the horses' heads 
 turned towards the North. 
 
 North, with the minimum of deflection, the travellers went, 
 by Gloucester, Bridgnorth, Liverpool, Lancaster, until, one 
 afternoon about three, they found themselves changing horses 
 for the last time at quiet Ambleside, at the gate of Paradise. 
 There, in the still bright afternoon, along the road we know, 
 across Pelter Bridge, along Rydal mere, and over " White-moss," 
 with the view into Grasmere, before the final dip to the lake ancj 
 Wordsworth's door. De Quincey and the two boys walk up the 
 hill, of course ; and from the top they are minded to go down 
 at a run, leaving the chaise to grind over the rough road at its 
 own pace. 
 
 " moment, one and infinite ! " 
 
 What is this cottage with the white walls, and the yew-trees 
 in front, that at a turn of the road arrests suddenly the 
 scamperers downhill } Is it not the same that De Quincey 
 fled from, "like a guilty thing surprised," the year before at 
 Hammerscar? Heavens! it is; for Hartley turns in at the 
 gate. De Quincey tastes the fearful joys of hero-worship on 
 the very edge of beatific vision. This time he will stand it out ; 
 he will not run away. In his transport he forgets his manners ; 
 he does not wait for the arrival of the chaise, that he may hand 
 out Mrs. Coleridge ; he hurries in after Hartley, and has the 
 reward of his long patience. 
 
200 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 All this is described by De Quincey with some artificiality 
 of manner ; but his emotion, as every hero-worshipper knows, 
 was perfectly natural, perfectly credible, and quite ordinary. 
 What is not ordinary, what makes the moment remarkable, is 
 the electricity that passed in that first handshake of Words- 
 worth and De Quincey, the instant of physical contact be- 
 tween a great poet, much misunderstood, greatly unpopular, 
 serenely, coldly self-centred ; and a critic, hardly great, but 
 infinitely ingenious, and with much in his power ; a critic, 
 subtle, sensitive, sympathetic, doubtfully scrupulous ; accepting 
 the Romanticism of Coleridge and Wordsworth with all his ( 
 heart, and yet ready, on the smallest provocation, to lacerate it 
 here and there with his logical understanding, and in a fit of the 
 spleen to expose his heroes with the resources of a master of 
 style. 
 
 However, electricity is, for the most part, a secret agency ; 
 and the meeting was serene in itself and its immediate sequel. 
 While the poet was receiving Mrs. Coleridge and Sara, De 
 Quincey was making acquaintance, inside the cottage, first with 
 Mrs. Wordsworth, and then with Dorothy. We already know 
 his impression of the poet's wife. That of the " dear, dear 
 sister," was equally vivid, and — from all the evidence we have — 
 equally true. He saw the eyes, " not soft, nor fierce and bold, j 
 but wild and startling, and hurried in their motion." He saw 
 the dark complexion, " gipsy " in its " determinate tan," as of 
 one against whom the " misty mountain winds " are " free to 
 blow." He felt the ardour and sensibility ; he was conscious of 
 "some subtle fire of impassioned intellect . . . which, being 
 alternately pushed forward into a conspicuous expression by 
 the irresistible instincts of her temperament, and then immedi- 
 ately checked, in obedience to the decorum of her sex and age 
 and her maidenly condition, gave to her whole demeanour, and 
 to her conversation, an air of embarrassment, and even of self- 
 conflict, that was almost distressing to witness. ... At times, 
 the self-counteraction and self-baffling of her feelings caused 
 her even to stammer, and so determinately 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." He thought she walked with a too "glancing 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY SOI 
 
 quickness/' and noticed that she stooped. Above everything, her 
 wonderful intellectual sympathy struck him. You could tell 
 tier nothing, quote nothing to her, which she did not receive so 
 IS to give it a new interest for you. " The pulses of light are 
 lot more quick or more inevitable in their flow and un- 
 iulation, than were the answering and echoing movements of 
 ler sympathizing attention." This we can well believe. And 
 ve can also believe that, though Dorothy had had more chances 
 )f going into polite society than Mary Hutchinson of Penrith, 
 hough she had even lived " under the protection " of a Canon 
 )f Windsor, she was not so " lady-like " as Mrs. Wordsworth. 
 
 But Wordsworth himself has by this time brought in Mrs. 
 Coleridge, and they are standing, we may hope, by a good fire. 
 A^hat did De Quincey think of his hero in the flesh ? 
 
 He thought, in the first place, that he was not well made, 
 iis legs, he thought, were faulty ; his shoulders were narrow 
 ,nd had a " droop," and his ** total efl'ect " was always worst " in 
 . state of motion." But his face was more satisfactory. 
 
 "Many such " [faces], writes De Quincey, "and finer, I have 
 een amongst the portraits of Titian, and, in a later period, 
 .mongst those of Vandyke, from the great era of Charles I., as 
 Iso from the Court of Elizabeth and of Charles H., but none 
 /hich has more impressed me in my own time." It was a long 
 'forth-of-England face ; the head was rounded behind as well as 
 1 front ; the forehead was remarkable for its breadth rather than 
 :s height. The eyes were small and neither " bright," " lustrous," 
 or " piercing " ; and yet at times, under the influence of 
 hysical fatigue, they would have a look " the most solemn and 
 piritual that it is possible for the human ,eye to wear." The 
 ose, as all portraits show, was large arid arched, indicating, 
 )e Quincey thinks, a strong animal basis of temperament. The 
 louth was not remarkable, but its " circumjacencies " were : 
 lere was a "swell and protrusion of the parts above and 
 round " the lips, which reminded De Quincey of Milton's mouth, 
 specially as it appears in the crayon drawing of Milton, engraved 
 y Richardson, whose verisimilitude was eagerly attested by 
 niton's daughter. In other respects, De Quincey thought that 
 /ordsworth's face was like Milton's ; in the droop of the eye- 
 ds, and the lie of the hair on the brow. 
 
 De Quincey's Wordsworthian fruition, the seeing of his hero 
 
202 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE ^ 
 
 face to face, produced, he tells us, a change "in the physica 
 condition of his nervous system." This is a grand way of sayins 
 that, after he had seen and spoken to Wordsworth, he was m 
 longer afraid of seeing and speaking to him. He regarded hin 
 henceforward as, like Milton's Raphael, an *' affable angel, wh' 
 conversed on the terms of man with man." The first evenin; 
 passed pleasantly ; the old-fashioned lamp-lit tea-table of 
 November evening was delightful ; and then Wordsworth rea 
 from Fairfax's Tasso ; and then "about eleven," De Quince 
 found himself in (presumably) the bedroom which the Word.' 
 worths had built. It was a narrow squeeze at Dove Cottag 
 when there were guests ; and in the morning De Quince 
 discovered (he seems to have been too sleepy to discover it i 
 night, or what kind of light did he go to bed by ?) that 
 " cottage bed " in the room was occupied by Wordsworth's thre 
 years' old boy John, who woke him by repeating the creed a 
 part of his matins. Dorothy made breakfast on that rain 
 morning ; and then, in spite of the rain, the poet and his siste 
 took De Quincey round the six-mile circuit of Rydal an 
 Grasmere lakes. Mrs. Coleridge and her children pursued the 
 journey to Keswick ; and the next day, Mr. and Mrs. Wordi 
 worth and Dorothy started with De Quincey on an expeditio 
 to see Southey, and the joint-establishment of Southeys an 
 Coleridges at Greta Hall. They went by way of Ullswate 
 driving to Ambleside in a one-horse cart driven by "a bonn: 
 young woman," Dorothy scattering genial salutations as the 
 rumbled along. On they went, walking, of course, up the stee 
 ascent of Kirkstone Pass ; then, in the cart again, down upo, 
 Brothers* Water and Patterdale, at whose inn they stopped i 
 the moonlight. There a change of horses ; and on " through thoi 
 most romantic woods and rocks of Stybarrow — through thoi 
 silent glens of Glencoin and Glenridding — through . . . Gobarro 
 Park — we saw, alternately, for four miles, the most grotesque an 
 the most awful spectacles — 
 
 * Abbey windows 
 With Moorish temples of the Hindoos,' 
 
 all fantastic, all as unreal and shadowy as the moonlight whic- 
 created them ; whilst, at every angle of the road, broad glean: 
 came upwards of Ullswater, stretching for nine miles nortl 
 ward, but, fortunately for its effect, broken into three water 
 
D 
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 203 
 
 '"Ihambers of almost equal length, and never all visible at once." 
 ''" Kt " Ewesmere" (probably Easemerehill close to Pooley Bridge) 
 hey spent the night, and there they left the ladies. Wordsworth 
 nd his guests walked on by Emont Bridge to Penrith ; and on 
 ^l" hat day tcte-d,'tete companionship between the two probably 
 iegan ; for did not Wordsworth read part of his White Doe of 
 \ylstone, hardly yet seriously begun, to the disciple ? — an incident 
 most memorable " to the critic. De Quincey left Wordsworth 
 ehind at Penrith, and walked over the hills alone by Threlkeld 
 Keswick and Greta Hall, where Southey and Mrs. Coleridge 
 2ceived him. Thither came Wordsworth the following day ; 
 nd De Quincey watched the two great men together, with eyes 
 n the look-out, and ears listening for mischief. He thought they 
 ere not very friendly, or, at least, not more than friendly. In one 
 aspect, however, they seemed to him too friendly, namely, in 
 aeir sentiments on public affairs. De Quincey was an orthodox 
 'ittite ; and he heard, with dismay, echoes of unmistakable 
 Jacobinism," as it seemed to him, in the sympathetic talk of 
 Wordsworth and Southey. There was even profane jibing at 
 he English royal family, and about the hopelessness of any good 
 Dr England until they were expatriated, say to Botany Bay ! 
 Vhat was a proper young Oxford Tory to think of the con- 
 enience of such jesting } 
 
 Next day, the two pedestrians returned to Dove Cottage, and 
 he first chapter of De Quincey's personal acquaintance with 
 Vordsworth was closed. He went south, first to Bristol, and 
 hen to London, seeing much of Coleridge, and, once, giving 
 he poor laudanum - dazed, lecturing, ambulatory man very 
 ubstantial pecuniary help. 
 
 In June, 1808, the Wordsworths made their flitting from the 
 30 strait bounds of Dove Cottage to Allan Bank. As the 
 /Inter drew on, and Wordsworth settled down to the Convention 
 f CintrUy the discomforts of a hastily-chosen new house pressed 
 n the inhabitants. The chimneys smoked ; the cellars were wet. 
 )ne day the whole household had to go to bed because no fire 
 .'ould burn without intolerable smoke. If things could not be 
 emedied, the Wordsworths would have to leave Grasmere, for 
 here was no other house to be had. Fortunately, the final 
 efforts of the workmen must have been rewarded with some 
 'uccess, for Allan Bank remained the Wordsworth's home until 
 
204 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 1811. The first winter there was not dull, though it was uncon- 
 fortable. The discomfort, indeed, was heightened by the fac 
 that they had guests during great part of the time. Coleridg 
 was there, trying to launch The Friend^ and preparing the firs 
 number. Coleridge was still very dear to the Wordsworth: 
 dear and worrying and, for the most part, grievous. He wa 
 trying to do without opium, and his London lectures had nc 
 been a failure. Still, he was in wretched health, physical an 
 moral, as, indeed, he nearly always was. He was frankl 
 separated from his wife that winter ; that is, he lived at Alia 
 Bank, and she at Greta Hall, to their mutual satisfaction, anc 
 as Dorothy Wordsworth hoped, their mutual benefit. "The 
 are upon friendly terms," she wrote, " and occasionally see eac 
 other. In fact, Mrs. Coleridge was more than a week at Grasmer 
 under the same roof with him." Things might have been worse' 
 then ; but it could not be said that they were ideal. 
 
 De Quincey, too, was a guest at Allan Bank that winter 
 but neither from him nor from the Wordsworths have an;' 
 particulars of his visit come to us. He must, however, hav 
 known all about the first number of The Friend ; and h 
 certainly knew all about the Convention of Cintra pamphlet 
 In the spring of 1809 he went south again, to Bristol an( 
 London, to ** eat dinners " and otherwise make some kind of over 
 tures towards active life ; and in London he saw Wordsworth' 
 pamphlet through the press, enriching it with an appendix 
 and worrying the printers with his punctuation. Wordswortl 
 thought De Ouincey's additions " most masterly," and wa 
 very grateful to his Oxford disciple, in spite of his finicking' 
 ways with colons and semi-colons. All the foundations of ;■ 
 close friendship were being laid. While De Quincey was a- 
 Allan Bank, he was keeping his eye on Dove Cottage ; and^ 
 before he left, it was settled that he was to be its next tenant,— 
 Dorothy undei taking the oversight of furnishing and the rest 
 it, against his return in November. She enjoyed the work 
 and it is evident that the coming of the new occupant wai' 
 much looked forward to in the Vale. Backwards and forward; 
 Dorothy trudged between Allan Bank and the cottage in thai, 
 spring and summer of 1809 (the great year, for England, 
 Darwin's birth and Tennyson's and Gladstone's ; the year, also 
 in which Byron's English Bards and Scotch Reviewers saw thf 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 205 
 
 ght) ; seeing to the laying of carpets, the hanging of curtains ; 
 ix)ve all, the setting-up of bookshelves for one of the most 
 pokish of men ; in that respect, how unlike her William ! The 
 l^ordsworths were too near at Allan Bank to feel it any pain to 
 f) back to Dove Cottage ; and Dorothy loved her visits in De 
 [uincey's interest ; hearing the cuckoo as of old, and fancying 
 jat the little birds in the orchard recognized her, and rejoiced 
 \ the branches of the apple-trees at her presence. 
 I De Quincey's coming, she felt, would carry on the Words- 
 prthian tradition at the cottage. " Pleasant indeed it is to 
 link of that little orchard, which for over seven years at least 
 uch was the length of De Quincey's lease] will be a secure 
 )vert for the birds, and undisturbed by the woodman's axe." 
 p Dorothy wrote. And she went on telling her " dear friend " 
 ' the " impious strife " waged that year by the said woodman's 
 «e among the old trees on Nab Scar, and of "the wicked 
 issions," uttering themselves in lawsuits and rumours of law- 
 lits, that were let loose in the very sanctuary of Nature. 
 
 De Ouincey arrived, bag and baggage, in October, to stay 
 th the Wordsworths and bear with them the still smoky 
 limneys of Allan Bank, while his servant prepared the 
 )ttage. More than a month he enjoyed this ever-ready 
 >spitality — Dorothy writing that he seemed like one of the 
 mily. At last the cottage was ready, and he entered on his 
 ng residence there, his occupancy, with many long intervals, 
 r twenty-seven years. 
 
 And De Quincey loved his cottage, well enough, at least, to 
 re there a great deal, and to write about it in his most 
 igaging style. For his sake, the reader will bear to hear a 
 
 ;*|tle more about it, so that when he goes to look at it he may 
 
 •member that it has a complete double set of associations. 
 
 " Cottage immortal in my remembrance ! " he apostrophized 
 
 once. " This was the scene of struggles the most tempestuous 
 
 id bitter within my own mind : this the scene of my despon- 
 
 i^ncy and unhappiness : this the scene of my happiness — a 
 
 , appiness which justified the faith of man's earthly lot as upon 
 le whole a dowry from heaven ! It was, in its exterior, not so 
 uch a picturesque cottage ... as it was lovely : one gable-end 
 as, indeed, most gorgeously apparelled in ivy, and so far pictu- 
 iJsque ; but . . . the front . . . was embowered — nay, it may be 
 
 : 
 
 
we WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 said, smothered — in roses of different species, amongst which th 
 moss and the damask prevailed. These, together with as muc 
 jasmine and honeysuckle as could find room to flourish, . . 
 performed the acceptable service of breaking the unpleasant glar 
 that would else have wounded the eye. ... It was very irregula 
 in its outline to the rear, by the aid of one little projectin 
 room, and also of a stable and little barn in immediate conta( 
 with the dwelling-house." 
 
 Here, then, a mile from one of the poets of his dearei 
 adoption, with his thirty chestfuls or so of books, and, alas ! wit 
 a decanter full of laudanum on the table beside him, at a 
 events, on Saturday nights, this singular young man of twenty 
 five, the ** most well-informed man of his age " that Southe 
 had ever met (and Southey's standard of information wa 
 high), settled down to read German philosophy, pedestrianiz( 
 and intoxicate himself with the alluring Eastern drug. H 
 made a strange and dubious successor to the harmles. 
 abstemious Wordsworths — abstemious almost as much froi 
 reading, in De Quincey's avid sense of the word, as fror 
 illegitimate stimulants and sedatives. Yet we must not rejec 
 the kind of romance with which the opium-eater invested Dov 
 Cottage in his turn.. When we have had enough of the swec 
 garden-life and Nature-worship of William and Dorothy, let u 
 years afterwards, enter Dove Cottage on some bleak winte 
 night, and look on at another kind of pleasure. De Quince 
 has by this time taken a wife, a healthy, homely, Westmorlan 
 lass, Margaret Simpson by name, daughter of Farmer Simpso 
 (a " statesman," as freeholder-farmers are called in those parts 
 who lived at Nab Cottage. He loves winter and darkness an 
 artificial light, so we must not look for him in the orchard or th 
 summer-house or by the well, or prone on daisy- or celandine 
 besprinkled grass. Winter, " in its sternest shape," was a 
 essential of De Quincey's happiness, not for the sake of sunligh 
 on snow-wreath, sparkle of icicle, or the pink flush of mil 
 sunsets on the high clouds, but for the sake of "the divin 
 pleasures " of a winter fireside. He enumerates them 
 "Candles at four o'clock, warm hearthrugs, tea, a fair tea 
 maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies o 
 the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly withou 
 . . . Start at the first week of November : thence to the end c 
 
THOMAS DE QUIXCEV 
 
 FROM THE PAINTING BY SIK J. WATSON" GORDON IN THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 207 
 
 knuary, Christmas Eve being the meridian line, you may com- 
 ute the period when happiness is in season, which, in my 
 idgment, enters the room with the tea-tray." And the tea- 
 ay is not mainly for Mrs. De Quincey's benefit, nor is it a 
 iece of ceremonialism. There is an " eternal teapot " in the 
 ^sion. " I [De Quincey] usually drink tea from eight o'clock 
 ; night to four in the morning." As we look in, then, we see 
 lese things ; and we see that the room is " populous " with 
 Dout five thousand books, steadily collected since De Quincey 
 ent to Oxford. We see a good fire and simple furniture, and 
 motherly and not intellectual wife making tea. Lastly, we see 
 decanter holding a quart of ruby-coloured laudanum on the 
 ible ; beside it a book of German metaphysics ; and, near the 
 indies and the laudanum and the German metaphysics, we see 
 le large head and pale, short-sighted face of De Quincey 
 imself. 
 
 No other inhabitation did Dove Cottage know in the tens 
 lid twenties of the nineteenth century. Yet De Quincey was by 
 o means always there ; he went to London and ate dinners at 
 le Middle Temple ; he went to the west country ; he went to 
 Edinburgh and saw *' Christopher North " about Blackwood. As 
 rule, he soon drifted back to Grasmere. In 182 1 he was some 
 lonths in London, and in that year the Confessions of an 
 '.nglish Opium-Eater began to come out in the London 
 Magazine, Yet, if it was (as it is credibly reported) in London, 
 od " in a little room at the back of Mr. H. G. Bohn's premises, 
 To. 4, York Street, Covent Garden," that De Quincey described 
 le pleasures and pains of opium, it was at Dove Cottage that 
 e felt them. The " pains of opium," those delirious horrors in 
 lat jasmine-clothed, rose-scented place of innocence and peace ; 
 >hat a paradox ! 
 
 The year 18 13 was critical in the lives of both De Quincey 
 nd Wordsworth. For Wordsworth it was the year in which he 
 nally left Grasmere and settled at Rydal Mount. For De 
 )uincey it was a year of multiform calamity. Something — 
 robably something pecuniary — went seriously wrong in his 
 ffairs ; illness, " a most appalling irritation of the stomach," 
 eized him ; he became " a regular and confirmed (no longer an 
 itermitting) opium-eater." We may think of the year, perhaps, 
 s the moment of transition from the pleasures to the pains. It 
 
208 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 was unfortunate, no doubt, from this point of view, that th 
 Wordsworths left the Vale, and went even to so short a distanc 
 as Rydal. For their going denuded Grasmere of the societ 
 which might have kept De Quincey on a higher moral plane 
 Coleridge had disappeared from those parts in 1810, to g 
 to London, then to Bristol, and finally, to enter on his Ion. 
 domestication at Highgate ; and the Lakes saw him no more 
 Southey was a long way off ; and Southey did not care muc 
 for De Quincey. During their last years at Grasmere, D 
 Quincey's relations to the Wordsworths were rather uncertair 
 With Wordsworth himself the friendship did not grow. Ther 
 was no positive breach, but there was undeniable estrangement 
 which was emphasized by the departure of the poet from th 
 Vale. Wordsworth was reserved ; and, though he was in m 
 discreditable sense self-involved, he lived too much in th( 
 practice of his art, too much in the routine of domesticity, am 
 too much in the rites of Nature-worship, to set much store bj 
 companionship, however intellectually congenial. And wa; 
 perfect intellectual congeniality possible between those tw( 
 men ? De Quincey had helped Wordsworth with his pamphlet 
 he understood his poetry, at least better than any other of th( 
 small band of Wordsworth-readers in those days ; and, befon 
 he saw him, his heart had bounded like a lover's at the though 
 of him. But was that enough for a perfect friendship with sucl 
 a man ? Was not De Quincey too bookish, too merely ingeniou; 
 and subtle, to claim perfect fellowship with one so absolutel} 
 original, so naked-souled as Wordsworth } And then their habit 
 were so irreconcilable! There is no reason to suppose tha 
 De Quincey would hide, or would try or wish to hide, th( 
 laudanum-decanter from Wordsworth's austere eye ; and whai 
 can Wordsworth have thought of that } And the tea-drinking 
 till four in the morning ! Those were not Wordsworth's ways 
 And the German metaphysics ! We know what Wordswortt 
 thought of them and of German literature in general when ht 
 was in Germany ; and he was not a man to change his estimates 
 under anybody's influence. Both men were great walkers, bul 
 even here they differed. For while Wordsworth would stroll out 
 before an orthodox bedtime to see the moon and the stars, De 
 Quincey was an out-and-out nocturnal animal ; and, as he 
 prowled along, he thought less of moon and stars than of signs 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 209 
 
 of humanity ; the twinklings in cottage windows ; the telling of 
 ;the hours to heedless ears in graves. And, to crown all, there 
 ;was De Quincey's incurable, appalling shyness ; his irrepressible 
 : jimpulse always to run away from everybody ! 
 
 But if he drew off from Wordsworth himself, if the glamour 
 
 of years inevitably waned, De Quincey was still closely knit 
 
 with Dorothy. The Wordsworth children, too, twined themselves 
 
 round his still bachelor heart, and the shy, pale-faced little man, 
 
 vvith his comings and goings, was an object of great interest to the 
 
 youngsters. A letter from him, when an absentee in London, 
 
 would bring a flush of pleasure to Johnny's face ; and all the 
 
 :hildren looked eagerly for the promised gifts — the black hat, 
 
 :he toy carriage, or whatever they might be — on his return. 
 
 Poor little Katy was his special friend. As an infant she 
 
 : (loticed De Quincey more than anybody, except her mother. 
 
 AVhen she died, in 1812, he mourned her with a note of real 
 
 poignancy. He was in London at the time of her death ; 
 
 Dorothy wrote to tell him of it, and of " the perfect image of 
 
 oeace " on the bed. " I was truly glad to find," he wrote, in the 
 
 :ourse of his reply, "from your account of her funeral, that 
 
 hose who attended were, in general, such as would more or less 
 
 mafifectedly partake in your sorrow. It has been an awful 
 
 i:mployment to me, the recollecting where I was and how 
 
 iccupied when this solemn scene was going on. At that time 
 
 must have been in the streets of London ; tired, I remember, 
 
 dv I had just recovered from sickness, but cheerful, and filled 
 
 . i^ith pleasant thoughts. ... As well as I recollect, I must have 
 
 .. ^een closing my eyes in sleep just about the time that my 
 
 . l.lessed Kate was closing hers for ever ! Oh that I might have 
 
 led for her or with her ! ... If I had seen her in pain I could 
 
 ave done anything for her ; and reason it was that I should, 
 
 Dr she was a blessing to me, and gave me many and many an 
 
 our of happy thoughts that I can never have again." His 
 
 eart, he assures Dorothy, grows heavier every day. As he was 
 
 acking his things to go back to Westmorland, he reme/nbered 
 
 ow, on the Sunday before he left Grasmere, Katy got up on 
 
 chair, and putting her hand on his mouth, whispered earnestly, 
 
 Kinsey ! Kinsey ! what a bring Katy from London ? " Never, 
 
 £ thought, should he hear so sweet a voice again. The poor 
 
 hild, as we know, was to her father an incarnation of childhood, 
 
 p 
 
210 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 and some of his sweetest poetry of childhood was dedicated to' 
 her. It was, in some respects, the same with De Quincey. He 
 made prose-poetry about her; he fanned and stimulated his, 
 passionate feeling about her. " I had always viewed her," he 
 wrote, "as an impersonation of the dawn and the spirit of 
 infancy; and this abstraction seated in her person, together 
 with the visionary sort of connection which even in her parting 
 hours she assumed with the summer sun, by turning her 
 immersion into the cloud of death with the rising and the 
 setting of that fountain of life — these combined impressions 
 recoiled so violently into a contrast or polar antithesis to the 
 image of death, that each exalted and heightened the other." 
 And so, when he came back to Grasmere, little Katy's spirit 
 was with him all the summer, bringing her innocent presence 
 into his opium-led reveries and dreams. He tasted something 
 of the luxury of woe. He tells us that he often passed the 
 night on her grave " in mere intensity of sick, frantic yearning 
 after neighbourhood to " the darling of his heart. In broad 
 daylight he would resort to certain upland fields where he knew, 
 he should see the sweet phantom ; born, as it seemed, out ol 
 ferns and flowers ; always coming towards him with a baskei 
 on her head, wearing " the little blue bedgown and black skirl 
 of Westmorland." 
 
 When little Tom followed his sister in December, Dc 
 Quincey was again absent, and the tidings met him at Liverpoo 
 on his way home. Wordsworth himself was his informant 
 and his letter breathes anything but estrangement. " Pra} 
 come to us," he wrote, "as soon as you can. . . . Most tenderl} 
 and lovingly, with heavy sorrow for you, my dear friend (i 
 was the time of De Quincey's mysterious misfortune). I remaii 
 yours, W. Wordsworth." 
 
 Yet, for all this, the milk of De Quincey 's feeling fo:' 
 Wordsworth was losing its sweetness, and there was never an) 
 return of the old fascination. The Wordsworths went to Rydal 
 and a new chapter of their life began. The pains of opiun 
 held De Quincey helpless for years. When recovery set in, hi; 
 movements were more and more regulated by the exigencie^ 
 of the journalistic career into which he had drifted, a caree 
 which, in those days as in these, a man could hardly foUov 
 satisfactorily among far-away mountains, even in a Paradise 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 211 
 
 ; To London or Edinburgh — in those days as much an intellectual 
 ; :entre as London — or to the immediate neighbourhood of either, 
 ;' :he journalist was inevitably drawn. De Quincey, after some 
 /ears in London, fixed himself for the rest of his life in and 
 lear Edinburgh. For a time he was kept among the Lakes by 
 '* [lis first definite journalistic job, the editorship of the Westmor- 
 ■■^•and Gazette, which lasted for about a year, in 1819 and 1820. 
 ';• 3ut he was made for higher things; and in September, 1821, 
 '"^ 'he best of his mind began to appear to the world in the pages 
 "' )f the Londofi Magazine, in the shape of the first instalment of 
 '- -he Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Henceforward, 
 ^' ihough Dove Cottage remained the home of his wife and 
 ''■ children until 1830, and he was occasionally there, he could 
 "" (lardly consider himself the neighbour of Wordsworth. 
 ^S L)e Quincey thought Wordsworth very "proud." As he 
 ^^"iut it, instead of calling him as proud as Lucifer, one ought 
 ^. b say that Lucifer may possibly be nearly as proud as Words- 
 •^rorth. Yet, in 18 14, Wordsworth was consulting De Quincey 
 '• bout Laodamia, and welcoming his criticisms deferentially. 
 ■ ind two years later, Wordsworth was complaining that De 
 - luincey had "taken a fit of solitude." One phase of the 
 /ordsworthian "pride" galled De Quincey after his marriage 
 , 1816. Good Margaret Simpson, the "statesman's " daughter of 
 ydal Nab, was not the kind of Mrs. De Quincey on whom Mr. . 
 ld Mrs. Wordsworth felt they could call ; or, if they called, they 
 t the acquaintance drop at that point. There seems no doubt 
 at the good woman suffered social neglect at their hands ; and 
 e Quincey was not philosophical enough not to wince. After 
 ^s wife's death he wrote pathetically, with a reference which, 
 ' liough hidden, is unmistakable. " The hour is passed irre- 
 vocably and by many a year, in which an act of friendship so 
 : ifitural, and costing so little (in both senses so priceless) could 
 ■'- l,ve been availing. The ear is deaf that should have been 
 Placed by the sound of welcome. Call, but you will not be 
 I'ard ; shout aloud, but your * Ave ! ' and * All hail ! ' will now 
 t.l only as an echo of departed days, proclaiming the hollow- 
 ss of human hope.'* 
 
 this painful situation, Dorothy seems to have tried to play 
 ts part of helper and healer. She went to Dove Cottage, with 
 br bright eyes and enchanting sympathy, during De Quincey's 
 
 -:• ijss o 
 ■^\ In 
 
212 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 long absences ; and when at last it was evident that Edinburgl: 
 was to be his home, it was Dorothy who suggested that he 
 should move his family thither from Grasmere. She saw, she 
 wrote to him, the sadness in his wife's manner ; and she made 
 bold to advise that the separation should be brought to an end 
 as in due time it was. To Edinburgh the family went ; anc 
 there the wife and mother died and was buried. 
 
 But De Quincey was not wholly egoistic when he spoke o 
 Wordsworth's pride. By " pride " he also and chiefly meant hi: 
 serene self-consciousness, his lofty self-approval. And for tha 
 he had a good as well as a bad word. One of his best pieces O; 
 literary criticism occurs incidentally in an article on one c 
 Landor's Imaginary Co7iversations, in which Landor an( 
 Southey discuss Milton. By one of the speakers, Wordswortl 
 is reported to have spoken slightingly of Keats, and is blamec 
 accordingly. De Quincey does not dwell long, though he dwell 
 to much purpose, on Keats ; but he says a good deal abou 
 Wordsworth, and especially about the nobler phase of his pridf 
 The interlocutors put down Wordsworth's depreciation of Keat 
 to envy. Any such idea De Quincey scouts utterly. " Words 
 worth is a very proud man, as he has good reason to be. . . 
 But if proud, Wordsworth is not ostentatious, is not anxious fc 
 display, and least of all is he capable of descending to env} 
 Who or what is it that he should be envious of? Does any 
 body suppose that Wordsworth would be jealous of Archimede 
 if he now walked upon earth, or Michael Angelo, or Milton 
 Nature does not repeat herself. Be assured she will neve 
 make a second Wordsworth." Wordsworth, he means, was nc 
 only great, absolutely great, but unique. " If you show t; 
 Wordsworth a man as great as himself, still that great man wi. 
 not be much like Wordsworth — the great man will not t 
 Wordsworth's doppelgdnger. If not impar (as you say) he will t 
 dispar ; and why, then, should Wordsworth be jealous of him 
 . . . But suddenly it strikes me that we are all proud, ever 
 man of us ; and I dare say with some reason for it." E 
 Quincey was in a rather riotously playful mood when he wrol- 
 this essay ; and he soon passes into his characteristic persiflag, 
 But, so far as Wordsworth was concerned, he, in the wore 
 which have been quoted, wrote, surely, with genuine magnan 
 mity, genuine insight. 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 21S 
 
 After years of habitual separation from the Lake Poets, De 
 
 Juincey began to use them as copy. In the thirties, there 
 
 ippeared those Recollections of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and 
 
 Southey, from which, here and there, quotations have already 
 
 )een made. With Wordsworth De Quincey dealt much more 
 
 landsomely than with Coleridge, with whom he wrangled as a 
 
 ival opium-eater, and then abused for plagiarism, and one 
 
 mows not what besides. Yet his touch on Wordsworth is not 
 
 hat of the hero- worshipper ; it is hardly that of the friend. He 
 
 ells a propos of nothing in particular that Wordsworth once, 
 
 .nd only once, got drunk at Cambridge. By hints here and 
 
 uggestions there, in a characterization meant to be exceedingly 
 
 avourable, he manages to give the impression of a personality 
 
 undamentally unattractive. We are told, probably quite truly, 
 
 hat Wordsworth was incapable of the self-surrender without 
 
 ;hich a man cannot be a proper lover. We are told of occasional 
 
 peevishness and ill-humour ; we are given to understand a lack 
 
 f amiability ; we are assured of a total absence of gallantry. 
 
 •\.nd Wordsworth's indifference to books is, in De Quincey's 
 
 ersion of it, somehow made to show some shabbiness of mind as 
 
 ^ell as slenderness of purse. Much of the disillusionment 
 
 uffered by Wordsworth in De Quincey's regard turned on the 
 
 itellectual narrowness shown in his very partial and very one- 
 
 ided interest in literature. That narrowness made the dis- 
 
 lusion a loss of critical respect, as well as a diminution of 
 
 ersonal affection. " It is impossible," wrote De Quincey, in 
 
 is over-emphatic way, " to imagine the perplexity of mind 
 
 ^hich possessed me when I heard Wordsworth ridicule many 
 
 ooks which I had been accustomed to admire profoundly." 
 
 Jis one-sidedness in literary taste amounted to a deformity. 
 
 le would praise mere nobodies and dispraise classics. De 
 
 )uincey seriously doubted if he had ever read a page of Scott's 
 
 ovels. This was strange and shocking indeed, nor, of course, 
 
 as it true. Yet, as regards Wordsworth's taste in fiction, it 
 
 ould seem that it was in one respect sounder than his quondam 
 
 isciple's. For he read and admired Fielding, Smollett, and 
 
 -e Sage, at whom De Quincey only turned up his nose. On 
 
 le whole, De Quincey came to view Wordsworth as " a mixed 
 
 reature, made up of special infirmity and special strength," 
 
 nd as " no longer capable of an equal friendship." 
 
214 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 In the year 1845, ^^^ years before the poet's death, D 
 Quincey composed a final critical estimate of Wordswortl 
 He announced it with something of a flourish of trumpets. ] 
 was to be an estimate of the poet's total work, a thing he ha 
 not attempted in the case of any writer before. Yet th ' 
 achievement does not bear out the preface. The essay is littl 
 more than an outline, a series of reflections and notes, favourabl 
 and unfavourable, on Wordsworth's poetry, out of which 
 complete critical estimate might be made. But it has, at leas 
 the importance of being De Quincey's last word on the subjec 
 a word spoken at a long remove, in time and space, fror 
 irritating thoughts and irritated feelings. 
 
 " In calm of mind, all passion spent." 
 
 It is characteristic of the critic and of the developed relatior 
 ship between the two men that he begins with dispraise. In th 
 course of accounting for Wordsworth's early unpopularity, h 
 falls upon his theory of poetic diction, with which, however, h 
 fails to deal either exhaustively or very impressively. Hi 
 conclusion, indeed, is that " the whole question moved b 
 Wordsworth is still a res Integra (a case untouched). And fc 
 this reason, that no sufficient specimen has ever been given c 
 the particular phraseology which each party contemplates a 
 good or as bad ; no man in this dispute steadily understands evei 
 himself." So De Quincey takes his leave of poetic diction. 
 
 Then come his suggestions for praise. The first is recondit 
 and subtle. Hazlitt remarked that Wordsworth dealt little i] 
 his poetry with ''marrying and giving in marriage." "Well, 
 replies De Quincey, *'one man cannot deal with everything 
 But there is another reason why Wordsworth could not meddl 
 with festal raptures like the glory of a wedding-day. Thes 
 raptures are not only too brief, but (which is worse) they tem 
 downwards; even for as long as they last, they do not mov 
 upon an ascending scale. And even that is not their wors 
 fault : they do not diffuse or communicate themselves. . . 
 Mere joy, that does not linger and reproduce itself in reverbera 
 tions and endless mirrors, is not fitted for poetry." This i. 
 hardly convincing. Spenser's Epithalamium * is surely poetry, 
 
 * De Quincey refers to Spenser's EpithcUamia (j/'c), but only as poems whic 
 '* nobody reads." 
 
 I 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 215 
 
 i if poetry ever was ; and it is made out of "mere joy " with no 
 
 t reverberations or reflections, no altruistic arrihe pensie of any 
 sort. Could Wordsworth not have written it only because he 
 
 ^ iwas more unselfish than Spenser, and therefore had truer insight 
 
 ■i into poetic fitness ? 
 
 But De Quincey gives yet another and a better reason for 
 Wordsworth's avoidance of unrelieved joy. Wordsworth, he 
 thinks, was constitutionally obliged always to contemplate joy 
 in relation to its opposites, to pain and grief. In illustration, he 
 points to Matthew, and the cheerfulness born out of his sorrows ; 
 to We are Seven, and its blending of life so intense as to destroy 
 death with the very idea of the death that is destroyed. " The 
 little mountaineer, who furnishes the text for this lovely strain, 
 she whose fulness of life could not brook the gloomy faith in a 
 grave, is yet (for the effect upon the reader) brought into con- 
 nection with the reflex shadows of the grave. . . . That same 
 (infant, which subjectively could not tolerate death, being by the 
 reader contemplated objectively, flashes upon us the tenderest 
 iimages of death." Here we feel that De Quincey is as sound 
 as he is subtle. It was of the very essence of Wordsworth, as it 
 must be of all the greatest men, to find no beauty in falsification ; 
 to be content with no sugaring of life for poetic purposes ; no 
 filtering of daylight through rose-coloured curtains. His joys 
 were *' three parts pain ; " " the Comforter " was surest to find 
 him at his heaviest moments ; it was " sweet " to him when 
 
 .: .pleasant thoughts brought sad thoughts to his mind. He had 
 reached the faith which looks throicgh death ; and the source of 
 his joy was there. 
 
 De Quincey proceeds to give a brief account of some of the 
 books of The Excursion, With the story of Margaret in Book 
 I., and, indeed, with the whole poem, he deals in the spirit of 
 Jeffrey rather than in that of Coleridge. "Not in The Exciir- 
 sionl' he concludes, " must we look for that reversionary in- 
 fluence which awaits Wordsworth with posterity." We must 
 look for it in his short poems ; where we shall find it in their 
 ''truth"; their power of strengthening impressions already faintly 
 made, or of suddenly unveiling " a connection between objects 
 liitherto regarded as irrelate and independent." It is truth of 
 Nature, truth of scenery, primarily, which it was Wordsworth's 
 prerogative thus to reveal. From Shakespeare onwards such 
 
216 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 revelation had been suspended. " At length, as the eighteenth 
 century was winding up its accounts, forth stepped William 
 Wordsworth, of whom, as a reader of all pages of Nature it may 
 be said that, if we except Dampier, the admirable buccaneer, 
 the gentle flibustier^ and some few professional naturalists, he 
 first and he last looked at natural objects with the eye that 
 neither will be dazzled from without nor cheated by preconcep- 
 tion from within." The careful student of Wordsworth will 
 hardly be satisfied with this, in spite of its plausibility. For it 
 conveys a wrong idea of Wordsworth's nature-poetry, of his 
 attitude towards Nature and his method of dealing with her. 
 It gives the impression of Wordsworth as a careful realist ; a 
 reproducer of Nature's mintUicBy without limitation and without 
 amhe pensie. But it is not so ; Wordsworth was far from being 
 any such "naturalist" in verse. In spite of poems about pet 
 lambs, greenfinches, cuckoos, and daffodils ; in spite of poems 
 about clouds and waterfalls, he was no poet of such objects in 
 themselves, and those who go to him fancying that he was, 
 will always be disappointed. He was a poet of the Universe 
 and of Man ; a poet of large vague objects and effects, of 
 abstractions in their ultimate truth expressible only by sug- 
 gestion. And the scenery of the Lake district, its flora and 
 fauna, its clouds and waters, was used by Wordsworth, not for 
 its own sake, but for the sake of the Universal Life and Beauty 
 which informed them. Many readers of Wordsworth fail to 
 grasp this ; it is strange that De Ouincey should be among 
 them 1 
 
 His insight is true when he speaks of Wordsworth as a 
 revealer of spiritual truths in these human relations, and it 
 helps him to a worthy leave-taking of the poet who, from first 
 to last, had bulked so largely in his life. His early unpopularity 
 in this respect came from no weakness or shortcoming ; it was 
 the inevitable result of the poet's originality and depth. 
 " Whatever is too original will be hated at the first. It must 
 slowly mould a public for itself. . . . Meditative poetry is, 
 perhaps, that province of literature which will ultimately main- 
 tain most power amongst the generations which are coming ; 
 but in this department, at least, there is little competition to be 
 apprehended by Wordsworth from anything that has appeared 
 since the death of Shakespeare.'* 
 
hi 
 
 ii 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 "THE FROLIC AND THE GENTLE 
 
 00 r^UR last glimpse of Charles Lamb was at the end of his 
 ioj O^ holiday- week in 1797, in the return coach from Bridg- 
 p« Irater to Bristol, on his way back to London ; — the India House, 
 ind the terrible problems of his tragedy-smitten home-life. A 
 ries of poems — too sacredly personal to be criticized as mere 
 raJ>oetry — remains to show something of what the collapse of 
 -.amb's first home meant to him. The week at Nether Stowey 
 nth Coleridge and the Wordsworths was but a tiny green islet 
 a a "deep wide sea" of black weltering waves. Charles Lamb 
 ^as only twenty-two, and he was to be before all things a 
 Lumorist ; but the grief which speaks in these verses is neither 
 entimental nor theatrical. His mother dead, we remember 
 LOW ; his sister in her shroud of alienation ; his father stricken 
 ^ith palsy, and in a few months to follow his wife out of the 
 irorld, what could compensate for all this ? Even his good old 
 ,unt, who had been so kind to him in his school-days, so 
 terested in his yellow coat, blue gown, and red belt — even 
 he must needs leave him in this dark time ! 
 
 " Farewell, good aunt ! 
 Go thou and occupy the same grave-bed 
 Where the dead mother lies." 
 
 In after-life, religion, in any of its more definite forms, did 
 ■lot play a great part in Charles Lamb's nature ; literature, 
 riendship, the patience of daily duty, and the sanctities of 
 )rotherly compassion and tenderness, seemed to suffice for that 
 strange privileged being. But in those days of early sorrow, 
 le was brought well within the circle of Christian thought and 
 
 217 
 
218 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 consolation. Even when he hung over his mother's dead bod} 
 
 he felt— 
 
 " The blest subsidings of the storm 
 Within, the sweet resignedness of hope 
 Drawn heavenward, and strength of filial love, 
 In which I bow'd me to my Father's will." w 
 
 That his poor father was soon taken was not the worst c ~ 
 his sorrows. That place was held by Mary's aberration an 
 enforced absence from his hearth. Yet even under this load h 
 would not sink, would hardly bend. 
 
 " Yet I will not think, 
 Sweet friend, but we shall one day meet, and live 
 In quietness, and die so, fearing God." 
 
 Thus, in default of hope, resignation closes on as deep 
 note, surely, as it has ever sounded — 
 
 " If ;/^/, and these false suggestions be 
 A fit of the weak nature, loth to part 
 With what it loved so long, and held so dear ; 
 If thou art to be taken, and I left 
 (More sinning, yet unpunished, save in thee). 
 It is the will of God, and we are clay 
 In the potter's hands ; and, at the worst, are made 
 From absolute nothing, vessels of disgrace. 
 Till, His most righteous purpose wrought in us, 
 Our purified spirits find their perfect rest." 
 
 After such intimate breathings, the well-known Old Farnilia. 
 Faces, with its quaint rhymeless austerity of reminiscence an( 
 regret, seems ordinary ; yet it belongs to the same date, and i 
 directly linked with the central tragedy. 
 
 " I had a mother, but she died and left me, 
 Died prematurely in a day of horrors — 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
 
 " For some they have died, and some they have left me, 
 And some ai'e taken from me ; all are departed ; 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces." 
 
 From Stowey, Lamb took back to London Wordsworth'.' 
 friendship as a permanent possession ; and henceforward he 
 must be regarded as a regular member of the "circle." He 
 
 1 
 
"THE FROLIC AND THE GENTLE'' 219 
 
 was, indeed, a typical member of it : the friendship between 
 the two men was constant ; on Wordsworth's side, tenderly- 
 appreciative to the last hour of Lamb's life and beyond it ; on 
 Lamb's side, respectfully, but always critically, appreciative. 
 Lamb was ten years older than De Quincey, and only five 
 years younger than Wordsworth himself. He never took De 
 Quincey's attitude of discipleship ; he never felt the younger 
 man's engotiemeni for Wordsworth. Nor was he quite (if the 
 expression may be allowed) of Wordsworth's kidney. He was 
 one of the greatest of critics — much too great, too sympathetic, 
 and too fully emancipated from the conventionalisms of the 
 eighteenth-century tradition to attack Wordsworth as an 
 innovator. But the greatest and most open-minded critic may 
 have his favourites and favouritisms ; his genius may have its 
 natural starting-point, its chosen exercise-ground. Lamb's 
 favouritism was for dramatic poetry ; his palaestra was among 
 the Elizabethans. His specific task was to revive the Eliza- 
 bethans ; to restore them to critical favour ; to explain their 
 inward significance. And after the Elizabethans proper, he 
 loved poets like Cowley and Wither. " Meditative " poetry (to 
 use De Quincey's favourite epithet), like Wordsworth's, had no 
 special relish for him. 
 
 In many respects, Lamb's affinities were with Coleridge, the 
 friend through whom he came to know Wordsworth, rather 
 than with Wordsworth himself. Both critics had a much wider 
 joutlook over literature than Wordsworth ; both were full of 
 Elizabethan and dramatic sympathies. Nor were their direct 
 attitudes to Wordsworth so very different. True, Coleridge 
 was Wordsworth's colleague ; together they planned a new 
 poetry ; together they issued Lyrical Ballads. But there colla- 
 boration ceased. Wordsworth's theories of poetry, especially 
 his theories of poetic diction and imagination, he worked out 
 alone; Coleridge was interested and appreciative, but always 
 critical, and sometimes, as we know, disapproving. Very much 
 the same was it with Lamb. He saw too deeply into the 
 facts of style to take up the " poetic diction " polemic. When 
 the first Lyrical Ballads came out, it was evidently the Ancient 
 Mariner that impressed him most. When the second issue 
 appeared, he wrote to Wordsworth appreciatively and discrimi- 
 natingly ; but still it was the Ancient Mariner that seemed to bulk 
 
220 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 largest. He told him how much he liked the Lucy poems, thi i 
 " Sexton'^ and others. He complained of "the common satire upoi j 
 parsons and lawyers in the beginning " of A Poet's Epitaph, anc 
 " the coarse epithet of ' pin-point ' " in the first version of th( 
 sixth stanza. He objected to the didactic strain in " TJie Beggar^ 
 " The instructions conveyed in it are too direct, and like c J 
 lecture ; they don't slide into the mind of the reader while he ' 
 is imagining no such matter. An intelligent reader finds a sor , 
 of insult on being told, ' I will teach you how to think upor j 
 this subject' This fault, if I am right, is in a ten-thousandtl ' 
 worse degree to be found in Sterne, and in many novelists anc ; 
 modern poets, who continually put a sign-post up to show 
 where you are to feel. They set out with assuming theii 
 readers to be stupid ; very different from Robinson Crusoe^ the 
 Vicar of Wakefield, Roderick Random ^ and other beautiful, bare 
 narratives." "Well and good. Master Charles," Wordsworth 
 might have replied ; " but Tristram Shandy is as good and 
 lasting stuff as Roderick Random any day." Then Lamb harks 
 back to the Mariner. "For me, I was never so affected by 
 any human tale. After first reading it, I was totally possessed 
 with it for many days." He thought Wordsworth failed tc 
 appreciate it enough. " I totally differ from your idea that 
 the Mariner should have had a character and profession. . . . 
 Your other observation is, I think as well, a little unfounded ; 
 the Mai'iner, from being conversant in supernatural events, ha^ 
 acquired a supernatural and strange cast of phrase, eye, appear- 
 ance, etc., which frighten the wedding guest. You will excuse 
 my remarks, because I am hurt and vexed that you should 
 think it necessary, with a prose apology, to open the eyes of' 
 dead men that cannot see." And he concludes: "To sum up 
 a general opinion of the second volume, I do not feel any one 
 poem in it so forcibly as the Ancient Mariner and Tlie Mad' 
 Mother and the Lines at Tintern Abbey in the first." What was 
 unfavourable in this criticism roused Wordsworth to quick self- 
 defence, which disgusted Lamb. The most reluctant of letter- 
 writers, as Wordsworth professed himself, lost no time, Lamb 
 sarcastically observed, in answering this letter. Possibly, he 
 was riled by the inaccurate titles given by Lamb to the poems 
 he referred to ; anyhow, the less noble side of his egoism seems 
 to have shown itself in his letter. He expressed himself as 
 
i 
 
 "THE FROLIC AND THE GENTLE^' 221 
 
 $1' compelled to wish that my [Lamb's] range of sensibility 
 p^jyas more extended, being obliged to believe that I should 
 in: receive large influxes of happiness and happy thoughts." He 
 tl discoursed, in the technical phraseology affected by him, about 
 ir. he union of tenderness and imagination, in a way which 
 eiiseemed to Lamb to indicate that he put himself above Shake- 
 li peare. Altogether the critic was punished with " four sweating 
 5or pages" of rebuke and self-exposition. Nor was this all, 
 poj (Coleridge sprang to the aid of his collaborator, and inflicted 
 dj pn Lamb four more pages, " equally sweaty and more tedious," 
 je; ithe upshot of which was that, when one did not care for any- 
 B (thing of Wordsworth's, the fault must be one's own. " What," 
 nei pxclaimed Lamb, in humorous despair, " am I to do with such 
 ii people ? " Yet, even in this mood. Lamb was far from feeling 
 ]ar ^bout any of Wordsworth's poetry as Jeffrey did. He thought 
 X [ihe volume full of originality and observation. He so admired 
 an; j* She dwelt among the untrodden ways," as to copy the whole 
 ir^ |5f it in a letter. " This," he commented, " is choice and genuine, 
 ': |ind so are many, many more." But in the volume as a whole 
 ;;r lie felt that there was too deliberate an aim at simplicity. 
 
 Lamb, in truth, was out and out a Londoner ; and his 
 
 jympathies were more concretely human, less abstract and 
 
 rural, than Wordsworth's. Wordsworth invited him to come 
 
 ;o Grasmere. Lamb's reply, as Mr. Knight has pointed out, 
 
 shows the characteristic differences between the two men. 
 
 Lamb doubted whether he should ever be able to afford so long 
 
 .j; a journey. But that was not all. " Separate from the pleasure 
 
 - of your company, I don't much care if I never see a mountain 
 
 n my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have 
 
 , (formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you 
 
 .. mountaineers can have done with dead Nature. The lighted 
 
 shops of the Strand and Fleet Street ... all the bustle and 
 
 . ,<vickedness round about Govent Garden . . . the watchmen, 
 
 ^ drunken scenes, rattles . . . the impossibility of being dull in 
 
 iFleet Street ; the crowds, the very dirt and mud. . . . Steams 
 
 f soups from kitchens ... all those things work themselves 
 
 nto my mind, and feed me. ... I often shed tears in the motley 
 
 Strand from fulness of joy at so much life. All these emotions 
 
 nust be strange to you ; so are your rural emotions to me." 
 
 He even feels inclined to pity Wordsworth for his preference. 
 
 :H 
 
222 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 " I should pity you, did I not know that the mind will mak 
 friends of anything. Your sun, and moon, and skies, and hill: 
 and lakes, affect me no more, or scarcely come to me in mor 
 venerable characters, than as a gilded room with tapestry am 
 tapers. ... I consider the clouds above me but as a roc 
 beautifully painted, but unable to satisfy the mind. . . . S< 
 fading upon me, from disuse, have been the beauties of Nature 
 as they have been confinedly called ; so ever fresh and greei 
 and warm are all the inventions of men, and assembling of men 
 in this great city." 
 
 Yet, in thus humorously sharpening the antithesis. Lamb wa 
 showing himself a more incomplete philosopher than probabl} 
 in reality he was. The Excursion and The Prelude, of course 
 were as yet non-existent ; and no reader of Wordsworth ye 
 knew how human, in one sense, the sources of his poetry were 
 But Lamb ought to have recognized the very real, thougl 
 deeply hidden bond, which unites urban and rural phenomen? 
 in one comprehensive conception of Nature. Lamb's analysis 
 of his London pleasure reads like an anticipation of Wall 
 Whitman ; and, indeed, it was left for Walt Whitman — in one 
 respect, at least, Wordsworth's true continuator — to show thai 
 the poet's world has no exclusions, and that the Universal 
 Spirit, which gives Nature its meaning and charm, is at work 
 on the crowded bridge as in the mountain solitude, in the 
 thickest press of human toil as much as in remote places where 
 men are sparsely sown. 
 
 However, the Lakes did at last draw the Lambs to theii 
 bosom ; but it was not Wordsworth that they went to see. In 
 1802, the year of Wordsworth's marriage, and while he was 
 away on the long absence which ended in that event, Charles 
 and Mary Lamb paid a surprise visit to Coleridge at Greta 
 Hall. While Wordsworth was writing sonnets at Calais, the 
 Lambs were making acquaintance with Skiddaw and Blen- 
 cathara, and the folded hills between Derwentwaterand Butter- 
 mere. In a post-chaise they came from Penrith in a glorious 
 summer evening, "in a gorgeous sunshine, which transmuted 
 all the mountains into colours." Such evenings are none too 
 common in that land of watery veils ; and there were no more 
 fine sunsets, though the Lambs stayed three weeks. Lamb 
 found that the beauties of the land spoke to his imagination 
 
"THE FROLIC AND THE GENTLE ^^ 223 
 
 lifter all. The weather on the night of arrival was lucky ; and 
 Mien there was the impression of Coleridge's study, with the 
 'f [lazing fire which all good Lake dwellers allow themselves in 
 Jie finest summer evenings. The "large antique ill-shaped 
 !(bom, with an old-fashioned organ, never played upon, big 
 i Liough for a church, shelves of scattered folios, an ^olian harp, 
 i\ nd an old sofa, half bed, etc." Above all, there was the vast 
 f ulk of Skiddaw " and his broad-breasted brethren," which 
 :: iems to have dominated Lamb's imagination as well as his 
 Ad of vision. He writes the word " Skiddaw " seven times in 
 Ue course of one not very long letter. He climbed the hill 
 i! (ith Mary, rejoicing in the walk and the view ; the mountain's 
 i tfine black head, and the bleak air atop of it, with a prospect 
 s f mountains all about and about, making you giddy ; and then 
 f; cotland afar off, and the border countries, so famous in song 
 I jid ballad ! It was a day that will stand out like a mountain, 
 I jam sure, in my life." When first he got back to the Temple 
 i .fter all this. Lamb felt smal/, as though denuded of ideals, 
 ijut he was soon hugging himself as a Londoner again. It 
 c ts better to live in Fleet Street and the Strand than " amidst 
 ikiddaw." "After all, I could not live in Skiddaw." "Still, 
 kiddaw is a fine creature." 
 
 In their hospitable way, the Wordsworths allowed the 
 
 !ambs to stay a day or two at Dove Cottage in their absence 
 
 •-[-the Clarksons, whose own dwelling was near Ullswater, 
 
 oing the housekeeping. But it was in London, after their 
 
 ; iiturn, that Charles and Mary saw the Wordsworths that year. 
 
 i'itie Wordsworths dined with them at the Temple, and the 
 
 ■, lambs took them to see some of the sights. A month or two 
 
 Iter, Charles was forwarding, in a parcel to Coleridge, books 
 
 ^^lich Wordsworth had left behind, and " strange thick-hoofed 
 
 • ^oes which are very much admired in London." We can fancy 
 
 te look of them ! 
 
 The Lambs never again ventured as far as Lakeland ; and 
 flture intercourse with Wordsworth was all in London, during 
 te poet's fairly frequent visits. The friendship was established ; 
 Jjd so was the cordial literary appreciation — on Lamb's part 
 ^ays without infatuation or even glamour. As in the friend- 
 sip with De Quincey, Dorothy was a powerful link. There 
 vis much similarity between Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary 
 
224 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Lamb ; both were gifted and literary ; both had quick sens 
 bilities and rare powers of intellectual sympathy ; in both, ala: 
 the nervous mechanism broke down under the strain of thoup 
 and feeling. One of the most touching of Charles Lamb 
 letters is to Dorothy in the summer of 1805, during one of h 
 sister's absences through mental illness. To no one else did 1 
 ever so completely lay open the sad recurrent wound. It seen 
 almost profanation to quote from, or even to publish, such utte 
 ance ; the agonizing love, the distracting perplexity, the broke 
 and the contrite heart (for Lamb knew that his own part in tl 
 dual life was sadly flawed), which surely in this case would n( 
 be despised. He tenderly quotes some pretty verses of h 
 sister's, and concludes : " This is a little unfair, to tell so muc 
 about ourselves, and to advert so little to your letter, so fu 
 of comfortable tidings of you all. . . . That you may go c 
 recovering strength and peace is my next wish to Mary 
 recovery." 
 
 Twelve years later, when the Lambs moved into Russe 
 Street, Covent Garden, we find Mary writing lovingly t 
 Dorothy, and wishing that " Rydal Mount, with all its inhab 
 tants enclosed," could be transplanted into the midst of Cover 
 Garden. "I hope we shall meet," she goes on, "before tt 
 walking faculties of either of us fail ; you say you can wal' 
 fifteen miles with ease, [people used to think Dorothy ovei 
 walked herself into premature senility] that is exactly my stin 
 and more fatigues me." 
 
 Charles Lamb was quick to congratulate Wordsworth c 
 the birth of his son Thomas in 1806; and he promptly too 
 him into his confidence about the failure of his farce, Mr. h 
 as also about his and Mary's better-starred enterprise, the Tali 
 from Shakespeare. He never lost his sense of a certain sel 
 blindness, a certain conceit, in Wordsworth ; he never considere 
 himself as much his partisan as Coleridge was. Thus, in i8o< 
 just before a London visit of Wordsworth's, we find Lam 
 writing : ** Wordsworth, the great poet, is coming to town ; h 
 is to have apartments in the Mansion House. He says he doe 
 not see much difficulty in writing like Shakespeare, if he ha, 
 a mind to try it. It is clear, then, nothing is wanting but th 
 mind. Even Coleridge a little checked at this hardihood c 
 
"THE FROLIC AND THE GENTLE" 225 
 
 Yet we must not make too much of such little asides. 
 
 mb knew Wordsworth's magnitude, and was not backward to 
 iicknowledge it. Even about the Convention of Cintra pamphlet 
 jie was enthusiastic. " Its power over me," he wrote to Cole- 
 idge, " was like that which Milton's pamphlets must have had 
 r)n his contemporaries, who were tuned to them. What a piece 
 )f prose ! " 
 
 When TJie Excursion came out in 1814, Lamb praised it 
 leartily, as we shall see in the last chapter. 
 
 Then, in 18 15, came the first collective edition of the poems, 
 vlth one of the critical essays. Now was Lamb's first intro- 
 luction to such things as Laodamia and There is a Yew-tree ; 
 tnd now, indeed, he bowed his head. For the moment, and in 
 [iddressing Wordsworth himself, he came very near enrolling 
 Himself with the Words worthians proper. He was afraid 
 A^ordsworth would concede even an image or a phrase to the 
 onventional critics. " I would not have had you offer up the 
 poorest rag that lingered upon the stript shoulders of little 
 \lice Fell, to have atoned all their malice ; I would not have 
 qven 'em a red cloak to save their souls." Yet it is all, of 
 course, contemporary criticism of a contemporary ; it is not 
 he homage of posterity to a classic, which, in the nature of 
 he case, is a very different matter. He cannot resist his joke. 
 What is good for a bootless henef he suddenly asked Mary, as 
 le turned the pages. A shoeless pea, she promptly replied. 
 ,Vith Wordsworth's discourse on imagination. Lamb professed 
 limself satisfied. 
 
 V^hQn Peter Bell "NdiS published in 1819, Lamb complained 
 •f it as being too lyrical It is not quite clear what he means 
 )y the word in this connection. He seems to have specially 
 iesented the form of the poem, by which a group of people, 
 ' The Vicar and his Dame," " Stephen Otter," and the rest, are 
 nterposed between the poet and his reader ; but there is 
 lothing lyrical in such a form. He said, in 181 1, to Henry 
 "rabb Robinson, the delightful diarist, and most literary of 
 parristers, in the course of a conversation in which he asserted 
 Coleridge's superiority to Wordsworth, that Wordsworth forced 
 he reader to submit to his individual feelings ^ instead of, like 
 Shakespeare, becoming everything he pleased. The evidential 
 -alue of reported talk is very slight: so much depends on 
 Q 
 
226 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 context, on tone, and a score of things which the diarist does not 
 or cannot record. The above dictum, as it stands, is so dis- 
 creditable to Lamb's critical power, that one feels something 
 essential must be left out. Certainly the critical honours were 
 with Crabb Robinson, when he rejoined that this so-called 
 inferiority '* lay very much in the lyrical character." Still. 
 Lamb must have said something of the sort ; and it is probably 
 true that Wordsworth was **too lyrical," too abstract, too 
 egoistic — in the sense in which all lyrical poetry tends to be 
 egoistic — to ravish the heart of one so dramatic and concretely 
 human as the Fleet Street-loving Charles Lamb. 
 
 Lamb had a great fancy for another humorously didactic 
 poem of Wordsworth's, The Waggoner, It had been written in 
 1805, and Lamb had seen it in manuscript. He persuaded^ 
 Wordsworth to publish it immediately after Peter Bell ; and the' 
 poet pleased him by a gracious, though very temperate, dedica- 
 tory letter, in which he acknowledged the pleasure he hadi 
 derived from Lamb's writings, and the *' high esteem " with 
 which he was truly his. (We must remember that there were 
 as yet no Essays of Elia, and that the only writings of Lamb's! 
 from which Wordsworth, in 18 19, could derive pleasure, were 
 Rosamond Gray^ John Woodvill, some of the Tales from 
 Shakespeare^ the notes to the Specimeyis of Dramatic Poetry^] 
 and one or two critical essays.) Lamb did well, certainly, to 
 unearth the story, so delightfully and so humorously told, of the 
 thirsty carter and his toiling team ; he rightly praised the 
 "beautiful tolerance" of the poem. For, alas ! Benjamin, the 
 waggoner, was, as we have hinted, and as Burns would havcj 
 called him, a " drouthy neebor " ; and every inn between \ 
 Ambleside and Keswick was for him a door into the nether: 
 regions. The poem follows him on one of his northward 
 journeys, full of good resolutions; past the "Dove and Olive 
 Bough " at Town End, past the " Swan " at Grasmere, his virtue 
 as yet quite safe. But on the ascent of the Raise, there is a 
 bewildering thunderstorm in the hot June night, and the 
 waggoner forgathers with a sailor and his wife. The sailor 
 has a donkey, and his wife a baby ; and the two storm-stressed 
 parties join together, the woman and her child safe under the 
 hood of the waggon. As they pass Wytheburn, on the drop to 
 Thirlmere, the fatal sounds of fiddling issue from the " Cherry 
 
"THE FROLIC AND THE GENTLE ^^ 227 
 
 ree," and Benjamin's virtue gives way under the new 
 •rain. 
 
 " Nor has thought time to come and go, 
 
 To vibrate between yes and no ; 
 
 For, cries the Sailor, ' Glorious chance 
 
 That blows us hither ! — let him dance, 
 
 Who can or will ! — my honest soul, 
 
 Our treat shall be a friendly bowl ! ' 
 
 He draws him to the door, ' Come in, 
 
 Come, come,' cries he to Benjamin ! 
 
 And Benjamin — ah, woe is me ! 
 
 Gave the word — the horses heard 
 
 And halted, though reluctantly." 
 
 After some flowing bowls have circulated, the sailor goes out, 
 id returns with a wonderful model of a man-of-war — the 
 'anguard, flagship at the Battle of the Nile ; and at sight of it, 
 ad of the very spot where Nelson stood, the fiddlers and the 
 dncers cease, and you might hear a mouse nibble. But then, 
 c Benjamin's motion, they must drink to the great admiral, 
 tDugh the very mastiff, chained under the waggon outside, 
 r.tles his chain in protest. After two hours of this kind of 
 t ng, the cavalcade starts again for the run by the lake, the 
 nistiff and the donkey tied side by side, much to their mutual 
 iii^onvenience, and the — 
 
 I" Va7iguard^ following close behind, 
 Sails spread, as if to catch the wind ! " 
 j At last come the signs of morning ; the waking of the birds 
 irSt. John's Vale; the rosy light on Skiddaw. Here lies the 
 iriginative value of the poem ; in the contrast and antagonism 
 8(1 subtly indicated, between the nocturnal pleasures of the 
 herry Tree," and the beauties of the morning. 
 
 " The mists, that o'er the streamlet's bed 
 CI] Hung low, begin to rise and spread ; 
 
 rMk Even while I speak, their skirts of grey 
 
 , lH Are smitten by a silver ray ; 
 
 And lo ! — up Castrigg's naked steep 
 
 (Where, smoothly urged, the vapours sweep 
 S'H Along — and scatter and divide, 
 
 [eiH Like fleecy clouds self-multiplied) 
 
 >(;H The stately waggon, is ascending, 
 
 With faithful Benjamin attending, 
 
 Apparent now beside his team — 
 
 Now lost amid a glittering steam : 
 
 « 
 
228 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 And with him goes his Sailor-friend, 
 By this time near their journey's end ; 
 And, after their high-minded riot, 
 Sickening into thoughtful quiet ; 
 As if the morning's pleasant hour 
 Had for their joys a killing power. 
 And, sooth, for Benjamin a vein 
 Is opened of still deeper pain 
 As if his heart by notes were stung 
 From out the lowly hedge-rows flung ; 
 As if the Warbler lost in light 
 Reproved his soarings of the night." 
 
 The dinoument may be fancied ; the wrath of Benjamii 
 master at the fresh outbreak ; the enigmatical appearance 
 the party, and the Waggoner's final dismissal. 
 
 " All past forgiveness is repealed ; 
 And thus, and through distempered blood 
 On both sides, Benjamin the good. 
 The patient, and the tender-hearted, \ 
 
 Was from his team and waggon parted ; 
 When duty of that day was o'er. 
 Laid down his whip — and served no more." 
 
 Excellent as The Waggoner is, Wordsworth was right wh 
 he felt that in Peter Bell there were " a higher tone of imagin 
 tion " and " deeper touches of feeling." Lamb sturdily preferr 
 The Waggoner; partly, perhaps, because (and, indeed, so 
 plainly hints) he was himself sensitive to Benjamin's temptatior 
 "Methinks there is a kind of shadowing affinity between t 
 subject of the narrative and the subject of the dedication." 
 
 The Lambs' modest London dwellings continued to 
 regular resorts of Wordsworth as the years went on, and t 
 friendship never felt the passage of a single cloud. There is 
 delightful letter of Charles's to Dorothy Wordsworth, dat 
 November 25, 1819, in which the writer describes his experienc 
 in introducing little Willy Wordsworth, the poet's younge 
 child, now a boy of nine, to the London sights. " Till yeste 
 day," Lamb writes, " I had barely seen him [Willy], but ye 
 terday he gave us his small company to a bullock's heart, ai 
 I can pronounce him a lad of promise. . . . He has observatic 
 and seems thoroughly awake. . . . Being taken over WaterL 
 
"THE FROLIC AND THE GENTLE'^ 229 
 
 Iridge, he remarked, that if we had no mountains, we had a fine 
 ver at least ; which was a touch of the comparative : but then 
 e added, in a strain which argued less for his future abilities as 
 political economist, that he supposed they must take at least 
 pound a week toll. Like a curious naturalist, he inquired if 
 le tide did not come up a little salty. . . . He put another 
 uestion, as to the flux and reflux ; which being rather cunningly 
 vaded than artfully solved by that she-Aristotle, Mary — who 
 luttered something about its getting up an hour sooner and 
 Doner every day — he sagely replied, 'Then it must come to 
 le same thing at last ; ' which was a speech worthy of an 
 ifant Halley ! The lion in the 'Change by no means came up 
 3 his ideal standard ; so impossible is it for Nature, in any of 
 er works, to come up to the standard of a child's imagination ! 
 . . William's genius, I take it, leans a little to the figurative ; 
 )r, being at play at tricktrack (a kind of minor billiard-table, 
 'hich we keep for smaller wights, and sometimes refresh our 
 vvn mature fatigues with taking a hand at), not being able to 
 it a ball he had iterate aimed at, he cried out, * I cannot hit 
 lat beast!' Now the balls are usually called men, but he 
 ilicitously hit upon a middle term ; a term of approximation 
 nd imaginative reconciliation ; a something where the two 
 nds of the brute matter (ivory), and their human and rather 
 iolent personification into men, might meet, as I take it — 
 lustrative of that excellent remark, in a certain preface, about 
 nagination, explaining, ' Like a sea-beast that had crawled 
 )rth to sun himself!' * Not that I accuse William Minor of 
 ereditary plagiary, or conceive the image to have come ex traduce. 
 Lather he seemeth to keep aloof from any source of imitation, 
 lid purposely to remain ignorant of what mighty poets have 
 tone in this kind before him ; for, being asked if his father had 
 ver been on Westminster Bridge, he answered that he did not 
 now ! " t 
 
 In 1820 began the last and most fruitful section of Charles 
 .amb's life ; for it was in August of that year that the first 
 ssay signed " Elia " came out in the London Magazine — the 
 
 * The echo of a phrase from Resolution and Independence. 
 
 t The allusion, of course, is to Wordworth's great sonnet, beginning — 
 
 "Earth has not anything to show more fair." 
 
230 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 
 vehicle, as we remember, of the Confessions of an English Opinn 
 Eater. The world will always know and love Lamb as the essayi: 
 and letter-writer — the essayist in him being but the letter-write 
 transfigured, — the revealer, under the restraint of a dignifie 
 tradition, and on the impulse of mature literary power, of th 
 rich, quaint, lovable personality already well known to his corrt 
 spondents. Month after month the exquisite essays stol l 
 forth, " taking " the air with their fragrance — a fragrance lik 
 that of the old Spectator, but deeper, sweeter, subtler ; with th 
 Addisonian grace and humour, and unspoiled by the Addisonia 
 woodenness, the Addisonian conventionalism. The Essays c 
 Elia, appearing when they did, formed one of the best link 
 between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, having all th 
 sanity, the lucidity, the placid reflectiveness of the past age, an 
 much of the freshness, the truer pathos, the purer humour, th 
 courageous individuality, the lyrical charm, of the new. If on 
 cannot speak of Lamb as exhibiting the " Renascence c 
 Wonder" in the strict sense of the words, one can mos 
 literally describe him as a child of the Romantic Revival. 
 
 Fourteen years — no more — passed between the first Essay ^ 
 Elia and Charles Lamb's quiet death at Edmonton in 183^ 
 A large part of the charm of the essays lies in their directl; 
 autobiographical character ; in the portrayal, absolutely faithfu 
 under every alias, of the writer, his relations, his friends, th 
 scenery of the different stages of his life. Delicious summer day 
 in Hertfordshire, nourishing the dreamy bookish childhood ; th 
 cloisters of Christ's and the purlieus of the Temple ; holiday 
 rambles to Margate, to Oxford, but seldom very far afield; th 
 love-tragedy, with the rainbow-faces of " dream-children 
 heightening it. Mary, needing hardly any of her brother' 
 idealism to deepen the pathos and heighten the charm of th 
 figure; evenings over books or whist ; occasional visits to the play 
 such is the stuff of the essays. Their chief scenery is furnishe( 
 by the streets of London ; and through them all we never los 
 sight of the spare, knee-breeched figure with the curling hair anc 
 dark, high-nosed, Jewish-looking face, the courteous manners 
 the ready smile, and the incurable stammer, day by day walking 
 swiftly eastwards to his clerk's work at the India House, an( 
 westward or north-westward again in the late afternoon to quie 
 literary or social evenings. More and more irksome became th' 
 
CHARLES LAMB (AGP:D ABOUT o(>) 
 
 FROM THE DRAWING BV THOMAS WAGEMAX IX 1824 OR 1825 
 
OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
 lL!FOR^i'^ 
 
"THE FROLIC AND THE GENTLE^' 231 
 
 lerkly drudgery, until at last, in 1825, it was got rid of, and 
 ^amb could escape to more country surroundings, first at 
 i^nfield, then at Edmonton. In those later years the intercourse 
 /ith the Wordsworths was more intermittent, and the corre- 
 pondence flagged. J But it was none the less congenial. "I 
 /ish," wrote Dorothy to Crabb Robinson, in the year after 
 .amb's retirement ; " I wish they [the Lambs] would now and 
 hen let us see their handwriting ; a single page from Charles 
 ^amb is worth ten postages." There were occasional letters, 
 occasional meetings ; and the friendship was strong as death. 
 )ne or two of the richest and most vivid of Lamb's latest letters 
 re to Wordsworth. In January, 1830, he writes describing the 
 ights and shadows of his superannuated life in Enfield lodgings. 
 )n the whole, the shadows predominate. " There are not now 
 he years that there used to be. . . . We have taken a farewell 
 f the pompous troublesome life called housekeeping. . . . We 
 ave nothing to do with our victuals but to eat them ; with the 
 arden, but to see it grow ; with the tax-gatherer, but to hear him 
 nock. . . . We are fed, we know not how ; quietists — confiding 
 avens. ... In dreams I am in Fleet Market, but I wake, and 
 ry to sleep again. . . . What have I gained by health ? In- 
 Dlerable dulness. What by early hours and moderate meals .? 
 L total blank." He hits off Enfield : " A little teazing image of 
 town . . . shops two yards square, half-a-dozen apples, and 
 NO penn'orth of overlooked ginger-bread ... a circulating 
 brary that stands still, where the show-picture is a last year's 
 'alentine, and whither the fame of the last ten Scotch novels 
 50 the Waverleys were often called in those days] has not yet 
 •avelled — (marry, they just begin to be conscious of the 
 ledgauntlet), to have a new plastered flat church, and to be 
 ishing that it was but a cathedral ! The very blackguards here 
 re degenerate." One supposes that Lamb always loved to sing 
 le praises of London in the pastoral Wordsworth's ear. 
 Wordsworth's eyesight gave him much trouble. ''From my 
 en I return you condolence for your decaying sight ; not for 
 nything there is to see in the country, but for the miss of the 
 leasure of reading a London newspaper. . . . The last long time 
 heard from you, you had knocked your head against something. 
 )o not do so ; for your head (I do not flatter) is not a knob, or 
 he top of a brass nail, or the end of a nine-pin — unless a 
 
 1 
 
^3^ WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Vulcanian hammer could fairly batter a * Recluse' out of it 
 then would I bid the smirched god knock, and knock lustily, th 
 two-handed skinker." 
 
 Three years later, he writes under new shadows, shadow 
 admitting of no humorous exaggeration. The mental clouc 
 that was never to lift was falling on Dorothy Wordsworth, an( 
 Mary was again very ill. " Her illnesses," he wrote, " encroacl 
 yearly . . . half her life she is dead to me, and the other hal 
 is made anxious with fears and lookings forward to the nex 
 shock. ... I see little of her. . . . Sunt lachrymce reruin ! anc 
 you and I must bear it." 
 
 In this letter, Lamb thanks Wordsworth for his "cordia 
 reception of Eliay We possess the letter to which Lamb's wa: 
 a reply. Wordsworth had written — " I have to thank you anc 
 Moxon for a delightful volume, not, I hope, your last, of Elia 
 I have read it all, except some of the popular fallacies which ] 
 reserve, not to get through my cake all at once. ... I am no' 
 sure but I like the Old China and The lVeddi7ig as well as anj 
 of the essays. I read Love vie and love my Dog to my sistei 
 this morning. . . . She was much pleased." 
 
 In the February before Lamb's death he wrote his lasl 
 surviving letter to Wordsworth. It is short, and its theme is o) 
 transitory interest, but one or two phrases make it immortal 
 for us here. He asked Wordsworth to help a proUg^e at Carlisle 
 " O, if you can recommend her, how would I love you — if 1 
 could love you better ! . . . Moxon tells me you would like a 
 letter from me ; you shall have one. This I cannot mingle up 
 with any nonsense which you usually tolerate from C. Lamb, 
 Need he add loves to wife, sister, and all ? Poor Mary is ilj 
 again, after a short lucid interval of four or five months. . . . 
 Good you are to me. Yours, with fervour of friendship, for 
 ever." 
 
 In July, 1834, Coleridge died at Highgate. The death was 
 saddening to Wordsworth, but shattering to Lamb. Words- 
 worth and Coleridge had hardly met for twenty years ; yet, as 
 Wordsworth told Coleridge's son, " his mind has been habitually 
 present with me." To Lamb, the loss of Coleridge was the loss 
 of a vital part of himself. He has recorded that he heard of the 
 death " without grief" ; but that was only because the hurt was 
 *' too deep for tears." Coleridge's spirit haunted him, bringing 
 
"THE FROLIC AND THE GENTLE^' 233 
 
 '^ m acute sense of desolation. " I cannot think a thought, I 
 
 '''Wnot make a criticism on men or books, without an ineffectual 
 
 urning and reference to him." He would suddenly exclaim, in 
 
 he midst of ordinary conversation, when the fact gripped him, 
 
 'Coleridge is dead I He was not long to suffer under the de- 
 
 ■ irivation. In December, 1834, his own hour struck. A trip on 
 he road, a fall, a slight face- wound ; then some hours' erysipelas; 
 
 • nd Charles Lamb was gone. Mary was too ill to realize what 
 
 ■ lad happened. 
 
 Dorothy Wordsworth also could hardly realize the event. 
 )ut Wordsworth himself bore noble tribute to it. In 1835, he 
 Tote a poem commemorating Lamb, and in after years a kind 
 f prose appreciation, by way of preface. Moxon had asked for 
 [U epitaph or elegy ; and Wordsworth immediately, with his 
 'abitual fluency, wrote a series of verses which could not be 
 iscribed on Lamb's gravestone, partly because of their length, 
 artly because of the intimacy of their revelations. If the 
 : lepitaph " is not one of Wordsworth's greatest poems, it at least 
 Dntains some admirable appreciation, at once sympathetic and 
 iscriminating, of Lamb. Wordsworth truly loved his odd 
 -ondon friend, though he regretted some of his characteristics, 
 is unwise conviviality, and what, to the grave, scantily humorous 
 3et, seemed his over-Indulged quizzicality. His tendency to 
 anter seemed to show a lack of sincerity. Wordsworth 
 lought that both Coleridge and he had learned a kind of 
 iperficial untruthfulness of mind at Christ's. 
 
 Yet, when Lamb died, it was his goodness that stood out 
 ^fore Wordsworth's mind in strongest relief. 
 
 " To a good Man of most dear memory 
 This Stone is sacred." 
 
 aults he had, as we all have ; yet he was, before all things, 
 inocent, like the creature whose name he bore. 
 
 " From the most gentle creature nursed in fields 
 Had been derived the name he bore — a name, 
 Wherever Christian altars have been raised, 
 Hallowed to meekness and to innocence ; 
 And if in him meekness at times gave way, 
 Provoked out of herself by troubles strange. 
 Many and strange, that hung about his life ; 
 Still, at the centre of his being, lodged 
 A soul by resignation sanctified : 
 
234 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 And if too often, self-reproached, he felt 
 
 That innocence belongs not to our kind, 
 
 A power that never ceased to abide in him, 
 
 Charity, 'mid the multitude of sins 
 
 That she can cover, left not his exposed 
 
 To an unforgiving judgment from just Heaven. 
 
 Oh, he was good, if e'er a good Man lived !" 
 
 His genius is admirably characterized ; his — 
 
 " Knowledge and wisdom, gained from converse sweet 
 With books, or while he ranged the crowded streets 
 With a keen eye, and overflowing heart," 
 
 pouring out — 
 
 " Truth in works by thoughtful love 
 Inspired — works potent over smiles and tears, 
 And, as round mountain-tops the lightning plays, 
 Thus innocently sported, breaking forth 
 As from a cloud of some grave sympathy. 
 Humour and wild instinctive wit, and all 
 The vivid flashes of his spoken words." 
 
 The poet cannot forget Lamb's scorn of the country ; but 
 recognizes that it was only half sincere, and he feels no unfitneu 
 in his burial in a rural place. 
 
 " Thou wert a scorner of the fields, my Friend, 
 But more in show than truth ; and from the fields, 
 And from the mountains, to thy rural grave 
 Transported, my soothed spirit hovers o'er 
 The green untrodden turf, and blowing flowers." 
 
 The wonderful bond between brother and sister, itself i 
 great poem, is amply celebrated in Wordsworth's lines. Ma' 
 Lamb, ten years her brother's senior, had at first been to hi 
 as a mother. 
 
 " When years 
 Lifting the boy to man's estate, had called 
 The long-protected to assume the part 
 Ot the protector, the first filial tie 
 Was undissolved ; and, in or out of sight, 
 Remained imperishably interwoven 
 With life itself." 
 
 In spite of all the adversity and tragedy, Mary was — 
 
 " The meek. 
 The self-restraining, and the ever-kind ;" 
 and — 
 
 " Thro' all visitations and all trials," 
 
 I 
 
*'THE FROLIC AND THE GENTLE" 235 
 
 the brother and sister were faithful ; 
 
 " Like two vessels launched 
 From the same beach one ocean to explore 
 With mutual help, and sailing — to their league 
 True, as inexorable winds, or bars 
 Floating or fixed of polar ice, allow." 
 
 A.nd the lines end worthily on the image of the two-in-one — 
 
 " O gift divine of quiet sequestration ! 
 The hermit, exercised in prayer and praise, 
 And feeding daily on the hope of heaven, 
 Is happy in his vow . . . but happier far 
 Was to your souls, and, to the thoughts of others, 
 A thousand times more beautiful appeared, 
 Your dual loneliness. The sacred tie 
 Is broken ; yet why grieve ? for Time but holds 
 His moiety in trust." 
 
 With the truth and love of this careful tribute we are well 
 
 latisfied. But perhaps the phrase in the Extempore Effusion on 
 
 ut:t^^ Death of James Hogg written in the same year, the phrase 
 
 '•ffiiedicated to Lamb, in the stanzas sacred to him and to Coleridge, 
 
 peaks with equal truth and a deeper tenderness. 
 
 I " Nor has the rolling year twice measured 
 
 From sign to sign its steadfast course, 
 Since every mortal power of Coleridge 
 Was frozen at its marvellous source ; 
 
 " The rapt one, of the godlike forehead. 
 The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth 
 And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle, 
 Has vanished from his lonely hearth." 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 WORDSWORTH, SCOTT, AND CHRISTOPHER NORTI 
 
 IT is tempting to compare and contrast Wordsworth an 
 Walter Scott. Born within a year of one another, bot 
 men were burly, honest northerners ; both were intense patriots 
 both were chivalrously devoted to literature ; both were grea 
 literary originators and reformers. Nor was this all. Both, i 
 a remarkable degree, gave spiritual significance to the region 
 in which their lots were cast. To a greater extent than an 
 other single man, Scott gave Scotland, topographical Scotlanc 
 modern Scotland, a soul He revealed it to the world, not a 
 a guide-book, but as a poet, does. And, similarly, Wordswort 
 was much more than a dweller among the Lakes ; he becam, 
 the very " breath and finer spirit " of them all ; in his geniij; 
 they live and have their being. 
 
 The parallelism can hardly be extended. As poets, indeec 
 Wordsworth and Scott were nearer than they knew, and tha 
 Wordsworth's rather scornful estimate allowed ; nearer in the 
 lyrical strain, nearer in their feeling for Nature. But thei 
 intellectual methods were essentially dissimilar. Wordswort 
 was intensely subjective, Scott cheerily and self-effacingly objec 
 tive. Wordsworth never wrote without looking into his ow, 
 thinking and feeling interior; Scott wrote only about a 
 external world, conceived by him as such, and nothing men 
 All his life Scott was looking on at a splendid pageantry, an 
 showing it to mankind, he himself being a mere showmai 
 hardly visible. For Wordsworth, too, there was a pageant — 
 pageant of Nature, a pageant of Man ; but it was mysteriousl 
 unrolled out of his own intelligence and imagination ; extei 
 nality supplied only raw material and stimulus. So far fror 
 being self-efifacing, Wordsworth had much of that egoism whicl 
 
 236 
 
WORDSWORTH, SCOTT, AND NORTH 237 
 
 IS Coleridge said about Milton, is a revelation of spirit — spirit 
 jrhich is universal. In a word, Wordsworth was a philosopher ; 
 kott was not. 
 
 Again, in Romanticism they took widely different ways. 
 except in parts of his poetry, those parts most lyrically inspired, 
 nd except in his Scottish character-drawing, Scott, in his 
 Romanticism, never got much beyond the mere idealization of 
 tiedievalism and feudalism. "Gothicism" of this kind was 
 lever much to Wordsworth. His point of view was too universal 
 incline him to it ; it was too heavily laden with trappings 
 
 n nd tinsel for his naked simplicity of taste. Even the Ancient 
 Mariner ^ the most arrestingly distinctive of Lyrical Ballads, was 
 bo romantic for him. As the Ancient Mariner is to the Tinier n 
 
 ^ ibbey lines, so — we may put it — was the Romanticism which 
 
 '^ >cott practised to the romance of Wordsworth. 
 
 Yet the two great pioneers were excellent friends. Scott 
 
 Ijl^as sweetly, wholly, loyal to, and admiring of, Wordsworth; 
 ordsworth, though he sniffed at Scott's poetry, and almost 
 nored his novels, loved the man, and felt, in spite of himself, 
 is greatness. They met for the first time in 1803, the year 
 
 •'l^hen Wordsworth first set foot in Scotland. It was a great 
 •ear in Wordsworth's life, not only because he first saw Scott 
 nd Scotland, but because he found there one of the critical 
 ispirations of his poetry. It was a great year also in Dorothy's 
 fe, because she was her brother's companion, and has left her 
 npressions in a diary which is a kind of Wordsworthian prose- 
 oem. In August, 1803, they set out with Coleridge, Mrs. 
 Vordsworth staying at home with her two-months'-old first 
 aby. Coleridge played his wonted unsatisfactory part in the 
 xpedition. He was, as Wordsworth said, "in bad spirits, and 
 omewhat too much in love with his own dejection." He got 
 s far as Loch Lomond ; but in the third week of the tour, the 
 bundant and apparently endless Scottish rains in a west 
 ountry August so completed his dejection that at Tarbet he 
 determined to send his clothes to Edinburgh and make the 
 ?est of his way thither." They left Arrochar all together. 
 ; Coleridge accompanied us a little way; we portioned out the 
 ; iontents of our purse before our parting ; and, after we had lost 
 Sght of him, drove heavily along," So Dorothy wrote. We 
 iiay be sure that the heaviness was not caused by mud alone. 
 
238 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Many a sigh Coleridge drew from that sympathetic heart fro 
 first to last. In the solemn recesses of Glen Croe her though; 
 were "full of Coleridge," and the image of him "sickly ar 
 alone" was as depressing as the savage place in the ble? 
 weather. 
 
 Coleridge apart, the tour was a bright success. The travelle 
 progressed at their leisure, in an Irish car drawn by one not tc 
 amiable horse, by way of Carlisle to Dumfries. Here Word 
 worth did homage to Burns, who had lain just seven years : 
 his grave in St. Michael's kirkyard, no stone as yet marking tl 
 place. He did his utmost towards a just estimate of his gre; 
 predecessor. He wrote three poems in Burns's own characterist 
 metre, in which moral, hardly, if at all, outweighs literary, crit 
 cism. The spiritual kinship between himself and the Scottis 
 lyrist he fully recognizes. They were "true friends, thoug 
 diversely inclined." As he looked across the Solway to the dii 
 heights of Skiddaw, he regretted that he had not known Burns 
 
 " Huge Criffel's hoary top ascends 
 By Skiddaw seen ; 
 Neighbours we were, and loving friends 
 We might have been." 
 
 In a nobler verse he bore his tribute to Burns's share in th 
 renascence of British poetry. It was Burns 
 
 " Whose light I hailed when first it shone, 
 And showed my youth 
 How Verse may build a princely throne 
 On humble truth." 
 
 Up Nithsdale, past Ellisland, the party went, still thinking c 
 Burns. The place was alive with his genius. Wordsworth put 
 to Nature a question about Burns's poetry which we ma; 
 perhaps put about his own. " Let us pause," he says — 
 
 " And ask of Nature, from what cause 
 And by what rules 
 She trained her Burns to win applause 
 That shames the Schools." 
 
 He thinks of him much as Shelley thought of Keats in Adonais 
 as " made one with Nature." 
 
 " He rules 'mid winter snows, and when 
 Bees fill their hives." 
 
WORDSWORTH, SCOTT, AND NORTH 239 
 
 0, Then come stanzas of moral reflection and regret, much too 
 itistinct with charity to be didactic — 
 
 ^f " Sweet Mercy ! to the gates of Heaven 
 
 2i| This Minstrel lead, his sins forgiven ; 
 
 The rueful conflict, the heart riven 
 With vain endeavour, 
 
 And memory of Earth's bitter leaven, 
 Effaced for ever. 
 
 *' But why to Him confine the prayer, 
 When kindred thoughts and yearnings bear 
 On the frail heart the purest share 
 
 With all that live ?— 
 The best of what we do and are, 
 
 Just God, forgive ! " 
 
 Hi 
 
 jA It was before Coleridge left the Wordsworths that they 
 
 ^;acountered at Inversnaid, on Loch Lomond, that Highland 
 
 ,^i who lives for ever in one of Wordsworth's most exquisite 
 
 perns — exquisite because the whole range of poetry hardly 
 
 liords a stronger instance of nearly sexless lyrical rapture 
 
 3. ere sex-feeling might be strong. It was by Loch Katrine 
 it the mysterious " Stepping Westward " question was put 
 ili answered. Then by Loch Awe and Kilchurn Castle, the 
 
 '•*!hild of loud-throated war," with a glimpse of Mull; across 
 :Iough Perthshire to Edinburgh ; then southward to the 
 Teed. They arrived at Edinburgh on September 15. Walter 
 Sott was at this time an active and gifted young advocate of 
 :Irty-two, the Sheriff of Selkirkshire, with a great love of 
 ).lads, German and British, and a vast multifarious knowledge 
 
 -pithe antiquities and poetic lore of the Border country, which 
 
 : :,i«had embodied two years previously in the Minstrelsy of the 
 :SHtish Bo7'dgr, With his wife and children he lived at Lass- 
 yde, near Edinburgh ; and there, in that early home, Scott 
 11:1 Wordsworth had their first meeting. Their first night in 
 Einburgh the Wordsworths spent at the White Hart in the 
 jissmarket, "which we conjectured," wrote Dorothy, "would 
 3(ter suit us than one in a more fashionable part of the town." 
 
 , Fday, i6th, was a wet day, and, in a city in which so much 
 iC'ends on distant views, this was unlucky for the sightseers. 
 * 'he Firth of Forth was entirely hidden from us, and all distant 
 3hcts, and we strained our eyes till they ached, vainly trying 
 
:i 
 
 240 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CHICLE 
 
 to pierce through the thick mist." Nevertheless, " Edinbur ; 
 far surpassed all expectation." 
 
 That evening they went to Rosslyn to sleep ; and on tj 
 Saturday morning, fine after the rain, they walked throu 
 Hawthornden to Lasswade. The Wordsworths were early fo . 
 like all tourists in new places ; and when they knocked : 
 Walter Scott's door, neither he nor his wife was up. They h 1 
 to wait in a large sitting-room ; but at last the Sheriff came i 
 with his limp and his durr a.nd his hearty manner — his "gra; 
 cordiality," as Wordsworth called it The guests had breakf ■ 
 with the Scotts, and stayed until two o'clock, when Sc : 
 accompanied them back to Rosslyn. We can fancy from wl : 
 stores the Sheriff would pour forth his delightful talk, and h 
 memorable he would make those hours. Wordsworth vj 
 struck, as in after years he always was, with Scott's modesty ; '.] 
 cheerfulness, his benevolence, his hopeful views of man and 1j 
 world. And he was privileged to hear, that day, the first fcr 
 cantos of the Lay of the Last Minstrel, which was not to ; 
 published for two years, " partly read and partly recited, son • 
 times in an enthusiastic style of chant." Wordsworth v> 
 "greatly delighted" by the "novelty of the manners, the clc 
 picturesque descriptions, and the easy, glowing energy of mil 
 of the verse." Would that there had always been the sa ) 
 appreciative note in his criticism of Scott's poetry ! 
 
 The Wordsworths were going south to see the Tweed a|f' "J^ 
 the storied places through which it flows ; and Scott, too, VJ 
 on the point of starting for the Jedburgh Assizes. They stru: 
 Tweed at Peebles, and there, on a Sunday morning, Wori- 
 worth wrote the sonnet of rebuke to the "unworthy Lor' 
 Douglas for felling the trees that clothed the nakedness 
 Neidpath Castle — a wrong 
 
 " Which Nature scarcely seems to heed ; 
 For shelter'd places, bosoms, nooks, and bays, 
 And the pure mountains, and the gentle Tweed, 
 And the green silent pastures yet remain." 
 
 They slept at Clovenford that night, and made the memoral : 
 decision to leave Yarrow unvisited, though Dorothy keei 
 wished to see the haunted stream. 
 
 I 
 
 *' Then said my winsome Marrow, 
 ' Whate'er betide we'll turn aside 
 And see the Braes of Yarrow.' " 
 
 ( 
 
li 
 
 WORDSWORTH, SCOTT, AND NORTH 241 
 
 Her brother's exquisite, if fallacious, dialectic, carried the day. 
 
 " Let beeves and home-bred kine partake 
 
 The sweets of Burnmill Meadow, 
 
 The swan on still St. Mary's Lake 
 
 Float double, swan and shadow. 
 '• We will not see them, will not go 
 
 To-day nor yet to-morrow ; 
 
 Enough if in our hearts we know 
 ... There's such a place as Yarrow." 
 
 4j On Monday morning to Melrose ; and there, on their way to 
 ^: the Abbey after breakfast, they met Scott in the street, and he 
 •^ivent with them. What an opportunity, and what a guide! — 
 f^^ though the ruins were "flouted" by "gay beams," and not 
 ^ glimmering in moonshine. 
 
 " The pillar'd arches were over their head, 
 And beneath their feet were the bones of the dead." 
 
 \11 that day the two poets were together and even all the 
 j: following night ; for they slept in the same room at the inn. 
 ••, jS'ext day Scott went on to Jedburgh, and the Wordsworths 
 ; [bllowed the river to Dryburgh, where Scott's body was one day 
 
 be laid. They intended to go on to Kelso, but late September 
 ;; jains drove them to Jedburgh, where they were again with 
 
 |5C0tt. They lodged with that excellent and young-hearted 
 V I Matron of Jedborough and her Husband " who are immortal 
 n Wordsworth's verse. It was the wife who, though over 
 eventy, would not grow old ; the husband was a speechless 
 /reck — 
 
 " With legs that move not, if they can, 
 And useless arms, a trunk of man. 
 He sits, and with a vacant eye ; 
 A sight to make a stranger sigh ! 
 
 The joyous Woman is the Mate 
 Of him in that forlorn estate ! 
 
 He is as mute as Jedborough Tower ! 
 She jocund as it was of yore 
 With all its bravery on ; in times 
 When all alive with merry chimes, 
 Upon a sun-bright morn of May, 
 
 1 It roused the Vale to holiday." 
 
 ''he merry old dame is to Wordsworth as eloquent from the 
 
242 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CHICLE 
 
 heart of Nature, as the Highland Girl herself. Her's was nc 
 thoughtless gaiety born of inexperience of pain ; she had knowi 
 suffering both of body and mind. When you talked to hei 
 there were times when 
 
 " Some inward trouble suddenly 
 Broke from the Matron's strong black eye — 
 A remnant of uneasy light, 
 A flash of something over-bright ! " 
 
 But it was for a moment only ; victorious and wholesome jo] 
 soon reasserted itself The poet learned his lesson about th^ 
 potentialities of old age. 
 
 " I praise thee, Matron ! and thy due 
 Is praise, heroic praise, and true ! 
 With admiration I behold 
 Thy gladness unsubdued and bold ! 
 Thy looks, thy gestures, all present 
 The picture of a life well spent : 
 This do I see ; and something more ; 
 A strength unthought of heretofore ! 
 DeHghted am I for thy sake ; 
 And yet a higher joy partake : 
 Our Human-nature throws away 
 Its second twilight, and looks gay ; 
 A land of promise and of pride 
 Unfolding, wide as life is wide." 
 
 Those were pleasant days at Jedburgh ; the Sheriff woul 
 come to supper when the Court rose, and go on reciting the Lay 
 or he would join the brother and sister in their rambles by th 
 woody Jed, or knee-deep in the ferns of Ferniehurst, whic 
 reminded Dorothy of Alfoxden. Young Will Laidlaw, to( 
 was there, "as shy," Dorothy found, "as any of our Grasmer 
 lads." He had a farm in Yarrow, and a poet's soul, and ws 
 eager to see Wordsworth. He was to write " Lucy's Flittin' 
 and other sweet genuine Scottish vernacular lyrics ; to be Scott 
 land-steward and amanuensis at Abbotsford, and to try to hel 
 his helplessness at the last. " Ha ! Willie Laidlaw ! " the dyin 
 man collected himself to exclaim, when they set him down i^ 
 the dining-room at Abbotsford after the sad time abroad and i, 
 London : " O man, how often have I thought of you ! " 
 
 Scott accompanied the travellers in their car from Jedburg 
 
WORDSWORTH, SCOTT, AND NORTH 243 
 
 to Hawick, the ''Jedborough Matron" supplying sandwiches 
 and cheesecakes for the journey. Scott pointed out Ruberslaw 
 and Minto Crags, and had some story about nearly every house 
 they passed. This was the last day of his company ; next 
 morning they parted at Hawick, after a wistful look from the 
 top of a hill toward Scott's and Dandie Dinmont's Liddesdale. 
 The Scottish tour was over ; two days later the Wordsworths 
 were at Dove Cottage again with Mary and Joanna Hutchinson, 
 and little Johnny asleep in a clothes-basket by the fire. 
 
 Here was the making of a mighty friendship ! Writing to 
 Scott a week or two later, Wordsworth used strong words about 
 it. " My sister and I often talk of the happy days that we spent 
 in your company. Such things do not occur often in life. 
 If we live, we shall meet again. That is my consolation, when 
 I think of these things. Scotland and England sound like 
 division, do what we can ; but we really are but neighbours, and 
 if you were no further off, and in Yorkshire, we should think so. 
 Farewell ! God prosper you and all that belongs to you ! 
 Your sincere friend — for such I will call myself, though slow to 
 use a word of such solemn meaning to any one." 
 
 Two years later, in 1805, Scott was in Lakeland, and went to 
 see Wordsworth at Dove Cottage. Authentic memories of this 
 visit are scanty : Mrs. Scott was with her husband ; was there 
 accommodation for the couple at the Town End cottage ? 
 , Tradition asserts that Scott himself was an inmate ; and that, 
 ! finding his host's water-drinking minage a little chilly, he went 
 ' for a daily morning-refresher to the inn at Grasmere. Quite 
 certain it is that on an August day Wordsworth, Scott, and 
 Humphry Davy climbed Helvellyn together. They passed, 
 as they mounted, the place where the body of a man had been 
 found that year, watched, three months after death, by his 
 terrier dog. The man was well known as a fisherman and lover 
 of the hills. Both poets commemorated the incident, Scott 
 in long lines of fluent amphibrachs ; Wordsworth in one of his 
 characteristic lyrical narratives called Fidelity, It was the dog's 
 behaviour which moved the poets, working wholly without 
 collusion. Wordsworth greatly admired the lines in which 
 Scott addressed the faithful dumb watcher — 
 
 " How long didst thou think that his silence was slumber ? 
 When the wind waved his garment, how oft didst thou start ? " 
 
244 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Wordsworth himself— so he tells us— took the "diction" of 
 his last beautiful stanza from peasant lips — 
 
 " Yes, proof was plain that, since the day 
 When this ill-fated Traveller died, 
 The Dog had watched about the spot, 
 
 Or by his master's side : 
 How 7ioiirished here through such long time 
 He knows, who gave that love sublime; 
 And gave that strength of feeling, great 
 Above allhujnan estimate ! " 
 
 Subsequent meetings, at the Lakes, in London, and at 
 Coleorton, deepened the respect and affection between Words- 
 worth and Scott. Yet Scott looked askance at a good deal in 
 Wordsworth's poetry ; and Wordsworth allowed himself to 
 wave aside the whole of Scott's in a very lofty manner. Scott's 
 disapprobation was hinted with the infinite modesty and delicacy 
 characteristic of the man. He pleaded for Wordsworth with 
 Jeffrey, and " made him admire " this and that. But he had to' 
 admit that Wordsworth sometimes " got beyond him." Though 
 he did not " know a man more to be venerated for uprightness of 
 heart and loftiness of genius," he " differed from him in very many 
 points of taste." " Why he will sometimes choose to crawl upon 
 all-fours, when God has given him so noble a countenance to 
 lift to heaven, I am as little able to account for, as for his 
 quarrelling . . . with the wrinkles which time and meditation 
 have stamped his brow withal." So Scott wrote when he was 49, 
 and Wordsworth 50. Seven years later, Scott put down more 
 subtle criticism in his Journal. He remarked that something in his 
 own character reminded him of Wordsworth's Matthew. Then 
 he turns aside to rebuke Jeffrey gently for his inappreciation of 
 Matthezv. Jeffrey " loves to see imagination best when it is bitted 
 and managed, and ridden upon the grand pas. He does not 
 make allowance for starts and sallies and bounds, when Pegasus 
 is beautiful to behold, though sometimes perilous to his rider." 
 This is exquisitely put ; and the Wordsworthian simplicity, over 
 against Jeffrey's common sense, could find no better apology. 
 But then Scott has a word for Wordsworth in his turn, mixed 
 with a thoughtful self-estimate. " Not that I think the amiable 
 bard of Rydal shows judgment in choosing such subjects as the 
 popular mind cannot sympathize in. It is unwise and unjust to 
 
WORDSWORTH, SCOTT, AND NORTH 245 
 
 himself. I do not compare myself, in point of imagination, with 
 Wordsworth — far from it ; for his is naturally exquisite, and 
 highly cultivated from constant exercise. But I can see as many 
 castles in the clouds as any man, as many genii in the curling 
 smoke of a steam-engine, as perfect a Persepolis in the embers 
 of a sea-coal fire. My life has been spent in such day-dreams. 
 But I cry no roast meat. There are times when a man should 
 remember what Rousseau used to say, Tais-toi, Jea^t Jacques, 
 car on ne fentend pas ! " In other words, it was excess, rather 
 than defect, of imagination which Scott blamed in Wordsworth ;> 
 and he blamed it more for the sake of the poet's popularity than 
 for anything deeper. 
 
 "Very different was Wordsworth's tone about the poetry of 
 
 Scott. He seemed unable to recognize in it any nobility of 
 
 tii .Romanticism ; or to hail it as a genuine agent in the restoration 
 
 acj ! of the beautiful, as a renascence of wholesome wonder ; as the 
 
 *ii:j homely harvest of a seeing eye and a feeling heart. He fixed 
 
 ::. ihis attention on the narrative flow, and thought of it as mere 
 
 11;: jrhymed story-telling ; he thought it superficial and external ; it 
 
 3 3 ihad for him none of the depth essential to his conception of the 
 
 aq (higher poetry. He blamed the carelessness of the style. A 
 
 :::: deeper objection gives us pause. Scott, he said, was not tnte to 
 
 e :. \NatiiJ/e ; his descriptions were addressed to the ear, not to the 
 
 b imind. It is curious to contrast with this judgment that of 
 
 ,:;:: iRuskin, who, when he wrote the third volume of Modern 
 
 hi. painters, was no mean literary critic. In that volume Ruskin 
 
 3- IdeHberately takes Scott, in his poetry, as the type of the truest 
 
 3b modern feeling for landscape ; and if one merely glances at the 
 
 \x [quotations by which he illustrates and supports his thesis, it is 
 
 m: difficult to disbelieve in its soundness. For the descriptions, 
 
 C phe renderings of landscape which Scott gives us in his poetry, 
 
 \':. bre without the frigidity and conventionality, the polysyllabic 
 
 ?a.v bomposity which do something to spoil his descriptions in 
 
 Srose ; in verse he attained to a rapidity which was not mere 
 
 laste, but the unhesitating expression of full conviction ; to a 
 
 .implicity and brevity which were born of perfect sincerity, and 
 
 vhich enabled him to minister of the beautiful to all who were 
 
 vorthy to receive it. 
 
 If this had been pointed out to Wordsworth, he could hardly 
 lave gainsaid it. But he would still have insisted that the 
 
246 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 beauty given by Scott was for the ear, not for the mind. He 
 probably never paused, as Ruskin did, over Scott's Nature- 
 poetry ; he read it or heard it, as part and parcel of a piece of 
 mere story-telling ; and his general sense of externality, of mere 
 picturesqueness and scene-painting, remained as his total impres- 
 sion. In Wordsworth himself, Nature, in detail as in general, 
 was too much the mere embodiment and vehicle of the Universe 
 to be accepted as Scott — a true poet, but no philosopher — pre- 
 sented her. For Wordsworth, the truth of Nature, which, in his 
 estimation, Scott failed to reach and convey, was indeed that 
 which never entered into the circle of Scott's mind — her mystical 
 personality, her sublime unity. All else was mere surface-work, 
 mere entertainment. It was a hasty and unjust judgment, and 
 it did both Scott and Wordsworth harm. 
 
 But Wordsworth, though he may have fallen short as Scott's 
 reader, showed no shortcoming as his friend. In the radiance 
 of that sweet personality, criticism was quickly lost in love; 
 before the totality of that astonishing achievement, all men have 
 to bow the knee. The fall of Scott, the collapse of his fortunes, 
 the fatal breach in his health, the certainty of death on the mere 
 confines of old age, gave deep pain to Wordsworth as it did to 
 all who knew him, all to whom he was known. Early in 1830, 
 when he was not yet 59, Scott had his first apoplectic stroke. 
 Yet he went on bravely with his duties in the Court of Session, 
 his Demonology and Witchcraft^ and other literary labours. He 
 would not look upon himself as fatally seized or threatened. 
 In July he wrote to Wordsworth — whom he addressed " Dearest 
 Wordsworth " — " Don't you remember something of a promises 
 broken, and propose to repair it next year? I hope you mean' 
 to visit Abbotsford, and bring with you as many of your family 
 as you possibly can. You will find me in my glory ; . . . Mrs. 
 Wordsworth and Miss Wordsworth will, I hope, think them- 
 selves at home, as well as my early acquaintance. Miss 
 Dorothea." Wordsworth replied to " dear Sir Walter," and 
 rebuked him gently for writing " Mount Rydal " instead of 
 " Rydal Mount." The visit came off in September, 1831, just a 
 year before Scott's death. Scott had been declining fast. He 
 had to retire from the clerkship of the Court of Session ; he 
 had another stroke ; his faculties were manifestly impaired. 
 More and more he leant on Will Laidlaw and his ever-ready 
 
KK'J.M UNFINISHED I'OKTKAIT 
 
 SIR WALTER SCOTT 
 
 SIR EDWIN LANDSEEK IN THE NATIONAL fOKTKAIT CJALLEKV 
 
V OF THE 
 
 OF 
 iLlfO 
 
 ^^ 
 
 i 
 
WORDSWORTH, SCOTT, AND NORTH 247 
 
 kindness ; patiently he worked at Count Robert of Paris, Castle 
 D anger otcs.d^nd Tales of a Grandfather. In the summer, Turner 
 the painter was with him. It was resolved to try the effect of a 
 voyage and winter abroad. Scott was to start on September 23, 
 and on the 21st Wordsworth and Dora arrived at Abbots- 
 ford. Wordsworth would have gone earlier, but had been 
 prevented from starting by a bad attack of inflammation of the 
 ^y^s. However, Scott's preparations were made, and there was 
 a pleasant little party at Abbotsford, with an air of leisurely 
 hospitality. Though Lockhart reports that his wife had gone on 
 to London the day before the Wordsworths came, Wordsworth 
 himself speaks of her as at Abbotsford, and as " chanting old 
 ballads to her harp." Major Scott was there, and his sister 
 Anne ; and there were other agreeable and amusing people. 
 Wordsworth was shocked by the change in his old friend ; but 
 Scott did his best as the poet-host of a poet. An expedition 
 was made to Newark Castle — Wordsworth's second visit to the 
 Vale of Yarrow. Sir Walter was able to walk with something of 
 the old vigour. Wordsworth commemorated the day in his 
 Yarrow Revisited — verses which have none of the charm of the 
 other poems inspired by the haunted stream. Yet there is fine 
 homage to Scott in the assurance of welcome by Italy to the 
 Minstrel of the Border — 
 
 " For Thou, upon a hundred streams, 
 
 By tales of love and sorrow, 
 Of faithful love, undaunted truth, 
 
 Hast shed the power of Yarrow ; 
 And streams, unknown, hills yet unseen, 
 
 Wherever they invite Thee, 
 At parent Nature's grateful call, 
 
 With gladness must requite Thee." 
 
 As they returned to Abbotsford by the ford of the Tweed, 
 Wordsworth saw a sad light, purple rather than golden, on the 
 , Eildon Hills. It seemed "fraught with omen" ; and he put all 
 I the sadness of his heart into an irregular sonnet — 
 
 " A trouble, not of clouds, or weeping rain, 
 Nor of the setting sun's pathetic light 
 Engendered, hangs o'er Eildon's triple height : 
 Spirits of Power, assembled there, complain 
 For kindred Power departing from their sight ; 
 
248 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 While Tweed, best pleased in chanting a blithe strain, 
 
 Saddens his voice again, and yet again. 
 
 Lift up your hearts, ye Mourners ! for the might 
 
 Of the whole world's good wishes with him goes ; 
 
 Blessings and prayers, in nobler retinue 
 
 Than sceptred king or laurelled conqueror knows 
 
 Follow this wondrous Potentate. Be true, 
 
 Ye winds of ocean and the midland sea, 
 
 Wafting your Charge to soft Parthenope ! " 
 
 In Dora's album, on the morning before the Wordsworths 
 left, Scott wrote verses, too imperfect to be transcribed here. 
 Speaking of them to Dora, Scott said : " I should not have done 
 anything of this kind but 'for your father's sake ; they are 
 probably the last verses I shall ever write." Then the poets 
 had a long talk, in the course of which Scott spoke of the 
 happiness, on the whole, of his life. To Wordsworth, wishing 
 him health from his journey, Scott, with a sad smile, quoted 
 from Yarrow U^ivisited — 
 
 " When I am there, although 'tis fair, 
 'Twill be another Yarrow." 
 
 Then they parted ; and next day Scott began his journey 
 to Naples. 
 
 In 1837, Wordsworth in Italy sums up his feeling about 
 Scott, in the long blank verse poem called Musings near Aqua- 
 pendente. The sight of the Apennines characteristically sent 
 his fancy wandering to his Lakeland, to Fairfield, and Seat 
 Sandal and Helvellyn. And then his thoughts fell on Scott, 
 and he remembered how Italy, with all her amplitude of beauty, 
 had no cure for his sick body and mind. And he was moved to 
 thanksgiving that he was still well enough, still free enough, 
 to enjoy what had done nothing for his friend — 
 
 " That I — so near the term of human life 
 Appointed by man's common heritage. 
 Frail as the frailest one, withal (if that 
 Deserve a thought) but little known to fame — 
 Am free to rove where Nature's loveliest looks, 
 Art's noblest relics, history's rich bequests, 
 Failed to reanimate and but feebly cheered 
 The whole world's Darling — free to rove at will 
 O'er high and low, and if requiring rest, 
 Rest from enjoyment only." 
 
 P 
 
 I 
 
WORDSWORTH, SCOTT, AND NORTH 249 
 
 In the Extempore Effusion of 1835 Wordsworth had re- 
 lembered Scott. He thought of his visits to Yarrow — 
 
 " When last along its banks I wandered, 
 
 Through groves that had begun to shed 
 
 Their golden leaves upon the pathways, 
 
 My steps the Border-Minstrel led. 
 " The mighty Minstrel breathes no longer, 
 
 'Mid mouldering ruins low he lies." 
 
 ^ \ But the immediate inspiration of the poem was a less 
 
 -fnous Scot than Sir Walter — less famous and yet as genuine 
 
 --James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, the author of Kilmeny 
 
 ^'•ad The Queen's Wake; one of the expounders of the Romanticism 
 
 -c the Scottish border, whom British literature cannot quite 
 
 -a'ord to forget. Wordsworth met him during his first Scottish 
 
 'iepedition in 1803, not long after Scott himself had come to 
 
 •kow him. Hogg was a sheep-farmer rather than a shepherd 
 
 f Dper ; a rough, uncouth fellow, with a streak of most real 
 
 gnius. In Wordsworth's cold, uncompromising phrase, " he 
 
 v.s undoubtedly a man of original genius, but of coarse manners, 
 
 ad low and offensive opinions." It was in Hogg's company 
 
 %it Wordsworth first saw Yarrow. 
 
 " When first, descending from the moorland, 
 I saw the Stream of Yarrow glide 
 Along a bare and open valley. 
 The Ettrick Shepherd was my guide." 
 
 Wordsworth had not enough humour, flexibility, breadth to 
 -t'lch things and persons Scottish with more than his finger- 
 ttti'S. But with one of the most vigorous and impressive of the 
 ■ Sots of genius in those days, he was brought into close relations 
 omore than one kind. John Wilson, the " Christopher North " 
 oBlackwood's Magazine, is one of those who suffer the nemesis of 
 to strong personality. A poet, a critic, an essayist, a humourist, 
 aournalist, a professor of moral philosophy, he was interesting 
 a|d creditable in each capacity, and yet he is hardly remembered 
 iiany. He is remembered chiefly by those survivors who can 
 lok back on the living man, with his splendid face and figure, in 
 tb Edinburgh streets, his masses of tawny hair, and the desultory 
 rapsodies in the college class-room, which did duty as lectures 
 c moral philosophy. Yet he was a grand combination of brain 
 
250 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 and muscle ; a lover of the open air, of sport, of pedestrian!: i, 
 "and yet a spirit still, and bright" with the love of all hum^a 
 and generous and inspiring things that are born of men's min , 
 The son of a Paisley manufacturer, John Wilson was born i 
 1785, the year also of De Quincey's birth. Unlike most Scs 
 of his rank in those days, Wilson went from Glasgow Colb* 
 to the University of Oxford, becoming a Commoner of Magdal 1, 
 in 1803. Before he left Glasgow there happened to him wit 
 happened to De Ouincey almost simultaneously — he felt ^ 
 impact of the early genius of Wordsworth. He read Lyril 
 Ballads ; and so moved by them was he that in May, 1802 i 
 his seventeenth year, he wrote a long letter about them to Wor.. 
 worth — a letter expressing the kind of passionate interest c\ 
 admiration which De Quincey felt; a letter such as it doe;i 
 youth good to write, and such as the greatest man may IJ 
 proud to get from the humblest of his disciples. "To rece; 
 a letter from you," Wilson wrote, "would afford me m-; 
 happiness than any occurrence in this world, save the happin 5 
 of my friends." He felt that humanity in Wordsworth spc; 
 straight to the humanity in himself "You have seized ufi 
 those feelings that most deeply interest the heart." He reali:! 
 the novelty, the orginality, of Wordsworth's treatment of Nati . 
 The " disposition of the mind to assimilate the appearances f 
 external nature to its own situation . . . you have emplo)] 
 with a most electrifying effect." With the ethical assurance f 
 a well-disposed youth, Wilson dwelt on the " morality " of the n ' 
 poetry ; and informed Wordsworth that Lyrical Ballads was 1; 
 book which he valued next to his Bible. Nor was the t* 
 afraid of blaming, any more than of praising, his hero to : 
 face. He considered that Wordsworth had fallen into an err , 
 the effects of which were, however, " exceedingly trivial." 
 his desire to be truthful he had at times forgotten the paramoi 
 obligation on poetry to give " pleasure," i.e. to be alwc 
 beautiful, or, at least, interesting. In The Idiot Boy, for examj 
 Wilson thought that Wordsworth had failed to make Bett- 
 maternal feeling interesting as such ; and that, he consider«, 
 was the reason why he " never met one who did not rise rati' 
 displeased from the perusal " of the poem. 
 
 Wordsworth's reply was lengthy, and must have intoxicat 
 Wilson. He discussed the influence of scenery on charact , 
 
WORDSWORTH, SCOTT, AND NORTH 251 
 
 id defended himself as to the unfortunate Idiot Boy, in words 
 
 vich are an instalment of his theory of poetry. Granting 
 
 "Olson's contention that poetry must please, he asks: must 
 
 oiase whom ? And he answers : not this taste or that taste, 
 
 iV; essential human nature. And then he asks : ''Where are 
 
 ■^ to find the best measure of this t I answer, from within ; 
 
 y stripping our own hearts naked, and by looking out of 
 
 rselves to those men who lead the simplest lives, and most 
 
 1 ;ording to Nature ; men who have never known false 
 
 •(inements, wayward and artificial desires, false criticisms, 
 
 B^minate habits of thinking and feeling ; or who, having 
 
 own these things, have outgrown them." " People in our 
 
 •;ik in life," Wordsworth proceeds, "are perpetually falling 
 
 iio one sad mistake, namely, that of supposing that Human 
 
 ''Ij.ture and the persons they associate with are one and the 
 
 •Wne thing." The fallacy imparts itself to literature ; and a 
 
 kid of conventionally polite standard is set up, below which 
 
 pi^tic themes must not fall. This standard it was the mission 
 
 ■o^ Lyrical Ballads to overthrow with the battle-cry of nothing 
 
 ■ ■zkmon I Idiot is an ugly word ; but the kind of human being 
 
 '-dliignated by the word is one of God's creatures, and he and the 
 
 iibistries of service which surround him are for poetry as much 
 
 aany other displays of human nature and human affection. " I 
 
 MiQ. often applied to idiots," Wordsworth wrote, " in my own 
 
 'n*nd,that sublime expression of Scripture, that their life is hidden 
 
 ■ikth God. ... I have often looked upon the conduct of fathers 
 
 %!d mothers of the lower classes of society toward idiots as a 
 
 •g^^at triumph of the human heart. It is there that we see the 
 
 sength, disinterestedness, and grandeur of love ; nor have I 
 
 ■efer been able to contemplate an object that calls out so many 
 
 excellent and virtuous sentiments without finding it hallowed 
 
 threby, and having something in me which bears down before 
 
 itlike a deluge, every feeble sensation of disgust and aversion." 
 
 Vordsworth concluded his argument with a significant state- 
 
 ri:nt. " It is not enough for me as a Poet, to delineate merely 
 
 ;s:h feelings as all men do sympathize with; but it is also 
 
 hjhly desirable to add to these others, such as all men may 
 
 supathize with, and such as there is reason to believe they 
 
 viuld be better and more moral beings if they did sympathize." 
 
 We know not how Wilson replied to this letter: perhaps 
 
252 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 he only hugged it to his heart. He might have replied It 
 Wordsworth had hardly met his chief difficulty, namely, laf 
 the affection of Betty Foy was not, in tJie poef s presentation . 
 interesting enough for poetry. It may be allowed to he 
 spectator of this argumentative encounter to remark jiat 
 neither of the disputants quite understood the real clairiof 
 The Idiot Boy to poetic rank — its possession of humour. \'.th 
 its delicate union of humour and tenderness, and its deliglful 
 background of moonlit landscape, it was and is a true pdm, 
 worth pages of the sentimental melody which Wilson was aibr- 
 wards to pour forth. Neither Wordsworth nor Wilson old 
 understand this ; and so their doughty strokes did little nlre 
 than beat the air. I 
 
 In 1807, when he was twenty-two, and had just finishel a 
 brilliant Oxford career, Wilson straightway made himsel a 
 Laker, by taking a cottage on the woody slopes that boid 
 Windermere on the east. Henceforth he was " Mr. Wilsoi of 
 EUeray," enjoying, like De Quincey, the proximity of the pits 
 of Grasmere and Keswick, and bent on spending ample meis 
 in a life of poetry and sport and congenial fellowship. He et 
 about building a larger house, and making acquaintance injl 
 directions. He now got to know Wordsworth for the Jst 
 time. In the winter of 1808-9, ^^e winter of The Friend 'id 
 the Convention of Cintra pamphlet, the smoky winter at Ai,n 
 Bank, Wilson first saw De Quincey, his contemporary it 
 Oxford, his one companion in true Wordsworthian insi<t 
 De Quincey and Coleridge were both at Allan Bank. " (iie 
 room on the ground-floor " — so De Quincey wrote — " desig |d 
 for a breakfasting-room . . . was then occupied by Mr. Ci 
 ridge as a study. On this particular day, the sun having 
 just set, it naturally happened that Mr. Coleridge — wh:e 
 nightly vigils were long — had not yet come down to breakfai ; 
 meantime, and until the epoch of the Coleridgian breakJit 
 should arrive, his study was lawfully disposable to profajr 
 uses. Here, therefore, it was, that, opening the door hastilyli 
 quest of a book, I found seated, and in earnest conversatii, 
 two gentlemen ; one of them my host, Mr. Wordsworth, t 
 that time about thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old; '; 
 other was a younger man by good sixteen or seventeen yec^, 
 in a sailor's dress, manifestly in robust health, fervidus juveV'^ 
 
PROFESSOR JOHN WILSON 
 
 (■' CHRISTOl'HEK NOKTH ") 
 
4 
 I 
 
 ■ 
 
WORDSWORTH, SCOTT, AND NORTH 253 
 
 1 wearing upon his countenance a powerful expression of 
 •,)ur and animated intelligence, mixed with much good 
 ure. 'Mr. Wilson of Elleray^ — delivered as the formula of 
 loduction, in the deep tones of Mr. Wordsworth — at once 
 lished the momentary surprise I felt on finding an unknown 
 tnger where I had expected nobody, and substituted a sur- 
 •e of another kind. I now well understood who it was that 
 iw." And De Quincey goes on describing the brilliant 
 Dng man in his careful copious way. " A tall man about six 
 { high . . . built with tolerable appearance of strength . . . 
 J wearing, for the predominant character of his person, light- 
 i\ and agility ; — he seemed framed with an express view to 
 /mastical exercises of every sort." De Quincey could not 
 li him handsome. His complexion was too florid ; hair of a 
 \ quite unsuited to that complexion ; eyes not good, " having 
 :apparent depth, but seeming mere surfaces " ; nothing fine, 
 .hort, except a Ciceronian mouth and chin. Wilson's manner 
 1 talk were more arresting than his appearance ; the things 
 Ich chiefly struck De Quincey were "the humility and 
 r/ity with which he spoke of himself; his large expansion of 
 3rt, and a certain air of noble frankness which overspread 
 /ything he said ; he seemed to have an intense enjoyment of 
 f; indeed, being young, rich, healthy, and full of intellectual 
 qvity, it could not be very wonderful that he should feel 
 apy and pleased with himself and others ; but it was some- 
 lit unusual to find that so rare an assemblage of endowments 
 a communicated no tinge of arrogance to his manner, or at 
 ["disturbed the general temperance of his mind." 
 The presence of such a man in those solitudes, and the 
 iiptuous, sociable life which he lived in the neighbourhood, 
 i something to enrich Wordsworth's experience. Words- 
 (th and Wilson made a more satisfactory pair of friends than 
 Wrdsworth and De Quincey. Like De Quincey, Wilson loved 
 D-amble about by night ; but his days were filled with more 
 eial companionships than the solitude-loving opium-eater 
 old or would command. Wilson made poetry in his nocturnal 
 ^Jks ; he cultivated Wordsworthian moods and even Words- 
 ^(thian expressions, here and there in a much more fuU- 
 1 )ded style than Wordsworth's — 
 
254 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 " Beneath the full-orb'd moon, that bathed in hght 
 The mellow'd verdure of Helvellyn's steep, 
 My spirit teeming with creations bright, 
 I walked like one who wanders in his sleep ! 
 
 Through the hush'd air awoke mysterious awe ; 
 
 God cheer'd my loneliness with holy mirth; 
 A7id in this blended 7nood I clearly saw 
 
 The moving spirit that pervades the earths 
 
 Wilson gave Wordsworth a very complete sympathy. '. | 
 fragment of prose-poetry, he commemorates, tenderly nj 
 lovingly, the parting of Wordsworth and his sailor-bro er, 
 which had made a great impression on his mind. *' I 
 sweet summer day went along with him and heard the m(.iii 
 choly tale. Then, whoever gave to that sublime solitude ria 
 with holy feelings, and with the wildness of nature join huai 
 sympathies." 
 
 The first phase of Wilson's Windermere life, with its er'itt 
 siasms of action and feeling, did not last very long. Wjdi 
 found a wife at Ambleside, and condensed his poetic effor ii 
 one long, fluent, picturesque poem, The Isle of Palms. !t! 
 fluency and picturesqueness, rather than inwardness and inji- 
 nation, justified Scott in speaking of it as "something in he 
 style of Southey." Scott welcomed Wilson as an author, id 
 characterized him well as an "excellent, warm-hearted, ii 
 enthusiastic young man ; something too much, perhaps, of hi 
 latter quantity, places him amongst the list of originals." \ 
 Isle of Palms appeared in 1812, and was well received. Anc lei 
 volume, containing a drama, The City of the Plague, and c .a 
 poems, came out in 18 16; but before its publication, the i)S 
 perity of the EUeray life was wrecked, and Wilson enteretDi 
 a new phase of activity. His independent income was ;t 
 he had to work for his bread ; and he went to Edinburg to 
 prepare for the Scottish Bar, and to enter, in a year or tw( 3n 
 his famous connection with Blackwood^ and his best-known ^ rk 
 as a writer of prose. He did not give up Elleray, th(^h 
 henceforward it was a haunt of his leisure, rather than a 
 manent home. 
 
 18 17 was an important year in British literary annals. ^ 
 critical renascence and the exciting conditions of public a 
 had given birth to the Edinburgh and Quarterly Revieii "» 
 
, WORDSWORTH, SCOTT, AND NORTH 255 
 
 rich the former was Whig and the latter chiefly Tory. Litera- 
 U3, as such, has nothing to do with party-politics ; but in 
 bse days partisanship was allowed to take possession of 
 itrature and falsify its criticism. Nowhere was partisanship 
 :(ner, nowhere was intelligence more vigorous, than in Edin- 
 ugh. The city teemed with able young men ; and William 
 5.ckwood the bookseller was as able and astute as any of 
 tm. The Whig Edinburgh, with Jeffrey as its oracle, had an 
 treasonable and undesirable monopoly : John Murray's 
 larterly was a London affaw*. There was room, nay, there 
 ^\ a crying need, for a monthly Edinburgh magazine, of Tory 
 mciples and with a mellower tone than Jeffrey and his co- 
 uutors could command. In October, 1817, after one false 
 trt under another name, Blackwood' s Edmbiirgh Magazine 
 )<;an to appear ; and Wilson found in it his chief outlet hence- 
 cward. Yet it was some time before he could accommodate 
 liiself to it, or, indeed, before it learned its own proper role in 
 :1 world of letters. In its first inception, Blackwood was very 
 •eublican in constitution, Blackwood himself being its sole 
 i(tor ; and it was written in too partisan, personal, and satirical 
 •i;iew to be suited either to Wilson's gracious and generous 
 .:;qper, or to the healing and edifying work it was destined to 
 ' i; in the 'twenties and 'thirties. The Blackwood which tried 
 xscorch Coleridge and put an extinguisher on Keats was not 
 .4= Blackwood oi "Christopher North." Blackwood was going 
 tcbe something very different from the mere organ of Scottish 
 .Iryism, something much better than an opponent of the 
 Einbtirgk, a rival of the Quarterly. Its real mission, not in 
 SDtland only, but in Britain, was to be the medium of that 
 h;her lighter literature — the literature of fiction, of sympathetic 
 cticism, of humour, of feeling for landscape and pastoral life — 
 \A.ich was born afresh at the opening of the nineteenth century. 
 The Blackwood which was all this was the Blackwood which 
 gve itself up to " Christopher North." He, laying poetry aside, 
 bcame its brain, its life, its soul. In 1820 Wilson was made 
 lofessor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, 
 ad Professor he remained for more than thirty years. But he 
 fand time simultaneously to pour himself out in Blackwood, to 
 b its best critic, its most unflagging humourist, its most delight- 
 f essayist. Of Wilson's humour the dialogues — not all written 
 
256 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 by Christopher — called Nodes AmbrosiaiiCB are the most si 
 stantial monument. If the Nodes repel by an occasioi ' 
 coarseness, or by a too continuous gush of the rhetor! 
 sentimentalism which was Wilson's bane, they are an invalual 
 record of an interesting phase of Scottish character and lettei 
 they show us, better than anything else, not only the better a 
 more intellectual side of Scottish convivialism in the reign 
 George IV., but that Scoto-English literary rapprocheme 
 which was shown also by the popularity of Scott on both sic 
 of the Border ; by De Quincey's complete domestication 
 Edinburgh ; by the Oxford associations of John Gibson Lo( 
 hart ; and, last but not least, by Wilson's own double personal! 
 as at once a Laker and a Scot of Scots. No literary shortcomin 
 can ever rob the Nodes of this high value. 
 
 And then the Recreations of Christopher North ! Christopt ^ 
 at the Lakes, Christopher at Colonsay, A nglimaiiia ; what delig] 
 ful desultoriness ; what lyrical egoism ; what wholesome Natui 
 worship, wholesome sociability ! For the periodical essay ' 
 this kind, John Wilson, on his much lower plane, really c' 
 nearly as much as Charles Lamb. 
 
 How Christopher North handled Wordsworth in Blackwc 
 — and he had much to do with him — we shall see in the h 
 chapter. Personal intercourse there was not much between t 
 two men after the change in Wilson's fortunes in 1815. Wilsoi 
 visits to EUeray were infrequent and brief, and generally 
 summer, when the Professor was the centre of a gay party, n 
 quite suited to Wordsworth's idiosyncrasy. 
 
 In the summer of 1825 there were specially great doin( 
 Sir Walter Scott, with his daughter Anne and Lockhart, w' 
 in Ireland that summer ; and, on their way back, they passi 
 northward by Wales and the Lakes. Of course they foui' 
 their way to EUeray, and stayed three days with the Wilsor' 
 Nor was this all. At Storrs, further down the lake, lived 
 certain Colonel Bolton, with whom George Canning was stayin 
 Canning and Scott were great friends ; and Wordsworth ar/ 
 Southey greatly admired the Tory statesman, with his love 
 national independence abroad, and his unflinching resistance 1^ 
 Parliamentary reform at home. Therefore there were gre; 
 comings and goings between Storrs, EUeray, Rydal, and Grei 
 Hall ; and the eastern shore of Windermere was brilliant 
 
 f: 
 
WORDSWORTH, SCOTT, AND NORTH 257 
 
 iagust, 1825. Canning was greatly appreciative of Wilson, 
 viom he called " Lord High Admiral of the Lakes." Wilson's 
 f ^ourite form of social celebration was the organizing a regatta 
 c the lake ; and he outdid himself on this occasion. The house- 
 prties at Storrs and Elleray met day after day; Wordsworth 
 ad Southey were as merry as everybody else ; there were 
 ring-parties in the woods in the mornings; boatings on the 
 rjonlit lake in the evenings ; and then the climax — the un- 
 pralleled regatta. " Perhaps," Lockhart narrated, " there were 
 nt fewer than fifty barges following in the Professor's radiant 
 p^cession when it paused at the Point of Storrs to admit into 
 ti place of honour the vessel that carried kind and happy 
 I:. Bolton and his guest. The three Bards of the Lakes led 
 t^ cheers that hailed Scott and Canning ; and the music and 
 sishine, flags, streamers, and gay dresses, the merry hum of 
 vices, and the rapid splashing of innumerable oars, made up a 
 dzzling mixture of sensations, as the flotilla wound its way 
 aiong richly-foliaged islands, and along bays and promontories 
 popled with enthusiastic spectators." 
 
 But, though Elleray and Wordsworth occasionally saw 
 \ilson, he was now and henceforward essentially the Edin- 
 ^rgh man, the mainstay of Blackwood, the beloved paterfamilias 
 id Professor. Between them, his daughter and his pupils have 
 l(t a delightful picture of the splendid giant when his yellow 
 bir was growing grey; of his loving heart, his overflowing 
 esrgy, his bewildered and bewildering absence of mind. We 
 Si him in his class-room with his copious rhetorical lectures 
 vitten on backs of old letters or any other handy scraps of 
 j>per ; his blue eyes flashing with elevated feeling ; or his 
 pwerful frame shaken with emotion under some spasm of 
 pthetic reminiscence or tragic contrast. We see him in his 
 hme, tender with his wife, playful with his children and grand- 
 cldren ; the friend of every gentle and oppressed dumb 
 Ciature. He outlived Wordsworth four years ; working on 
 nmfully until the arresting touch of paralysis was laid upon 
 hn. When he passed away, in the spring of 1854, a large and 
 liht-bearing spirit was lost to the world. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 FELLOW-WORKERS IN ROMANTICISM 
 
 THE question as to Wordsworth's affinities with contempi 
 rary poets who have become immortal, is not to 
 solved by collecting his opinions of them, or theirs of hir 
 Wordsworth's own criticism was never enthusiastic, and ofte 
 when he was dealing with individuals, it was ill-informed, preji 
 diced, and conventional. Moreover, great as was his achiev(:, 
 ment in poetic reform, splendidly as he showed how imaginatici 
 at its highest deals with poetic material, he was often impe. 
 fectly aware of the whereabouts of his own successes ; and h 
 theory of imagination, which he was eager to put in logical forn 
 is, when one tries to grasp it, a mere vanishing cloud. Thei 
 was a strong tendency, even among those who were hard) 
 " Lakists," to accept the Lakist theory and to cut Wordsworth 
 or Wordsworth and Coleridge, off from the poetic movement ( 
 their age. (Compare C. Lamb's attitude to Byron, and the a 
 but ignoring of Shelley and Keats.) 
 
 The other side of the account, no doubt, is more satisfactor; 
 What Wordsworth said or wrote of the poetry of Coleridge, c; 
 Scott, or Keats, or Shelley, or Byron, might be blotted out wit! 
 hardly a grain of appreciable loss. On the other hand, if wi 
 forget Byron's vulgar scorn, there is sufficient evidence that thj 
 poets we have named, although not Wordsworth's partisan., 
 gave him the kind of consideration and veneration, the kind c. 
 admiring homage which the world now gives him withoii 
 dissent. Yet, even so, their criticism was contemporary ; and it, 
 historical interest is not equalled by its absolute value. Thei 
 consciousness, however, that Wordsworth, with whatever dil 
 ferences, was in poetry a fellow-worker, makes a better starting 
 point than Wordsworth's own self-consciousness, or the parti 
 sanship which flattered it. We can see what Wordsworth 
 
 258 1 
 
FELLOW-WORKERS IN ROMANTICISM 259 
 
 Inself failed to see, that the other great poets of the Romantic 
 Ijvival were in Wordsworth's circle : we only want to assure 
 crselves as to their claims and qualifications to stand there. 
 
 The Romantic Revival as a whole may be treated from 
 nmy points of view. Perhaps one of the most practically use- 
 fi approaches to it is made by considering its relation to 
 lizabethanism on the one hand, and to the dominant genius of 
 tJi eighteenth century on the other. For, if we exclude 
 Caucer, as being outside our immediate question, and if we 
 rr.ke the Elizabethan age and the eighteenth century large 
 3 )ugh to include all the epoch-making English poetry between 
 :1: SJiephea7'dd s Calendar and Lyrical Ballads, we shall 
 Dipare ourselves to realize what was done, and done in concert, 
 ;c English poetry between 1798 and 1825. The change from 
 were poetry stood under Dryden and Pope to where it stood 
 itier, say, Wordsworth and Shelley, is so startling that it 
 :anot be ignored, and cannot easily be misunderstood. Had 
 Cyden been what Chaucer has been called, the " father of 
 Eglish poetry," one might say with some plausibility that such 
 p^try as he founded was hardly poetry at all, and that it was 
 e: for the poets of the Romantic Revival to distinguish the 
 :r3 from the nominal, the real from the official. With the 
 p<:try of Dryden and Pope, even with the poetry of Gray, the 
 Dctry of the first quarter of the nineteenth century has the 
 jliderest affinities. Milton stands in a class by himself, 
 r aching Dryden on the one hand, and easily reaching back 
 m the Elizabethan age on the other, he has but slender 
 •e.tionship to either. Essentially, what the Elizabethans did 
 b English poetry was to make it human, and to make it the 
 vcicle of beauty. And they did it by inventing and perfecting 
 ::hi drama on the one hand, and the lyrical strain on the other. 
 5]!inser's great allegory is, like Paradise Lost, to some extent 
 5ctary : it is a poem of many aspects, partly didactic, partly 
 Pitestant, partly courtly, partly conventional-chivalric. It is 
 tb constant beauty and unfailingly sweet phraseology of the 
 Fcrie Queene which secure its immortality. Much more 
 tyical is the Epithalamitim, with its whole-hearted exposition 
 ofove, its gorgeous imagery, its incomparable lyrical rapture. 
 Hre, and in Shakespeare, we have the best that Elizabeth's 
 a§ could do for poetry. 
 
260 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 It was much indeed ; and yet it left much to be done, mu 
 towards which the eighteenth century accomplished nothir, 
 Poetry was not yet " meditative"; it was not yet introspectiv; 
 it was hardly yet ideal or universal. The glory of Elizabeths 
 ism was its actuality, its satisfaction with its own surroundin ' 
 its own successful, strong-pulsed life. England, the Que, 
 Protestantism, El Dorado — these were universals and ide . 
 enough ; and if at any point they failed, there was the past > 
 supplement them, the past of Greece, the past of Rome. W:. 
 such a world to be realized, to be held, by such intelligen, 
 there was no room for philosophy, no temptation to sentimc 
 talism : here was no place for bitter indignation ; for ea^ 
 longing, for scornful satire ; no call to be over-stimulated 
 cosmopolitan ideals, or to reconstruct ultimate conceptions 
 God and man. Action and passion, the glory of the establish 
 order, so new and yet so strong ; the romance of discove: 
 added to the immortal romance of love ; were these things r 
 the stuff of centuries of poetry ? 
 
 But things move quickly ; and the Elizabethan freshm 
 died away. Puritanism came, suggesting a new synthesis 
 things ; poetry, in spite of Milton, was forced into oppositio 
 it became the minister of intelligence rather than of feeling, 
 criticism rather than of enjoyment ; it lost its hold on beau 
 Too much was sacrificed to form ; too little play was allowed 
 individuality. Then, at last, individuality turned scornfu! 
 round on tradition. The world seemed cumbered with outwo 
 tyrannies ; and, except where there was revolution, the imagir 
 tion took refuge in ideals, ideals of the past, ideals of the futu 
 The sense of the beautiful reawoke, and insisted on expressi 
 itself anew. Nature, which the Elizabethan had cared for afl 
 his fashion as a haunt of fairies or a background for human li 
 came to be loved for its own sake and for its infinite spiriti 
 significance, as well as its infinite beauty and charm. Forei{ 
 landscape began to make appeal to the most insular of Engli 
 patriots. Individual feeling, even the " pageant of bleedii 
 hearts," was precious now as poetry. The relations of God ai 
 the world called out for poetic restatement. 
 
 In all these things we recognize the work of the Romani 
 Revival as a whole. How is the responsibility for it to 
 distributed 1 
 
FELLOW-WORKERS IN ROMANTICISM 261 
 
 Take the two most apparently antithetic of all the great 
 pets of the age — Wordsworth and Byron. Nothing would have 
 srprised and shocked Wordsworth more than to have been 
 r^arded as in any sense a co-operator with Byron. " Power/' 
 pwer prostituted for the most part to the basest uses, was all 
 tat that pure and stern mind would have allowed to the poet of 
 (tilde Harold and Don Jtcan. And we know that Byron, in 
 Is estimate of Wordsworth, never got much beyond contempt 
 ; perinduced upon conventionalism. Yet how does the matter 
 £ind ? Byron had Popian sympathies and did Popian work ; 
 3 1 Byron was as much an innovator on the poetic tradition as 
 '^'ordsworth. His satire may be his best work ; but Childe 
 .arold lives and will live ; the charm of the oriental tales will 
 r ver wholly disappear ; and Byron, after his fashion, was a 
 Irist, and not a wholly insincere one. His ways, indeed, lay 
 Ir apart from Wordsworth's ; yet, in one respect at least, he 
 (d Wordsworth's work. If Mrs. Radcliffe can be credited, as 
 :suredly she can, with having rediscovered the beauty of 
 iature, so still more can Byron. If Wordsworth sang the 
 jaise of mountains and lakes in England, so, and with an equal 
 (thusiasm, did Byron of mountains and lakes in Switzerland 
 i,id Greece. Byron's sunset at Venice is as carefully observed, 
 cid treated with as much sense of the beautiful, as Wordsworth's 
 \ een linnet or daisy. Moreover, no English poet before Byron 
 puld or could have written such a passage. It is as much a 
 *'omantic revival" as The Ancient Mariner ; nay, it is not a 
 i{vival, it is an origination. 
 
 I Because Byron was a sentimentalist, a rhetorician, an egotist 
 ijis the shallowest criticism to deny him true and wonderful 
 Ipetic inspiration. And though he was much of a poseur, a good 
 (i^al of his poetry represented as genuine a return to Nature as 
 Yordsworth's. His appropriation of European landscape for 
 petry, his invention of a poetry of travel, was an achievement 
 (osely akin to Wordsworth's invention of a new pastoralism. 
 oth achievements were wholly free from imitativeness ; in both 
 I.ere was a return to 'Ca^ facts of Nature from the ideal landscape 
 i Spenser and Milton ; both record impressions absolutely at 
 I'st hand. Wordsworth maintained that Byron, when his poetry 
 'as nearest being good, plagiarized from him ; and it is much 
 e fashion to find Words worthian influence in the third and 
 
262 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 fourth cantos of Childe Harold. We may decline to take up t 
 question of the plagiarism. As for influence, it is evident th 
 the purest originality has parentage and ancestry ; and th 
 influence does not necessarily turn first-hand into second-hai 
 work. 
 
 Another point of kinship between the two dissimilar poets 
 their common passion for liberty. Here there is essential uni 
 with superficial diversity. Byron was nearly a generati( 
 younger than Wordsworth ; and while the elderly senior po 
 was reposing in the Conservative atmosphere of Lord Liverpoo 
 regime, the young Byron was plunging and kicking in tl 
 somewhat aimless energies of the new Radicalism. But the.i 
 things do not count. In the politics of their poetry both m( 
 were pledged — so to put it — to tyrannicide, to the cause ' 
 nations against their oppressors. As Wordsworth's heart leapc 
 for Switzerland and Venice and Spain, so did Byron's fc 
 Greece. And, long before the age at which Wordsworth becatii 
 a timid Conservative, Byron, in a fantasy of self-devotion, ha. 
 given his life for the kind of liberty which Wordsworth had ma 
 at heart. 
 
 Once more, if Byron is sometimes wearisome with his guide 
 book-like snippets of reminiscence, his sequences of appropriat 
 poetical reflection, is not Wordsworth sometimes the same 
 What about Ecclesiastical Sonnets ; what about those supe: 
 abundant " Memorials " of tours in Scotland, tours on th 
 Continent ? To pause, with one's " foot upon a nation's dust 
 to "start a ghost at every corner," is of the essence c 
 Romanticism. 
 
 Wordsworth and Byron, then, were not wholly antithetic 
 still less so were Wordsworth and Shelley. Wordsworth, for hi- 
 part, mostly ignored Shelley, though he knew something of hi 
 poetry, and thought him a great artist, a master of style. Shelle 
 thought of Wordsworth much as " the lost leader ; " but h 
 thought of him, at least early in his life, as an excellent poet. T 
 Wordsworth, Shelley, like Byron, was a moral suspect, a teache 
 of dangerous doctrines, made all the more seductively dangerou 
 by the fineness of the art by which they were conveyed. Ii' 
 Wordsworth's nature there were recurrent strata of common 
 place ; and these were often tapped in the course of his critica 
 operations, especially upon contemporaries. One of the mos 
 
FELLOW-WORKERS IN ROMANTICISM 263 
 
 '^Plaracteristic of these strata was the conviction that poetry 
 
 '^1 ght to be, and is, didactic in the sense in which teaching and 
 
 ^ I Caching are ; and the allied conviction, that a man's poetry is 
 
 ^'^ i mere transcript of his opinions. It is perhaps impossible to 
 
 ticeive Wordsworth reading through ProinetJieus Unbound 
 
 ^' th the care which he demanded from readers of TJie Excursion ; 
 
 i; t it is certain that, if he had done so, he would have regarded 
 
 '^ as spreading atheism and rebellion clad in rainbows. If he 
 
 d read The Cenci^ he (who was capable of calling Coleridge's 
 
 we sensual and Christabel indelicate) would have said, " See 
 
 lat comes of loose notions about marriage ! " As regarded his 
 
 rn poetry, Wordsworth of course transcended this view of 
 
 ings. There would have been a pretty to-do if anybody had 
 
 lied the Tintern Abbey lines pantheistic, or had tried to connect 
 
 em with their author's infrequent church-going in those days. 
 
 ordsworth would have replied, and replied quite properly, that, 
 
 iwever necessary dogma may be in religion, it is not required 
 
 all in poetry ; and that, if a poet uses quasi-x€^\g\o\x'S> phraseo- 
 
 "^Yy he does so with at least a philosopher's or scientist's licence. 
 
 ^nd as to the church-going, he would have said to the critic qiid 
 
 (itic, "What business is that of yours ?" 
 
 The question as to the didactic motive and practical moral 
 I Feet of any given poetry, and the question whether any sup- 
 ])sed taint of life or opinion in a poet communicates itself to 
 Is writings, are among the most delicate problems in literary 
 (iticism. If Wordsworth failed to see that the problem is 
 dved very differently in the cases of Byron and Shelley, we 
 i:ed not be very hard on him. Nor does it matter if he failed 
 t: recognize the essential kinship between his own work and 
 helley's. For us who read both poets with inward as well as 
 atward eyes, the kinship is plain enough. 
 
 The poets had very similar experiences in the education of 
 ieling, that education which gives a permanent direction to 
 petic effort. Shelley has not left so much express auto- 
 lography as Wordsworth ; but he has left enough, direct and 
 iidirect, to show how he was led to his view of the poetry of 
 'lings. If we do not learn as much from Alastor -axiA the Hj/mn 
 Intellectual Beauty as from T/ie Prelude and the Tintern Abbey 
 oes, we learn enough to convince us that both poets felt much 
 le same need, and supplied it in much the same way. Alastor, 
 
S64 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 for all its beauty and characteristic charm, is a dreary and morll 
 poem, and Wordsworth would doubtless have dismissed it 5 
 such, horrified at the suggestion that it had any affinity w i 
 himself. The hero of Alastor is not even Shell jy as he was ; ; 
 is Shelley as he might have been, as he was just saved frc. 
 being. Yet Alastor is, mutatis mutandis^ essentially wl; 
 Wordsworth was at that stage in the "growth of a poe; 
 mind " before " love of Nature " had begun to *' lead to love * 
 man " ; before the " still, sad music of humanity " had enter 
 to harmonize with the tones of early rapture. It is very like 
 that Shelley, who was much under Wordsworth's influence 
 those days, borrowed from Wordsworth the phrase " natui 
 piety," which occurs in the third line of Alastor ; and, at ai 
 rate, Shelley's hero, at the outset, is a recognizably Wore 
 worthian figure. Wordsworth, indeed, was never morbid : J 
 never, so far as we know, made his bed "in charnels and c 
 coffins," in the hope of inducing some communicative gho' 
 to make known to him the secret of things. But, on the whol 
 the analysis of Alastor's early " natural piety " might be that < 
 Wordsworth's — 
 
 " If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even. 
 With sunset and its gorgeous ministers, 
 And solemn midnight's tingling silentness ; 
 If autumn's hollow sighs in the sere wood, 
 And winter robing with pure snow and crowns 
 Of starry ice the gray grass and bare boughs ; 
 
 If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast 
 I consciously have injured, but still loved 
 And cherished these my kindred." 
 
 Alastor is a purely abstract figure ; the mere shadow of 
 shade. The feverish thirst of his egoism drives him into experi 
 ences of which there is no counterpart in Wordsworth's biograph; 
 or imagination. But, like Paracelsus, like Aprile, or, for tha 
 matter, like Faust, Alastor is the victim of a false view of th 
 universe, a wilful taking of the part for the whole, the wilfu 
 rejection of the divine obligations of fellowship. His ideal i; 
 never realized, because he will have nothing to do with it' 
 appointed realization in the ministries of social life. And the 
 
FELLOW-WORKERS IN ROMANTICISM 265 
 
 ^^ Inowledge of this was a critical lesson of Wordsworth's educa- 
 • on as a poet. Shelley might have taken as the motto of his 
 oem Wordsworth's verses on Peel Castle — 
 
 " 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. 
 
 Ij " 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." 
 
 If 
 
 In the Hymn to Intellectital Beauty Shelley speaks of himself 
 :: jithout mystification or disguise. But he first speaks of Beauty 
 \\\ the most universal conception of it, and on its intellectual 
 : ither than its sensuous side, in language which inevitably 
 ;: ijminds us of Wordsworth. For what is Wordsworth's most 
 '7 i^neral and abstract conception of Beauty ? 
 
 " Beauty — a living Presence of the earth, 
 Surpassing the most fair ideal Forms 
 Which craft of delicate Spirits hath composed 
 From earth's materials — waits upon my steps ; 
 Pitches her tents before me as I move, 
 An hourly neighbour ; Paradise, and groves 
 Elysian, Fortunate Fields — like those of old 
 Sought in the Atlantic Main — why should they be 
 A history only of departed things, 
 Or a mere fiction of what never was ? 
 For the discerning intellect of Man, 
 When wedded to this goodly universe 
 In love and holy passion, shall find these 
 A simple produce of the common day." 
 
 In Shelley's Hymn Wordsworth's " cheerful faith " is 
 unting. Beauty is a compensation for the blank and chill 
 igation of things ; it is not their efflorescence and fruition, 
 ind even Beauty, without which we could not live, has the 
 f^itiveness of the rainbow, not the steadfastness of the day and 
 ii?ht. 
 
 l" 
 
 Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate 
 
 With thine own tears all thou dost shine upon 
 
 Of human thought or form, — where art thou gone ? 
 
266 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Why dost thou pass away and leave our state, 
 
 This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate ? 
 
 Ask why the sunlight not for ever 
 
 Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain river. 
 
 Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown, 
 
 Why fear and dream and death and birth 
 
 Cast on the daylight of this earth 
 
 Such gloom — why man has such a scope 
 
 For love and hate, despondency and hope ? 
 
 " No voice from some sublimer world hath ever 
 To sage or poet these responses given — 
 Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven 
 Remain the records of their vain endeavour, 
 Frail spells — whose uttered charm might not avail to sever, 
 From all we hear and all we see, 
 Doubt, chance, and mutability. 
 Thy light alone — like mist o'er mountains driven, 
 Or music by the night wind sent 
 Thro' strings of some still instrument, 
 Or moonlight on a midnight stream, 
 Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream." 
 
 The melancholy, the agnosticism of all this are, of cour; 
 quite foreign to Wordsworth ; but not so, surely, is the id 
 which underlies the lines that follow — 
 
 "Man were immortal and omnipotent 
 Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art, 
 Keep with thy glorious train, firm state within his heart. 
 
 Thou messenger of sympathies 
 
 That wax and wane in lovers' eyes — 
 Thou — that to human thought art nourishment, 
 
 Like darkness to a dying flame ! " 
 
 Shelley's account of the development and purification of 1 
 sense of the unseen is very like Wordsworth's. 
 
 " While yet a boy," he tells us, " I sought for ghosts " ; b 
 he neither heard nor saw them. Then suddenly there w 
 revealed to him the more excellent way, and he saw Beauty — 
 
 " When musing deeply on the lot 
 Of life, at the sweet time when winds are wooing 
 
 All vital things that wake to bring 
 
 News of birds and blossoming — 
 
 Sudden, thy shadow fell on me ; 
 I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy ! " 
 
FELLOW- WORKERS IN ROMANTICISM 267 
 
 And we remember Wordsworth at Hawkshead, first terrified 
 »y the spirituality of Nature, then, in later days — 
 
 *' Only then 
 Contented, when with bliss ineffable 
 I felt the sentiment of Being spread 
 O'er all that moves and all that seemeth still ; 
 
 O'er all that leaps and runs, and shouts and sings, 
 
 Or beats the gladsome air . . . 
 
 One song they sang, and it was audible." 
 
 The last stanza of Shelley's Hymn is closely Wordsworthian, 
 ^. kth an echo even of the Wordsworthian phraseology — 
 
 " The day becomes more solemn and serene 
 When noon is past — there is a harmony 
 In autumn, and a lustre in its sky, 
 Which thro' the summer is not heard or seen, 
 As if it could not be, as if it had not been ! 
 Thus let thy power, which like the truth 
 Of Nature on my passive youth 
 Descended, to my onward life supply 
 Its calm — to one who worships thee, 
 Whom, Spirit fair, thy spells did bind 
 To fear himself, and love all human kind." 
 
 We are reminded, not only of the conclusion of Wordsworth's 
 mmortality Ode, but of the moral of those very early lines 
 eft on a Seat in a Yew Tree^ which haunted Charles Lamb after 
 is visit to Nether Stowey — 
 
 " True dignity abides with him alone 
 Who, in the silent hour of inward thought. 
 Can still suspect, and still revere himself. 
 In lowliness of heart." 
 
 Shelley speaks of his " passive youth ; " but that is not the 
 
 i jnpression left on us by his account of the attitude of young 
 
 r'' Dets towards the secrets of things. Wordsworth might have 
 
 ty' tore fittingly called his youth passive in this sense : he was the 
 
 ^althy, natural boy, whom Nature sought with her revelations, 
 
 " More Hke a man 
 Flying from something that he dreads, than one 
 Who sought the thing he loved." 
 
 Shelley, on the other hand, pursues Nature with shrill eager 
 
268 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 insistence ; follows her over the world and into every region f 
 thought and feeling ; and will have her secret or die. That s 
 the moral of Alastor's feverish quest and untimely end. 
 
 But there were deeper affinities between Wordsworth ai 
 Shelley than any similarities of poetic training and tenden '. 
 They were alike as poets, in realizing, conceiving,*the Univen ; 
 and realizing it as spiritual and q?casi-person3ih This co - 
 munity brings them closely into line as fellow- workers in te 
 Romanticism of the nineteenth century. They two, inde-l, 
 share, and share almost equally, the honour of giving to Brit i 
 literature a truly philosophical poetry, of conceiving for poet^ 
 the ideality and unity of the world, with the conviction of 1 2 
 theologian or the constructor of a philosophy. What is Won - 
 worth at his deepest and loveliest ? 
 
 '•' I have felt 
 A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
 Of elevated thought ; a sense sublime 
 Of something far more deeply interfused 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns 
 And the round ocean and the living air, 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man ; 
 A motion and a spirit that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought 
 And rolls through all things." 
 
 These lines may be said to be Wordsworth's text ; they r, 
 the key to all his poetry. And an almost equal importars 
 belongs to the lines from Shelley's Adonais, in which M 
 phrases march with something of the finality of the clauses o i 
 creed — 
 
 " That Light whose smile kindles the Universe, 
 That Beauty in which all things work and move. 
 That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse 
 Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love 
 Which through the web of being blindly wove 
 By man and beast and earth and air and sea 
 Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of 1 
 
 The fire for which all thirst ; now beams on me." p 
 
 Every reader of both poets must recognize how represen • 
 tive both those passages are; how the conviction of all thir; 
 as combined in, and informed by, a unity, to which it is r: 
 mere fancy to attribute thought and love, explained, for Shell" 
 and Wordsworth alike, both the beauty of Nature and t: 
 
FELLOW-WORKERS IN ROMANTICISM 269 
 
 Jlestiny of Man. Wordsworth read the riddle as a realist, 
 
 -:j )helley as an idealist ; but both were engaged on the same 
 
 iddle, both found the same solution. Wordsworth attained his 
 
 ^..iniversal through the humble folk and temperate beauties 
 
 i,j.,mong which he lived ; Shelley through courageous and 
 
 ajjpoundless idealization, a new mythology, almost new heavens 
 
 ,nd a new earth. But both (religion and theology apart) were, 
 
 /ithout knowing it, worshippers in the same temple, heralds of 
 
 he same hope. 
 
 Also they were alike in their essential devotion to human 
 
 iterests in their poetry. It needs no exhaustive knowledge of 
 
 JjVordsworth to prove that mountains and lakes, cuckoos and 
 
 aisles, were not his real themes, but Man, and his " unconquer- 
 
 ble mind " ; Man, Nature's child and spoiler ; whom Nature 
 
 an punish or heal, but never rob of his lordship. Wordsworth 
 
 I'ent to school to Socialism and Revolution ; and what he 
 
 parned in France determined his bent towards the poetry of 
 
 illowship for ever, made certain his farewell to " the heart that 
 
 :ves alone." Nature was but the second person of the trinity 
 
 |n which he mused in his solitude ; the other two persons 
 
 l^ere Man and Human Life. Let us not be deceived as 
 
 Wordsworth's humanity by his comparative indifference to 
 
 lie interest of sex, and by the hodden gray and slow rustic 
 
 ,.„ jiovements of so many of his characters. No one needs to 
 
 jj.|e reminded of the Sonnets Dedicated to National Inde- 
 
 y'mdence and Liberty , and the passion with which they throb. 
 
 .. lut one might be tranced into ignoring the depths of tragedy 
 
 nd pathos, and of every kind of human interest hidden in so 
 
 lany homely-sounding little poems, in Lucy Gray, in the 
 
 Matthew group, in Michaely in The Excursion — indeed, where 
 
 ot } — unless one kept in mind that the high argument was not 
 
 :enery, not landscape, but — 
 
 " How exquisitely the individual mind 
 (And the progressive powers perhaps no less 
 Of the whole species) to the external world 
 Is fitted : — and how exquisitely too 
 (Theme this but little heard of among men) 
 The external world is fitted to the mind." 
 
 If the case was so with Wordsworth, it was equally so with 
 ' thelley. Matthew Arnold never made a stranger critical lapse 
 
270 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 than when he dismissed Shelley as a poet of clouds and sunset? 
 except when he proclaimed his failure as an interpreter c 
 Nature. We need not ransack Shelley's biography in order t 
 find evidence of his love of Man ; it is the pulse and nerve c 
 his poetry. We have just reminded ourselves of the moral o 
 Alastor ; we have just seen the poet's commerce with Beaut; 
 issue in a kind of summary of individual and social perfection- 
 
 " To fear himself, and love all human kind." 
 
 The essential, central Shelley is not in lovely bye-play lik( 
 The Cloud and The Sensitive Plants nor even in mystica 
 invention like The Witch of Atlas. It is in TJie Revolt of Islam 
 Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, Hellas — works instinct witl 
 sociality, with morality. Even poems primarily and ostensiblj 
 of Nature, even the Skylark and the Ode to the West Wind, tak(f 
 all their deepest meaning from the human problem and struggle 
 over against which Nature is set. 
 
 " We look before and after 
 And pine for what is not ; 
 
 Our sincerest laughter 
 
 With some pain is fraught ; 
 Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought." 
 
 " Drive my dead thoughts over the universe 
 Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth ! 
 And, by the incantation of this verse, 
 Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth 
 Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind ! 
 Be through my lips to unawakened earth 
 The trumpet of a prophecy ! " 
 
 Finally, if both Wordsworth and Shelley were poets of Man,, 
 and especially of social Man, and such serious philosophic poets 
 of Man as British literature had hardly known before, they were 
 conspicuously fellow-workers in the task of interpreting Nature, 
 twin-priests of her mysteries, twin-prophets of her message. 
 Wordsworth's work in this capacity needs no insisting on. 
 Readers have dwelt, only too readily and exclusively, on his 
 merits as a poet of landscape. They have recognized that he 
 at least, after the long spell of blindness or crooked vision, 
 wrote of natural phenomena with his eye on the object ; at last 
 spoke the " truth in love " of the common objects of the country. 
 But Shelley's idealism has deceived many readers into the beliel 
 
FELLOW-WORKERS IN ROMANTICISM 271 
 
 tat his scenery was all invented : that his poetic world was 
 f ryland, where realistic standards cannot be applied, and it is 
 relevant to ask for truth of portraiture. And, so far as definite 
 f restrial effects are concerned, there is some justification for 
 t2 belief Shelley had the generalizing, not the particularizing 
 bbit in his Nature-work ; and the habit prompts him, when he 
 iidealing with the surface of the earth and its vegetation, to 
 ioalize his objects beyond reality. This is very conspicuous in 
 ^^le Sensitive Plant, in which Shelley might, if he would, have 
 g^en us a real garden, and does not do so. But there was left for 
 bn one province — the world of the atmosphere, of the clouds, 
 wods, and dews — where his genius hampered him with no 
 simbling-blocks, where his idealism was the handmaid of an 
 uapproached and unapproachable fidelity to fact. Nothing, 
 e^n in Wordsworth, is so true to Nature as Shelley's atmos- 
 peric and meteorological poetry. The atmosphere was his 
 bue, his element, and he could not report falsely of it. The 
 Cncd is fantastic, if you will ; but every statement may be 
 /•ified every day. It is because the skylark is a bird of the 
 \\ beyond all others — because it sings at heaven's gate — that 
 Sdley so loved it ; and it is because his poem is in the best 
 je se realistic that it is so popular. The beauty of the Ode to 
 'J. West Wind is in its truth ; its imagination is in its exacti- 
 ;i e. And when the poet, at the climax of his passion, calls 
 'c identification with the wind — Be thoii, me, impetuous one ! — 
 icdoes but proclaim himself as the very child and voice of the 
 fluents in the popular sense of the word. Such a poet of the 
 A^ither, of water, air, and fire, so ethereal, so genuine, there 
 .1^1 never been before. 
 
 Wordsworth's kinship with Keats was much more distant 
 :bn his kinship with Shelley. To the one poet Wordsworth 
 liiself was as deaf and blind as to the other. The well-known 
 Jt>y of his comment when Keats read him the Hymn to Pan, 
 Tm Endymion : A very pretty piece of paganisfu, fairly repre- 
 jets, we may be sure, the kind of comment he would have 
 nie on the rest of Keats's poetry if he had known it. On 
 :h other hand, Keats was as much interested in Wordsworth 
 is Shelley was ; and something is to be learned from his 
 reorded feelings and opinions about him as to the relations, 
 if py, between Wordsworth's work and his own. 
 
272 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Wordsworth never saw Shelley; but Keats he met severa 
 times. They had a common friend in Haydon, the painto 
 who took pleasure in bringing them together. In Decembei 
 1 8 17, Wordsworth, with his wife and Dora, was in London. H 
 visited his brother, Dr. Christopher Wordswortn, at Lambeth 
 and saw many friends. The Lambs, of course, were much i: 
 his circle; Coleridge was at Highgate, and in sociable mood 
 the assiduous Crabb Robinson was everywhere to bear testi 
 mony. It was an important moment in British literature 
 Coleridge had just published Biographia Liter aria, and wa 
 taking advice as to the wisdom of prosecuting Blackwood, c . 
 which the first number had appeared in October, for libei^; 
 Shelley's Revolt of Islam was just out, and so was Keats's firsjh 
 miscellaneous volume, which was to be followed by Endymia.w 
 in the spring. Lalla Rookh was a poem of the year, and Cokit 
 ridge was disgusted with it. Wordsworth did not please Crab'j[; 
 Robinson as much as usual on this occasion ; he thought hir|[ 
 sometimes contradictory and egotistical, and inclined to b 
 hard on Coleridge. When Keats first saw Wordsworth, he to ■ 
 had an unpleasing impression. He thought him pompous an;!; 
 stiff; he kept him a long time waiting when he went to pay hi}[: 
 respects, and came into the room dressed to dine with anothejt; 
 Commissioner of Stamps, looking grand in knee-breeches, silji: 
 stockings, and stiff collar. To the Bohemian, open-necke L- 
 Keats this was repellent. Yet he wanted to see more of Word* ' 
 worth, and Haydon arranged a dinner-party in his rooms fc 
 December 28th. Charles Lamb was there, and Words wortlit 
 and Keats's friend, Monkhouse. Everybody was at his beijj^^; 
 that day, though to Charles Lamb's best alcohol contribute] ( 
 considerably. There was much literary talk at dinner. Lamb' 
 interventions in the midst of Wordsworth's solemn discours 
 reminded Haydon of the Fool's interruptions of Lear's passior. 
 Lamb grew merrier and merrier. Wordsworth had been df 
 nouncing Voltaire. "Now," said Lamb, "you old lake poeii 
 you rascally poet, why do you call Voltaire dull ? " A propo^ 
 of Newton's head in one of Haydon's pictures, they discussetii 
 poetry and science. " A fellow," Lamb said of Newton, " wb ' 
 believed nothing unless it was as clear as the three sides of 
 triangle ! " Keats and he agreed that Newton's prism ha( 
 destroyed the rainbow, as Keats afterwards sang in Lamia — 
 
FELLOW-WORKERS IN ROMANTICISM 273 
 
 " Do not all charms fly 
 At the mere touch of cold philosophy ? 
 There was an awful rainbow once in heaven ; 
 We know her woof, her texture ; she is given 
 In the dull catalogue of common things. 
 Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, 
 Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, 
 Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine — 
 Unweave a rainbow." 
 
 In all the fun and extravagance Wordsworth heartily joined 
 ;er his manner. After dinner an inimitable intellectual toady- 
 like Wordsworth, a Comptroller of Stamps — turned up, and 
 
 ^ platitudes gave Lamb — now more than half-seas-over — a 
 eat opportunity. " Don't you think, sir," said the new guest 
 Wordsworth, "that Milton was a great genius?" The rest, 
 DUgh it has been told so often, must be told yet once more in 
 aydon's words. "Keats looked at me, Wordsworth at the 
 )mptroller. Lamb, who was dozing by the fire, turned round 
 d said, ' Pray, sir, did you say Milton was a great genius ? ' 
 Id, sir ; I asked Mr. Wordsworth if he were not.' ' Oh,' said 
 imb, *then you are a silly fellow.' * Charles! my dear 
 liarles ! ' said Wordsworth ; but Lamb, perfectly innocent of 
 e confusion he had created, was off again by the fire. After 
 
 ft awful pause, the Comptroller said, ' Don't you think Newton 
 great genius ? ' I could not stand it any longer. Keats put 
 head into my books. . . . Wordsworth seemed asking himself, 
 Vho is this ? ' Lamb got up, and taking a candle, said, * Sir, 
 ill you allow me to look at your phrenological development ^ ' 
 e then turned his back on the poor man, and at every question 
 the Comptroller he chaunted — 
 
 " ' Diddle, diddle, dumpling, my son John 
 Went to bed with his breeches on.' 
 
 " The man in office, finding Wordsworth did not know who 
 * was, said in a spasmodic and half-chuckling anticipation of 
 sured victory, ' I have had the honour of some correspondence 
 ith you, Mr. Wordsworth.' * With me, sir ? ' said Wordsworth, 
 lot that I remember.' ' Don't you, sir ? I am a Comptroller 
 Stamps.' There was a dead silence ; the Comptroller evidently 
 inking that was enough. While we were waiting for Words- 
 orth's reply, Lamb sung out — 
 
 T 
 
274 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 " ' Hey diddle, diddle, 
 The cat and the fiddle. ' 
 
 " * My dear Charles ! ' said Wordsworth — 
 
 '"Diddle, diddle, dumpling, my son John," 
 
 chaunted Lamb, and then rising, exclaimed, ' Do let me ha\ 
 another look at that gentleman's organs.' Keats and I hurrie 
 Lamb into the painting-room, shut the door, and gave way 1 1 
 inextinguishable laughter. Monkhouse followed and tried to g( 
 Lamb away. We went back, but the Comptroller was irrecor 
 cilable. We soothed and smiled and asked him to supper. H 
 stayed, though his dignity was sorely affected. However, bein , 
 a good-natured man, we parted all in good humour, and no i: 
 effects followed. All the while, until Monkhouse succeeded, w 
 could hear Lamb struggling in the painting-room, and callinL,., 
 at intervals, ' Who is that fellow ? Allow me to see his or^^fan 
 
 Keats's feeling about Wordsworth wavered, but was on th^ i 
 whole respectful and appreciative. In a sonnet of 1816 hi 
 dedicated to him four sonorous lines — 
 
 " Great spirits now on earth are sojourning 
 He of the cloud, the cataract, the lake, ,r 
 
 Who on Helvellyn's summit, wide awake it 
 
 Catches his freshness from Archangel's wing." 
 
 He probably agreed with Leigh Hunt, who, with man} . 
 grumbles, recognized Wordsworth as the foremost of the 
 reformers of poetry after the post-Restoration lapse, whose work ;- 
 was celebrated by Keats in his Sleep and Poetry. Haydon.j 
 proposed to send the sonnet to Wordsworth ; and Keats told.'j 
 him that the proposal put him *' out of breath." "You know," 
 he wrote, " with what reverence I would send my well-wishes to 
 him." He was never weary of repeating the hitimations oj 
 Immortality Ode ; and in January, 181 8, when he was fresh from,j 
 personal intercourse with Wordsworth, he spoke of The Excur- 
 sion as one of the few satisfactory artistic products of the time. 
 On the other hand, he was riled by much in both Wordsworth's 
 personality and his poetry. He wrote to his brothers that 
 Wordsworth had " left a bad impression wherever he visited in 
 town by his egotism, vanity, and bigotry." Yet he maintained 
 that he was "a great poet." He spoke of himself once as 
 
FELLOW-WORKERS IN ROMANTICISM 275 
 
 li:ng "half of Wordsworth." In a letter to John Hamilton 
 
 Rynolds — who wrote the first skit on Peter Bell — he entered 
 
 J on a subtle criticism of Wordsworth's achievement. He 
 
 rclized that the human heart was indeed, as Wordsworth 
 
 imed, the main region of his song. He wondered whether 
 
 had real "epic passion." He compared him with Milton. 
 
 th poets he felt to be partial, fragmentary ; he wanted 
 
 rdsworth to produce something more, something different. 
 
 \ th a truly critical instinct he took the Tintern Abbey lines as 
 
 resenting Wordsworth at his best, and he evidently felt in its 
 
 less the power of those lines — how firmly they front the 
 
 stery of life ; how clearly they see and show the light beyond 
 
 Milton, he thought, had no such vision of the light. As for 
 
 iself, he was but a child in knowledge of life, beginning to be 
 
 : iscious of its mystery and adversity, and of doors opening, but 
 
 y into darkness. 
 
 In the summer of 1818 Keats was walking with a friend in 
 
 Lake country, and of course called at Rydal Mount. To 
 
 disappointment and displeasure Wordsworth was at Kendal 
 
 ing part in the General Election of the year ; so Keats could 
 
 y leave a note on the mantelpiece. It was the election about 
 
 !ch Wordsworth wrote his Addresses to the Freeholders of 
 
 ^stmorland ; and Keats, though much more indifferent to 
 
 itics than Shelley and Byron, was of course on the Liberal 
 
 ;, and antagonistic to Wordsworth accordingly. 
 
 Some months later, Keats was putting himself into a 
 
 erent poetic category from Wordsworth's, which he dis- 
 
 tf^uished as the "egotistical sublime," and as containing 
 
 A^)rdsworth alone. He ranked himself, on the other hand, as a 
 
 7umal poet, i.e. a non-moral one ; an artist without preferences, 
 
 hidng "as much delight in conceiving an lago as an Imogen." 
 
 Hre he was deeply unjust to poetry ; but he was not unjust to 
 
 huiself. Indeed, if we combine Keats's two self-estimates — 
 
 thj one, namely, and his consciousness of himself as hardly 
 
 bcond the stage of childhood in his poetic experience of life, we 
 
 sUl understand his art, and the slenderness of the tie which 
 
 bids it to Wordsworth's. 
 
 ; Keats did not live long enough to make the human heart or 
 hman life the main object — he hardly made it at all an object 
 -~f his song. He is perhaps the most non-moral poet in 
 
'216 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 English, certainly the most non-moral English poet of mode, 
 times. And he was this not from any weakness, not from a- 
 error, but from a preoccupation with mere beauty which vc, 
 entirely honourable and natural, and, as he himself recognizi, 
 belongs to the youth, the opening stage, of the poet's experien , 
 He was not one to express at any time, like Shelley, his ecsta' 
 in a *' shriek" ; but his thirst for the beautiful, his joy in it, v 
 of the kind which Shelley felt when he made his quest " a 
 clapped his hands" at his discovery. Only, as to Shelley, 1: 
 intellectual and moral revealed themselves in such close c( 
 tiguity with the beautiful, that he could hardly for a mom( 
 cease to be a moral poet ; human error and human hope, as 
 conceived them, were interwoven with every show of Natui 
 and beauty was raised, by the presence of its opposites, into t 
 unearthly and divine. Keats had his moral moments, his br" 
 essays at a " criticism of life." In his Ode to Melancholy and 
 the great lyrical apostrophe to sorrow in Endyrnion, he toucl 
 the harp with all his might, and reveals a pessimism whi 
 would be unendurable if it were not fugitive. Here and th( 
 in Hyperion^ he utters, without ceasing to be his best s( 
 wisdom as deep and as mellow as ever was Shakespeare's 
 Wordsworth's. 
 
 " Now comes the pain of truth to whom 'tis pain ; 
 O folly ! for to bear all naked truths, 
 And to envisage circumstance, all calm, 
 That is the top of sovereignty." 
 
 The whole of Oceanus's speech in the second book, in whi 
 these lines occur, has exactly as much ethical as aesthetic vab 
 It is very likely that if Keats had lived, lived beyond his intoxi< 
 tion with beauty, his mere artist's satisfaction, he would he 
 given us much poetry of a like strain. But, taking his fr; 
 mentary bequest as it stands, we feel that the central Keati 
 in The Eve of S. Agnes, Lamia, the Ode to Atttitmn, the Ode. 
 Psyche ; in poetry which shows him with a boundless appet 
 for the beautiful as the pleasurable, and not as an uneartl 
 abstraction, but as actualized in beautiful things, taken inc' 
 criminately from the earth and air, from Grecian mythology, 
 from mediaeval romance. The essential Keats is an artist 
 painter of pictures for beauty's sake. And he is an artist, 
 
FELLOW-WORKERS IN ROMANTICISM 277 
 
 v; said, without preferences, "having as much deh'ght in con- 
 civing an lago as an Imogen," except, we may add, that his 
 -tpral sense is hardly as yet enough developed to make him 
 (rjj Ice much interest in either of them. 
 
 ;rij Keats's non-morality, his love of " pretty pieces of Paganism," 
 
 ^ noves him very far from Wordsworth. But we are here com- 
 
 ;■ ring our poets, less with each other than with their predecessors ; 
 
 ■ : are thinking of them as, among them, restoring to English 
 
 J,, etry certain great things which it seemed to have lost ; and 
 
 ;j, p greater the unlikenesses within the band, the more interest- 
 
 ,3, g is the joint result. We have just quoted a passage from 
 
 Isats which Wordsworth might have countersigned ; and, as for 
 
 Iiganism, it has been pointed out that Wordsworth himself had 
 
 cmoment when he cried — 
 
 " Great God ! I'd rather be 
 A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn ; 
 So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
 Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 
 Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; 
 Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 
 
 But it is not in such stray parallelisms that the fellowship of 
 eats and Wordsworth, or, indeed, the unity of all the great 
 pets of the Romantic Revival, is to be found. Wordsworth 
 i;id Keats were at least on the same plane in their sense, quick 
 jid novel and inspiring, of what Keats called the " poetry of 
 (.rth " ; they both possessed what is the innermost nerve of 
 ])etry, the power of finding the beautiful, and showing it in 
 leir words to others for all time. And, different as, in many 
 ispects, their ideas of it were, they were both wise enough to 
 i,iow that beauty is a unity in diversity ; that it has its temperate 
 ;id torrid zones ; its simplicities as well as its complexities ; its 
 :straints as well as its licences; that it is here as well as 
 pnder ; in the spirit as well as in the body. Both poets meet 
 '. the shelter of Shelley's phrase — 
 
 " That Beauty in which all things work and move." 
 
 In this comprehensiveness of the beautiful is to be found the 
 ommunity of that poetry of the early nineteenth century to 
 hich Wordsworth was so great a contributor. Hardly one of 
 is peers and younger contemporaries, certainly not Southey, 
 
278 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CHICLE 
 
 not Byron, not Scott, but was alive with a quick sense of bea 
 such as generations had not felt. It is the quickness, 
 novelty, the pulsing throb of the sense, which makes it impossi 
 for the poets of the Romantic Revival to disown one anotl; 
 Poets with the classical ideal, poets like Milton and Gr 
 splendid as are their services to the beautiful, do not give j 
 feeling of novelty, of young enthusiasm, which the Romantic 
 gave. They too cannot disown, be disowned ; but they are i i 
 separate province, the province held by tradition, by its maje 
 its dignity, its repose. 
 
 Wordsworth has often been compared with Milton ; but r 
 it seems, with any fruitful result. One may set the blank ve 
 of the one beside that of the other to establish the inferiority 
 Wordsworth's. They were alike patriots, alike grave, mor 
 serious poets. But Wordsworth was an innovator and a reston 
 and it was no tradition, Miltonic or other, that he restored, 
 was of his own underived, vigorous individuality that he ga' 
 In spite of his sobriety, his narrowness, his cold welcome 
 novelty, the world in which he lived was a new world, and 
 saw and felt it anew, with an untaught and enthusiastic mir 
 His poetry was no product of culture ; it was the immedic 
 reaction of an original mind to the beautiful significance 
 things. And it was the same with his peers. They all felt t 
 world afresh ; and as they felt, they sang, a harmony of ma 
 voices. 
 
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CHAPTER XIII 
 
 AFTERGLOW 
 
 •^ YDAL MOUNT, to which the Wordsworths moved from 
 .\ Grasmere in 1813, is one of the most purely ideal poets' 
 i rsidences in the world. Hidden, like the nest of a shy bird, 
 f )m wanton eyes and approaches, it looks out frankly in 
 to directions. It stands on a spur of Nab Scar, rising with 
 sdden steepness from the road, just at the angle — almost 
 aright angle — between the valley containing Rydal lake, and 
 t2 valley along which the Rothay flows to Windermere. Down 
 tis latter valley, past Loughrigg and across the light smoke- 
 veath of Ambleside, the homely frontage of the house looks 
 suthward to the distant gleam of the lake. With a yet nobler 
 £d more subtly suggestive outlook, a door in the western gable, 
 cd the rocky terraces to which it leads, show Rydal water and 
 i island, the northern side of Loughrigg, and the way to Gras- 
 rsre. On the eastern side lies, unseen from the Mount, the 
 f e park-like demesne of Rydal Hall, with the wild heights and 
 r:esses of Fairfield in the background. 
 
 The house and grounds, save for some modernizing of 
 \ndows, and the hand of time on shrub and tree, have been 
 l.rdly changed since the Wordsworths lived and died there, 
 'lere are the same pleasant low-roofed sitting-rooms, the same 
 load central staircase, the twisted chimneys, the bedrooms where 
 te poet and his wife and sister died. There is the same view- 
 pint southwards, led to by descending and ascending steps, 
 ibove all, there is the extension and expansion of what gave 
 bve Cottage its chief charm — a simple and yet ingenious land- 
 eape-gardening ; steps, terraces, shrubbery, summer-houses ; 
 tcky paths, pink with Wordsworth's own geranium, and yellow 
 vth the pale poppy, which haunts all dwellers among the Lakes. 
 
 279 
 
 li 
 
280 WORDSAVORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Rydal Mount has a spaciousness and dignity which dwarf poo 
 little Dove Cottage and its tiny hanging-orchard into ven 
 humble stature. Yet in both places there is the same spiritua 
 suggestion ; the same essential dignity ; the same undying 
 association. Here, as there, is a perfect setting for " plain living; 
 and high thinking," the fitting abode of a Nature-worshippei 
 for whom the humblest flower and loneliest rock speak thu 
 language of a Universal Mind and Heart ; here, as there, we seej- 
 and hear the same stooping, burly, austere, carelessly clad figure^ 
 somewhat harsh in voice and feature, but with eyes of infinittj 
 expression, muttering lines of verse as he paces up and dowr 
 his terraces, or lies at length on daisy-sprinkled grass. Ryda, 
 Mount was a fit place for the kind of star-gazing that the Words, 
 worths loved ; for the stars seemed to touch the hilltops at th(i 
 back, while among the trees in the valley southward the) 
 twinkled like lamps. Wordsworth drew from them a parable, 
 of his poetic mission. " If thou indeed," he exclaims, addressing. 
 the Poet— 
 
 * " If thou indeed derive thy light from Heaven, 
 
 .JKr J, Then, to the measure of that heaven-born light 
 
 Shine, Poet ! in thy place, and be content : ] 
 
 The stars, pre-eminent in magnitude, 
 
 And they that from the zenith dart their beams, ] 
 
 (Visible though they be to half the earth, < 
 
 Though half a sphere be conscious of their brightness) ' 
 
 Are yet of no diviner origin, 
 
 No purer essence, than the one that burns, 
 
 Like an untended watch-fire on the ridge 
 
 Of some dark mountain ; or than those which seem 
 
 Humbly to hang, like twinkling winter lamps, 
 
 Among the branches of the leafless trees. 
 
 All are the undying offspring of one sire : 
 
 Then, to the measure of the light vouchsafed, 
 
 Shine, Poet ! in thy place, and be content." 
 
 i 
 An increase of income, won not without much difficulty, en- 
 I abled the poet to go to the larger house, and become something 
 of a country gentleman on a small scale. Lord Lonsdale made 
 him Commissioner of Stamps for Westmorland, with a salary, 
 of ;^400 a year, and the modest Wordsworth was thus enabled, 
 to snap his fingers at mere literary profits. But it was chiefly 
 to escape from the shadow of death at Grasmere, from the daily, 
 
AFTERGLOW 281 
 
 Imrly sight of his children's new graves, that he finally left the 
 car Vale. The moment had come, which comes now and 
 rain in most lives, when a new leaf must be firmly and reso- 
 Itely turned. And so Wordsworth, at forty-three, entered on 
 te last thirty-seven years of his life. 
 
 When one thinks of these figures, and looks at the mass of 
 petry yet to be produced by Wordsworth, it may seem mere 
 j.radox to speak of the move to Rydal as a sunset, and the life 
 tere as afterglow. And, indeed, it may be put in much too 
 |.radoxical a way. Matthew Arnold, with the best intentions, 
 cd Wordsworth a disservice when he spoke as if his only good 
 petry had been composed between 1798 and 1808. The 
 cntrast between Wordsworth's best work and his merely good, 
 c even that between his best and his worst, striking as it is, is 
 i)t miraculous ; and his later, his Rydalian work, is full of 
 iterest for all lovers of him and lovers of poetry. Yet it is 
 iiquestionable that Wordsworth did not live or produce at his 
 iilest strength after he went to Rydal Mount. He became 
 jematurely elderly ; his verse lost much of its passion and 
 f .icity ; his splendid patriotism tended towards a prejudiced 
 isularity ; his fine instinct for public righteousness towards a 
 (lerulous and close-fisted conservatism. Wordsworth's youth 
 i one sense departed so early ; the mood of the Tijitem Abbey 
 lies and the Immortality Ode, the mood— so to call it — of 
 .evermore ! set in so soon and so permanently, that at forty- 
 tree Wordsworth, who was always old-fashioned, had become 
 tally old. If he had lived to be a hundred, he would hardly 
 l.ve been older in spirit in 1870 than he was in 1820. 
 
 Passionate movements rocked the crust of British life while 
 ''ordsworth lived at Rydal. Liberalism, with its lurid portents 
 iid solid achievements ; the poetry of Shelley and Keats ; 
 iientific development and mechanical invention ; Tractarianism ; 
 C'lartlsm ; but of none of them did Wordsworth sing ; in none 
 (I them did he take other interest than that of a rather languid 
 i\d often disapproving spectator. His days and his verse flowed 
 (I serenely; his fame steadily and noiselessly grew; his hair 
 s.vered, his high-nosed face grew grimly lined ; then, unex- 
 j'lctedly, he sickened and died when he was just eighty. Hardly 
 iiy fresh light or heat was given out during the thirty-seven 
 ;ears. It was mostly afterglow. ' ' 
 
le: 
 
 282 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 So far as quantitative production went, there was no sign of ' 
 stint or decline. In 1814 appeared T/ze Excursion, which 
 Wordsworth meant to be, and which in many respects is, of his 
 ripest work ; but that, as we know, was first conceived at Race- 
 down, and the greatest part of it was written at Grasmere. It 
 was issued from Rydal Mount with a preface, and a Dedicatory 
 Sonnet to Lord Lonsdale, somewhat in the strain, though with 
 none of the spirit, of the days of pre-Johnsonian patronage. 
 Waterloo year, 181 5, is very important in Wordsworth's biblio- ; U 
 graphy, for then appeared the first collected edition of his 
 poems, and also TJie White Doe of Rylstone. As for The White 
 Doe, we remember that he introduced De Ouincey to it in 
 1807; but it was regularly begun at Stockton-upon-Tees, and 
 completed at Dove Cottage. Among the collected poems there 
 was one new one of great importance — a noble first-fruits of 
 Rydal Mount — Wordsworth's finest classical poem, Laodamia. 
 He himself once, in one of his flashes of excessive self-esteem, 
 put it with Lycidas in a unique class. If that was too bold, it is 
 not too much to find in Laodamia a genuine phase of the Greek 
 spirit, the Greek restraint, the Greek subordination of personal i 
 emotion to public obligation, expressed in English verse of i 
 the stateliest grace. Laodamia wins back the spirit of her 
 slaughtered lord, Protesilaus, but only to learn from his lips 
 the philosophy of an emotion transcending and outlasting even : 
 the holiest nuptial passion ; to hear a description of Elysium ■ 
 touched with hues of the Christian heaven. 
 
 " Be taught, O faithful Consort, to control 
 Rebellious passion ; for the gods approve 
 The depth, and not the tumult, of the soul." 
 
 " He spake of love, such love as Spirits feel 
 In worlds whose course is equable and pure ; 
 No fears to beat away — no strife to heal— 
 The past unsighed for, and the future sure ; 
 Spake of heroic arts in graver mood 
 Revived, with finer harmony pursued ; 
 
 " Of all that is most beauteous — imaged there 
 In happier beauty; more pellucid streams, 
 An ampler ether, a diviner air, 
 And fields invested with purpureal gleams ; 
 Climes which the sun, who sheds the brightest day 
 Earth knows, is all unworthy to survey." 
 
AFTERGLOW 283 
 
 Here is taught the lesson of ideal widowhood, but in 
 vain — 
 
 " Learn, by a mortal yearning, to ascend — 
 Seeking a higher object. Love was given, 
 Encouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for that end ; 
 For this, the passion to excess was driven — 
 That self might be annulled : her bondage prove 
 The fetters of a dream, opposed to love." 
 
 Laodamia could not take the lesson : as the Spirit retired from 
 her, she died in her rebellious passion — 
 
 " And, as for a wilful crime, 
 By the just Gods, whom no weak pity moved, 
 Was doomed to wear out her appointed time, 
 Apart from happy Ghosts," 
 
 and the poem ends in tragic hopelessness. 
 
 In the same first Rydal year was written another classical 
 poem, Dzon. Dion of Syracuse, the rich warrior who forsook 
 wealth for philosophic poverty, and was driven from Sicily to 
 attach himself to Plato at Athens, showed himself in Words- 
 worth's "study of imagination " as a kind of swan-like being, an 
 image of " haughtiness without pretence," unfolding " a still 
 magnificence." The poet sees him Plato's pupil, learning the 
 secret of high life — 
 
 " What pure homage if/ien did wait 
 On Dion's virtues, while the lunar beam 
 Of Plato's genius, from its lofty sphere, 
 Fell round him in the grove of Academe, 
 Softening their inbred dignity austere ; 
 
 That he, not too elate 
 
 With self-sufficing solitude, 
 But with majestic lowliness endued, 
 
 Might in the universal bosom reign, 
 And from affectionate observance gain 
 
 Help, under every change of adverse fate." 
 
 But alas ! he goes back to Syracuse as a vulgar conqueror, and 
 his hands are reddened with blood. The poet calls on Academe 
 to mourn — 
 
 " Mourn, hills and groves of Attica ! and mourn 
 Ilissus, bending o'er thy classic urn ! 
 Mourn . . . 
 
284 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 For him who to divinity aspired 
 Intent to trace the ideal path of right 
 But He hath overleaped the eternal bars." f 
 
 A hideous spectre appears to him ; the spectre of the lower life 
 into which he has gone down. He sinks into death ; and for 
 him there is no resurrection. Nothing but a stern moral 
 survives — 
 
 " Him only pleasure leads, and peace attends, 
 Him, only him, the shield of Jove defends, 
 Whose means are fair and spotless as his ends." 
 
 / Yarrozv Visited is another of the Rydal first-fruits which the 
 (fl world will not willingly allow to decay. In 1814 Wordsworth 
 ^ paid his second visit to Scotland, this time with his wife and her 
 sister, Sarah Hutchinson. There was no Dorothy to write 
 another journal ; and the commemorative poems are few. But, on 
 a September day, Wordsworth, with James Hogg, the '* Ettrick 
 Shepherd," and a certain Dr. Anderson (whose collection of 
 " British Poets " had introduced Wordsworth to Chaucer and 
 the Elizabethans) walked from Traquair into that Vale of 
 Yarrow which he would not see eleven years earlier. What he 
 found there is perhaps too well known to be written out here. 
 
 Waterloo and its sequels brought forth at last the Thanks- 
 giving Ode of January, 18 16, with some flanking poems. One 
 turns to them with interest to see how they compare with the 
 great anti-Napoleonic sonnets. They are fine and impressive, 
 though they lack the fresh fire of the early sonnets. 
 
 It is plain that for Wordsworth the battle of Waterloo 
 closed an epoch : the monster, begotten of the French Revolu- 
 tion, was laid low ; the killing spell was lifted off the world, and 
 by providentially chosen Britain. Thenceforward Wordsworth's 
 social and political feeling took the normal Conservative course ; 
 the fort of English liberty, the fort of English religion, secured 
 by a perfectly balanced constitution, a perfectly reformed Church, 
 were to be held at all costs. Wordsworth's Rydalian muse was 
 a faultless conformist. 
 
 The records of hardening conformity are abundant, both in 
 prose and verse. Towards the Liberal movement which set in 
 in the 'twenties of the nineteenth century, and which led to the 
 
AFTERGLOW 285 
 
 Reform Bill and other great measures of constitutional and 
 administrative amendment in the 'thirties, Wordsworth felt an 
 aversion which was natural, and may or may not have been 
 justifiable ; but his dismal vaticinations, his conviction, uttered 
 with accompaniment of inarticulate groans, that Liberalism, — 
 whether it took the form of Catholic Emancipation, of the 
 rationalizing of Parliamentary representation, the advocacy of 
 vote by ballot, or even of municipal reform, — was a mere process 
 of ruin, are hardly more than psychological eccentricities. He 
 wrote doleful letters to his friends. A great poetry born of 
 emotion so baseless there could hardly be. Typical of the mood, 
 alike in its sincerity and its weakness, are the lines which Words- 
 worth discharged on the innocent head of his first grandchild in 
 1834. Oppressed by the thought of what might lie before the 
 infant, he gives expression to his fears. He cannot make up 
 his mind whether the child has been born too early or too late. 
 He sees " ensigns of mimic outrage unfurled," and he asks — 
 
 " Who shall preserve or prop the tottering Realm ? 
 
 If to expedience principle must bow ; 
 
 Past, future, shrinking up beneath the incumbent Now ; 
 
 If cowardly concession still must feed 
 
 The thirst for power in men who ne'er concede ; 
 
 Nor turn aside, unless to shape a way 
 
 For domination at some riper day ; 
 
 If office help the factions to conspire, 
 
 And they who shoidd extinguish, fan the fire — 
 
 Then, will the sceptre be a straw, the crown 
 
 Sit loosely, like the thistle's crest of down ; 
 
 To be blown off at will, by Power that spares it 
 
 In cunning patience, from the head that wears it." 
 
 and so on, through leagues of dreary heroics. 
 
 Wordsworth's feeling about the Church was richer and more 
 positive, and lent itself to a better poetry than his feeling about 
 the State. It is interesting to trace his relations to the revival 
 in the Church of England which had its most widely known 
 expression in the so-called Oxford Movement. Long before 
 the Movement was born, long before Keble published The 
 Christian Year, Wordsworth had departed somewhat from the 
 ordinary Protestant view current in his youth, of the ecclesiastical 
 
286 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 history of the seventeenth century. In 1822 he had incurred 
 
 censure by his favourable estimate of Laud. On the other hand, 
 
 though his churchmanship steadily grew more definite and 
 
 jealous as years went on, though he lived to declare his general 
 
 sympathy with what has been called the " Catholio Revival," he 
 
 never at any time showed the genuine Tractarian anhmis. His 
 
 full reverence for Milton was never soiled by controversial 
 
 prejudice. One compares Keble's recorded impression of 
 
 Presbyterian churches with Wordsworth's poem, written in 1831,: 
 
 On the Sight of a Manse in the South of Scotland — 
 
 i 
 
 . /I " Say, ye far-travelled clouds, far-seeing hills — 
 
 [• ' w^ Among the happiest-looking homes of men 
 
 Scattered all Britain over, through deep glen. 
 
 On airy upland, and by forest rills. 
 
 And o'er wide plains cheered by the ark that trills 
 
 His sky-born warblings — does aught meet your ken 
 
 More fit to animate the Poet's pen, 
 
 ,^ Aught that more surely by its aspect fills 
 
 Pure minds with sinless envy, than the Abode 
 \ Of the good Priest : who, faithful through all hours 
 
 To his high charge, and truly serving God 
 Has yet a heart and hand for trees and flowers, 
 Enjoys the walks his predecessors trod, 
 Nor covets lineal rights in lands and towers." 
 
 Fancy Keble writing such a poem ! 
 
 The chief poetic monument of Wordsworth's churchmanship 
 is the long series of Ecclesiastical Sonnets^ the greater numbei 
 of which were published as "Ecclesiastical Sketches "in 1822 
 though some were written earlier and some later. The sequence 
 traces the story of English Christianity from its introduction tc 
 the " Present Times." The impulse to make it came from the 
 sig-ht of a new church on the Beaumonts' estate in Leicestershire 
 Much the same feeling was stirred in the poet's mind when the 
 Rydal chapel was built below the Mount by the Flemings, thai 
 chapel in which he for the last time bent the knee a few week* 
 before his death. At various points the sonnets reflect Words-' 
 worth's characteristic attitude in churchmanship — the modera- 
 tion, the Protestantism, of his Anglicanism. Here is nc 
 aversion from Ridley, Latimer, Cranmer ; here is even the 
 traditional view of the Scottish Covenanters — 
 
AFTERGLOW 287 
 
 *' Slain by Compatrlot-protestants that draw 
 From councils senseless as intolerant 
 Their warrant." 
 
 Wordsworth's typical parish-priest uses his authority, neither 
 .t the altar nor in the confessional, but in the pulpit (No. i8). 
 rhe sonnets are not all historical ; some deal with aspects 
 ►f ritual, baptism, matrimony, and what not. And they end 
 j/ith a fine vision of the stream of English Church history and 
 ts goal — 
 
 " The living Waters, less and less by guilt 
 Stained and polluted, brighten as they roll. 
 Till they have reached the eternal City — built 
 For the perfected Spirit of the just ! " 
 
 Towards the expression of the poetry of his own neighbour- 
 ood and of the Lake country at large, Wordsworth did much 
 1 the Rydal days. The privacy of his larger demesne 
 ivoured his chosen method of composition ; up and down his 
 srraces he would walk, growling, murmuring, booing (as his 
 umble neighbours called it) his lines. Often they lack inspira- 
 on of feeling and felicity of phrase ; often the didacticism is too 
 rominent, the moralizing too trite. Now and then, however, 
 lere is all that one could wish of landscape spiritualized. 
 
 A more delightful sonnet sequence than the Ecclesiastical 
 ^^onnets is the series to the River Duddon^ the stream that rises 
 est of the Langdale Pike region, and falls, after a short 
 Durse, into the Irish Sea. Many a sight and sound in the 
 .ydal Mount garden, or among the stately trees of the Hall ; 
 lany a vision of star hanging over the trees, or glow-worm 
 linging to the rock, yielded its secret to the poet as he grew 
 Id in his last home. Among the finest of these later Nature- 
 oems are those classed by him as Evening Vohmiaries ; and 
 oiong them the very finest is the sunset-picture, " Composed 
 pon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendour and Beauty." 
 /ritten in 1818, it can in no sense be said to belong to old 
 ^e ; yet it expresses what we recognize as Wordsworth's final 
 ew of some of the mysteries with which he dealt in the Iin~ 
 'ortality Ode. In this aspect it is very important. 
 
 Standing on his view-point in front of the house, the poet 
 les an unparalleled afterglow in the western heavens. He 
 
288 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 reads in it, not a conventional vision of the past, but an ideal 
 of the beyond, of the future. No choirs of angels, singing 
 between sky and earth, could be more moving than the natural 
 spectacle — 
 
 " This silent spectacle — the gleam — 
 The shadow — and the peace supreme ! " 
 
 Yet there is more in the sight than the purely natural 
 there are agencies at work more august than the purpk 
 evening — 
 
 " From worlds not quickened by the sun 
 A portion of the gift is won." 
 
 The hills, climbing towards the boundless glory, are 
 parable of the vision of old age, of the compensation, beyonc 
 life, for life's pain and loss. 
 
 " Come forth, ye drooping old men, look abroad, 
 And see to what fair countries ye are bound ! 
 And if some traveller, weary of his road, 
 Hath slept since noon-tide on the grassy ground, 
 Ye Genii ! to his covert speed ; 
 And wake him with such gentle heed 
 As may attune his soul to meet the dower 
 Bestowed on this transcendent hour ! " 
 
 In this vision the poet finds a restoration of what he ha 
 deplored the loss of in the Immortality Ode. It is but a glean 
 indeed ; but it is the true lost light. And so he prays — 
 
 " Dread Power ! whom peace and calmness serve 
 No less than Nature's threatening voice, 
 If aught unworthy be my choice. 
 From Thee if I would swerve ; 
 Oh, let thy grace remind me of the light 
 Full early lost, and fruitlessly deplored ; 
 Which, at this moment, on my waking sight 
 Appears to shine, by miracle restored ; 
 My soul, though yet confined to earth, 
 Rejoices in a second birth ! " 
 
 The shade of difference between this mood and that of tl 
 last stanza of the Immo7'tality Ode^ is the difference between tl 
 earlier and the later Wordsworth, between the Wordsworth 
 poetic, and the Wordsworth of religious, faith. Whether t 
 
OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
 k 
 
WILLI AAI WORDSWORTH 
 
 FROM THE PAINTING BY H. \V. PICKERSGILI. IN THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY 
 
AFTERGLOW 289 
 
 liange was not made at some cost of imagination is open to 
 uestion. -^^ 
 
 A considerable part of Wordsworth's Rydal life was spent 
 I travelling. Visits to London there frequently were ; visits 
 hich brought the rural poet into contact with old friends like 
 .amb, Coleridge, and Crabb Robinson ; fellow-craftsmen like 
 Logers, Moore, and Crabbe. There were tours in Scotland, 
 Durs on the Continent, which yielded large crops of thoughtful, 
 ut hardly inspired, verse. 
 
 Fruition, which, in Wordsworth's case, never took a pecuniary 
 Drm, came at last in the better shape of fame. In the course 
 f the 'thirties, in the moment of pause between the living 
 enown of Byron, and the coming importance of Tennyson and 
 drowning, England's high places awoke to a sense of Words- 
 worth's rank. Cambridge, his own university, bowed before 
 im ; in 1839 came his open triumph at Oxford, when, amid I 
 he thunders of the Theatre, he received his Doctor's degree. It ' 
 3 not difficult to call up the strong bony figure in the scarlet 
 obe, and the dignity of the wrinkled face ; not difficult to see 
 Ceble in the rostrum, and hear the Latin sentences in which the 
 oet of The Christian Year claimed academic honour for the 
 oet of poverty, philosophy, and religion. Bunsen was there to 
 e honoured with Wordsworth. Dr. Arnold was looking on, 
 laving come from Rugby for the day ; Robertson of Brighton, 
 till an undergraduate, was there, rather shocked, in his early . 
 • nthusiasm, by the pomp in which the simple unworldly poet 
 vas made to share. Never, by general consent, did the old 
 vails echo to more rapturous applause. 
 
 A few years later, when Southey died in 1843, came the 
 -.aureateship. At first Wordsworth refused, fearing, in his 
 eventy- fourth year, the " duties " belonging to the office. But 
 Dir Robert Peel, the Prime Minister, wrote that there was no 
 mrpose of imposing duties, but only of paying " that tribute of 
 espect which is justly due to the first of living poets." And 
 le added, as he well might, that there was no question as to 
 vho should be selected. 
 
 " The first of living poets." That, after all the vicissitudes 
 
 )f Wordsworth's reputation, was the national judgment. Yet 
 
 jven then the poetic pause was at an end ; the old order was 
 
 :hanging and giving place to new. When the laurel was set on 
 
 u 
 
290 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Wordsworth's brow, Tennyson was a famous poet ; Browninj r*-' 
 had published Paracelsus and Strafford and Pippa ; Matthev f* 
 Arnold was an undergraduate at Oxford, with poetry ready t 
 come. Wordsworth had several pleasant meetings with hi;: 
 successor in the Laureateship, and he cordially recognized hi J 
 achievement and promise. In 1845, when the old poet mad t 
 his official appearance at the State ball, in Rogers's uniforr 
 borrowed for the occasion, he saw Tennyson several times, anjr; 
 applied to him Peel's phrase about himself, " the first of livin 
 poets." Tennyson expressed cordial appreciation of Word* 
 worth, and was greatly pleased by Wordsworth's cordiality t 
 him. He remembered how, when he dined in Wordsworth 
 company, Wordsworth said to him, " Come, brother bard, t 
 dinner"; and took his arm. Tennyson gave Wordsworth th 
 impression that he was "not much in sympathy with what 
 should myself most value in any attempts, viz. the spiritualit 
 with which I have endeavoured to invest the material universe 
 and the moral relations under which I have wished to exhib 
 its most ordinary appearances." He congratulated Tennyso: 
 upon Dora^ as being a success in a line which he had ofte 
 attempted, but in which he had never succeeded. 
 
 What Wordsworth knew of Browning's poetry we cannc 
 tell. He took a kindly interest in Elizabeth Barrett and h( 
 writings; and when she and Browning married, in 1846, 1: 
 wrote that she had married a very able man. And he adde 
 sardonically, " Doubtless they will speak more intelligibly 1 
 each other than they have yet done to the public.'* 
 
 As the growing light of fame fell on Wordsworth, a shado 
 came on his home life. Dorothy's companionship, which, sine 
 his childhood, had been the giain human influence in his lif 
 was withdrawn from him, gradually, but steadily. At the ag 
 of fifty-six she had a serious illness, while she was keeping hou 
 for her nephew, John Wordsworth, at Whitwick, near Lougl 
 borough and Coleorton ; and she never properly recovered fro 
 it. In 1832 her brother was writing, "Coleridge and m 
 beloved sister are the two beings to whom my intellect is mo 
 indebted, and they are now proceeding, as it were, pari pass 
 along the path of sickness ; I will not say towards the grav ^ 
 but I trust towards a blessed immortality." Dorothy's life w< 
 prolonged beyond the limits of her brother's ; but never agari 
 
AFTERGLOW 291 
 
 /as she able to quit the " path of sickness." She dropped, very 
 radually and gently, but very steadily, into that saddest valley 
 f the shadow, where life ebbs with maimed intelligence. Her 
 ecline was hastened by the death, in 1835, of Mrs. Wordsworth's 
 ister, Sarah Hutchinson, who had been for a long time a 
 teloved member of the family. She retained her general 
 itelligence, her literary task, and literary memory ; but of the 
 resent she took no heed. The radiant, eager Dorothy ! She 
 3 clearly remembered still, wheeled about the garden at the 
 ILount, and scattering, as in better days, nods and smiles on 
 hose she knew and loved. 
 
 Dorothy's fate saddened Wordsworth's afterglow; but his 
 /ere the "years that bring the philosophic mind," his was a 
 ranquillity of resignation, a " calm of mind, all passion spent," 
 /hich made such sorrow a fortification, not a weakening or 
 verthrow. And there was much to compensate : happy family- 
 fe, with patriarchal satisfaction ; deep friendships ; the sense of 
 low, well-earned fame, bringing modest admirers to look on 
 heir poet face to face. 
 
 It is a pleasant picture that Sir John Taylor Coleridge, 
 ephew of the poet, and father of the Lord Chief Justice of the 
 ature, gives of the Wordsworths as he saw them in 1836, and it 
 lay be taken as fairly representative of their aspect at that 
 eriod. Coleridge was with his family at Fox How, lent by 
 le Arnolds for six weeks ; and the Rydal Mount people were 
 leir only neighbours. In the mornings Wordsworth was busy 
 dth the proofs of the first six-volume edition of his complete 
 oems ; in the afternoons he was ready for long walks. Cole- 
 dge tells us how delightful these walks were made by the 
 oet's talk — by its raciness of the soil, its evidence of minute 
 atural and local observation, of insight into character, of 
 empathy with the homeliest types. He was struck by Words- 
 l^orth's interest in landscape-gardening. He describes a little 
 jcene in the grounds of Rydal Mount. He found Wordsworth 
 b anxious dialogue with his gardener. "James and I," said he, 
 are in a puzzle here. The grass here has spots which offend 
 tie eye ; and I told him we must cover them with soap-lees. 
 That,* he says *will make the green there darker than the 
 est.' * Then,' I said, ^ we must cover the whole.' He objected : 
 That will not do with reference to the little lawn to which you 
 
292 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 pass from this/ 'Cover that/ I said. To which he reph'esi^' 
 *You will have an unpleasant contrast with the foliag 
 
 surrounding it. 
 
 t 
 
 Wordsworth was always ready to talk of poetry, includinj 
 his own ; though as to the latter it seemed to Coleridge that h 
 showed no forwardness. He let his companion into some of th 
 secrets of his " diction " ; telling him how his narrative poem 
 were all founded on fact ; how, when his stories were acquirelhe 
 by hearsay, he used in his poems the very words which they wer t 
 told, " dropping all vulgarisms and provincialisms." He showe 
 abundantly his extreme verbal and metrical fastidiousness ; an 
 blamed his constant analysis of, and theorizing about, emotiorti:; 
 for some injury of which he was conscious to his aesthetic sensip 
 bility and poetical power. 
 
 But more than any literary criticism, Coleridge admire 
 Wordsworth's gracious personality ; his kindly, sympatheti x 
 ways with his humbler neighbours ; his fine, sturdy pedestrianisn 
 as he "trudged" along (Coleridge chose the word because 
 seemed to express the ''boldness" of his gait) in his plaiji 
 jacket and waistcoat, with the too frequent green shade over hi 
 unhappy eyes. When they parted, Coleridge was able to sa 
 that the more he saw of Wordsworth, the more he admired hir 
 as a poet and as a man. 
 
 Wordsworth's two sons, his eldest and youngest child, Joh 
 the clergyman, and William, his father's successor in the Con 
 missionership, both married happily in their father's lifetim<i 
 and their wives and children added to the poet's happines 
 But his heart was most garnered up with his one daughte 
 Dora. Born in 1804, Dora had her ripening girlhood during th 
 early time at Rydal, and she remained in the nest until 184 
 She grew up into a slender graceful woman, with much of h( 
 mother in her, and especially her mother's candid trust-inspirin 
 eyes. In 1841, when she was thirty-seven, she made a marriag, 
 which was full of promise. Twenty years before, there had com 
 to live in the neighbourhood a very interesting man name§s: 
 Edward Quillinan. His father was a merchant trading wit 
 Portugal, and Edward was born at Oporto. His father's con 
 mercial career was interrupted by the French invasion of tb k 
 Peninsula ; and Edward entered the army, seeing a good de;i 
 of service here and there in the pre-Waterloo days. In 18 17 I 
 
AFTERGLOW 293 
 
 arried a Miss Bryder, the daughter of a baronet. In spite of 
 
 s mercantile and military pre-occupations, Quillinan was a 
 
 an of literary sympathy and ability ; and he had been a reader 
 
 id admirer of Wordsworth while Wordsworth's reputation hung 
 
 the balance. Quartered in Penrith in 1820, he rejoiced in his 
 
 harness to the poet ; and, when he left the service in the 
 
 llowing year, he settled close to him — at Rydal Cottage. 
 
 here, in 1822, his wife was burned to death, leaving him with 
 
 vo daughters, of whom the younger, Rotha, — called after the 
 
 veet river of Grasmere and Rydal lakes — was Wordsworth*s 
 
 od-child. Soon after, the widower went to Kent ; but the 
 
 iendship with the Wordsworths suffered no check ; there were 
 
 iterchanges of visits, and there was much literary sympathy. 
 
 Juillinan wrote poetry as well as prose ; and he used his skill 
 
 1 Portuguese to translate the Lusiads of Camoens. In 1841 he 
 
 Dok Dora Wordsworth as his second wife. Wordsworth greatly 
 
 alued Ouillinan's friendship, but he disliked the idea of the 
 
 larriage, partly, perhaps, because Quillinan, brought up a Roman 
 
 atholic, had never formally renounced his faith. But the chief 
 
 Dstacle was his jealous affection for his daughter, that kind of 
 
 ppropriating, clinging affection, by which many a father has 
 
 polled a daughter's life before and since. All the same, the 
 
 larriage took place ; and the omens were fair. The Quillinans 
 
 lad no children, and they were able to be a good deal at Rydal 
 
 idount, so that the pain of separation was lessened. They spent 
 
 'ne winter at Ambleside ; and they were a good deal at the 
 
 large square house on Belle Isle, Windermere, which he who 
 
 rosses the lake by the ferry can see looking out at him from 
 
 ihe trees. But Dora's health began to give way ; a winter in 
 
 r'ortugal was tried, about which Dora wrote books : A Jotirnal 
 
 ]f a Few Months^ Residence i7t Portugal^ and Glimpses of the South 
 
 / Spain. She wrote them at Loughrigg Holme, quite close to 
 
 .lydal, where she and her husband seemed at last to have found 
 
 I settled home, where both could follow their literary pursuits in 
 
 )eace, under the patriarchal shadow of the Mount. But death 
 
 vas inexorable, and claimed her in the high summer of 1847, 
 
 vhen she had been just a year at the Holme. We can imagine 
 
 vhat the blow must have been to the old man of seventy-seven. 
 
 ^e wrote no verse about it ; and his utterance in letters has the 
 
 estraint we should expect. To one friend he wrote : " We bear 
 
294 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 up under our affliction as well as God enables us to do." An( 
 to another : " Our sorrow, I feel, is for life ; but God's will bt 
 done ! " When, less than three years later, the poet was on th< 
 brink of the River, his wife said to him : " William, you an 
 going to Dora." Woke one morning by the entrance of one o 
 his nieces, he said, " Is that Dora ? " And, when all was over 
 Mrs. Wordsworth went to Dorothy and said : " Dear, he ha 
 gone to Dora." 
 
 Wordsworth never suffered the vulgar inquisitiveness whict 
 pestered Tennyson at Farringford. Pilgrims were many, indeed 
 but they were reverent ; and Wordsworth, unlike Tennyson 
 mostly enjoyed their visits. His circle in the latter days a1 
 Rydal Mount was large enough, and distinguished enough, to dc 
 him ample honour. For the most part it was very different frorr 
 the earlier one. The old familiar faces were mostly gone. A 
 in an august funeral procession they pass before us in the 
 Extempore Effusion on the Death of James Hogg, 
 
 One familiar face remained to the end, and beyond it 
 Wordsworth's son, writing by his father's dead body, called 
 Samuel Rogers, his father's " oldest, perhaps, living friend." 
 Rogers holds a curious place in English literature. Born in 
 1763, and living until 1855, he spanned nearly a century, a 
 century of portentous literary change. Twenty, or thereabouts, 
 when Johnson died and Cowper published his Task^ he was past 
 thirty when Keats was born, and alive when Tennyson had 
 been Poet Laureate for five years. He produced poems — The 
 Pleasures of Memory in 1792, and Italy in 1822 to 1828— poems 
 of pensive reminiscence and well-bred description — of which 
 everybody has heard, and everybody in the future probably will 
 hear, the names ; but which no mere lover of poetry probably 
 will ever read. No one, even in his own day, thought of putting 
 Rogers among the great poets ; yet he might have been Poet 
 Laureate at almost any period of his life, and he held a kind of 
 respected mastership among all the poets. This was partly due 
 to his Maecenas-like qualities ; to his hospitable sympathy with 
 men of letters ; to his wealth and splendid house in St. James's 
 Place, where great men met at sumptuous breakfasts, and heard 
 the good stories and small-voiced epigrams — not always good- 
 natured — of the caustic little man. A bald head and wrinkled 
 face, cadaverous in its paleness, and blue eyes which Carlyle 
 
DORA WORDSWORTH (MRS. QUILLINAN 
 
 BY MARGARET GILLIES 
 
I' 
 
 t: 
 
AFTERGLOW 295 
 
 ailed both " sorrowful " and " cruel," is shown in the pictures 
 f Rogers. But if there was cruelty in his nature, and if it 
 poke out at times in his talk, there went with it enough 
 indness to make him famous as a good friend and a good 
 lan. 
 
 Rogers and Wordsworth first met at Grasmere in 1803, just 
 
 efore the first Scottish expedition. When Wordsworth, Dorothy 
 
 nd Coleridge set out Rogers followed them, and they were 
 
 Dgether at Dumfries. Thenceforward the friendship stood 
 
 teady, founded on genuine mutual respect. Rogers turned 
 
 ip at the Lakes occasionally ; and Wordsworth, when in town, 
 
 /as always a welcome guest in St. James's Place. Rogers once 
 
 ntroduced him to Charles James Fox. He was always willing 
 
 o mediate between authors and publishers ; and he helped 
 
 A/'ordsworth about the production of The Excursion^ and others 
 
 f his poems, and advised Dorothy as to the printing of her 
 
 ournal of the 1803 Scotch tour. Wordsworth gave wooden 
 
 commendation of Italy, and dwelt on his daughter Dora's 
 
 ippreciation of it. In 1848, after Dora's death, the affection 
 
 )f the two old men — Roger was eighty-five — found beautiful 
 
 expression. Wordsworth closed a letter to Rogers thus : 
 
 * Believe me, my friend of nearly half a century, very affection- 
 
 itely yours," a strong phrase from him ; and Rogers, in his 
 
 reply, exclaimed : " What delightful days have we passed 
 
 together, walking and sitting wherever we were, and more 
 
 especially among the rocks and waters of your enchanting 
 
 country. Oh that they were to come over again ! You may 
 
 well conceive how much you were in my mind during your long, 
 
 long trial. Pray remember me to those who remain with you, 
 
 her [Dora's] dear, dear mother and aunt, and pray believe me to 
 
 be your grateful and affectionate friend." 
 
 Another link with the early days long remained in poor 
 Hartley Coleridge, Coleridge's eldest son, and too like his father 
 in inconstancy of purpose, and inability to achieve results. We 
 remember him in 1807, when he was eleven, scampering down- 
 hill when De Quincey escorted his mother to Dove Cottage, 
 and rushing in first to greet the occupants. He was always 
 a pet of Wordsworth's. When he was six years old he had 
 inspired Wordsworth to write one of the most exquisite lays of 
 childhood in existence. 
 
296 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 *' O Thou ! whose fancies from afar are brought ; 
 Who of thy words Jost make a mock apparel, 
 And fittest to unutterable thought 
 The breeze-like motion and the self-born carol ; 
 Thou faery voyager ! that dost float 
 In such clear water, that thy boat 
 May rather seem 
 
 To brood on air than on an earthly stream ; 
 Suspended in a stream as clear as sky, 
 Where earth and heaven do make one imagery," etc. 
 
 toa: 
 ^■■ 
 
 li:: 
 
 s: 
 
 With so wretched a home, and so unhappy a parentage on f 
 the paternal side, the boy needed outside guardians and helpers. ^^• 
 Southey did much for him. When he was seventeen, Wordsworth '^^ - 
 wrote to that incarnation of benevolence, Thomas Poole, to ask i- 
 for his advice in Hartley's behalf. It was not easy, he said, to 
 determine what the youth was fit for ; his talents were con- 
 siderable ; his knowledge was patchy. Poole, of course, wasi 
 ready, not only with advice, but with money ; and at last, 
 Hartley went up to Oxford, where he got a Postmastership at 
 Merton. His talents stood him in good stead at Oxford ; for, 
 in 1 8 19, he obtained one of the Oriel Fellowships, which in 
 those days were Oxford's greatest prizes. But what was the 
 good of it ? He was " irregular " ; and one of his irregularities 
 was intemperance. Altogether, he was too irregular for Oriel ; 
 and he never got beyond the probationary year of his Fellow- 
 ship. Wordsworth said that his father's aspiration for him had 
 been too literally fulfilled — 
 
 *' But thou, my child, shalt wander like a breeze." 
 
 Like a breeze, indeed, the poor little creature — " lile Hartley," 
 as he was fondly called at the Lakes — wandered for the rest 
 of his life. A little journalism in London ; brief spasms of 
 schoolmastering at Ambleside and Sedbergh ; the writing 
 of some poetry, too beautiful to be wholly fugitive, and, latterly, 
 years of desultory poetizing and pedestrianism in the Lake 
 country, radiating from that Nab Cottage between Rydal and 
 Grasmere whence De Ouincey took his wife. In the 'forties 
 "lile Hartley," with his squat figure, dark eyes, and bright 
 merry face was as familiar about the haunted paths as the 
 stately Wordsworth, and, by the rustics at least, more loved. 
 For " lile Hartley " was always in the mood for a friendly 
 
AFTERGLOW 297 
 
 alutation ; and his queer, uncertain gait, his ways with his 
 walking-stick, his hurryings and stoppings, made him a lovable 
 ccentric. Wordsworth, on the other hand — so it was reported 
 y one of the rustics — would pass you " as if you was nobbut a 
 toan " ; and he was chary of greetings to children. From so 
 ear a fellow as Hartley even poetry could he endured, thought 
 he Westmorland rustics ; but Mr. Wordsworth, ** booing" and 
 lurmuring his lines, his lips going upon the road, though he 
 light be "cleverish," what was the good of him if he wouldn't 
 ive you the time of day, and look as if he enjoyed himself? 
 ndeed, it was darkly hinted by the rustic mind that Hartley 
 d most of Wordsworth's poetry for him. There was, at any 
 ate, much trafficking between the Mount and the Nab ; Hartley 
 orrowed Mr. Wordsworth's books ; and Mr.i Wordsworth would 
 ften look in at the Nab of an afternoon ; there would be long 
 ilks ; and then the two would come out, arm-in-arm, and pace 
 ack to Rydal together. 
 
 The rustics might be wrong in the inferences they drew 
 :om the intimacy of the two men ; but they were not wrong 
 
 to the fact. Much of the admiring, anxious, affectionate 
 olicitude which Wordsworth had felt for S. T. Coleridge was 
 estowed on his not dissimilar son. And Wordsworth was to 
 utlive the son as he had outlived the father, as he had outlived 
 early all his contemporaries. Poor Hartley died in 1849, the 
 ear before Wordsworth's death. The rustics noticed that Mr. 
 Vordsworth paid " lile Hartley " a daily visit while he lay on 
 is deathbed, and they reported that he "took communion wi' 
 im at the last." Wordsworth was not with him at the moment 
 f his passing ; but when he heard that he was gone, he said 
 
 Derwent Coleridge, his brother, "Let him lie by us — he 
 ^ould have wished it." And the next day the two men went 
 3 Grasmere churchyard, and a solemn little scene was transacted. 
 Vordsworth bade the sexton measure out his own and his wife's 
 rave, and then another, behind, for Hartley Coleridge. " When 
 lifted up my eyes from my daughter's grave," Wordsworth 
 aid, "he was standing there!" Then he turned to the sexton 
 nd said, " Keep the ground for us, we are old people, and it 
 annot be for long." 
 
 Harriet Martineau, who wrote harshly about both Words- 
 iTorth and Hartley Coleridge, wrote gently about the last of 
 
298 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Hartley. " I witnessed his funeral," she wrote, " and, as I saw 
 his grey-headed old friend bending over his grave that winterjisi: 
 morning, I felt that the aged mourner might well enjoy such 
 support as could arise from a sense of duty faithfully performed fc 
 to the being who was too weak for the conflicts of life." And j. 
 again, " When nothing more than pity and help was possible, 
 Wordsworth treated [Hartley] as gently as if he had been (what 
 indeed he was in our eyes) a sick child." 
 
 The social side of Wordsworth's later years was chieflyjun 
 determined by some strong friendships, and by certain felicitieS| jl: 
 of neighbourhood, which brought the Arnolds to Fox How ; 
 Mrs. Fletcher and her family to Lancrigg ; and Harriett 
 Martineau to the outskirts of Ambleside. Then there were i 
 the many pilgrimages of admirers, and meetings, here andfc: 
 there, with younger men of letters. 
 
 Wordsworth was the worst of correspondents. He had V 
 always disliked the act of writing ; and the frequent attacks of 
 inflammation of the eyes from which he suffered, latterly with 
 increasing frequency, added real disability to distaste. Yet to 
 the very last he would not suffer any friendships to die for 
 want of epistolary nutriment. 
 
 One of the most substantial of his later friendships was with 
 William Rowan Hamilton, the great Irish mathematician, who, 
 invented " quaternions." Hamilton was one of those men of 
 supreme mathematical genius who disprove the vulgar notion- 
 of the isolation of mathematics among the affairs of the mind 
 and spirit He loved poetry, and longed to be a poet. When 
 he was young, he and his sister were constantly writing verses and 
 sending them to Wordsworth for criticism. Wordsworth was, 
 by no means indifferent to mathematics. He was educated at 
 a college pre-eminent in mathematics. All his readers know; 
 how, as he lay in bed in his rooms at John's, he could see much 
 of Trinity, even — 
 
 " The antechapel where the statue stood 
 Of Newton with his prism and silent face. 
 The marble index of a mind for ever 
 Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone." 
 
 In another part of T/ie Prelude he narrates how to him, in: 
 his student days, " poetry and geometric truth " seemed between 
 
AFTERGLOW 299 
 
 hem to possess a monopoly of immortality and exemption from 
 lisease. Still, it was poetry rather than mathematics that 
 Hamilton and Wordsworth conferred and corresponded about, 
 rhey met first in September 1827, when Hamilton, aged twenty- 
 wo, was visiting the Lake country, and a very real friendship 
 iras cemented in spite of the inequality in age. The two men 
 lad a wonderful midnight walk in which — as Hamilton's 
 )iographer puts it — they '' oscillated between Rydal and 
 Vmbleside, absorbed in converse on high themes, finding it 
 ilmost impossible to part." 
 
 In 1829 Wordsworth visited the Hamiltons at Dunsink, to 
 heir great joy. Hamilton was now Irish Astronomer-Royal ; 
 ind Wordsworth stayed at the Observatory. Mrs. Hamilton 
 las recorded her impression. She " saw, approaching the house, 
 I tall man, with grey hair, a brown coat, and nankeen trousers," 
 ooking as unlike her preconceptions as possible — 
 
 " And is this Wordsworth ? this the man 
 Of whom my fancy cherished, 
 So faithfully a waking dream 
 An image that hath perished." 
 
 3o she parodied inwardly, as she watched her realized ideal at 
 unch. She saw, in the first place, great reserve ; then she saw 
 rusticity, simplicity, and dignity ; none of which qualities, 
 ipparently, had formed part of her conventional idea of a poet. - 
 And she added what we can well believe to show deep insight : 
 other men did not seem necessary to him. His intellectual and 
 moral loftiness struck her so much that she could no longer 
 think any of his poetry " silly." What she had thought silliness 
 was but the stooping of a great nature, to which nothing was 
 common or unclean. He seemed to her " sublime" ; and, when 
 he was still only fifty-nine, " a divine old man." 
 
 Next year Hamilton stayed three weeks at Rydal Mount ; 
 and correspondence, about poetry, science, and politics, went on 
 at intervals throughout the poet's life. There was an interesting 
 time in 1844, when Hamilton was staying with R. P. Graves at 
 (Windermere, another guest being Archer Butler. Julius Hare 
 was staying at Fox How ; and Graves had Wordsworth, 
 Hare, and Edward Quillinan to meet Hamilton and Butler. 
 ' Before he left the Lakes on that occasion, Hamilton celebrated 
 
300 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 his relations with Wordsworth by writing an impromptu sonnet i 
 in Dora's album at Rydal Mount, in which he described the lie-? 
 change from the "unquiet transport " of a mere disciple to the 
 " calmer joy " of a friend. In 1846, through Hamilton's influence, ¥ 
 Wordsworth was made an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish i«^ 
 Academy. 
 
 Another stimulating and enlarging correspondence was with W''' 
 the American Henry Reed, Professor at Philadelphia, though nc' 
 the two men never saw each other in the flesh. Reed was 
 Wordsworth's American editor, and they corresponded much 
 on international copyright and other themes. It was a goodjtiir 
 thing for so insular an Englishman as Wordsworth to have a 
 transatlantic correspondent. There was not much in the \rd 
 " Great Republic" to attract one who believed that the English 
 Constitution, before the Whigs began to desecrate it, was 
 perfect ; but Wordsworth did admit to Reed that he had as 
 little or less faith in absolute despotism. Nay, in 1843, he did 
 not "conceal that, as far as the people are capable of governing 
 themselves, he was a Democrat." 
 
 In the last summer of his life Wordsworth received a friend 
 of the Professor, Mr. Ellis Yarnall, of Philadelphia, who has 
 left a record of his impressions. He walked from Ambleside to 
 the Mount, feeling, much as De Quincey had felt in 1807, that 
 " after long years of waiting, of distant reverential admiration 
 and love," he was about to see a man who had so thrilled him 
 across the ocean with the power of his words. He arrived at 
 the early dinner-hour, and Wordsworth left the table to receive 
 him at the door. " It could be no other — a tall figure, a little 
 bent with age, his hair thin and grey, and his face deeply 
 wrinkled. The expression of his countenance was sad, mournful 
 I might say ; he seemed one on whom sorrow pressed heavily." 
 He insisted that Mr. Yarnall should join them at their meal in 
 the little dining-room ; Mrs. Wordsworth was there, with three 
 grandchildren. They talked of American affairs ; Mrs. Words- 
 worth going on with her knitting after dinner. It was the year 
 of the Californian gold-fever ; but Mr. Yarnall was tactful 
 enough to speak of American progress only in so far as it meant 
 an extension of the English tongue. Wordsworth looked up at 
 this, with " a fixing of his eye as if on some remote object," and 
 remarked that it behoved those who wrote to see to it, that 
 
 r.' 
 
AFTERGLOW 801 
 
 /hat they uttered was on the side of virtue. Of Henry VIII. 
 le spoke to his guest with positive loathing. The subsequent 
 onversation ranged widely. They spoke of France, just through 
 he '48 upheaval. He recalled his youth there among the 
 cenes of the great Revolution, and said, " I should like to 
 ;pend another month in France before I close my eyes." They 
 poke of Modern Painters, the two first volumes of which were 
 low before the world. Wordsworth thought Ruskin a brilliant 
 vriter, but regretted his too exclusive partisanship of Turner, 
 rhey spoke of the "Oxford Movement," which had by this 
 :ime more than run its early course. Wordsworth registered 
 lis definite approval. " I foresaw," said he, " that the movement 
 vas for good, and such I conceive it has been beyond all 
 question." 
 
 Mr. Yarnall noticed the quality of Wordsworth's talk ; how 
 :hoice his words were ; how faultless seemed each sentence. 
 When he was with him in the open air, he marked, as others did, 
 the poet's habit of stopping frequently to emphasize something 
 he was saying, and again and again he saw the far-away look 
 in the eyes, and the fire of genius unquenched by nearly eighty 
 years. Wordsworth was evidently feeling his age ; he wistfully 
 asked what age men reached in America } They went to see 
 the Rydal waterfall before they parted on the Ambleside road. 
 As they walked, Wordsworth gave to a beggar — the fifth or 
 sixth, he said, to whom he had given that day. Mr. Yarnall 
 eft him, he reported to Reed, ''in a tumult of excitement." 
 He felt that a great man, great morally, and great intellectually, 
 had passed from his sight — a man who seemed " living as if in 
 the presence of God by habitual recollection." 
 
 As early as 1841, Wordsworth was introduced to Emerson's 
 writings, but they had no message for him. He could not away 
 with the style, and wrote sarcastically to Reed about "a 
 language which he (Emerson) supposed to be English." Yet 
 Emerson had made a pious pilgrimage to Rydal in 1833, and 
 had a long talk with Wordsworth, in which apparently there 
 was not much love lost. Emerson's anwms is very different 
 from Mr. Yarnall's. He described Wordsworth as "a plain, 
 elderly, white-haired man, not prepossessing, and disfigured by 
 green goggles, called in by his daughters \sicy The bulk of the 
 conversation naturally was on American affairs ; and though 
 
ic- 
 
 302 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Emerson only reports Wordsworth's remarks, he does so with 
 a scornful mnuendo which cannot be mistaken. Wordsworth 
 unfortunately, took the lead in transatlantic criticism ; and (it ^■' 
 was the year after the Reform Bill) was in his most dolefully ^- 
 didactic vein. In his literary criticism, as Emerson reports^ 
 him, he did not get beyond wooden platitudes, and denuncia- 
 tions born of imperfect knowledge and insight. He thought 
 Carlyle, though clever and deep, sometimes insane. He was"^ 
 so disgusted with the first part of Wilhelm Meister that he i^-'" 
 threw the book across the room. He had always wished that •?: 
 Mr. Coleridge would write more to be understood, etc. Emerson 
 admitted Wordsworth's kindness and courtesy, his truthfulnessl^^ 
 and modesty. But he found " hard limits " to his thought ; he \'- 
 " made the impression of a narrow and very English mind ; of- 
 one who paid for his rare elevation by general tameness andf- 
 conformity." One may resent the animus of all this ; but onef- 
 recognizes the truth in it. 
 
 The fact is that Emerson and Wordsworth stood too neaf 
 each other, and yet had too sharp differences of method and ^' 
 medium to realize their spiritual kinship. Carlyle, who was 
 wanting in Emerson's suavity and tolerance, was even more 
 inappreciative of Wordsworth. Wordsworth thought of Carlyle 
 as merely a clever and rather dangerous man who did not know 
 how to write English. Carlyle thought of Wordsworth as an 
 overpraised literary lion with a very feeble roar. He saw him 
 occasionally in London, early in the 'forties, when the poet's 
 living reputation was at its highest ; and he recalled his 
 memories in the miserable early days of his widowerhood, when 
 the heavens above him were as brass, and all his life seemed) 
 vanity and a striving after wind. What he has to say of 
 Wordsworth is unsympathetic, and therefore, in a sense, value- 
 less as criticism ; yet the shrewdness of his insight and his 
 inimitable power of expression give it the value of partial 
 truth. Even the most reverent Wordsworthian may allow ■ 
 himself the sly enjoyment of this : " A man recognizably of 
 strong intellectual powers, strong character ; given to medita- 
 tion, and much contemptuous of the unmeditative world and its 
 noisy nothingnesses ; had a fine limpid style of writing and 
 delineating, in his small way ; a fine limpid vein of melody too in 
 him (as of an honest rustic fiddle, good, and well handled, 
 
 iree: 
 
 Of:: 
 p. 
 
 Fa: 
 I'j.. 
 
 tV: 
 
AFTERGLOW 303 
 
 lit wanting two or more of the strings, and not capable 
 f much ! ) " Or even this : " To my private self his divine 
 ^flections and unfathomabilities seemed stinted, scanty, palish, 
 nd uncertain . . . and I reckoned his poetic storehouse to be 
 ir from an opulent or well-furnished apartment ! " 
 
 Carlyle remembered best a literary breakfast in St. James's 
 itreet in or about 1840, given by Henry Taylor, at which he 
 Dund himself in Wordsworth's company. James Spedding was 
 nother of the guests. Wordsworth talked much, and more, 
 pparently, about the mechanism of verbal expression than 
 Carlyle cared for. Carlyle's sketch of his appearance and 
 [iterance ought to be given at first hand. " His voice was 
 ood, frank, and sonorous, though practically clear, distinct, and 
 orcible, rather than melodious ; the tone of him businesslike, 
 edately confident ; no discourtesy, yet no anxiety about being 
 ourteous. A fine wholesome rusticity, fresh as his mountain 
 freezes, sat well on the stalwart veteran. You would have said 
 10 was a usually taciturn man. . . . His face bore marks of 
 nuch, not always peaceful, meditation ; the look of it, not bland 
 )r benevolent, so much as close, impregnable and hard ; a man 
 nulta tacere loquive paratus, in a world where he had ex- 
 )erienced no lack of contradiction, as he strode along! The 
 jyes were not very brilliant, but they had a quiet clearness ; there 
 ivas enough of brow, and well shaped ; rather too much cheek 
 
 . face of squarish shape and decidedly longish, as I think the 
 lead itself was (its 'length' going horizontal) ; he was large boned, 
 ean, but still firm-knit, tall, and strong-looking when he stood, 
 1 right good steel-grey figure, with rustic simplicity and dignity 
 ibout him, and a vivacious strength looking through him." 
 
 Carlyle and Wordsworth had several other meetings. At 
 Dne of them they talked of the French Revolution ; and Carlyle 
 was interested in Wordsworth's personal experiences of it. On 
 another occasion they talked of English poetry ; but from this 
 conversation Carlyle carried off no idea save of Wordsworth's 
 literary self-esteem. What he liked best in the poet was his 
 vigorous word-painting of famous men he had known in early 
 days. "Never, or never but once, had I seen a stronger 
 intellect, a more luminous and veracious power of insight, 
 directed upon such a survey of fellow-men and their contem- 
 porary journey through the world." 
 
304 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 ^::- 
 
 The two men evidently neither loved nor understood onc^, 
 another ; what was wesentlich in each was, on the whole, hidden 
 from the other. Yet, in the play of Hamlet, there is much besides 
 the character of Hamlet that is interesting and important, and 
 Carlyle's hard unsympathetic flashes on Wordsworth's accidents 
 are not without some value in helping us to understand his^' 
 essence. Let us leave this phase with one little picture, by''^ 
 no means rich in significance, and yet called by Carlyle, " sym- 
 bolical of all." Carlyle and Wordsworth were dining in company*-- 
 somewhere in London, while Wordsworth was a lion there. '^' 
 " Dinner was large,, luminous, sumptuous ; I sat a long way ?■• 
 from Wordsworth ; dessert, I think, had come in, and certainly "^• 
 there reigned in all quarters a cackle as of Babel (only politer. ^" 
 perhaps), which far up in Wordsworth's quarter (who was leftward ''"■'■ 
 on my side of the table) seemed to have taken a sententious, '' ; 
 rather louder, logical and quasi-scientific turn, heartily unim-i^^ 
 portant to gods and men, so far as I could judge of it and oi ^' 
 the other babble reigning. I looked upwards, leftwards, the^- 
 coast being luckily for a moment clear ; there, far off, beautifully ^''■ 
 screened in the shadow of his vertical green circle * (which was ^'^ 
 on the further side of him, sat Wordsworth, silent, slowly but*"^- 
 steadily gnawing some portion of what I conceived to be raisins, ^ 
 with his eye and attention placidly fixed on these and these ^'^- 
 alone. The sight of whom and of his rock-like indifference to ^■ 
 the babble, quasi-scientific and other, with attention turned on ^•' 
 the small practical alone, was comfortable and amusing to me,' ^•■• 
 who felt like him, but could not eat raisins." ' R 
 
 Wordsworth and Walter Savage Landor met for the first ''"•^• 
 time in the summer of 1832, at Moresby, but they had corre- ''^•' 
 sponded previously. Wordsworth passed a day on the banks of 
 Wast Water in Landor's company, and evidently liked the man. 
 He thought him original and learned as well as modest ; and he 
 enjoyed his hearty laughter. Landor was Southey's friend; 
 and Southey kept him in Italy au courant of Wordsworth's work- 
 in poetry. Landor cordially, though critically, admired Words-' 
 worth. "The first poet that ever wrote," he once said, "waslK:: 
 not a more original poet than he is, and the best is hardly ai "^ 
 
 greater." Wordsworth, in his turn, said that he would rather C 
 
 J».. 
 
 ♦ Carlyle noticed that Wordsworth, for the relief of his poor eyes, carried a 
 circular green shade, which could be unfolded and stuck in a stand. 
 
AFTERGLOW 305 
 
 ave written some of Landor's verses than any poetry produced 
 his time ; and he greatly admired the Imaginary Conversations y 
 hen they began to come out in 1824. They met again in 
 336, in London ; and this time, unhappily, things went wrong, 
 /"ordsworth went to London in May, to see his friends and to 
 ;e Talfourd's play lon^ with Macready in it, about which there 
 as a flutter of expectation in literary circles. The first per- 
 jrmance was at Covent Garden ; and the first-night audience 
 Lcluded Wordsworth, Crabb Robinson, Joanna Baillie, and 
 ,andor. When Wordsworth appeared in a box, with his green 
 jectacles on, the audience cheered him. He shook hands with 
 oanna Baillie in the adjoining box; took off his spectacles, 
 nd looked round the house, nodding to those he recognized. 
 [e seemed sad, and as if smiling were difficult. However, he 
 it patiently through the long play, thumping applause from 
 me to time with his stick. 
 
 It was at Talfourd's house that Wordsworth and Landor met ; 
 nd Landor resented Wordsworth's tone about his friend 
 )0uthey. He thought, too, that Wordsworth's dislike of Goethe 
 ^as due to jealousy, and not to mere misconception. He was 
 ehement and impulsive, and he turned on Wordsworth, satiriz- 
 ng him, and even stooping so low as to parody We are Seven, 
 "rabb Robinson, who lamented Wordsworth's insensibility to 
 he merit of such great foreigners as Goethe and Voltaire, but 
 :new that it came from nothing worse than a wooden John 
 Jullishness of mind, remonstrated with Landor, but to no pur- 
 )ose. The friendship was blighted. In December, 1842, Landor 
 Lttacked Wordsworth in Blackwood in an Imaginary Conversa- 
 ion between Porson and Southey ; and in April, 1843, Edward 
 Juillinan rushed in, in Wordsworth's defence, with an Imaginary 
 ^Conversation between Landor and Christopher North. Words- 
 vorth disapproved of his championship, chiefly because he 
 bought Landor beneath notice. He characterized him in 
 language unusually strong for him. " His character," he wrote 
 :o Rowan Hamilton, " may be given in two or three words — a 
 madman, a bad man, yet a man of genius, as many a mad- 
 inan is." 
 
 Crabb Robinson himself was one of the best friends, as 
 Viends, that Wordsworth ever had. He was intensely apprecia- 
 tive, and yet perfectly aware of the poet's limitations, and not 
 
 X 
 
306 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 afraid to point them out to him, when he thought them discredit- 
 able. He was much in Wordsworth's company, not only in 
 London when the poet chanced to be there, but many times at 
 Rydal, and during the continental tour in 1837. Robinson 
 spent the Christmas season of 1835 at Rydal in a cottage just 
 below the Mount. He arrived early on Christmas Day, to find 
 a comfortable fire burning in his lodgings, and tea and sugar 
 provided by the housewifely hands of Mrs. Wordsworth. It 
 was always at the same season that he paid his subsequent 
 visits. Mrs. Wordsworth valued his buoyant spirits as a stimu- 
 lant for her husband in the dark days ; but Robinson insisted 
 on being in lodgings, that he might have his breakfast and milk 
 supper under an independent roof. These winter visits became 
 an institution, and the lively barrister was looked on as one of the 
 family at Rydal Mount. ^^ No Crabb, no Christinas !'^ Edward 
 Quillinan used to say. We have no pleasanter picture of those 
 days of afterglow than that which the diarist has sketched for 
 us. The Arnolds, let us remember, were at Fox How ; Dr. 
 Arnold was in his full vigour. Robinson would read in bed 
 of a morning, and occupy himself indoors until it was time 
 to go to the Mount for the one-o'clock dinner. Or there 
 might be quite a long walk with Wordsworth before dinner, 
 and in the dusk of the afternoon a stroll to Ambleside for the 
 newspaper. On Sunday, Dr. Arnold would preach ; or at least 
 they would meet him after church, and there might be deep 
 theological talks. How wholesome for Wordsworth, in those 
 days of his conservative despair, to have to encounter, in the 
 frosty or rainy weather, the nimble Whig wits of Arnold of 
 Rugby and Crabb Robinson, both of whom were perfectly 
 reverent, but neither of whom, we may be sure, would give the 
 poet any dialectic handicap ! The Doctor would attack Milton's 
 Satan as not wicked enough ; and Wordsworth, as they trudged 
 along, would point out the cunning of the art in Paradise 
 Regained ; would tell once more the story of the genesis of the 
 Ancieitt Mariner ; or would discourse on the significance of the 
 sonnet. Wordsworth would tell Dr. Arnold how Robinson 
 helped him through the winter ; and Robinson would climb into 
 the coach, after his six weeks' stay, with a heart full of tender- 
 ness and regret. 
 
 In those days of the 'thirties, before Dora's marriage, and 
 
AFTERGLOW 307 
 
 hile Wordsworth's public fame was ripening, the nearness of the 
 irnolds was a great enrichment of the Rydal Mount life. Fox 
 [ow, under Loughrigg, turning its back on the sun, but with 
 s face to the mountains between Wansfell and Fairfield, to which 
 le Arnolds came in 1833, was closely associated with Words- 
 orth from the beginning. The poet gave his help in the 
 )rmalities of the purchase ; he advised as to the building of the 
 ew house ; he directed the laying out of the delightful grounds. 
 [e was especially insistent about the chimneys ; like his own 
 fc Rydal, they must have some colour, a bit of red and a bit of 
 ellow ; and they must be partly square and partly round. The 
 uilders remembered how " Wudsworth " and the Doctor would 
 rgue about this matter. 
 
 The rustics remembered also that Wordsworth and Dr. 
 Lrnold were " ter'ble friends ; " but the records of their actual 
 itercourse are not very abundant. There must, of course, have 
 een antagonism ; for there was not only the Doctor's Whiggism, 
 ut his impassioned distrust of that Anglican Revival with 
 rhich Wordsworth was more and more inclined to sympathize. 
 )n the other hand, Wordsworth would like Arnold's sturdy 
 'rotestantism ; and — but why should one try to explain the 
 itimacy of two great men, however divergent, in any respects, 
 ley might be } Great educators, great Christians, great 
 Englishmen, could they meet day by day "in the silent woody 
 llaces," and among the perpetual hills, far from the din of con- 
 troversy, and not rush together in the great communions of 
 •hought and feeling ? Strange that Wordsworth had to outlive 
 jo long the eager reformer young enough to be his son ! In 
 June, 1842, there dawned at Rugby the summer morning when 
 i\rnold heard the sudden call — 
 
 I " Thou arosest to tread 
 
 In the summer morning, the road 
 Of death, at a call unforeseen." 
 
 Much less comfort was in the proximity of Harriet Marti- 
 leau. Between her and Wordsworth there was indeed a 
 )otential antagonism which it would have been hard to trans- 
 :end. Logical, materialistic, utilitarian, she gave her talents to 
 :auses which were far removed from Wordsworth's ideals. More- 
 over, she had an acrid tongue, and an eye quick to see weaknesses 
 ind blemishes. 
 
la: 
 
 308 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 She came to Ambleside in the spring of 1845 resolved tO| 
 make it her home ; and, within a year, had bought land about a j; 
 mile from the town on the Rydal road, and built herself a house, • 
 which she called " The Knoll." She came with the defiant self- 
 consciousness of heterodoxy, foreseeing that provincial respect- : 
 ability would frown upon her, and resolved to have as few 
 dealings with it as possible. The klaircisseme7it of her heresies 
 was delayed until 185 1, when Wordsworth had passed beyond 
 time ; and he received the new-comer graciously. After hisk 
 fashion, he gave practical help in the laying out of her little o{ 
 domain. He threw himself down among the hazel bushes on.(fo: 
 the site of the future house, and discussed architectural points ;d 
 with her. When she began farming her two acres, he came to 
 see her first calf. As a great man, he had, of course, to plant a 
 tree ; and she remembered his workmanlike way of doing it, 
 and how he washed his hands afterwards in the watering-pot. 
 He washed them that he might give them both to her, and wish 
 her many happy years in her new home. " Then," the acrid k 
 lady goes on to tell us, " he proceeded to give me a piece of jc 
 friendly advice. He told me I should find visitors a great 
 expense, and that I must promise him (and he laid his hand onfc 
 my arm, to enforce what he said) I must promise him to do aS: or 
 he and his sister had done, when, in their early days, they had ar 
 lived at Grasmere. * When you have a visitor,' said he, * you 
 must say : if you like to have a cup of tea with us, you are veryfc 
 welcome ; but, if you want any meat, you must pay for your 
 board. Now promise me that you will do this.' " 
 
 As Dorothea, in Middlemarchy remarked to her sister, it is 
 only certain people who see the moles on a hero's face, and Miss 
 Martineau was one of them. But the moles are generally there ; 
 and perhaps it is well, in the interests of realism, that there is 
 always somebody disagreeable enough to notice them. Miss 
 Martineau was struck by the combination of extreme economy 
 and generosity displayed by the Wordsworths. One could 
 hardly get a drop of cream with one's tea at Rydal Mount, and 
 yet Wordsworth would outrage political economy by giving 
 away his milk to cottagers who were quite able to buy it for 
 themselves. Miss Martineau's visits to the Mount were few, 
 though she was always welcome there. In fact, she says that 
 she went only twice. She kept young servants, and was afraid 
 
AFTERGLOW 309 
 
 t) leave them even for a few hours. She had no carriage; and 
 was a mile and a half from The Knoll to Rydal Mount. But 
 ley often met in the open air ; and it was a pleasure to the 
 ever deaf woman to see the poet on a winter's day in "his 
 oak, Scotch bonnet and green goggles." Unlike some other 
 bservers, she reports him as evidently popular among children. 
 lalf a score of them would accompany him on the road — one 
 pulling at his cloak, or holding by his trousers " — while he 
 ould cut switches out of the hedge for them. He would 
 idulge in a little heavy fatherly badinage at her expense. He 
 ould rally her on her walking-powers, though he ought to have 
 nown that she was no walker. Meeting her one day with 
 er collaborator Atkinson, " * There, there ! ' " said he, laying his 
 and on Atkinson's arm. " ' Take care ! take care ! Don't let 
 \er carry you about. She is killing off half the gentlemen in 
 >he county ! ' " 
 
 I She noticed the change wrought on Wordsworth by his 
 laughter's death, and thought him somewhat selfish in his 
 kief. His wife's personality attracted her more than his own. 
 I Her excellent sense and her womanly devotedness (especially 
 r/hen she grew pale and shrunk and dim-eyed under her mute 
 lorrow for the daughter whom he mourned aloud) made her by 
 lar the more interesting of the two to me." 
 i A charming family lived at Lancrigg in Easedale in those 
 flays. A certain Archibald Fletcher, a Scottish Advocate of 
 li'ery advanced reforming views, who died in 1828, had married 
 iliza Dawson, a delightful woman of refined tastes and literary 
 i^ifts. Some years after her husband's death, Mrs. Fletcher 
 ::ame often to the Lake country with her children. The first 
 asit was in the summer of 1833, while Fox How was building, 
 md the Arnolds were temporarily occupying Wordsworth's old 
 louse, Allan Bank. The Fletchers had lodgings in a farmhouse 
 n Easedale, close to Lancrigg, which was to be their future 
 lome. It was a sad summer to Wordsworth, because it was 
 ;hen that Dorothy's illness became pronounced ; but he always 
 orightened up when he walked over into Easedale and saw 
 :he old views and the new friends. Both Mrs. Fletcher and her 
 daughters, Mary and Margaret, who afterwards married respec- 
 tively Sir John Richardson and Dr. John Davy, younger brother 
 of Sir Humphry, have left memorials of their impressions of 
 
i; 
 
 310 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Wordsworth. As he had acted for the Arnolds about Fox 
 How, so he did for the Fletchers about Lancrigg. In 1840 they 
 settled in, and for the next ten years were much to Wordsworth. 
 He loved his visits to Lancrigg, and all he did and said was 
 seen and heard by eyes and ears of love, not of mere gossippy 
 intelligence. There were many meetings and many walks, of 
 which the reminiscences fill up and round off our idea of the poet. 
 This, for instance, of the shortest day of 1843: "Wordsworth 
 and Miss Fenwick came early, and although it was misty and 
 dingy, he proposed to walk up Easedale. . . . He said on the 
 terrace, 'This is a striking anniversary to me; for this day - . 
 forty-four years ago, my sister and I took up our abode at ,,:. 
 Grasmere, and three days after we found out this walk, which ij!::; 
 long remained our favourite haunt.' There is always something 
 very touching in his way of speaking of his sister ; the tones of, : 
 his voice become more gentle and solemn, and he ceases to q:: 
 have that flow of expression which is so remarkable in him on 3;- 
 all other subjects. It is as if the sadness connected with her r^ 
 present condition was too much for him to dwell upon in con- ^y. 
 nection with the past, though habit and the ' omnipotence of 
 circumstance' have made its daily presence less oppressive to 
 his spirits. He said that his sister spoke constantly of their 
 early days, but more of the years they spent together in other |jy-. 
 parts of England than those at Grasmere." Here again is a 
 little picture which tells us something. On January 22, 1844, 
 Mrs. Fletcher's grandson Henry was starting for Oxford. " His 
 young cousins and I," writes Mrs. Davy, "went down with him, 
 to wait for the mail in the market-place [of Ambleside]. We 
 found Mr. Wordsworth walking about before the post-office 
 door, in very charming mood. His spirits were excited by theL' 
 bright morning sunshine, and he entered at once on a full flow 
 of discourse. He looked very benevolently on Henry, as he 
 mounted on the top of the coach, and seemed quite disposed to 
 give an old man's blessing to the young man entering on ani 
 untried field, and then (nowise interrupted by the hurrying to and 
 fro of ostlers with their smoking horses, or passengers withL: 
 their carpet bags) he launched into a dissertation ... on the. 
 subject of college habits, and of his utter distrust of all attempts 
 to nurse virtue by an avoidance of temptation. He expressed 
 also his entire want of confidence (from experience, he said) of 
 
AFTERGLOW 311 
 
 lighly-wrought religious expression in youth. The safest train- 
 ng for the mind in religion he considered to be a contemplating 
 if the character and personal history of Christ. ' Work it/ he 
 aid, *into your thoughts, into your imagination, make it a real 
 >resence in the mind.' " 
 
 There was a great celebration of the poet's seventy-fourth 
 rtrthday at Rydal Mount on April 9, 1844. Lady Richardson 
 ^rote of the tables spread in front of the house, and of a con- 
 ourse of Grasmere boys and girls, " Their eyes fixed with 
 i^onder and admiration on the tables covered with oranges, 
 gingerbread, and painted eggs, ornamented with daffodils, 
 aurels, and moss, gracefully intermixed." She tells how the 
 ;hildren played hide-and-seek among the shrubs, and how 
 ^leased the old man was with it all. 
 
 Besides the Lancrigg ladies, one other woman held an 
 ntimate place in the Wordsworth circle in the latter days, 
 ienry Taylor, author of Philip van Artevelde^ and famous for 
 lis splendid looks, had a connection — a cousin of his stepmother 
 —called Isabella Fenwick. She was much older than Taylor, 
 )eing, in fact, only about twelve years younger than Words- 
 vorth. She was a very remarkable woman ; fine-looking, 
 itrong-minded, deeply religious, and yet — what deeply religious 
 vomen and men sometimes fail to be — well versed in varieties 
 )f human nature, and therefore humorous, charitable, and free 
 jf spirit. She was much of an educator, much of a hero-' 
 vorshipper. Over Henry Taylor, as long as he was unmarried, 
 )he had much influence, and loved to exercise it. When he 
 Harried, Miss Fenwick transferred herself to Wordsworth. 
 :Taylor, who had known Wordsworth for many years, kindled 
 :he lady's interest in him. In 1830 she was at Rydal Mount 
 for the first time. In the 'thirties Miss Fenwick had a house in 
 London, and Wordsworth stayed with her on his way to the 
 Continent in 1837. Next year she settled at Ambleside, and 
 began to feed herself on Wordsworthian air. In 1838 she was 
 writing enthusiastically to Henry Taylor about her intercourse 
 with the poet, and he was reading The Prelude (which he was 
 then revising) to her. Crabb Robinson reported that Words- 
 worth talked well to her and that she understood him. She 
 regarded him with that intensity of interest and that depth of 
 insight which only a woman feels and exercises. "What strange 
 
312 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 workings," she wrote to Taylor, " there are in his great mind, 
 and how fearfully strong are all his feelings and affections ! If I 
 his intellect had been less powerful, they would have destroyed 
 him long ago ; but even in the midst of his strongest emotions, 
 his attention may be attracted to more intellectual speculation, 
 or his imagination excited by some of those external objects 
 which have such influence over him ; and his feelings subside, 
 like the feelings of a child." Soon she became so closely knit 
 to the Wordsworths (Mrs. Wordsworth loved her enthusiasti- 
 cally) that — about the end of 1840 — she went to live at Rydal 
 Mount ; and was an almost constant inmate for many years. 
 " I would be content to be a servant in the house," she wrote, 
 " to hear his wisdom." Her presence was of especial value when 
 Dora went away to be married, in 1841. Wordsworth dictated 
 to Miss Fenwick those precious bibliographical notes, prefixed, 
 in all good editions, to his poems. In such intimacy it was 
 inevitable that a shrewd observer like Miss Fenwick should 
 be critical of her hero ; and critical she was. She chafed 
 sometimes under his self-esteem ; she thought some of his 
 moods unworthy. But she was faithful unto death ; and much 
 of the light and strength of the home-life at Rydal in that last 
 decade came from her. She died in 185 1. 
 
 The Laureateship, pressed, as we have seen, on Wordsworth's 
 reluctance, set a seal to his public estimation. But the last 
 years, 
 
 " Placid in their going 
 To a lingering motion bound," 
 
 yet moving at times through dark waters, have that privacy, 
 that domestic inwardness, which marked the whole of Words- 
 worth's life. What he was, rather than what the world thought 
 of him ; the light he gave rather than the rewards he received ; 
 the sound of his voice without the reverberations of fame — these 
 are what matter most in our estimate. From this point of view, 
 his death was in perfect keeping with his life. In fulness of 
 days, surrounded by the love and reverence of a perfect home, 
 the strong man yielded without a struggle to the Power that 
 was stronger than he. It was the spring of 1850; on April 7 
 he would be eighty years old. On Sunday, March 10, he 
 was at Rydal chapel for the last time. Spring winds bear 
 
I 
 
. AFTERGLOW 313 
 
 firdly on the aged : on that very Sunday, he looked feeble in 
 J cold walk to Grasmere with his sister-in-law and Edward 
 (uillinan. For a day or two he went about still, calling on 
 ;;rs. Arnold, calling on Quillinan. But deadly shafts were 
 ying ; and on March 14 he was pierced. He had sat too 
 >ng the evening before, on a cottage bench near White-moss, 
 .'•oking at the sunset. Pleurisy came on ; and for more than a 
 lonth he lay with ebbing life. His wife was with him, and his 
 [dest son ; Quillinan was constant in love and care ; Dorothy, 
 'ith clouded mind, was there to love him still. On April 23 — 
 le day of Shakespeare's birth and death, as some have loved to 
 ote — as his cuckoo-clock was striking noon, he passed into the 
 ;iimortal. Some of his friends, looking on his dead face, were 
 truck by its resemblance to Dante's, others by the look of his 
 ister. Dorothy was being drawn about, as usual, in her chair, 
 ^s she passed his door they heard her say, " O death, where is 
 hy sting ? O grave, where is thy victory ? " She survived him 
 ive years. 
 
 The funeral was of the simplest and most private kind. 
 wVordsworth had put on record his wish to be carried to the 
 Trave . Westmorland-wise, on the shoulders of his humble 
 neighbours, but this did not happen. The procession by the two 
 lakes was of the ordinary kind. Grasmere church was filled, 
 but not by the peasants, whom Wordsworth had so idealized. 
 They never understood him. 
 
 Mrs. Wordsworth was able to be there, supported by her two 
 sons, her figure bowed by grief. Yet she did not faint, as they 
 thought she might. She bore up calmly, and was able to appear 
 among the mourners at Rydal Mount later in the day. Nine 
 years after she was laid in the same grave. 
 
 Many a pilgrim has visited, and will visit, the group of 
 kindred graves near the east end of the church, the Rothay 
 murmuring below. The one of chief interest is marked by the 
 plainest of stones with the inscription, William Wordsivorth, 
 1850 ; and below it, Mary Wordsivorth, 1859. 
 
 Such simplicity is more than an accident, or even a symbol. 
 It is a vital part of the noblest genius ever devoted to showing 
 the depth that underlies the common, the majesty that is in the 
 humble. Wordsworth's life and poetry alike were without pomp 
 and circumstance, and so is his grave. Towards the close of his 
 
314 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 life he said that his chief aspiration was to fulfil the beatitude, 
 Blessed are the poor in spirit. If this is not the legend which we 
 would add to his name, there is another of which none will 
 dispute the fitness : Blessed are the peacemakers ; they shall be 
 called children of God. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 FAME 
 
 WE have seen enough, in the course of our journey with 
 Wordsworth, to show us in what various esteem his 
 vork was held during his lifetime, and how long he had to 
 earn to win his soul in the patience of unpopularity. More 
 :han half a century after his death, we are in a position to 
 Tiake some estimate of the curves of his reputation, and to 
 :onjecture his ultimate place among English poets. 
 
 On the whole, the history of Wordsworth's fame has been 
 that of a steady advance from contempt to honour — honour 
 which seems ever on the increase. But in his reputation in 
 Britain alone the story has to take note of many phases and 
 eddies. 
 
 Lyrical Ballads was a challenge ; an enterprise conscious of 
 its own novelty and daring ; and in Lyrical Ballads Words- 
 worth was the predominant partner. In the minds of two 
 young men who were to become considerable critics, in De 
 Ouincey and' John Wilson, he found, as we have seen, immediate 
 enthusiastic sympathy, though, in the case of Wilson, it was 
 not the sympathy of unmixed approval. Still, it was disciple- 
 ship ; the kind of appreciation which an innovator would give a 
 great deal to win. It did not, however, represent accurately 
 any large section of critical opinion about Wordsworth. 
 
 During at least the first quarter of the nineteeth century, 
 Wordsworth entirely failed to win popularity among the general 
 poetry-reading and poetry-buying public. This was the more 
 disappointing that in those days there was a relatively much 
 larger poetry-reading public than there is in these, when novels 
 and plays engage so much superficial literary interest. But at 
 popularity of this kind Wordsworth did not aim, and he was 
 
 315 
 
DuC 
 
 316 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 not in the least embittered by the want of it. He knew that 
 he could not compete in the market with the sumptuousness 
 and glitter of his contemporaries, with the attractiveness of 
 Scott and Byron and even of Southey ; and, though he thought 
 amiss and too lowly of that rival work, he was justified in the 
 serenity of his self-esteem, and his content to work for the 
 future and the few. But, though the public was heedless, 
 the narrower critical world was stirred from the outset, and 
 three movements are distinguishable. 
 
 First in time, and making most noise, came the stir of un- 
 sympathetic criticism, typically represented by Jeffrey in the 
 Edinhirgh Review. It is a mistake to regard this criticism as 
 wholly unfavourable, or to think of Jeffrey as stamping a 
 clumsy and brutal heel on the fine flowers of romantic poetry. I 
 Jeffrey was an accomplished critic and a discriminating one ; 
 his dealings with Scott, Byron, and Keats make it quite evident 
 that he could appraise them nearly as well as his most " superior " 
 successors ; his appreciation of the Elizabethans was as strong, 
 if not as delicate and inward, as that of Charles Lamb. But he 
 was essentially a critical pedagogue of the old-fashioned type ; 
 he seemed to be half-scolding his charge even when he com- 
 mended them, and when he conceived it to be his duty to 
 punish, he showed little mercy. With the instincts of the 
 schoolmaster he combined those of the partisan and the 
 journalist ; he believed in the "reality" of classes and "schools" 
 as many mediaeval thinkers believed in the " reality " of general 
 ideas ; and he knew that only opinions served up hot and strong 
 avail to sell a periodical. \ He by no means denied all merit to 
 Wordsworth, but he put Wordsworth into a "Lake School," 
 and against that School he took sides ; against it he fought 
 like a Trojan. He admitted, for example, that Lyrical Ballads 
 "were deservedly popular" (only a hostile eye, by the way, 
 could have detected their popularity) ; " they were undoubtedly 
 characterized by a strong spirit of originality, of pathos, and 
 natural feeling." In The Excicrsion he found pathos, eloquence, 
 tenderness, sweetness, and other good things. But he was con- 
 vinced that the essential importance of Wordsworth lay in his 
 supposed membership of the supposed Lake brotherhood, — a 
 brotherhood of literary heretics and dissenters, partly of German 
 and partly of Rousseau-ish origin ; a sect which the Edinburgh 
 
FAME 317 
 
 as bound to suppress in the name of literary catholicity, ortho- 
 oxy, and apostolical succession. 
 
 In proceeding from this starting-point, Jeffrey's criticism of 
 Vordsvvorth broke down. The start was a false one. Words- 
 rorth belonged to no brotherhood, no party ; even in the first 
 jsue of Lyrical Ballads he was working for his own hand ; 
 rith Coleridge he hardly co-operated. And though there are 
 mteresting affinities between some of Rousseau's thought and 
 ome of Wordsworth's, it is absurd to maintain that Words- 
 v^orth derived from Rousseau, or was in any sense a propagan- 
 dist of his doctrines. Failing to understand Wordsworth's 
 ;olitariness and originality, Jeffrey failed to understand him at 
 ill, and his blame and his praise were alike nearly worthless. 
 By the time 1807 was reached, Wordsworth had published 
 much which easily lent itself to smart journalistic ridicule, and 
 lelped to accumulate the discredit of the imaginary " Lakers." 
 Jeffrey lived under the constant sense of a kind of conspiracy 
 among the mountains : the new poets, he seemed to believe, 
 haunted them like a nest of brigands. TJiey were affected ; 
 they were exaggerated ; tJtey were silly ; they were revolutionary ; 
 and they hung together for the purpose of sowing affectation, 
 exaggeration, silliness, and social discontent broadcast. 
 
 Fortified by this theory, Jeffrey had an easy task with 
 
 Wordsworth's poetry in detail. By this time he ought to have 
 
 discovered that Wordsworth, whatever his faults, was not only 
 
 a good poet, but a great one ; but he never made that discovery 
 
 at all. He believed that in his simplicity Wordsworth was 
 
 imitating Ambrose Philips ; and so it was obvious to call the 
 
 lines to The Small Celandine "namby-pamby." As to Alice 
 
 Fell: "if the printing of such trash be not felt as an insult to 
 
 the public taste, we are afraid it cannot be insulted." He 
 
 ; seemed to be stooping to uproot a noxious weed when, speaking 
 
 of Resolution and Independence in words which, with an opposite 
 
 innuendo, would be an excellent criticism, he defied " the bitterest 
 
 enemy of Mr. Wordsworth to produce anything at all parallel 
 
 from any collection of English poetry, or even from the 
 
 specimens of his friend Mr. Southey." The Lake School were 
 
 tedious and affected, and so was Yarrow Unvisited, The Lake 
 
 School were always imitating somebody ; and in his sonnets 
 
 Wordsworth was at his best, because in them he was imitating, 
 
318 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 not Quarles, Ambrose Philips, Cowper, Schiller, or Kotzebue, 
 but Milton. 
 
 But there was a deeper depth waiting for poor Jeffrey. One 
 does not expect an eminent journalist to be constitutionally a 
 philosopher ; and there never was less of a philosopher than the 
 bright, trenchant Whig lawyer into whose hands Wordsworth 
 fell. Jeffrey had an uncomfortable feeling from the beginning 
 /that Wordsworth's poetry was philosophic, and the feeling was 
 much strengthened by The Excursion and The White Doe of 
 Rylstone. The feeling took shape in the conclusion that Words- 
 worth was, or pretended to be, a " mystic ; " it was one of the 
 sins of the Lakers, learned from Germany, to darken with 
 mysticism the clear British air. (At a later stage Carlyle gave 
 Jeffrey much trouble by the same propensity.) Mysticism, 
 therefore, must be got rid of thoroughly. It is perceptible in 
 the Ode to D^ity^ and of that Ode we accordingly say, in our 
 best style, that in it "the lofty view is very unsuccessfully 
 attempted," and concerning two lines in particular — 
 
 " Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, 
 And the most ancient Heavens, through. thee, are fresh and strong " — 
 
 \f- 
 
 that they " seem to be utterly without meaning ; at least, we 
 have no sort of conception in what sense Dicty can be said to 
 keep the old skies /r^j-/^, and the stars from wrong." The Ode 
 on Inti^nations of Immortality has its venom so concentrated 
 that it may be killed by one jingling phrase : "it is the most 
 illegible and unintelligible part of the publication." 
 
 In pursuing this method with The White Doe, Jeffrey had a; 
 f leg to stand on. There is certainly mysticism in it, and it is' 
 mysticism which does leave the reader somewhat perplexed and 
 unsatisfied. It is a little difficult, when one has finished it, to 
 be sure what it is all about, and why things in it happen as they 
 do. It is an ambitious and self-conscious poem. Wordsworth 
 meant to do, and felt that he was doing, something specially 
 remarkable in it; and perhaps in proportion to this ambition; 
 and self-consciousness, it is not a complete success. But ati; 
 least it is a beautiful poem ; beautiful in its melody and pathos ; : 
 beautiful in its suggestiveness and tender treatment of the tie' 
 between man and the humbler creatures. But Jeffrey saw'i 
 nothing of the beauty ; it seemed to him "to consist of a happy 
 
FAME 319 
 
 nion of all the faults, without any of the beauties, which belong 
 D [Mr. Wordsworth's] school of poetry." In his best journalese 
 he critic explained that when he first took it up he thought 
 : was a parody, but that he had not gone far till he felt 
 intimately" that "nothing in the nature of a joke could 
 € so insupportably dull." In Lyrical Ballads the poet was 
 xhibited on the whole " in a vein of very pretty deliration ; " 
 1 The White Doe he appears " in a state of low and maudlin 
 mbecility." And so on. Enough of this phase of Words- 
 orthian criticism. 
 Another phase is centrally represented by Hazlitt. We 
 ftiay perhaps label it superior critical approval, with the word 
 M* superior" in inverted commas. It stands midway between n 
 f he unsympathetic and uncomprehending treatment of Jeffrey, 
 und the enlightened critical sympathy which makes the third 
 iohase of the period. Like Jeffrey, Hazlitt loved to lecture the 
 oeople he was criticizing ; he had much of Jeffrey's cocksureness 
 ind partisanship. Like Jeffrey, too, he was a journalist, and a 
 /et more eminent one than Jeffrey ; after Defoe, Hazlitt is 
 perhaps the most distinguished journalist, pure and simple, of 
 pre-Victorian times. Like the journalism which Defoe did so 
 Qiuch to found — that of Queen Anne's reign — the journalism of 
 the teens of the nineteenth century was half literary and half 
 political ; and Hazlitt, its most brilliant ornament, made ample 
 use of the double inspiration. He was a liberal when Words- 
 worth, Coleridge, and Southey had become conservative, and' 
 this antagonism made his literary epigrams sting like whips. / 
 Nothing, certainly, in that kind could be better than some of 
 Hazlitt's dicta. What more, for instance, could Coleridge's 
 worst enemy desire for him than such treatment as this : " He 
 is equally averse to the prejudices of the vulgar, the paradoxes 
 of the learned, or the habitual convictions of his own mind. He 1 
 moves in an unaccountable diagonal between truth and false- 
 hood, sense and nonsense, sophistry and commonplace, and only 
 assents to any opinion when he knows that all the reasons are 
 I against it. A matter of fact is abhorrent to his nature ; the 
 very air of truth repels him. He is only saved from the 
 extremities of absurdity by combining them all in his own 
 person. Two things are indispensable to him — to set out from 
 no premises and to arrive at no conclusion. The consciousness 
 
320 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 of a single certainty would be an insupportable weight upon 
 his mind." 
 
 The hand that could thus castigate Coleridge, would not, we 
 might expect, spare Wordsworth. Nor did it, when Hazlitt 
 was playing the journalist rather than the literary critic proper. 
 Here is Jeffrey's method reproduced in perfection. *' The spirit 
 of Jacobin poetry is rank egotism. We know an instance. It 
 is of a person who founded a school of poetry on sheer humanity, 
 on idiot boys, and mad mothers, and on Simon Lee, the old 
 huntsman. The secret of the Jacobin poetry and the anti- ■ 
 Jacobin politics of this writer is the same. His lyrical poetry 
 was a cant of humanity about the commonest people, to level 
 the great with the small ; and his political poetry is a cant oi 
 loyalty to level Bonaparte with kings and hereditary imbe- 
 cility. . . . This person admires nothing that is admirable, feels 
 no interest in anything interesting, no grandeur in anything 
 grand, no beauty in anything beautiful. He tolerates nothing 
 but what he himself creates ; he sympathizes only with what 
 can enter into no competition with him, ' with the bare earth 
 and mountain bare, and grass in the green field.' He see^ 
 nothing but himself and the universe. He hates all greatness 
 and all pretensions to it but his own. His egotism is, in this 
 respect, a madness ; for he scorns even the admiration of him-; 
 self, thinking it a presumption in any one to suppose that M 
 has taste or sense enough to understand him. He hates all! 
 science and all art . . . he hates prose, he hates all poetry bul' 
 his own." \ 
 
 This bluster was political : Hazlitt was a Bonapartisi 
 liberal, and he was punishing Wordsworth, with any weapon: 
 which he thought would serve, for being a constitutionalist 
 But there was another Hazlitt — the literary critic ; and tkii 
 Hazlitt was for Wordsworth, not against him. The man whc 
 wrote what has just been quoted, wrote less than two yean; 
 later, " Mr. Wordsworth is the most original poet now living. . 
 Of many of the Lyrical Ballads it is not possible to speak ir 
 terms of too high praise . . . they are of inconceivable beauty 
 of perfect originality and pathos. They open a finer and deepei 
 vein of thought and feeling than any poet in modern times has 
 done or attempted." Jeffrey would now and then fling a morsel 
 of praise at Wordsworth ; but Hazlitt is here doing something 
 
FAME 321 
 
 ery different. This is sympathetic criticism ; and, for its 
 nmediate purpose, it is adequate. Hazlitt's sympathy with 
 Vordsworth was incomplete, but it was genuine. He knew the 
 oet's weaknesses ; but he knew also his strength and how 
 nighty it was. He was not a philosopher ; but he made what 
 5, after all, the central discovery about Wordsworth, namely, 
 hat he was. He describes Wordsworth's higher egoism, his 
 elf-projection into things, with some hardness of tone, but with 
 
 true insight. Of Lyrical Ballads he says, " Fools have laughed 
 it, wise men scarcely understand, them. He takes a subject or 
 L story as pegs or loops \sic\ to hang thought and feeling on ; 
 he incidents are trifling, in proportion to his contempt for 
 mposing appearances ; the reflections are profound, according 
 ;o the gravity and aspiring pretensions of his mind. . . . He 
 las dwelt among pastoral scenes, till each object has become 
 :onnected with a thousand feelings, a link in the chain of 
 ;hought, a fibre of his own heart. . . . To the author of the 
 Lyrical Ballads, nature is a kind of home ; and he may be said 
 :o take a personal interest in the universe. There is no image 
 30 insignificant that it has not, in some mood or other, found 
 the way into his heart. . . . He has described all these objects 
 in a way, and with an intensity of feeling that no one else had 
 done before him, and has given a new view or aspect of 
 nature. . . . Remote from the passions and events of the great 
 world, he has communicated interest and dignity to the primal 
 movements of the heart of man, and ingrafted his own conscious' 
 reflections on the casual thoughts of hinds and shepherds. . . . 
 'The tall rock lifts its head in the erectness of his spirit ; the 
 cataract roars in the sound of his verse. . . . There is little 
 mention of mountainous scenery in Mr. Wordsworth's poetry ; 
 .but by internal evidence one might be almost sure that it was 
 written in a mountainous country, from its bareness, its 
 simplicity, its loftiness, and its depth." This, we feel, is the 
 essential Wordsworth ; this is Wordsworth almost as Matthew 
 Arnold understood him. 
 
 Hazlitt, of course, wrote always as a contemporary critic, 
 
 with no obligation to be reverent, and with an imperious 
 
 obligation to be effective. He has said a great deal about The 
 
 Excursion^ with which, whether in its praise or its blame, little 
 
 ; fault can be found. He is quite right, we feel, when he finds in 
 
 Y 
 
322 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 it a lack of constructive power proportionate to its pretensions 
 and its length. He is quite right when he detects in it both 
 flatness and insipidity. Yet we should feel debarred from 
 saying of it, as he does, " The effect was like being ushered into 
 a stately hall and invited to sit down to a splendiJ banquet in 
 the company of clowns, and with nothing but successive courses 
 of apple-dumplings served up." That is not the way to speak 
 of a classic ; and The Excursion, with all its faults, is a classic. 
 
 Thirdly, there is to be distinguished, alike from Jeffrey's 
 jfecornful depreciation, and Hazlitt's somewhat patronizing 
 (approval, a body of cordially and intimately sympathetic 
 j criticism, which is centrally represented by Coleridge, and the 
 later, soberer, " Christopher North." We have already found it 
 in De Quincey, in Charles Lamb, and in Southey. In that 
 Quarterly article which was so pulled about by Gifford, but 
 which remains as an authentic and official counter-manifesto to 
 Jeffrey, Charles Lamb came to close quarters with The Excursion, 
 In spite of the editor's mauling, Wordsworth might well have 
 been grateful for the appreciation. For Lamb writes reverently 
 as well as approvingly ; he has no scorn for The Excursion ; 
 makes no apology for it. Even Despondency Corrected, the 
 Elizabethan Lamb — sometimes so non-moral as to have no word 
 of disapproval for Wycherley — singles out as the best part of the 
 poem. And when, at the close, he deals with Wordsworth's 
 unpopularity, he accounts for it, not by any faults, but by his 
 boldness and originality, and by the blindness of readers to 
 those grandeurs and simplicities of the world which were 
 revealed to the poet. "It \The Excursion'] must indeed be 
 approached with seriousness. . . . Those who hate the Paradise 
 Lost will not love this poem. The steps of the great master are 
 discernible in it ; not in direct imitation or injurious parody, but 
 in the following of the spirit, in free homage and generous 
 subjection." Greater praise there could hardly be. 
 
 But the most systematic exposition of this kind of criticism 
 was in Coleridge's Biographia Liter aria, published in 1817. 
 This desultory book is one of the landmarks of romantic 
 criticism. It reveals, in the light shed by an absolutely great 
 critic, the inner workings of a literary movement in which he 
 bore a chief part. The Wordsworthian criticism contained in 
 it, however, has not all an equally absolute value. Part of it 
 
FAME 323 
 
 s criticism, not of Wordsworth's poetry, but of his theories of 
 poetry, imagination and fancy ; and with those theories Cole- 
 ridge had uncomfortable personal entanglements. He collabo- 
 rated with Wordsworth in the original Lyrical Ballads^ and 
 then he edged out of the collaboration. The theory of poetry 
 which Lyrical Ballads exemplified was excogitated by the two 
 men on the Nether Stowey road and among the Ouantocks ; 
 but when Wordsworth published the full exposition of the theory 
 in later issues, Coleridge did not find himself altogether in 
 agreement with it. Much of Biographia Liter aria is occupied 
 with dissent from Wordsworth's doctrines of imagination and 
 poetic diction, and with a display of the inconsistencies between 
 his theories and his practice. But at last the critic forgets 
 controversy, and deals with the absolute value of Wordsworth's 
 poetry as it was known in 1817. 
 
 Coleridge's criticism from this point of view is very far from 
 being all praise. He complains of Wordsworth's egotism as 
 a limitation. He finds many faults and defects in his poetry, 
 and he begins by stating them. And when he comes to 
 praise, he uses an ascending climax, in which the highest 
 comes last. We must therefore begin at the end if we would 
 know where Coleridge " places " Wordsworth. He places him, 
 he estimates his absolute rank, in the following sentences : / 
 . " Lastly, and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift ^ 
 "of imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word. ... 
 In imaginative power, he stands nearest of all modern writers 
 to Shakespeare and Milton ; and yet in a kind perfectly 
 unborrowed and his own." This is enough ; such an utterance 
 from such a man, side by side with the judgments of Jeffrey 
 and Hazlitt, makes the picture of early criticism all but com- 
 plete. The rest, whether praise or dispraise, is, by comparison, 
 detail. Yet it is important detail ; and we may glance at it. 
 
 It is notable that Coleridge had the insight to praise highly 
 Wordsworth's style : i.e., in particular, the careful appropriateness 
 of his words, their " untranslatableness, in words of the same 
 language without injury to the meaning." The value of this 
 praise is heightened by Coleridge's consciousness of what he 
 calls the " inconstancy " of Wordsworth's style, his frequent 
 lapses in sentence or statement from the distinguished to the 
 prosaic. There is no doubt that Wordsworth aimed at extreme 
 
324 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 verbal conscientiousness and precision ; and we must be grateful 
 to Coleridge for hailing his success, and distinguishing it from 
 those deficiencies in style which have bulked so large to many 
 readers. And we must agree with him in finding in it, as he 
 does, a moral as well as a literary element, an evidence of truth- 
 fulness as well as of artistic skill. 
 
 Coleridge urges also the freshness and originality of Words- 
 worth's thought ; his truth to Nature ; his deep pathos, born of 
 human sympathy. The sympathy, he truly maintains, is that 
 of a spectator rather than of a fellow-sufferer in the strict sense ; 
 but perhaps, as art, it is none the less wonderful for that. " In 
 this mild and philosophic pathos," says Coleridge, " Wordsworth 
 seems to me without a compeer. Such he is; so he writes.^* 
 On the other side of the shield, as Coleridge saw it, there were 
 Wordsworth's " inconstancy " and its derivatives ; his matter-of- 
 factness, his prosaic detail, his frequent failure to produce 
 imaginative fusion. Nor was Coleridge able to approve Words- 
 worth's addiction to rural forms of low life, though his reason 
 for disapproval was different from those of the scornful critics. 
 He was ready with some reservations to admit the essential 
 dignity of the humblest human being, and the equality, in 
 certain respects, of all men ; but these were facts, he considered, 
 for the moralist rather than the poet ; the poet's primary aim is 
 aesthetic ; and it is somewhat morbid to derive poetic pleasure 
 exclusively, or even chiefly, from the lowest rank of life, especially 
 when, as in the case of the Wanderer in The Excursion, the senti- 
 ments attributed to a pedlar would have been more relevant to 
 some more dignified personage. 
 
 Finally, Coleridge complained of an occasional want of the 
 sense of proportion in Wordsworth ; of an approach at times to 
 " mental bombast," the use of " thoughts and images too great 
 for the subject." It is the curse of those in whom the sense of 
 humour, involving the sense of proportion, is feebly developed. 
 
 Not much later than Biographia Liter aria, Blackwood took 
 up the championship of Wordsworth with all the generous- 
 hearted vigour of "Christopher North." Like Coleridge, and 
 unlike both Jeffrey and Hazlitt, Wilson refused to adopt the 
 " superior " attitude in criticizing. " For our own parts," he 
 wrote, speaking for Maga, "we intend at all times to write of 
 great living poets in the same spirit of love and reverence with 
 
FAME 325 
 
 which it is natural to regard the dead and the sanctified ; and 
 this is the only spirit in which a critic can write of his con- 
 temporaries without frequent dogmatism, presumption, and 
 njustice." Wilson could make a sly jest at Wordsworth's 
 expense, but only over the cheering cup of an ambrosial night ; 
 in his serious hours he kept the enthusiasm of his youth, and 
 was ready to maintain that Wordsworth was one of the great 
 poets of his age, one of the greatest poets of any age. He 
 recognized the philosophy and ethical elevation of his poetry ; 
 the " love, benignity, and ethereal purity " which made him a 
 unique interpreter of Nature. He considered him all but 
 absolutely original in two respects : as a revealer of the more 
 hidden and " silent " laws of the universe ; and as a revealer 
 of the higher and more " beautiful," because gentler, phases of 
 human nature. In both respects he seemed to Wilson other 
 than characteristically English ; his philosophy, in its contem- 
 plative quietude, was " Indian " rather than British ; his studies 
 in humanity were far away from the tastes which find poetry 
 only in characters like Richard the Third, Milton's Satan, or 
 the Giaour, Wilson cordially admitted Wordsworth's Miltonic 
 rank ; and, in some respects, was disposed to put him above 
 Milton. His sonnets, he thought, were finer than Milton's ; and 
 "the openings into immutable brightness and harmony" which 
 it was given to Wordsworth sometimes to reveal, were diviner 
 than any sublimities of terror, tumult, or discord. There was, in 
 short, an eternal value in Wordsworth's poetry which must 
 ensure its immortality. It was "impossible, in the very nature 
 of things, that he ever could be eclipsed." 
 
 Writing in the 'twenties, Wilson was able to recognize that 
 ' the tide had turned ; that Wordsworth's influence was already 
 great and was waxing. He found Wordsworth in Scott, 
 Coleridge, Southey, Crabbe, even in Byron. "The two last 
 cantos of Childe Harold . . . are in many places absolutely 
 written, it may be said, by Wordsworth. He it was that taught 
 Byron how to look on a mountain, and how to listen to a 
 cataract or the sea." That may have been so ; but it was 
 Byron's lasting vogue and the wide appeal of the sentimentalism 
 borrowed from him by lesser versifiers, which was the chief bar 
 to Wordsworth's popularity. Those who were leaving Byron 
 behind did not turn to Wordsworth, but occupied themselves 
 
326 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 with "L. E. L." and Mrs. Hemans until Tennyson was ready 
 for them. 
 
 But great powers were on Wordsworth's side, and his hour 
 had come. In the end of the 'twenties there was a great stir 
 in the national life, and that stir helped Wordsworth. With 
 the usual irony of things, the Liberalism which he so feared 
 and hated helped to bring men to his feet. If the Romantic 
 Revival was over, it was over only as summer is over when it 
 passes into autumn. It was gathering in some of the many 
 fruits of its harvest, and in that enrichment Wordsworth was 
 made rich. Poetry like his, founded in revolution, permeated 
 by philosophy, and maintaining, with serene inflexibility, the 
 indefeasible dignity of essential human nature, could not be 
 alien to an age of new ventures in thought and faith, an age 
 eager to begin an assault on privilege. The newer Liberalism 
 was too young to think of Wordsworth as a lost leader ; in so 
 far as Liberalism means thought as opposed to habit, there was 
 much in Wordsworth to nourish Liberalism, and, on the other 
 hand, the higher Conservatism which arose in opposition to 
 Liberalism, the Conservatism which idealized the past, and 
 found a voice in The Chi'istian Year and the Oxford Tracts, 
 might, if it would, claim Wordsworth's direct support. 
 
 It was in 1839 that Wordsworth's general fame was 
 announced by the Oxford Doctorate ; and it was in the course 
 of the 'thirties that he was quietly winning the posts from which 
 his forces never have been, and never will be, dislodged. He 
 had a great ally in his old University. Byron was still power- 
 ful at Cambridge ; but, among the younger and abler men there, 
 there was a band of keen Wordsworthians who pitted their 
 leader against Byron. The disciples of Coleridge, who were 
 many at Cambridge, were, of course, readers and admirers of 
 Wordsworth. What was practically a new cult was eagerly 
 adopted by men like Monckton Milnes, John Sterling, and some 
 others. Nothing could be more significant of Wordsworth's 
 widening power than John Stuart Mill's testimony. Mill, 
 though he had Cambridge friends, was not a Cambridge man. 
 He was educated by his father, trained in utilitarian radicalism 
 and agnosticism for utilitarian radicalism and agnosticism. 
 In 1826 he passed through one of the crises to which thoughtful 
 men are subject ; his creed failed him, his power of hoping and 
 
FAME S27 
 
 icting seemed to die. In 1828 he first read Wordsworth ; and 
 ife, faith, and hope came back. Mill did not cease to be an 
 agnostic and a utilitarian; but he became, through Wordsworth's 
 agency, a new man. He was no Wordsworthian ; he thought 
 
 ere were greater living poets than Wordsworth ; nay, he 
 :hought him "the poet of unpoetical natures." But all the 
 
 reater on this account was, he believed, his healing power. ! 
 Mightier poets might soar too high, and dazzle instead of j 
 comfort. Wordsworth, by his contemplative tranquillity, taught 
 the art of lasting happiness. 
 
 Mill remained a Benthamite after he came to admire 
 Wordsworth. Frederick Maurice upheld Wordsworth against 
 Utilitarianism at Cambridge ; but he never whole-heartedly 
 cared for him ; he thought him too egoistic to be a great spiritual l 
 teacher. Henry Tabor's was a powerful voice for Wordsworth 
 at this juncture. In 1834 and 1841 respectively, he wrote in the! 
 Quarterly essays on Wordsworth's poetry in general, and on his 
 sonnets in particular. Taylor noted the strong turn of the tide in 
 Wordsworth's favour during the ten years before 1834. He 
 himself, though no blind partisan, had no hesitation in hailing 
 Wordsworth as the greatest poet and philosopher of his age. 
 Primarily he thought him a poet : he was a philosophic writer 
 only "in the sense in which any man must be so who writes 
 from the impulses of a capacious and powerful mind, habituated 
 to observe, to analyze, and to generalize." His philosophy was 
 his own ; and could be understood only by those in sympathy 
 with him as a poet. Taylor grasped the central fact that 
 Wordsworth's subject was man ; but man " never divested of 
 his relations to external nature. Man is the text ; but there is 
 always a running commentary of external phenomena." 
 
 Wordsworth, Taylor thought, was sometimes artificial in his 
 simplicity, and so gave the enemy occasion to blaspheme ; and, / 
 in such poems as The Idiot Boy^ he attempted an impossible , 
 amalgam of " the trivial and the grave, the imaginative and the : 
 familiar." Yet his habitual sincerity was one of the sources of 
 his strongest power, and another was the accuracy of his know- 
 ledge founded on sympathy. Nor had he anything to be ashamed 
 of in his style. Speaking of Beggars, Taylor dwells on " the 
 consummate art with which it is constructed ; the free vigour of 
 the * liquid lapse ' of the verse ; the care which is taken that there 
 
328 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 shall be no prominences, nothing which shall arrest attention 
 and exact admiration for parts to the injury of the rest" 
 
 For Wordsworth's intellectual powers in general, Taylor had 
 the highest admiration ; he would not have been misplaced in 
 any situation ; he was in possession of '*a complete mind." 
 
 Yet in the fame which Wordsworth reaped in the last twenty 
 I years of his life, his power as a spiritual teacher was the chief 
 / factor. His most appreciative readers in his old age did not 
 think of comparing him with Byron ; they were not concerned 
 either to condemn or defend the novelties with which he fluttered 
 critical dovecots half a century before. Great seriousness, great 
 conscientiousness was abroad ; there was much individual heart- 
 searching ; great variety in social effort ; much intensity of 
 divergent religious thought. Wordsworth, standing outside all 
 this, was to a large extent the poet of it. He was resorted to 
 as a philosopher, a reconciler, able to grant Nature's own peace 
 to tired effort and wounded hearts. The Coeleste lumen of which 
 Keble spoke in his Creweian oration was the light of his poetry 
 to the most discerning in those days. It was, as the same 
 grateful reader wrote five years later, because Wordsworth, 
 whatever was his theme, raised men's minds " to holier things " 
 that he was loved and honoured. 
 
 Frederick Robertson of Brighton, a man of the keenest 
 sensibilities, religious and literary, spoke words about Words- 
 /worth in 1853 which are significant as to this phase of his 
 /reputation. He told an audience of working-men that for years 
 he had tried to make Wordsworth's principles the guiding prin- 
 ciples of his own inner life. He proceeded : " The general 
 opinion about Wordsworth is exceedingly superficial. To the 
 mass of the public all that is known of him is a conception 
 something like this : They have heard of an old man who lived 
 somewhere in the Lake District, who raved considerably of Lake 
 scenery, who wrote a large number of small poems, all of them 
 innocent, many of them puerile and much laughed at, at the 
 time they appeared, by clever men ; that they were lashed in 
 the Reviews, and annihilated by Lord Byron." 
 
 Robertson's own high estimate of Wordsworth was very 
 largely ethical. " The work he did, and I say it in all reverence, 
 was the work which the Baptist did when he came to the 
 pleasure-laden citizens of Jerusalem to work a reformation ; it 
 
FAME 329 
 
 vas the work which Milton tried to do, when he raised that 
 ;lear, calm voice of his to call back his countrymen to simpler 
 nanners and simpler laws." 
 
 Plainly, then, even at the date of his death, when he had / 
 )een seven years Poet Laureate by universal acclamation, / 
 A^ordsworth was not a popular poet. The echoes of the 
 nocking laughter which greeted his early appearances had not 
 juite died away. The mantle of mere popularity had passed 
 rem Byron, first to the minor sentimentalists, and then straight 
 :o Tennyson, who, during the whole of Wordsworth's laureate- 
 jhip, and in the years immediately following his death, interested 
 (the poetry-reading public much more keenly than Wordsworth 
 did. Yet a thoughtful critic, now little heeded, who was too 
 soon lost to English letters, George Brimley, the librarian of 
 Trinity College, Cambridge, estimating Wordsworth in 185 1, 
 wrote thus : " William Wordsworth is generally allowed to have . 
 exercised a deeper and more permanent influence upon the / 
 literature and modes of thinking of our age, than any of the / 
 great poets who lived and wrote during the first quarter of/ 
 the present century." And that influence, we may be sure, was/ 
 mainly philosophical, mainly ethical, and it fell in an age which 
 5 needed it. 
 
 " He, too, upon a wintry clime 
 
 Had fallen — on this iron time 
 
 Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears. 
 
 He found us when the age had bound 
 
 Our souls in its benumbing round." 
 
 Every age, probably, thinks its round benumbing, but certainly 
 doubt and fear are far from Wordsworth ; and it must be a fatal 
 numbness which does not disappear under his touch. 
 
 More than half a century has passed since Wordsworth died, 
 and during that time criticism of the best kind has been doing 
 its slow and steady work on his reputation. We may take note 
 of some of that work, and estimate its general result. 
 I In anticipation, we may perhaps say that the general result 
 has been to define Wordsworth's greatness, and to merge his 
 philosophical and ethical in his aesthetic and literary value. His 
 greatness was assured before the close of his life ; as to that 
 criticism had decided with Coleridge and Wilson against Jeffrey 
 and the scorners. But it remained to estimate and analyze it ; 
 
330 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 it remained, in particular, to show it as poetic greatness, and not >-.;: 
 as merely ethical and didactic profitableness. The "doubts, )^ii 
 disputes, distractions, fears " of the mid-century tended to make : 
 Wordsworth seem mainly a teacher. If he is to stand as a great ' 
 poet, he must be shown as an artist primarily giving " pleasure," . 
 and only secondarily as doing good. 
 
 Skilful and reverent hands have been at work on the task. :. 
 Wordsworth, as Matthew Arnold said, " has brought luck to his 
 critics " ; they have praised him so well, and so worthily enhanced 
 their critical reputation by his means. Perhaps the first of the 
 band to deserve mention is John Campbell Shairp, the Scottish . 
 Professor of Poetry at Oxford between 1877 and 1887, a fine 
 critic, and, in spirit and tendency, one of the most Wordsworthian 
 of poets. Shairp, born in 18 19, was old enough to remember 
 vividly various ups and downs of Wordsworth's reputation ; 
 he could remember his rivalry with Byronism ; his advance to 
 the fulness of fame in which he died. He was acutely conscious 
 also of a reaction which followed his death — a reaction which it 
 would, perhaps, be more accurate to speak of as an eclipse. 
 For in the 'fifties and 'sixties Tennyson loomed so large, and 
 attracted so swiftly and so widely, that his predecessor in the 
 laurel was inevitably obscured. Moreover, these were years 
 when Browning was in his slow and remote ascendant, influencing 
 selecter spirits whom Wordsworth might have satisfied. Such 
 obscuration was really in Wordsworth's favour ; he never has 
 been, he never will be, popular as Tennyson and even Browning 
 have been popular ; and the preoccupation of poetry-readers 
 with them has enabled him to take his place quietly among the 
 classics. But to Shairp the neglect of Wordsworth seemed an 
 evil si^n, an indication of an "excitement-craving, unmedita- 
 tive age." 
 
 Nothing, in any case, could have been better than the way 
 in which the critic framed his apologia. He at once seized and 
 kept the right point of view from which to estimate Wordsworth ; 
 he showed him, neither as an eccentric experimenter in poetic 
 style, nor as an ethical teacher, but as a great imaginative poet, 
 a revealer of that inner truth of things, which is their beautiful 
 significance for poetry. Such a passage as the following showed 
 what was a new insight into Wordsworth when it was written, 
 an insight without which a true criticism of him cannot be 
 
FAME 331 
 
 ttempted. " There are many now in middle life, who look 
 
 ack to the time of their boyhood or early youth, when Words- 
 
 /orth first found them, as a marked era in their existence. 
 
 rhey can recall, it may be, the very place and the hour, when, 
 
 .s they read this or that poem of his, a new light, as from 
 
 leaven, dawned suddenly within them. The scales of custom 
 
 Iropped from their eyes, and they beheld all nature with a 
 
 plendour upon it, as of the world's first morning. The common 
 
 ights and sounds of earth became other than they were. The 
 
 eart leapt up to the white cirrhi clouds, and looked on the 
 
 sarly stars of evening with a young wonder, not felt before. 
 
 Man, too, and human life, cleared of the highway dust, came 
 
 home to them more intimately, more engagingly, more solemnly, 
 
 than before. For their hearts were touched by the poet's 
 
 creative finger, and new springs of thought, tenderer wells of 
 
 feeling, broke from beneath the surface. And though time and 
 
 custom may have done much to dim the eye and choke the 
 
 feelings which Wordsworth once unsealed, no time can ever 
 
 efface the remembrance of that first unveiling, nor destroy the 
 
 grateful conviction that to him they owe a delicate and inward 
 
 service, such as no other poet has equally rendered." 
 
 In this " delicate and inward " utterance, put forth as a modest 
 record of personal experience, Shairp inaugurated worthily the 
 latest and best Wordsworthian criticism. For what he had 
 found in Wordsworth was imagination, imagination of so high 
 ! a quality and so original in its manifestation as to entitle him 
 I who exercised it to a place among great poets. Shairp was 
 intensely religious, and exceedingly sensitive to the ethical sides 
 of things ; but he would have nothing to do with such a mis- 
 reading of Wordsworth as would make him primarily a religious 
 or ethical poet. For Shairp he was primarily a man of imagina- 
 tion, though he might not have so phrased it ; a " vital soul." 
 " The vital soul," he wrote, " it is a great gift, which, if ever it 
 dwelt in man, dwelt in Wordsworth. Not the intellect merely, 
 nor the heart, nor the imagination, nor the conscience, nor any 
 of these alone, but all of them condensed into one, and moving 
 all together. In virtue of this vital soul, whatever he did see 
 he saw to the very core. He did not fumble with the outside or 
 the accidents of the thing, but his eye went at once to the quick 
 — rested on the essential life of it. He saw what was there, but 
 
332 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 had escaped all other eyes. He did not import into the out- 
 ward world transient fancies or feelings of his own, * the pathetic 
 fallacy,' as it has been named ; but he saw it, as it exists in 
 itself, or perhaps rather as it exists in its permanent moral 
 relations to the human spirit." Could the action of imagination 
 be better described or in more general terms ? Here, indeed, is 
 the common platform on which all the great artists stand. This 
 is their power, their prerogative ; here is at once their starting- 
 point and their goal. Sir Leslie Stephen, early in the 'seventies, 
 devoted one of his most thoughtful essays to Wordsworth. The 
 title of the essay, ** Wordsworth's Ethics," is significant of the 
 critic's point of view, though it hardly defines the scope of 
 the criticism. Stephen firmly grasps Wordsworth as a philoso- 
 pher ; and he admires him as a moral teacher. But his essay is 
 mainly concerned to show the essential identity, or, at all events, 
 the harmonious co-operation, of poetry and philosophy, in the 
 explanation of the world and the guidance of conduct. Unlike 
 Sir Henry Taylor, Stephen found, and rejoiced to find, a system 
 of thought, or at least materials lending themselves to system, 
 in Wordsworth. " Wordsworth's poetry," Stephen wrote, " speaks 
 to our strongest feelings because his speculation rests upon our 
 deepest thoughts. . . . His psychology, stated systematically, is 
 rational ; and, when expressed passionately, turns into poetry." 
 Matthew Arnold, who was Shairp's contemporary and friend, 
 did much for Wordsworthian criticism, though not as much as 
 he might have done. For, in spite of early personal association 
 with Wordsworth, in spite of keen insight and considerable 
 breadth of view, his temperament was antagonistic to Words- 
 worth's, and he did not understand or appreciate him as well as 
 he thought he did. While he fully realized Wordsworth's great- 
 ness and his right to a very high place in England's poetic 
 hierarchy, and while he realized that it was his poetry, and not 
 his mere morality, that set him there, he spoiled his estimate by 
 pooh-poohing his philosophy. He was led to do this emphatically 
 by Leslie Stephen's criticism referred to above. He put Words- 
 worth's poetry and philosophy in antithesis to one another : the 
 poetry, he said, was reality, the philosophy illusion. He took the 
 popular view of Wordsworth's inequality ; he held that the trans- 
 cendent merit which he found in him belonged only to a fraction 
 of his work, a fraction from which The Prelude and The 
 
FAME 333 
 
 'xcursion were excluded. But to treat Wordsworth's poetry 
 
 lus is to subject it to an indignity, it is to mangle it into 
 
 (ishonour. Wordsworth is, indeed, strangely unequal ; didac- 
 
 cism in him again and again breaks bounds ; truth wearies 
 
 stead of delighting with its beauty ; inspiration rubs shoulders 
 
 th what looks very like platitude. But, for all that, if 
 
 ordsworth's philosophy is illusion, his poetry is not worth 
 
 uch. If it is a disservice to him to reprint The Excursion and 
 
 ^he Prelude^ Jeffrey's estimate was not, after all, so wide of the 
 
 aark. For, when all due admission has been made for Words- 
 
 /orth's inequalities and lapses, his work remains a unity, and 
 
 nust be shown, must be accepted or rejected, as such. So much 
 
 le claimed for it ; so much must be granted him. If it is refused 
 
 im, justice will not be satisfied by allowing to some of his 
 
 )oetry that it has an admirable "criticism of life," or "natural 
 
 nagic." If Shairp's words are not true : that " the vital soul 
 
 dwelt in Wordsworth ; not the intellect merely, nor the 
 
 leart, nor the imagination, nor the conscience, nor any of these 
 
 done, but all of them condensed into one, and moving all 
 
 ogether ; " and if the totality of Wordsworth's poetry is not the 
 
 evidence of their truth, it is difficult to see how Wordsworth can 
 
 iltimately stand near Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley ; how 
 
 le can be a great poet. 
 
 Richard William Church, sometime Dean of St. Paul's, was 
 ran eminent critic of Wordsworth, who did not make Matthew 
 Arnold's mistake. Belonging in the main to Keble's school of 
 religious thought. Church felt no agnostic repulsion to Words- 
 worth's " sober certainties," to his sense of the reality of the 
 Unseen, to his ever-recurring ethical emphasis, to the perfect 
 terms on which he kept with religious ideas and phraseology. 
 Whatever, therefore, he might say about Wordsworth, he was 
 quite certain not to call his philosophy "illusion." On the con- 
 itrary, he does not scruple to say, "Wordsworth was, first and 
 'foremost, a philosophical thinker." Nay, Dean Church came 
 very near to praising him for didacticism. He fixed on a saying 
 of Wordsworth's about himself, and gave it an interpretation of 
 his own. " Every great poet," Wordsworth said once, " is a 
 teacher ; I wish either to be considered as a teacher or as 
 nothing." Church conceives him to have meant not that he was 
 in any sense unpoetic or unimaginative, but that he exercised 
 
334 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 his poetic and imaginative powers under a sense of practical r 
 responsibility such as one cannot attribute to many other great [ 
 poets on an equality with, or surpassing, him. But Dean Church , 
 never forgets that his work was poetry ; and must be tried by j 
 the canons of poetry, i.e. primarily by intellectual and aesthetic 
 canons. He finds in the first Lyrical Ballads alone " force and 
 originality of thought, vividness and richness of imagination, 
 command over the instrument of language, in its purity, its to 
 beauty, and its majesty." He freely accepts Wordsworth's own lie: 
 estimate of his innovations in poetry ; he believes that the lowli 
 ness of his themes and diction was the result of imaginative jic: 
 insight, not of affected puerility. The "inflexible loyalty of 
 truth" which he defines as *'the prime condition of all his jtlie 
 writings " was loyalty to truth which " could only be reached by 
 thought and imagination." In this critic's estimate, Words- 
 worth's harvest of truth, gathered in by width and depth of 
 imagination, supplemented the gifts of Shakespeare and Milton, 
 and was contributed to by such writers as Thackeray, Dickens, 
 and George Eliot Nor, with such an estimate, does Dean 
 Church's sympathy with Wordsworth's high morality blind him 
 to his literary limitations and defects. He finds in him an 
 egotism which lowers him ; a narrowness which neutralizes, 
 hinders his insight ; a pompousness which spoils his style. 
 And he finally identifies himself with Coleridge's reverent and 
 undazzled appraisement. 
 
 Mr. Stopford Brooke, who has done so much towards the 
 better understanding of English poetry, has done much towards, 
 the better understanding of Wordsworth. More, perhaps, than 
 any other critic, he has realized what in him may be called 
 mystical, its reality and its importance. The quasi-personality 
 which Wordsworth found in Nature, the unity of thought which 
 he attributed to it, Mr. Stopford Brooke takes seriously, and 
 shows as the poet's central discovery. He points out that his 
 view of Nature as pervaded by one living soul, though it has 
 affinities with the view of some Italian Neo-Platonists of the 
 Renaissance, was quite new in English poetry. He was " the 
 first who loved Nature with a personal love." 
 
 The remainder of the criticism which deserves notice is 
 significant. For it proceeds from men who, from one cause 
 or another, are detached from moral prejudice and religious 
 
FAME 335 
 
 repossession ; many of whom are not ill disposed to toy with 
 he notion of " art for art's sake," and all of whom are well 
 iware that verse is not made poetry by being enlisted on the 
 ide of religion and virtue. ^ 
 
 Mr. Swinburne has praised Wordsworth highly at the expense ' 
 i Byron, and criticized him chiefly in opposition to Matthew 
 Arnold, so his estimate is too heavily seasoned with controversy 
 o live as a great appreciation. Yet the genuine homage, which 
 le makes no attempt to disguise or restrain, paid by him to a 
 Doet in all respects so heterogeneous as Wordsworth, is an 
 mportant sign of the times. 
 
 The late Mr. Frederick Myers gave us, in his monograph on 
 ;he poet, an excellent study of Wordsworth, based on the 
 ipproving acceptance, in his main, of his philosophy of Nature, 
 lis general conception of poetry, and his imaginative treatment 
 )f humanity. As regards the last point, Myers reached a 
 generalization in advance, perhaps, of anything hitherto asserted 
 n Wordsworth's praise. " We may almost venture ... to assert 
 hat no writer since Shakespeare has left us so true a picture of 
 he British nation." One wonders what Jeffrey, Hazlitt, or, for 
 hat matter, Coleridge, would have said to such a dictum. 
 
 Almost simultaneously with Myers, Sir John Seeley, in his ^^^^ -^ 
 Vatural Rdigion, linked Wordsworth with Goethe — superficially 
 lis acute literary antagonist — as one of the two great poets 
 \i\\Q expounded and exhibited the ideal natural religion, the 
 levotion and worship which may be paid to the Universe, con-' 
 :eived as a unity or system of inter-relations. 
 
 Mr. John Morley's admiration is less loftily pitched. His 
 istimate involves something of a return to the ethical respect 
 md gratitude of the mid-nineteenth century. Wordsworth's 
 )rimary claim on this critic's attention is, one can plainly see, 
 lis teaching ; the process of ethical simplification and purifica- 
 ion — what was best in Rousseau with none of what was bad — 
 ^hich was wrought by the austere revolutionary-conservative 
 ;nthusiast of Grasmere and Rydal. When he comes to a 
 mrely literary estimate, he falls back on the time-honoured 
 .ntithesis between Wordsworth inspired and Wordsworth un- 
 nspired, and is disposed to place him as mere poet, not only 
 auch below the greatest classics, but considerably below some 
 ►f his great contemporaries. Yet it is significant that he does 
 
336 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 not ultimately yield to the temptation. His last word is that 
 Wordsworth probably will itand below Shakespeare, Milton, 
 and Dante, but that he cannot be sure. After all literary 
 deductions have been conscientiously made, what remains 
 seems so great that the critic must account for it. He does so 
 by fixing once more on the ethical in Wordsworth, on his 
 " direct appeal to will and conduct " as that which places him 
 "on a line just short of the greatest of all time." This moral 
 appeal, Mr. Morley holds, is made poetically ; it is no system in 
 verse ; it stands or falls with no religious or metaphorical pre- 
 possession ; it reaches us, often through a fanciful, sometimes 
 through a false, medium. All the same, it is the appeal of 
 sincerity ; it proceeds from truthfulness, from one who saw and 
 knew things — many things, at least — with his own eyes and to 
 the bottom. So he was able to " bring the infinite into common 
 life," and, by doing so, " to assuage, to reconcile, to fortify." 
 
 From our point of view, the most important contribution to 
 Wordsworthian criticism is the latest, the careful study of Pro- 
 fessor Walter Raleigh. For here at last we get as complete 
 detachment as we can hope for ; here is no party-manifesto ; 
 no halting between ethical approval and literary fault-finding ; 
 this is the first genuine twentieth-century reaction to Words- 
 worth's influence. The wheel has come full circle ; and Words- 
 worth is avenged of all his adversaries. 
 
 Professor Raleigh is no ** Wordsworthian " ; he is as con- 
 scious of Wordsworth's shortcomings as of his successes ; but 
 he knows that, taken for all in all, and as he is, he is a great 
 poet, whom it is the business of true criticism to expound on 
 the assumption of his originality, not to judge according to 
 Aristotelian or other canons. "Criticism," he tells us, "must 
 . . . follow the poet, if he gives any token of being worth the 
 following, step by step, recreating his experiences, hanging on 
 his words, disciplining itself to the measure of his paces, 
 believing in him and living with him." And Professor Raleigh 
 ties himself to his own rescript ; he enters into Wordsworth 
 with reverence and sympathy, not so much either praising or 
 blaming him, as showing his method and analyzing his results. 
 He takes him quite seriously throughout, in his dealings with 
 Nature and in his dealings with Man, believing in the genuine- 
 ness, the reality, of what Wordsworth found in them. So 
 
FAME 337 
 
 strongly, indeed, does Professor Raleigh believe in the reality 
 Df those Wordsworthian assertions which many readers have 
 jhaken their heads over as "mystic," and which even Mr. 
 VEorley smiles at as mere play of fancy, that it is perhaps his 
 greatest discovery that Wordsworth wrote in a "spirit of 
 science." There is a great deal to make the superficial student 
 )f Wordsworth think otherwise ; he seems to have a quarrel 
 ivith science, to regard it as "murdering to dissect," as seeing 
 ^things "in disconnection dull and spiritless." But Professor 
 Raleigh is impressed by Wordsworth's famous saying that 
 '* Poetry is the impassioned expression which is in the counte- 
 nance of all Science " ; and he concerns himself to show that 
 the truth of the saying can be proved out of Wordsworth's own 
 work. Wordsworth's whole-hearted delight in Nature, the 
 sober cheerfulness of his hopes for the race, the profound awe 
 with which he came back from his visits to the " mind of Man,'* 
 were quite untainted with that distaste for reality which both 
 religion and art have often felt ; Wordsworth faced reality fully 
 with no impulse either to flee or to falsify ; and this, Professor 
 Raleigh reminds us, is the characteristic attitude of science. 
 Poetry smiles in the eyes of science ; beauty is begotten of 
 truth. 
 
 Wordsworth, in Professor Raleigh's estimate, was, before all 
 things, a seer : in his vision itself, and its inherent power, not in 
 any morals drawn from it by the poet, lies the moral force 
 which it is impossible not to feel in Wordsworth. It is thus that 
 Wordsworth is a teacher without being, in his best work, 
 didactic ; that he is philosophic without forfeiting poetry. And 
 he is not only a seer, but an adventurous explorer ; his imagi- 
 nation often led him into places beyond which there is no foot- 
 hold. It is in such situations that he comes nearest to failure. 
 He pressed onward to a point where speech fails and drops into 
 silence, where thought is baffled and turns back upon its own 
 footsteps. When we read him aright, we accompany him on his 
 great expeditions ; and are braced by sharing his honourable 
 retreats. " To know him is to learn courage ; to walk with him 
 is to feel the visitings of a larger, purer air, and the peace of an 
 unfathomable sky." 
 
 And so, at the end of our consorting with Wordsworth, 
 seeing him among his friends and fellow-workers, trying to 
 
338 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 realize him in his habit as he lived, and to read the features of 
 his genius, not only in his own writings, but in those answering 
 minds which have felt him most acutely, we bear away, it may 
 be hoped, a true image. We see him set free, after long 
 bondage, from the shackles of comparison, and the pitiful tyranny 
 of mockers and scorners. It does not interest us to assert or 
 deny his inferiority to other poets, any more than it would to 
 assert or deny the inferiority of the beauty of spring to the 
 beauty of autumn, of the pageantry of dawn to the pageantry 
 of sunset. Why should we insult the great brotherhood of song 
 by vulgar reasonings as to which shall be greatest ? Enough 
 for us that in that brotherhood Wordsworth has an undisputed 
 place. Let us compare him — and the more the better — with 
 Shakespeare, Milton, Gray, Burns, Shelley, or whom we will, 
 that we may, if possible, determine what is his special contri- 
 bution to the riches of the human spirit. But let us not misread 
 the lesson of his unconquerable solitariness, his serene egoism, 
 his austere isolation. They were the result neither of his great- 
 ness nor of his littleness, but of his individuality. It fell to him 
 to do — imperfectly, it may be, and at times almost repellently — 
 a peculiar work for poetry, to exercise a daring contemplative 
 and penetrative imagination in an age of many revolutions, with 
 the modern spirit developing at great proportionate speed. It 
 was work which could be done only in a beautiful and remote 
 place, sparsely peopled with simple folk. The literary excite- 
 ments of London, the stimulation of foreign scenery and races, 
 the convivialities and sensualities from the midst of which some 
 other poets have somehow learned to deliver their message, 
 would have made Wordsworth's message impossible. He had 
 many friends, and was always glad to see them ; but his teachers 
 and intimate companions could be none other than the stars 
 and the hills and the waters, and those human beings, at once 
 common and rare, who seemed to share their elemental life. 
 
 It is Wordsworth's great triumph that he has at last per- 
 suaded us to take him substantially at his own estimate, and 
 precisely as he was. Early critics thought him much of an 
 impostor ; whatever we may think of him, w^e shall never again 
 think that. The world which we find in his poetry may not be 
 the whole world, but it is the real world ; revealed to imagina- 
 tion and reproduced by art such as only great poets possess. 
 
FAME 339 
 
 And Wordsworth's narrowness, his petulant and ungracious 
 exclusions, do not, we now see, avail to hinder his ever active 
 sense of the Universal. The simple people and homely scenes 
 with which his verse concerns itself are chosen not for their 
 simplicity and homeliness, but for the transcendent majesty and 
 awful beauty, the melting pathos or terrifying tragedy, which 
 his imagination found in them, and of which his poetry 
 convinces us. Wordsworth knew the world differently from 
 Shakespeare; but it was the same world, and he knew it, in 
 
 (one sense, as well. And the depths discovered by both poets 
 are equally unfathomable. Therefore, it is, we are sure that 
 Wordsworth is immortal. Men will find something fresh in 
 him, something vitally relevant, in all ages. 
 
 We do not vex ourselves so much with that lack of unity, 
 I of homogeneity in Wordsworth's poetry which used to be 
 such a stumbling-block. Whether by sifting, or by increased 
 tolerance, we have enough to provide us with unity of im- 
 pression and estimate. Wordsworth is not only great ; he is 
 also one. The image no longer seems of mingled gold and 
 clay. There is clay, no doubt ; but it does not deform as it 
 used to do, and it does not trouble us. 
 
 Nor do we now fall on Wordsworth, as our fathers did, for 
 
 sacrificing beauty to truth, beauty that delights, to truth that 
 
 edifies. If he could be proved guilty of this charge, his claim 
 
 to be a great poet could not be sustained. Even poets like 
 
 Dryden and Pope do not live as poets by the common sense 
 
 ; which was their truth, but by the metrical skill and wit which 
 
 ' were their substitutes for beauty. Wordsworth had no such 
 
 , substitutes to fall back upon ; nor did he need them. He 
 
 I reached and rendered the beautiful. His was the quest on 
 
 which all great poets are more or less consciously bound, the 
 
 quest for the unity of the Beautiful and the True ; and we are 
 
 sure now that he did not return baffled. We know that he had 
 
 a fresh and original vision, and we can share it. He saw very 
 
 deep into the life of things, and in its depth is its beauty. 
 
 Hence his serenity, his optimism, his cheerful faifh. His genius 
 
 had a transfiguring touch, not, as we used to think, a dulling 
 
 one. He used the artist's loftiest power when he chose the 
 
 weak things of the world to confound the things that were 
 
 mighty, when he showed what less enlightened eyesight had 
 
340 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 taken for a wilderness to be blossoming as the rose. Nature 
 and Man ; the poet has essentially no other theme. Yet each 
 poet has his own message about them, his own chosen point of 
 view from which he regards them. Wordsworth's point of view 
 was that of the artist who is also a philosopher and a prophet, 
 in some sense a priest. Rightly understood, he can never seem 
 alien, either from the religious, or from those who stop short of 
 religion. The themes of his verse, the sights and sounds, the 
 things and the persons and thoughts that engage him, are 
 grounded on the most positive and reasonable reality. And 
 yet we see on them the stamp which men set on the foreheads 
 of angels ; and the service for which he marshals them is 
 Divine. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 REFERENCES 
 of some of the principal passages quoted in the text — 
 
 Page II. Many were the thoughts, etc. Prelude, Bk. i., 70-74. 
 
 „ 18. To place hz?nself, etc. Guide to the Lakes (Frowde, 1906), 22-24. 
 
 „ 20. Many are the notes, etc. Excursion, Bk. ii., 696-723. 
 
 „ 21. A step, etc. lb. ii., 829-876. 
 
 5, 25. Thou look'st upon me, etc. Address from the Spirit of Cocker- 
 mouth Castle. Sonnet of 1833. 
 
 „ 28. The sighs which Matthew, etc. Matthew. 
 
 „ 28. The eye — // ca?inot, etc. The Tables Turned. 
 
 „ 31. There was a Boy, Qic. The poem is so called. Pdso Prelude, v., 
 
 364- 
 „ 32. While on the perilous, etc. Prelude, i. 336-339. 
 „ 32. Far above, etc. lb. i., 371, 372. 
 )) 33' Wisdom and Spirit, etc. lb. i., 401-414. Also as separate poem 
 
 called "Influence of Natural Objects in Calling forth and 
 
 Strengthening the Imagination in Boyhood and Early Youth." 
 J) 33- Oft amid, ttc. lb. i., 581-588. 
 „ 35. Those hallowed, Qtc. lb. i., 551-558. 
 „ 35. For the discerning, etc. From The Recluse. 
 „ 36. Gentle agitations, etc. lb. Prelude, 298-301. 
 „ 36. An auxiliar light, etc. lb. ii., 368-376. 
 „ 36. The snow-white church, etc. lb. iv., 21, 22. 
 J3 37* When first I made, etc. lb. iv., 137-152. 
 „ 37. ^Mid a th7'07ig,e\.c. lb. i v., 309-319. 
 „ 38. To the brifn, etc. 333-337- 
 „ 45. I cannot paifit, tic. Lifies Composed a few 7niles above Tintern 
 
 Abbey. 
 
342 ^VORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Page 46. March firmly, qXz. P?'^/z/^^, x., 511-589. 
 
 „ 50. I saw her, etc. ^'' She was a phantom of delight^'' 
 
 „ 51. She whispered still, eiz. Pr^/w^^, xi., 345-347. 
 
 „ 51. But for thee, tie. lb. xiv,, 247-256. 
 
 „ 53. For the Man who, tic. Ex'cursio7t,\w., i2oZ-i2?.(). 
 
 „ 53. The Being, etc. lb. iv., 1 264-1 274. 
 
 ,, 65. I heard, etc. Lines writte?t in Early Spring. 
 
 „ 66. Nay, traveller, rest ! etc. Lines left upon a seat in a yew-tree. 
 
 „ 73. Thus fear relaxed, etc. Prel^ide, xiv., 2S2-201. 
 
 „ y^' That su7n7ner, etc. lb. xiv., 395-413. 
 
 „ 82. I mourned with thousands, etc. At the Grave of Burns, iSo^. 
 
 „ 120. A plague, etc. Written iti Germany. 
 
 „ 121. I kissed his cheek, etc. Address to the Scholars of the Village 
 
 School of . 
 
 ,, 124. there is blessi7ig, etc. Prelude, i. 1-3. 
 
 „ 124. To the ope?i fields, etc. lb. i. 50-54. 
 
 „ 126. A narrow girdle, etc. Poems oft the Na7ning of Places. No. 4. 
 
 „ 127. As beautiful to thought, etc. The Recluse. 
 
 „ 128. 71 Natures i7ivitatio7i, etc. lb. 
 
 „ 132. 071 77ie, etc. The Sparrow's Nest. 
 
 „ 132. While I a7n lyi7ig, etc. To the Cuckoo. 
 
 1) 133- Would' st thou be happy, etc. The Redbreast chasing the 
 
 Biitterfiy. 
 „ 134. Se7it forth S7ich sallies, etc. Poe77is on the Namiftg of Places. 
 
 No. I. 
 „ 134. The Emine7tce, etc. lb. No. 3. 
 
 „ 135. A cloistral place, etc. Poe77is 07i the Na77ii7ig of Places. No. 6. 
 „ 142. Never su7i 07i livi7ig creature, etc. Stanzas writte7i in my Pocket 
 
 Copy of Tho77iso7is Castle of Itidolence. 
 „ 148. Ifi the choir, etc. Coleridge: To a Gefitlema7i; beginning, 
 
 " Friend of the Wise ! and Teacher of the Good ! " 
 „ 149. Of thee, etc. Prelude, xiv., 276, etc. 
 „ 150. To fill, etc. The Recluse. 
 „ 153. He had felt, etc. Excursio7i, l, igi-2iS. 
 „ 155. " Ah/ why," etc. lb. ix., 36-47. 
 
 „ 159. In the shady grove, etc. Poe77is ofi the Na77ii7ig of Places. No. 6. 
 „ 163. Here did we stop, etc. Elegiac Verses i7i Me7noryof my brother^ 
 
 Joh7i Wordsworth. 
 5, 171. She came, no 77iore, etc. Prelude, xiv., 268-274. 
 „ 172. ^Tis a fruitless task, etc. To a Pai7tterj beginning, " All praise 
 
 the likeness by thy skill portrayed." 
 „ 173. O, my Beloved, etc. 07i the Sa77te Subject. 
 
■tnt. 
 
 % 
 
 04 
 
 APPENDIX 348 
 
 Page 238. He wrote three poems. The second of the three, from which the 
 verses on p. 239 are quoted, was written many years after 
 the visit to Dumfries, though/^//, Wordsworth tells us, at the 
 time. 
 
 „ 268. / have felt, etc. Lmes composed a few miles above Tintern 
 Abbey. 
 
 „ 269. How exquisitely, etc. The Recluse. 
 
 „ 277. Great God! etc. Sonnet beginning, " The world is too much 
 with us." 
 
 „ 298. The Aniechapel, etc. Prelude, iii., 60-63. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abbotsford, 246, 247 
 Addison, Joseph, 48 
 Alfoxden — 
 Description of, 65, 66, 67, 242 
 Cottle's visit to, 79 
 Coleridge's visits to, 65-91 
 Thelwall's visits to, 68, 90 
 Wordsworth at, 65-91, 124, 142, 165 
 Dorothy's influence, 129, 139, 141 
 Incidents in life recorded in poetry 
 
 of that time, 68, 91 
 Recollections of, in Germany, 120, 
 123 
 Allan Bank — 
 De Quincey at, 204-205 
 North at, 252 
 
 Wordsworth at, 189-194, 203-207 
 [/Alfred, King, 39 
 lAmbleside, centre of Lake district, 19, 
 20, 23, 25, 126 ; Coleridge's family at, 
 199 ; Quillinan at, 293 ; Hartley 
 Coleridge schoolmaster at, 296 ; H. 
 Martineau settled at, 298 ; otherwise 
 
 ^ mentioned, 125, 141, 143, 202, 254, 
 300, 301, 306 
 America, *' Pantisocratic" plan of emi- 
 ¥ gration to, 42-43 
 
 Amiens, Peace of, 183-187 
 If Anderson, Dr., 284 
 Apennines, 248 
 Armathwaite, 47 
 i Arnold, Matthew, criticism by, of Shelley, 
 269, 270 ; of Wordsworth, 332-333 ; 
 view opposed by Swinburne, 335 ; 
 knowledge of Wordsworth, 321 ; at 
 
 Oxford, 290 ; on Wordsworth's critics, 
 
 330 
 Arnold, Dr. Thomas, home of, 291, 298 : 
 
 Wordsworth's intimacy with, 306, 307 ; 
 
 death of, 307 ; otherwise mentioned, 
 
 12, 126 
 Arnold, Mrs. Thomas, 313 
 Arrochar, 237 
 Ashburner, Thomas, 140 
 Ashby-de-la-Zouch, 157 
 Askrigg, 128 
 Atkinson, 309 
 Awe, Loch, 239 
 
 B 
 
 Baillie, Joanna, 305 
 
 Bartholomew, John, 66 
 
 Barton Fell, 136 
 
 Bassenthwaite, 23 
 
 Bath, 40, 43 
 
 Beaumont, Lady, Wordsworth's letters 
 to, 2, 157 
 
 Beaumont, Sir 'George, presents Apple- 
 thwaite to Wordsworth, 157 j founder 
 of National Gallery, 158; Words- 
 worth's letter to, 161 ; death of, 158 ; 
 otherwise mentioned, 165, 286 
 
 Belle Isle, Windermere, 293 
 
 Birmingham, Lloyd at, 58, 59, 157 
 
 Blackwood, William, 255 
 
 Blake, 4, 82 
 
 Blakesware, 59, 60 
 
 Blea Tarn, " Solitary's " cottage near, 
 20 
 
 Blencathara, 23, 24 ; Lamb and Mary at, 
 222 
 
346 
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Bolton, Colonel, 256, 257 
 Bootle, 174, 175 
 Borrowdale, 19, 23 
 Boswell's son with Wordsworth, 1 15 
 Bowles, Caroline (Mrs. Southey), 1 16 
 Bowles, Rev. W. Lisle, 94 
 Brathay, 22 
 Bridgnorth, 199 
 
 Bridgwater, description of, 39 ; other- 
 wise mentioned, 55, 198, 217 
 Brimley, George, 329 
 Bristol, Burke member for, 41 ; capital 
 of West, 40, 41 ; Coleridge at, 42, 43, 
 54> 55» S^> 208 ; Cottle's home, 41 ; 
 Hmiiphry Davy at, 156; De Quincey 
 at, 198, 199, 203, 204 ; Southey at, 41, 
 42, 43, 54, 56 J Thelwall's birthplace, 
 67 ; Wordsworth at, with Dorothy, 55, 
 91 ; otherwise mentioned, 44, 217 
 Brompton, 170 
 Brooke, Stopford, on "Dove Cottage," 
 
 131 ; Wordsworth's critic, 334 
 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 290 
 Browning, Robert, 15, 147, 166, 178, 
 
 289, 290, 330 
 Bryder, Miss, 293 
 Bunsen, 289 
 Burke, Edmund, 40, 41 
 Burnett, Robert, 43, 56 
 Burns, Robert — 
 Death of, 82 
 
 Gray, Shenstone, and Thomson, admi- 
 ration for, 82 
 Lamb's estimate of, 94 
 Wordsworth's love for, 10 ; tribute to, 
 
 82, Ss J estimate of, 10, 238, 239 
 Otherwise mentioned, 4, 82, 83, 136 
 Buttermere, 19, 24, 222 
 Byron, Lord — 
 
 Estimates of — by Lamb, 258 ; by 
 Jeffrey, 316 ; by North, 325 ; by 
 Swinburne, 335 
 Fame of, 289 
 
 Greece, sympathy with, 262 
 Literary connections of — 
 Coleridge, with, 144 
 ' ' Lake " school, condemnation of, 
 
 96, 97 
 Scott, criticism of, 93 
 Southey, attack on, 97 ; jealousy of, 
 
 113 
 Wordsworth, satirical treatment of, 
 
 Byron, Lord — continued 
 
 10 ; criticism of, 258 ; accused c 
 plagiarism by, 261 ; comparisoi 
 with, 261, 262 ; no comparison ii 
 later years, 328 
 Orientalism of, no 
 Poetry of — 
 
 Character of, 261, 263 
 Popularity of, 108, 316, 326, 329 
 Romanticism of, 6, 93 ; his attack on 
 , Romanticism, 93 
 ^ Style of, 261-263 
 Otherwise mentioned, 4, 278 
 
 C 
 
 Calais, 170, 186, 222 
 
 Calvert, Raisley, visited by Wordsworth 
 47, 50 ; death of, and bequest t( 
 Wordsworth, 48, 49 
 
 Calvert, William, 47, 50 
 
 Cambridge — 
 
 Brimley, George, at Trinity, 329 
 Byron's popularity at, 326 
 Coleridge at, 42, 43, 60, 326 
 Wordsworth — at St. John's, 17, 26 
 44, 46, 213 ; his nephew Master o 
 Trinity, 24 ; his friends, 48, 49 
 honours, 289 
 
 Camoens, 185, 293 
 
 Canning, George, 256, 257 
 
 Cardiganshire, 80 
 
 Carlisle, 135, 232, 238 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, description of Southej 
 by, 99-105 ; on Coleridge's weakness 
 144; wedding journey of, 170 
 description of Mrs. Wordsworth by 
 172; sympathy of, with revolutionar) 
 ideas, 301 ; description of Words wort! 
 by> 3O3~305 » nieeting with him, 302 
 
 304 
 Carlyle, Mrs., 102 
 Cartmell, 46 
 Champion, Richard, 41 
 Chatterton, Thomas, z^, 136 
 Chaucer, 197, 259 
 Christ's Hospital, 59 
 Church, Dean, 333, 334 
 Cintra — 
 
 Convention of, 190 — Wordsworth' 
 horror at, 19 1 ; his pamphlet on 
 19s, 204 
 
 Southey at, 50 
 
INDEX 
 
 347 
 
 *orti 
 
 iJlarkson, friend of Wordsworth, 156, 
 157 J opponent of slave trade, 156 ; 
 description of Mrs. Wordsworth by, 
 173; caters for Lamb and Mary at 
 Dove Cottage, 223 
 31arkson, Mrs., 156, 157, 223 
 Clevedon, 50 
 Clovenford, 240 
 Cocker, 24 
 Cockermouth, 23, 24, 46, 125; '*nest" 
 
 in garden at, 132 
 Coker, 19 
 Coleorton, 157, 244 
 
 Coleridge, Derwent, birth of, 142 ; child- 
 hood at Greta Hall, 105 ; visit to 
 Wordsworth, 199 ; with Wordsworth 
 at Hartley's death, 297 
 Coleridge, Hartley, birth of, 54 ; child- 
 hood at Nether Stowey, 55 ; at Greta 
 Hall, 105 ; visits Wordsworth, 199, 
 295 ; Wordsworth's love for, 295-298 ; 
 career of, 296, 297 ; death of, 297 ; 
 H. Martineau's opinion of, 298 
 Coleridge, Sir John Taylor, 291 
 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor — 
 Ancestry of, 42 
 
 Appearance of, 42, 100 ; described by 
 Dorothy Wordsworth, 55 ; by De 
 Quincey, 198 
 Career of — birth, 42; at Christ's 
 Hospital, 59 ; at Cambridge (Jesus 
 College), 42, 43, 326 ; enlists, 42 ; 
 visits Southey at Oxford, 42 ; Welsh 
 tour, 42 ; at Bristol — plans emigra- 
 tion scheme, 42, 43, 46 ; engagement, 
 43, 60 ; walks in Somerset, 43, 56 ; 
 takes degree at Cambridge, 43 ; in 
 London, 43 ; marriage, 43, 92, 104 ; 
 at Clevedon, 50 ; at RedcHffe, 54- 
 55 ; plans " Watchman," 54 ; birth 
 of Hartley, 54 ; visit to Racedown, 
 55, 58 ; at Nether Stowey, 55-91 ; 
 visit to Alfoxden, 67-91 ; " Ancient 
 INIariner " published in " Lyrical 
 Ballads," 73, 77-81, 91 ; at Ham- 
 burg, 91, 119; at Ratzeburg and 
 Gottingen, 11 9- 124; at the Lakes, 
 125 ; at Greta Hall, ii, 23, 142 ; in 
 Malta, 198 ; separation from his wife, 
 204 ; at Highgate, 208 ; Scotch tour 
 with Wordsworth and Dorothy, 237 ; 
 at Fox How, 291-292 ; death of, 208 
 
 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor — contimied 
 Characteristics of — 
 
 Affection, 58, 62, 143, 145 
 Critical faculty, 176, 177, 334 
 Despondency, 145, 148, 237 
 Irresolution and vagrancy, 142-145, 
 
 237 
 
 Irresponsibility and neglect of home 
 duties, 65, 105, 142-145, 204 
 Criticisms by — of Wordsworth, 3, 183, 
 
 219, 322-324, 329, 335 ; of Lamb, 
 
 64, 65 ; of Southey, 98 
 Estimates of^by Wordsworth, 9, 10, 
 
 233, 235, 258, 263 ; by Lamb, 61 ; 
 
 by Carlyle, 144 ; by De Quincey, 
 
 198, 213 ; by Blackioood's Magazine^ 
 
 255 
 Family of, 65, 105, 142-I45, 199, 204, 
 
 291, 295-298 
 Literary connections and friendships 
 with — 
 
 Beaumont, Sir George, 157 
 
 Blackwood, 255, 272 
 
 Byron, 144 
 
 Carlyle, 144 
 
 Cottle, 41, 79 
 
 Davy, Humphry, 156 
 
 De Quincey, 198, 199-203 
 
 Lamb, 60, 66, 94, 217, 218, 222- 
 223 
 
 Lloyd, Charles, 58, 157 
 
 North, 252 
 
 Poole, Thomas, 56-58 
 
 Southey, 42, 54, 56, 60, 92, 94, 98 ; 
 decline of friendship, 54, 114 
 
 Thelwall, 90 
 
 Wordsworth, 54-55, 91-92, 114, 125, 
 133, 141-149, 233, 248, 297, 325, 
 326 ; joint work with " Lyrical 
 Ballads," 7, 76-91, 93, 142, 219, 
 317 ; first line of " We are Seven," 
 8; plan of "Ancient Mariner," 
 
 77 
 
 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 66, 70-76, 
 
 91, 141-145 
 Politics of, 42, 56, 68, 90, 319 
 Publications of — 
 
 *' Biographia Literaria," 272 
 "Christabel," 79, 144, I45 
 "Lyrical Ballads," 67, 76-91, 142, 
 219 
 Religion of, 44, 54, 57 
 
848 
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor — continued 
 Reputation of, 9, 10, 94, 233, 235, 
 
 258 
 Style of — inferior to Dorothy Words- 
 worth, 72 ; as nature painter, 64, 
 145-147 ; unequal in versification, 
 144 J great imaginative powers, 147 
 
 Coleridge, Sarah (Sarah Fricker), engage- 
 ment of, 43 ; marriage, 43, 92, 104 ; at 
 Greta Hall, 199, 200, 201, 203 ; receives 
 De Quincey, 203 ; visits Wordsworth, 
 I43> 199 ; neglected by her husband, 
 60, 142, 143, 145 ; jealousy of Dorothy, 
 145 ; separated from her husband, 204 ; 
 deserted, 114, 208 
 
 Coleridge, Sara, childhood of, at Greta 
 Hall, 105, 114 ; with de Quincey, 199 ; 
 visit to Wordsworth, 200 
 
 Colston, Edward, 40 
 
 Congreve, William, 6 
 
 Coniston, 18, 143, 197 
 
 Coniston Fells and Water, 20, 26 
 
 Cookson, Anne (Wordsworth's mother), 
 24 
 
 Cookson, Canon, 46, 90 
 
 Cottle, Joseph, 41, 43, 79 
 
 Cowley, Abraham, 219 
 
 Cowper, William, 3, 105 ; scorned by 
 Wordsworth, 8 ; Wordsworth's sup- 
 posed imitation of, 318 
 
 Crabb Robinson, Henry, 225, 305, 311 ; 
 Dorothy Wordsworth's letter to, 231 ; 
 Wordsworth criticized by, 289, 305, 
 316, 325 
 
 Crabbe, George, 289 
 
 Crackanthorp of Newbiggen Hall, 24 
 
 Crewkerne, 49 
 
 Crosthwaite, Southey's grave at, 92, 104, 
 116 
 
 Crummock-water, 19 
 
 Cumberland, 11, 19, 20, 64 
 
 Dampier, 216 
 
 Dante, sonnets of, 185 ; Wordsworth 
 
 compared with, 313, 336 
 Darwin, Charles, 204 
 Davy, Humphry, 156, 243 
 Davy, Dr. John, 309 
 
 Dawson, EHza (Mrs. Fletcher), 298- [ 
 
 309 
 De Quincey, Thomas — 
 
 Career of — birth in Manchester, 195 ; 
 at Manchester Grammar School, 
 195 ; in Wales, B^th and London, 
 195 ; at Oxford, 195, 197 ; tour in 
 Lake District, 197 ; at Nether 
 Stowey, 198, 199 ; first meeting with, 
 Wordsworth, 200 ; at Dove Cottage, 
 130, 131, 203 ; at Allan Bank, 204- 
 205 ; tenant of Dove Cottage, 205- 
 213 ; marriage and home life, 206-] 
 207 ; at Middle Temple, 207 ; inter- 
 view with North about Blackwood' i 
 ATagazme, 207 ; publication oi\ 
 " Confessions of an Opium-Eater,' 
 207 ; editor of Westmorelam 
 Gazette^ 21 1 ; family removal from! 
 Dove Cottage to Edinburgh, 21 
 212 
 Characteristics of — 
 Affection, 206 
 Desultoriness in work, 197 
 Emotionalism, 200, 209 
 Irregularity in habits, 208, 210 
 Opium habit, 207 
 Shyness, 209, 211 
 Waywardness, 195 
 Criticisms by, of — 
 Coleridge, 200 
 Fielding, 213 
 Keats, 212 
 Le Sage, 213 
 Smollett, 213 
 Southey, 203, 213 
 
 Wordsworth, 183, 200 ; enthusiastic 
 admiration, 196, 197, 250, 315, 
 322 ; later estimation, 213, 214- 
 216 ; on his fame, 12, 17 ; on 
 "The Excursion," 215 
 Literary connections and friendships 
 with — 
 Coleridge, 198, 203 
 North, 252, 253 
 Southey, 100 ; decline of friendship, 
 
 114 
 Wordsworth, 198, 200-204, 282 ; in 
 Wordsworth's circle, 195, 219, 
 300; decline of friendship, 208- 
 211 
 Wordsworth, Mrs., 173, 200 
 
INDEX 
 
 349 
 
 e Quincey, i:\ioxa2iS— contimted 
 Literary connections v^ixh—contimied 
 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 200, 202-204, 
 209, 211 
 Publications of — 
 
 " Confessions of an English Opium 
 
 Eater," 207, 211 
 "Recollections," 213 
 Style of, 4, 93. i95. 200 
 )e Quincey, Margaret, 206, 207, 211, 212 
 )efoe, Daniel, 319 
 
 )erwent, the, 19, 23, 24, 104; ^^ords- 
 worth's childhood near, 25, 139 5 ^^^ 
 love for, 23 ; romance of Cockermouth, 
 
 27 
 
 Derwentwater, 11, 23, 126, I45. 222 
 
 Devon, 50 
 Dewey, Orville, 14 
 Dickens, Charles, 334 
 Dorset, 17, 39, 4o; Wordsworth and 
 ■^Dorothy in, 49-55 J ''Margarets 
 story heard in, 54 
 Douglas, Lord, 240 
 
 Dove Cottage, description of, 180, 189 ; 
 De Quincey's life at, 204-212 ; Charles 
 and T^Iary Lamb at, in Wordsworth's 
 absence, 223; Scott's visit to, 243; 
 Wordsworth at, 128-174, 184, 189 
 Dryburgh, 241 
 
 Dryden, John, 5, 8, 175, 176, 259 
 Duddon, River, 18, 22, 287 
 Dumfries, 238, 295 
 Dunmail Raise, 22, 134 
 Dunsink, 299 
 
 E 
 
 Easedale, 22, I34, 309, 3 10 
 
 Edinburgh, de Quincey in, 207, 211, 212 ; 
 Christopher North's life in, 249-257 ; 
 Wordsworth's and Dorothy's visit to, 
 
 239 
 Edmonton, 231 
 Eildon Hills, 247 
 Eldon, Lord, 152 
 EHot, George, 334 
 Elleray, 256, 257 
 Ellisland, 238 
 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 301, 302 
 Enfield, 231 
 Ennerdale, 18 
 Esk, 18 
 
 Esthwaite, 26; boating scene at, 32; 
 
 influence of, on Wordsworth's love of 
 
 nature, 27, 28, 34, 36, 125 
 Exmoor, 39 
 
 Fairfax, Edward, 202 
 
 Fairfield, association of, with Wordsworth, 
 
 22, 125, 163, 248, 279, 307 
 Farringford, 294 
 
 Fenwick, Isabella, connection of Henry 
 Taylor, 102, 311 ; visits Carlyle, 102- 
 103 ; intimate with Southey, 102-103 ; 
 with Wordsworth, 310, S" *, influence 
 over Taylor, 31 1 ; better to Taylor on 
 Wordsworth, 312 ; at Rydal Mount, 
 312 ; death of, 312 
 Ferniehurst, 242 
 Fielding, 213 
 Flatholm, 39 
 Fletcher, Archibald, 309 
 Fletcher, Mrs. (Eliza Dawson), at Lanc- 
 rigg, 298-309; her impressions of 
 Wordsworth, 309 
 Fletcher, Margaret, 309-311 
 Fletcher, Mary. See Richardson, Lady 
 Forncett, 46 
 
 Fox, Charles James, Wordsworth s 
 "Hymn" on, 15 ; his admiration for, 
 134, 135 J his introduction to, by 
 Rogers, 295 
 Fox How, Dr. T. Arnold's home, 12, 
 298 ; Wordsworth's intimacy with, 306, 
 307 \ J. T. Coleridge's visit to, 291 ; 
 Julius Hare's visit to, 299 
 France, 17, 42, 190; influence of, on 
 Wordsworth, 14, i5, 45, 46, 9°, ^^3, 
 187, 193, 301, 303 ; l^is visit to, 44, 
 46, 186 ; account of, in " Prelude, 1 5 j 
 (See also Calais) 
 Fricker, Edith. See Southey, Mrs. 
 Fricker, Mary, engaged to Lovell, 43 
 Fricker, Sarah. See Coleridge, Sarah 
 
 Gallow Hill, 170 
 
 Galloway Hills, 82 
 
 Garsdale, 171 ^^ 
 
 Germany, Coleridge's visit to, 91, IS^ ; 
 visit wasted, 142 ; Wordsworth s like- 
 ness to contemporary metaphysical 
 
350 
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 poets of, 34 ; desire for independence 
 for, 193 ; Wordsworth's visit to, 91, 
 118-124, 1S9 
 Gibbon, Edward, 41 
 Gillies, Margaret, 172 
 Gladstone, William Ewart, 204 
 Glaramara, 23 
 Glasgow, 250 
 Glastonbury Tor, 67 
 Glen Croe, 238 
 Gloucester, 199 
 
 Goethe, greater works of, ii8 ; views of, 
 on Scott as novelist, 99 ; Klopstock's 
 opinion of, 119; Landor's opinion as 
 to Wordsworth's jealousy of, 305 ; 
 Wordsworth linked with, by Seeley, 
 335 ; his attitude towards, 120, 305 ; 
 death of, 82 
 Goldsmith, 3 
 Goodrich, 45, 80 
 
 Goslar, Wordsworth's visit to, 1 19-124; 
 Dorothy's influence at, 129; "Prelude" 
 begun at, 149 
 Gottingen, 119, 124 
 Grange, 45 
 Grasmere — 
 
 Coleridge's wife at, 204 ; his son's 
 
 grave at, 297 
 De Quincey at, 204, 252; his description 
 
 of, 197 
 Dorothy's influence at, 129 ; her journal 
 
 regarding, 139 
 Fair at, 143 
 
 Lamb and Mary at, 221-223 
 Situation of, 127 
 Vale of, 126-128 
 View from, 23 
 
 Wordsworth's life at, ii, 92, 128-175, 
 207, 208, 279, 313 ; his work at, 
 139 ; his children's death at, 175, 
 280 ; his political interests at, 183 ; 
 settling at Allan Bank, 203 ; his 
 meeting with Rogers, 295 ; his 
 funeral, 313 
 Otherwise mentioned, 19, 22, 153, 154, 
 170, 199, 226, 263 
 Graves, R. P., 299 
 
 Gray, 9, 259, 278 ; Burns's admiration of, 
 82 J Wordsworth's view of, 7, 8, 82 ; 
 Wordsworth compared with, 338 
 Great Gavel, 18 
 Greece, 262 
 
 Greenhead Ghyll, 134 
 
 Greta Hall, 157, 256, 257 ; Southey 
 home at, 104 ; Coleridge's life at, 104 
 142-145 ; Coleridge and Southey at 
 1 1 ; Mrs. Coleridge alone at, 204 
 Coleridge family at 199 ; visits to, b 
 Southey, 92, 1 14 ; Humphry Davy 
 156 ; De Quincey, 202 ; Charles anc 
 Mai-y Lamb, 222 
 
 Grisdale Tarn, 163, 166 
 
 Grosvenor, Southey's letter to, 106 
 
 H 
 
 Halifax, 46, 121 
 
 Hamburg, 91, 118, II9 
 
 Hamilton, William Rowan, Words- 
 worth's friendship with, 298, 299, 300 
 his letter to, on Landor, 305 ; his visit 
 to, 299 
 
 Hamilton, Miss, 299 
 
 Hammer Scar, 134, 198, 199 
 
 Hare, Julius, 299 
 
 Hawes, 171 
 
 Haweswater, 19 
 
 Hawick, 243 
 
 Hawkshead, Wordsworth at school at, 
 26-36, 125; his vacations at, 36-38; 
 dance near, 37; his writings of, at 
 Goslar, 121, 124 
 
 Hawthornden, 240 
 
 Harz Mountains, 119, 122 
 
 Haydon (painter), friend of Wordsworth 
 and Keats, 272, 273, 274 ; dinner to 
 Wordsworth given by, 272-277 
 
 Hayti, 189 
 
 Hazlitt, William, as critic, 176, 319, 
 324 ; as lover of books, 177 ; as critic 
 of Wordsworth, 183, 214, 319-322, 
 335 ; disapproves of Southey as court 
 official, 113 
 
 Helm, the, 134 
 
 Helmsley, 171 
 
 Helvellyn, 19, 22, 125, 142, 163, 248 
 
 Hemans, Mrs. Felicia, 12, 326 
 
 Highgate, 208, 232 
 
 Hogg, James, poems of, 249 ; associations 
 with Wordsworth, 284 ; Wordsworth's 
 poem on the death of, 294 
 
 Holford, 65, 66 
 
INDEX 
 
 351 
 
 |[omer, 109 
 
 :j lutchinson, Joanna, 243 
 
 la lutchinson, Mary. See Wordsworth, 
 
 Mrs. 
 aJlutchinson, Sarah, 284, 291 
 
 [nversnaid, 239 
 
 taly, Wordsworth's tour in, 24S 
 
 Jedburgh, 241, 242 
 
 Jeffrey, Francis— as critic, ii, 81, 93, 
 98, 221, 244, 316-319 ; connection 
 with Edinburgh ReviezVy 255, 316 
 •ijf Johnson, Dr. Samuel— as critic, 7, 8, 
 I7S> 176 ; as journalist, 47, 48 
 
 K 
 
 Kant, Immanuel, 1 19-120 
 
 Katrine, Loch, 239 
 
 Keats, John — estimate of, by De Quin- 
 cey, 212; by Wordsworth, 212, 271 ; 
 by Jeffrey, 316; publication of "En- 
 dymion," 272 ; criticism by, of Milton, 
 275 ; intercourse with Wordsworth, 
 271-275 ; as Romanticist, 271-277 
 
 Keble, John, 285, 286, 289 
 
 Kendal, 171, 191 
 
 Keswick, 12, 23, 47 
 
 Kilchum Castle, 239 
 
 Kir by, 171 
 
 Kirkstone Pass, 22 
 
 Klopstock, 119 
 
 Laidlaw, Willie, 246-247 
 Lakes, the, associated with — 
 
 Coleridge, Hartley, 296 
 
 De Quincey, 196, 204-212 
 
 Hamilton, 299 
 
 Keats, 275 
 
 Lamb, Charles and INIary, 221-223 
 
 North, Christopher, 252 
 
 Scott, 243, 244, 256 
 
 Lamb, Charles — 
 
 Career of— birth, 59 ; childhood in 
 Hertfordshire, 60, 230 ; at Christ's 
 Hospital, 59, 230 ; at Nether Stowey, 
 62-66, 217 ; domestic tragedy, 217 ; 
 later life with Mary in London, at 
 Margate, Oxford, Edmonton, En- 
 field, 224, 230-231 ; death, 230, 
 
 233 
 
 Criticisms by, of — 
 Bowles, 94 
 Burns, 94 
 Byron, 25S 
 Coleridge, 61 
 Cowper, 94 
 Keats, 258 
 Milton, 94 
 Shelley, 258 
 
 Southey, 94, 95 ; orientalism, no 
 Wordsworth, 81, 94, 224 ; compared 
 
 with Shakespeare, 225 ; not wholly 
 
 admiring, 220 
 Estimates of, by — 
 Coleridge, 64-65 
 Wordsworth, 219, 226 ; appreciation 
 
 of " Elia," 232 ; after death, 233- 
 
 235 
 Family of, 59, 60 
 Literary friendships and connections 
 
 with — 
 Clarksons, the, 223 
 Coleridge, 60-62, 219, 222; letters 
 
 to, 60-62, 94 
 Haydon, 272, 274 
 Keats, 272-274 
 Lloyd, 76 
 
 Monkhouse, 272-274 
 Southey, 1 14 
 Wordsworth, 62, 217, 218, 219- 
 
 228, 231 ; letter to, 232 
 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 219-228, 
 
 231 
 Publications of — 
 
 "Essays of Elia," 229 
 "Tales from Shakespeare," 224 
 Style of— as critic, 61, 176, 220, 221, 
 223, 225, 231, 316; as poet, 93, 
 217; as letter-writer, 105, 228, 
 232 ; as humorist, 217 ; as essayist, 
 230-232 ; compared with North, 
 256 
 Lamb, John, 59, 61 
 
352 
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Lamb, Mary — in London, 60 ; insanity 
 of, 61, 218, 224, 233 ; tour with Charles 
 in the Lakes, 222 ; intimacy with 
 Dorothy Wordsworth, 222, 223 ; col- 
 laboration in "Tales from Shake- 
 speare," 224 ; congenial companion to 
 Charles, 225, 230; Wordsworth's 
 tribute to, 234 
 Lancashire, ii, 20, 26 
 Lancrigg, 298, 309 
 Landor, Walter Savage, 1 14, 212, 304- 
 
 305 
 Langdale, 18 
 
 Langdale Pikes, "lusty twins" of "Ex- 
 cursion," 20, 21, 22; scenery of, 26, 
 287 
 Langside, 25 
 Lasswade, 239, 240 
 Laud, Archbishop, 286 
 Le Sage (Alain-Rene), 213 
 Leigh Hunt, 183, 274 
 Lessmg, 118, 1 19 
 Liddesdale, 243 
 Lincoln, 24 
 Liverpool, 40 
 Liverpool, Lord, 152, 262 
 Lloyd, Charles, 58, 59, 76, 157 
 Llyswen, 67 
 
 Lockhart, John Gibson, 247, 256-257 
 Lomond, Loch, 237, 239 
 London, as associated with — 
 Coleridge, Hartley, 296 
 Coleridge, S. T., 60, 203; lectures, 
 
 199, 204 
 Davy, 156 
 
 De Quincey, 203, 209, 211 ; seeing 
 "Convention of Cintra" through 
 the Press, 204 ; reading for the Bar, 
 207 
 Lamb, 66, 228, 231 
 Scott, 244 
 
 Wordsworth, 17, 44, 49, 188, 223, 
 228, 229, 244, 272, 289, 306, 311 ; 
 "Prelude" account, 153; meeting 
 with Carlyle, 302, 303, 304; last 
 meeting with John, 160 
 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 93 
 Lonsdale, Lord — Wordsworth's father 
 agent to, 24 ; makes Wordsworth 
 Commissioner of Stamps, 280 ; sonnet 
 to, 282 
 
 M 
 
 Macaulay, T, B., 99, 107 
 
 Malta, Coleridge in, 198 
 
 Manchester, 40, 103, 195, 196 
 
 Margate, 230 
 
 Martineau, Harriet, Wordsworth's neigh 
 
 hour at Ambleside, 12, 298, 308-309 
 
 mutual dislike, 297, 307 ; on Hartle; 
 
 Coleridge, 297, 298 
 
 Mathews, James, 48 
 
 Maurice, F. D., 327 
 
 Melrose, 241 
 
 Mill, John Stuart, appreciation of Words* 
 
 worth by, 326, 327 
 Milnes, Monckton, 56, 326 
 Milton, John — 
 
 Classical style of, i, 278 
 Criticisms of, by — 
 Arnold, Dr., 306 
 Coleridge, 74, 78 
 De Quincey, 197 
 Jeffrey, 318 
 Lamb, 94 
 Landor, 212 
 Morley, 336 
 
 Wordsworth, 78, 182, 286 
 Southey compared with, 97, 109 
 Wordsworth's appreciation of, 184, 
 185 J his resemblance to, in appear-" 
 ance, 201 ; Wordsworth compared 
 with, 278; by Southey, 1 15; by 
 Keats, 275 ; by North, 325 ; by 
 Morley, 330 
 Otherwise mentioned, 9, 182, 259-' 
 261, 278, 329, 334 
 Minto Crags, 243 
 Monkhouse, 272-274 
 Monmouth, Duke of, 39 
 Montague, Basil, 49 
 Montague, Basil (son), 80 ; in Dorothy's 
 
 charge, 49, 50, 66 
 Moore, Thomas, 1 10, 289 
 More, Hannah, 41 
 Morecombe, 18, 20 
 Morley, John, as Wordsworth's critic, 
 
 326, 327, 355 
 Moxon, 233 
 Mull, 239 
 Murray, John, 253 
 Myers, Frederick, 120, 335 
 
INDEX 
 
 353 
 
 N 
 
 Nab Scar, 125, 205, 279 
 Nab Cottage, 206 
 Naples, 248 
 
 Napoleon — Wordsworth's dislike of, 15, 
 187, 190, 320 ; loss of faith in, 1S3, 
 184 ; sonnet on, 185, 186 
 Nelson, Lord, 227; SouLhey's Life of, 
 107 ; Wordsworth's ideal of "Happy 
 Warrior," 167 
 Newark Castle, 247 
 Newman, Cardinal, 99 
 Newton, Isaac, 272 
 
 Nether Stowey, home of Coleridge, 55, 
 62, 68-91, 142; of the Pooles, 56, 
 57; scenery at, 64-91 ; described by 
 Coleridge, 64 ; visited by Wordsworth 
 and Dorothy, 55, 58, 59, 66, 142 ; by 
 Lamb, 59, 62-66, 217-218, 267; by 
 De Quincey, 198; "Lyrical Ballads" 
 planned at, 323 
 Nithsdale, 238 
 
 North, Christopher (John Wilson)— 
 Appearance of, described by De 
 
 Quincey, 253 
 Career of, 249-257 
 
 Criticism'by, of Wordsworth, 196, 322, 
 324-326, 329; enthusiastic, but 
 discerning, 196, 250, 315 
 Literary connections and friendships 
 with— 
 Blackwood, 256-257 
 Canning, 257 
 De Quincey, 253 
 Scott, 256, 257 
 Southey, 257 
 Style — as essayist, compared with 
 Wordsworth's, 249-257 ; with 
 Lamb's, 256 ; as humourist, 256 
 
 Ossian, 6-9 
 Oxford, 60, 310 
 Balliol College, Southey at, 41, 42, 
 
 194 
 Magdalen College, North at, 250, 252 
 Oriel College, Hartley Coleridge at, 
 
 296 ; Poole, John, fellow of, 56 
 Visits to, by Coleridge, 56 ; by Lamb, 
 2 A 
 
 Oxioxd—contiHued 
 
 230; by Wordsworth, for degree, 
 2S9 
 
 Worcester College, De Quincey at, 197, 
 1 98 
 
 Parret, 39 
 
 Pasley, 193 
 
 Patterdale, 163 
 
 Peebles, 240 
 
 Peel, Sir Robert, 289 
 
 Peel Castle, 165, 263 
 
 Pelter Bridge, 199 
 
 Pennines, 19 
 
 Peninsular War, Wordsworth's views on, 
 189-193 
 
 Penrith, 20, 50, 158, 201, 222, 293 
 
 Penzance, 156 
 
 Percy's "Reliques," 8 
 
 Petrarch's sonnets, 185 
 
 Philips, Ambrose, 317 
 
 Pinney, 49, 65 
 
 Pitt, William, 48 
 
 Plumer, 59 
 
 Poole, Rev. John, 57, 68 
 
 Poole, Thomas, career of, 55-58 ; friend- 
 ship with Coleridge, 56, 57, 62, 142 ; 
 with Southey, 56 ; with Wordsworth, 
 56, 70, 90 ; with Thelwall, 68 ; with 
 De Quincey, 198; with Hartley 
 Coleridge, 296 ; revolutionary ideas 
 of, 56, 90 
 
 Pope, Alexander, 5, 6, 8, 259 
 
 Porson, 305 
 
 Portugal, 190 J Southey in, 50, 54, 104 ; 
 Quillinan in, 293 
 
 Praed, Robert, I02 
 
 Quantocks, the, 62, 64, 65, 77, So, 91 ; 
 Wordsworth and Dorothy among, 
 55-59> 61, 139 ; " Lyrical Ballads " 
 planned among, 323 
 
 Quillinan, Edward, career of, 292-293 ; 
 at Southey's funeral, 1 16; literary 
 works, 293 ; marriage with Miss 
 Bryder, 293 ; with Dora Wordsworth, 
 293 ; Graves's guest to meet Hamilton 
 and Butler, 299 ; attacks Landor in 
 
354 
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Wordsworth's defence, 305 ; friend of 
 Crabb Robinson, 306 ; Wordsworth at 
 death of, 313 
 Quillinan, Rotha, 293 
 
 Racedown, Wordsworth and Dorothy at, 
 49-50, 65, 66, 129, 149 ; Coleridge's 
 visits to, 55, 58, 59, 141, 149 
 
 Radcliffe, Mrs., 6, 196, 261 
 
 Raincock, William, of Rayrigg, 31 
 
 Raise, 142, 189, 226 
 
 Raleigh, Prof. Walter, critic of Words- 
 worth, 336-337 
 
 Ratzeburg, Coleridge at, 119 
 
 Rawson family, 46 
 
 Redcliffe Hall, 54 
 
 Reed, Prof. Henry, 300, 301 
 
 Reynolds, John Hamilton, 275 
 
 Richardson, Lady (Mary Fletcher), 
 309-311 
 
 Richardson, Sir John, 309 
 
 Robertson, Frederick, 289 ; estimate of 
 Wordsworth by, 328, 329 
 
 Robespierre, 46, 47, 56 
 
 Robinson, H. Crabb. 61?^ Crabb Robin- 
 son 
 
 Rogers, Samuel, 2S9, 290, 294-295 
 
 Rosslyn, 240 
 
 Rothay, scenery, 22, 125, 279 
 
 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, revolutionary 
 views of, shared by Wordsworth, 3 ; 
 by Southey, 41, 42 ; Wordsworth's 
 supposed discipleship of, 317 ; his 
 likeness to, 335 
 Ruberslaw, 243 
 
 Rugby, 12, 126, 307 
 
 Ruskin, John, 12, 20, 74, 245, 246, 301 
 
 Rydal, 19, 22, 125, 127, 135, 137, 286, 
 
 335 
 Rydal Beck, 125 
 Rydal Cottage, 293 
 Rydal Mount, 125, 149, 279 
 
 Description of, by Dorothy Words- 
 worth, 140 
 Visits to, by— Canning, 256 ; Scott, 
 256 ; Keats, 275 ; Hamilton, 299 ; 
 Emerson, 30 1; Crabb Robinson, 306; 
 H. Martineau, 308 ; I. Fenwick, 
 311 
 Wordsworth's home at, 114, 207, 
 
 279-313 ; school feast on his birth. 
 
 day, 311 
 Rydal Nab, 211 
 Rydal Water, 125, 1S5, 199, 279 
 
 St. Albyn family, 65, 90 
 
 St. Andrews, 24 
 
 St. John's Vale, 19 ; in " The Wag- 
 goner," 227 
 
 Salisbury, 24 
 
 Salt, Samuel, 59 
 
 San Domingo, 187 
 
 Sandys, Edwin, Archbishop of York, 26 
 
 Sayers (Norwich poet), no 
 
 Scafell Pike, 20 
 
 Scandale Beck, 125 
 
 Scawfell, 18, 20 
 
 Scotland — Scott the revealer of, 236 ; 
 Wordsworth's tours in, 237-243, 247, 
 284, 289 ; Dorothy's journal of first 
 tour, 68, 237 
 
 Scott, Anne, 247, 256, 257 
 
 Scott, Lady, 240, 243, 247 
 
 Scott, Major, 247 
 
 Scott, Sir Walter- 
 Career of — candidate for Laureateship, 
 97 ; at Lasswade, 239 ; Sheriff of 
 Selkirkshire, 239 ; Wordsworth's 
 and Dorothy's visit to, 237, 239, 
 240 ; Jedburgh Assizes, 240, 242 ; 
 at Melrose with Wordsworth and 
 Dorothy, 241 ; at Hawick, 243 ; at 
 the Lakes, 243, 244 ; climbs Hel- 
 vellyn with Wordsworth and Davy, 
 243 ; with Anne and Lockhart in 
 Ireland, 256 ; at the Lakes with 
 North, 256-257 ; Wordsworth's and 
 Dora's visit to Abbotsford, 246-248 ; 
 visit to Newark Castle, 247 ; journey 
 to Naples, 248 ; death of, 246 
 Character of, 237, 240, 242, 246, 278 
 Criticisms by — of North, 254; of 
 
 Wordsworth, 237, 244, 245 
 Estimates of, by — 
 Byron, 96 
 Goethe, 99 
 Jeffrey, 216 
 Ruskin, 245 
 
 Wordsworth, 10, 99, 213, 236, 
 237, 240, 243-246 
 
INDEX 
 
 35i 
 
 Scott, Sir Walter — continued 
 
 Literary friendships and connections 
 with — 
 
 Byron, 96 
 
 Canning, 256 
 
 North, 256, 257 
 
 Southey, 257 
 
 Turner, 247 
 
 Wordsworth, 10, 240-244, 246-258 ; 
 letter after first meeting, 243 ; 
 tribute to, in " Extempore Effu- 
 sion,". 249 
 
 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 239-244, 
 246 
 
 Wordsworth, Mrs., 246 
 Publications of — 
 
 "Demonology and Witchcraft," 246 
 
 *' Lay of the Last Minstrel," 93, 240 
 
 " Marmion," 93 
 
 " Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," 
 
 239 
 Novels, 99, 213, 247 
 Reputation of, 96, 108, 316 
 Style of, 6, 99, 240, 243, 245, 316; 
 compared with Wordsworth, 93, 236, 
 237 ; influenced by Wordsworth, 325 
 
 Seeley, Sir John, 183, 335 
 
 Shairp, John Campbell, 330-333 
 
 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, attitude of, to- 
 wards Lake school, 12 ; estimate of, 
 by Matthew Arnold, 269, 270; by 
 Wordsworth, 262 ; his opinion of 
 Wordsworth, 262 ; publication of " Re- 
 volt of Islam," 272 ; style and theories 
 of, 262-271 
 
 Shelvocke's voyages, 77 
 
 Shenstone, William, 82 
 
 Silver How, 22, 134, 140 
 
 Simpson, Margaret. See De Quincey, 
 Mrs. 
 
 Skiddaw, associations of, with Words- 
 worth, II, 23, 24, 104 ; Lake poets at 
 bonfire on, 115; Charles and Mary 
 Lamb near, 222; in "The Wag- 
 goner," 227 
 
 Snowdon, 152 
 
 Sockburn-on-Tees, 124-128, 282 
 
 Solway, 22 
 
 Somerset, scenery of, 17, 39, 40 J Cole- 
 ridge in, 42, 43, 46, 56 ; Southey in, 
 42, 46, 56 ; Wordsworth in, 55, 58, 
 59-91, 142 ; conservatism of, 90 
 
 Southey, Robert — 
 
 Appearance of, 100-104 
 
 Career of— at Westminster School, 
 
 41 ; at Balliol, 41, 94 ; Coleridge's 
 
 visit to, 42, 56, 104 ; at Bristol, 42, 
 
 56, 60 ; emigration scheme, 42-43, 
 
 46 ; tours in Somerset, 42, 43 ; at 
 
 Nether Stowey, 56 ; engagement to 
 
 Edith Fricker, 43 ; at Bath, 43 ; 
 
 marriage, 43, 92, 104 ; in Portugal, 
 
 50, 54, 93 ; at Bristol, 55, 93 ; Poet 
 
 Laureate, 97, 104 ; at Greta Hall, 
 
 II, 23, 92, 100, 104, 114 ; death of 
 
 first wife, 115; on the Continent, 
 
 116 ; at Lymington, 116 ; marriage 
 
 with Caroline Bowles, 116 ; death 
 
 of, 116, 298 
 Character of, 92, 103-106, 113-115, 
 
 117 
 Criticisms by, of — 
 
 Byron, 113 
 
 Coleridge, 81 
 
 De Quincey, 206, 208 
 
 Wordsworth, 81, 115, 322 
 Estimates of, by — 
 
 Byron, 97. "S 
 
 Carlyle, 99, 103 
 
 Coleridge, 98 
 
 De Quincey, 10 1, 213 
 
 Jeffrey, 317 
 
 Lamb, 94 
 
 Macaulay, 99 
 
 Newman, 99 
 
 Stanley, 99 
 
 Wordsworth, lo, 1 13 
 Literary connections with — 
 
 Byron, 97» "3 
 
 Canning, 256, 257 
 
 Carlyle, 101-104 
 
 Coleridge, 42, 54, 94, 98 
 
 Cottle, 41 
 
 De Quincey, loi, 203, 206, 208, 213 
 
 Fenwick, Isabella, 102-103 
 
 Jeffrey, 317 
 
 Lamb, 94 
 
 Landor, 212, 305 
 
 Lovell, 43, 76 
 
 North, 256 
 
 Scott, 256 
 
 Wordsworth, 10, 54, II3, "5; 
 criticises Wordsworth, 322 ; in- 
 fluenced by him, 325 
 
S56 
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Southey, Robert — continued 
 
 Parentage of, 41 
 
 Politics of, 42-43, 56, 99 
 
 Popularity of, li, 12, 99, 316 
 
 Publications of, 94-95, 107, 1 13 
 
 Religion of, 44. 57 
 
 Reputation of — as poet, 99, 107, 109 ; 
 as prose writer, 107 ; inferior to 
 Wordsworth and Coleridge, 104 
 
 Style of, 92-96, 99-100, 107-113, 
 
 277; humorous, 105; imaginative, 
 
 95 ; his orientalism, no ; originality, 
 
 109 ; romanticism, 6, 95 
 
 Southey, Mrs. (Caroline Bowles), 116 
 
 Southey, Mrs. (Edith Fricker), 106, 114, 
 
 115 
 
 Southey, Robert, 41 
 
 Spain, Wordsworth's sympathy with, 
 1S9, 193, 262 
 
 Speddings, the, 47 
 
 Spenser, Edmund, 185, 197, 259, 261 
 
 Stanley, Dean, 99 
 
 Steele, Sir Richard, 48 
 
 Stephen, Sir l/cslie, essay by, on Words- 
 worth, 332 
 
 Steepholme, 39 
 
 Sterling, John, 326 
 
 Sterne, Rev. Lawrence, 220 
 
 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 10 
 
 Stewart, Mary, Queen of Scots, 25 
 
 Stone, Arthur, 134 
 
 Storrs, 256 
 
 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 335 
 
 Switzerland, Wordsworth's anger at loss 
 of freedom by, 15, 184, 262 
 
 Talfourd, 305 
 
 Tarbet, 237 
 
 Tasso, 109, 185 
 
 Taylor, Sir Henry, friendship of, with 
 Southey, loi, 103, 114 ; with Isabella 
 Fenwick, 102, 311 ; with Carlyle, 103, 
 303 ; with Wordsworth, 303 ; famous 
 for good looks, 311 ;. Wordsworth's 
 advocate in the Quarterly, 327, 328 
 
 Taylor, Rev. William, 27, 28, 46 
 
 Tennyson, Lord, delicacy of versification 
 of. III ; dawn of fame of, 289, 290 ; 
 
 pestered by tourists, 294 ; popularity 
 of, 326, 329, 330 J Wordsworth's appre- 
 ciation of, 290 ; otherwise mentioned, 
 4, 204 
 
 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 334 
 
 Thelwall, John, 67, 68 90 
 
 Thirlmere, scenery of, 22, 23 ; asso- 
 ciated with " The Waggoner," 134, 
 226 
 
 Thomson, 8, 82 
 
 Tintern Abbey, 91, 275 
 
 Tooke, Horn, 67 
 
 Trafalgar, 167, 184, 188 
 
 Truro, 156 
 
 Turner, 247, 301 
 
 Tweed, 239, 242, 247 
 
 Tyson, Ann, 26, 27 
 
 U 
 
 Ullswater, 19, 22, 126, 157, 163, 202 
 Ulverston, 45, 47 
 
 Vale of St. John, 23 
 Valley of Rocks, 77 
 Venice, 187, 261, 262 
 Vimiero, 189, 190 
 Virgil, 109 
 Voltaire, 272, 305 
 
 W 
 
 Warton, Joseph, 7, 176 
 
 Wales, furnaces of, 39 ; De Quincey 
 
 in, 195, 196 ; Scott in, 256 
 Walpole, Horace, 6, 9 
 Wansfell, 22 
 Watchet, 77 
 Waterloo, 184, 188, 284 
 Wellington, Duke of, 193 
 Wesley, John, 107 
 West Country, 40 
 Westminster School, 41 
 Westmorland, descriptions of, 11, 19, 
 
 20 ; Wordsworth's tour in, with John 
 
 and Coleridge, 1 25-1 28 
 "White Moss," 135, 199, 313 
 
INDEX 
 
 357 
 
 Whitman, Walt, 222 
 
 Whitwick, 290 
 
 Wieland, 118, 119 
 
 Wilberforce, 156 
 
 Wilson, John. See North 
 
 Windermere, 11, 12, 18-20, 26, 31, 32, 
 125, 126, 257, 293, 299 
 
 Windsor, 46 
 
 Windybrow, 47, 48, 50, 129 
 
 Wither, 219 
 
 Wordsworth, Charles, 24 
 
 Wordsworth, Rev. Christopher, 24, 44, 
 272 
 
 Wordsworth, Dora, birth of, 174 ; girl- 
 hood, 292 ; Applethwaite presented 
 to, 157 ; visit to Scott with Words- 
 worth, 246-248 ; in London, 272 ; 
 Hamilton's writing in album of, 299, 
 300; marriage of, 306, 312; literary 
 works of, 293 ; death of, 293 
 
 Wordsworth, Dorothy, companionship 
 of, with her brother, 46-55, 65-91, 
 1 18-163, 169, 189, 203-205, 207-291 J 
 her influence on him, 50-58 ; friend- 
 ship with Coleridge, 55-155, 204, 
 237-238 ; with De Quincey, 200, 202, 
 205-212, 223 ; with Lamb, 223-224, 
 228, 231, 232 ; with Rogers, 295 ; 
 journals of, 68, 80, 141, 158, 189, 
 237, 284 ; illnesses of, 232, 233, 290, 
 
 309, 313 
 
 Wordsworth, John (brother), birth of, 
 24; career of, 158-163 ; tour in Lake 
 district, 125-128; estimates of, by 
 Coleridge, 125 ; by Dorothy, 161 ; by 
 Wordsworth, 158, 159, 160 ; death 
 of, 161 ; Wordsworth's poems on, 
 161-169 ; Wordsworth's ideal of 
 *' Happy Warrior," 167 
 
 Wordsworth, John (grand-nephew), 
 Bishop of Salisbury, 24 
 
 Wordsworth, John (son), birth of, 174 j 
 on Skiddaw, 115 ; with De Quincey, 
 202 ; house kept by Dorothy, 290 ; 
 marriage of, 292 ; at Wordsworth's 
 funeral, 313 
 
 Wordsworth, Katy, 174, 175, 209 
 
 Wordsworth, Mrs. (Mary Hutchinson), 
 marriage of, 137, 170 ; at Skiddaw 
 bonfire, 115; appearance described 
 by De Quincey, 201 ; walk with De 
 Quincey, 202 ; at Rydal during 
 
 Scotch tour, 237, 243 ; in London, 
 272 ; Scotch tour, 284 ; visited by 
 De Quincey, 200 ; by Yarnall, 300 ; 
 by H. Martincau, 308; by Isabella 
 Fenwick, 312; death of, 313; esti- 
 mates of, by Wordsworth (in "Pre- 
 lude"), 171; by Carlyle, 173; by 
 De Quincey, 173 ; by H. Martineau, 
 309; lines in "Daffodils" suggested 
 by, 72 
 Wordsworth, Richard (brother), 24 
 Wordsworth, Richard (father), 24 
 Wordsworth, Thomas, 174, 175, 210, 
 
 224 
 Wordsworth, William (son), birth of, 
 174 ; with Lamb in London, 228 ; 
 marriage of, 292 ; at Wordsworth's 
 funeral, 313 
 Wordsworth, William — 
 
 Career of — birth, 44 ; childhood at 
 Cockermouth, 24-25 ; schooldays 
 at Hawkshead, 25-38 ; at Cam- 
 bridge, 36-38, 44, 46, 49, 298 ; 
 visits to France, 44, 46 ; tour in 
 Wye Valley, 45 ; at Forncett, 46 ; 
 in the Lake district, 46-50 ; at 
 Racedown Lodge, 49-58, 60 ; 
 visited by Coleridge, 55 ; visit of, 
 to Coleridge at Nether Stowey, 55, 
 58* 59} 65 ; at Alfoxden, 66-91 ; 
 walk to Lynton with Dorothy and 
 Coleridge — plan of " Ancient 
 Mariner," 77; at Nether Stowey, 
 91 ; in the Wye Valley, 91 ; in 
 Germany, 118- 124; at Sockburn, 
 124, 128 ; Grasmerc visit, 128 ; 
 Dove Cottage, Grasmere, 12 ; at 
 Calais, 170, 222 ; marriage and 
 wedding tour, 170, 171 ; his children, 
 174 ; Scotch tour with Dorothy, 237- 
 244 ; at the Rectory, Grasmere, 
 174; visit to Bootle, 174; Katy's 
 death, 175 ; Tom's death, 175, 210 ; 
 at Allan Bank, 189, 203-205 ; De 
 Quincey's visit to, 205 ; appointed 
 Commissioner of Stamps, 280 ; at 
 Rydal Mount, 207, 224, 275, 279- 
 313 ; Scotch tour with his wife, 284 ; 
 in Ireland, 299 ; Scotch tour with 
 Dora, 247 ; visits to London, 272, 
 289 ; tour on the Continent, 289 ; in 
 Italy, 248 ; honours at Cambridge 
 
358 
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Wordsworth, William — continued 
 
 and Oxford, 289 ; Poet Laureate, 
 289, 312 ; death of Dora, 293, 309 ; 
 death, 294, 313 ; grave, 313 
 Characteristics of — 
 Abstemiousness, 206 
 AfiFection, 161, 232, 233, 237, 254 
 Despondency, 136 
 Egotism, 2, 119, 220, 272 
 Humour, lack of, 16, 89 
 Imagination, 13, 31 
 Nature, love of, 14, 17, 27-3S, 45 
 Originality, 3 
 Philosophical bent, 13-15, 120, 123, 
 
 237 
 Reserve, 208 
 
 Self-complacency, 152, 274 
 Tranquillity, 15, 51 
 Comparison of, with — 
 Arnold, INIatthew, 290 
 Brownhig, Robert, 290 
 Burns, 338 
 
 Byron, 4, 261-262, 277 
 Dante, 336 
 Dickens, 334 
 Dryden, 339 
 Eliot, George, 334 
 Goethe, 335 
 Gray, 338 
 Keats, 271-278 
 Milton, 201, 275, 27S, 333, 334, 
 
 336, 338 
 Pope, 339 
 
 Scott, 4, 236, 237, 244, 245, 277 
 Shakespeare, 54, 333, 334, 336, 
 
 338 
 
 Shelley, 262-271, 333, 338 
 
 Southey, 92, 277 
 
 Tennyson, 4, 290 
 
 Thackeray, 334 
 Critic as, 175-177 
 Criticisms by, of — 
 
 Brownin^, Robert, 290 
 
 Burns, 82, 23S-239 
 
 Byron, 258, 261, 263 
 
 Carlyle, 302-304 
 
 Coleridge, 233-235, 237, 258, 263 
 
 Cowper, 8 
 
 Emerson, 30 1, 302 
 
 Goethe, 305 
 
 Gray, 8, 9 
 
 himself, 2 
 
 Wordsworth, William — contmued 
 Criticisms by, of — continued 
 Keats, 212, 258, 271 
 Lamb, 226, 233-235 
 Landor, 304, 305 
 Milton, 306 
 North, 251 
 Ossian, 9 
 
 Percy's " Reliques," 8 
 Pope, 8 
 Ruskin, 301 
 Scott, 213, 237, 240, 243, 245-249, 
 
 258 
 Shelley, 258, 262, 263 
 Southey, 113, 305 
 Tennyson, 290 
 Thomson, 8 
 Turner, 301 
 Voltaire, 272 
 Estimates of, by — 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 281, 330, 332, 333, 
 
 335 
 Brimley, George, 329 
 Brooke, Stopford, 334-335 
 Byron, 258, 261, 335 
 Carlyle, 302-304 
 Church, Dean, 333 
 Coleridge, 3, 183, 192, 258, 322- 
 
 324, 329, 335 
 
 Crabb Robinson, 305, 306 
 
 De Quincey, 17, 183, 195, 196, 197, 
 
 216, 315 
 Fenwick, Isabella, 311, 312 
 Hazlitt, 183, 215, 319-322, 335 
 Jeffrey, 31, 244, 316-319. 329, 335 
 Keats, 258, 274 
 Lamb, 81, 219-222 
 Landor, 304-305 
 Leigh Hunt, 183, 274 
 Martineau, Harriet, 297, 307-309 
 Maurice, F. D., 327, 328 
 Morley, John, 335-337 
 Mill, John Stuart, 326, 327 
 Myers, Frederick, 335 
 North, 196, 250-254, 256, 315, 322, 
 
 325. 329 
 Raleigh, Prof., 397 
 Robertson, Frederick, 328-329 
 Scott, 244-245, 258 
 
 Seeley, Sir John, 335 
 
 Shairp, John Campbell, 330-332 
 
 Shelley, 258 
 
INDEX 
 
 359 
 
 Wordsworth, William — continued 
 Estimates of, by — continued 
 Southey, 8i, 115 
 Stephen, Sir Leslie, 332 
 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 335 
 Taylor, 327 
 Yarnall, 301 
 Fame of, 17, 289; Southey's view of, 
 II5> 315-340; Toet Laureate, 289, 
 312, 313 
 Family of, 24, 46, 174, 175, 291, 
 
 292 i^ 
 
 Literary connections and friendships 
 wth — 
 Arnold, Dr., 12, 298, 306-307, 313 
 Baillie, Joanna, 305 
 Beaumont, 157 
 
 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 290 
 Browning, Robert, 15, 290 
 Byron, 10 
 
 Cal verts, the, 47-50, 133 
 Carlyle, 302-304 
 Clarksons, the, 156 
 Coleridge, Hartley, 295, 298 
 Coleridge, S. T., 9, 12, 55-91, Ii8- 
 
 155. 156, 162, 291 
 Davy, Humphry, 156 
 De Quincey, 195-216 
 Dewey, 14 
 
 Fenwick, Isabella, 3 10-3 1 2 
 
 Fletchers, the, 309-311 
 
 Fox, 15 
 
 Graves, R. P., 299 
 
 Hamilton, Rowan, 298, 300 
 
 Hemans, Mrs., 12 
 
 Jeffrey, ii 
 
 Keats, 10 
 
 Lamb, 217-235 
 
 Landor, 304-305 
 
 Lloyd, 157 
 
 Martineau, Harriet, 12, 298, 307 
 
 Montague, Basil, 49 
 
 North, Christopher, 12, 249-254, 
 256, 305 
 
 Pinney, 49 
 
 I Poole, 90 
 Quillinan, Edward, 293-313 
 Reed, Prof., 300 
 Rogers, 290, 294, 295 
 Ruskin, 12 
 Scott, 10, 239-248 
 
 Wordswor th , William — continued 
 
 Literary connections j^d friendships 
 with — continued \ 
 Southey, 54, 92, Ii4-n7. 203, 305 
 Talfourd, 305 
 
 Taylor, 27, 46, 121, 311, 312 
 Tennyson, 290 
 Thehvall, 67-69, 90 
 Walpole, 90 
 Yarnall, 300 
 
 ^ga-rentage of, 24, 46, 90 
 Personality of, 201 j when composing, 
 ZS7'; described by Coleridge, 292 ; 
 by Mrs. Hamilton, 299 ; by Yarnall, 
 300, 301 ; by Emerson, 301 ; by 
 Carlyle, 303 ; by Harriet Mar- 
 tineau, 307, 309 ; likeness to Dante, 
 
 313 
 
 Politics of, 14, 45, 90 ; revolutionary 
 views, 90, 92 ; in the Grasmerc days, 
 183-194 ; conservatism, 275, 281, 
 284-285 ; disbelief in despotism, 
 300 ; sympathy with French Re- 
 volution, 3, 15, 45, 183, 301 ; dis- 
 gust at French Revolution, 15, 45, 
 183-194, 301 ; sympathy with Spain, 
 189, 193, 262 
 Popularity of, 17 ; never great in early 
 
 days, 289, 315, 329, 338 
 Publications of — 
 "Borderers," 54 
 " Convention of Cintra," 195 
 "Descriptive Sketches," 3, 44 
 "Evening Voluntaries," 2S7 
 "Excursion," 54, 149, 152-155, 222, 
 
 225, 282, 316, 318 
 "Independence and Freedom of 
 
 Nations," 190 
 " Laodamia," 225, 282 
 "Lyrical Ballads," 7, 9, 17, 79-81, 
 84-88, 91, 160, (preface) 177, 
 195, 198, 219, 237, 250, 259, 315, 
 
 Z^^y 317, 319, 334 
 
 " Musings near Aquapendente," 
 248 
 
 " National Independence and Lib- 
 erty, Sonnets dedicated to," 15 
 
 "Ode on Intimations of Immor- 
 tality," 152, 155, 161, 274, 287- 
 289, 318 
 
 "Ode to Duly," 161 
 
 "Old Cumberland Beggar," 81 
 
360 
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE 
 
 Wordsworth, William — continued 
 Publications of — continued 
 
 "Peter Bell," 8i, 88, 89, 225, 226, 
 
 228, 275 
 "Prelude," 51-53, 124, 148, 149, 
 
 152, 161, 222, 263, 298 
 "Recluse," 129, 152 
 "Resolution and Independence," 
 
 135 
 
 " River Duddon," sonnets, 287 
 "Stanzas written in my pocket- 
 copy of Thomson's ' Castle of 
 Indolence,' " 133 
 "Tintern Abbey," 275 
 "Waggoner," i6r, 226, 228 
 " White Doe of Rylstone, 203, 282, 
 
 318, 319 
 "Yarrow Revisited," 247 
 " Yarrow Visited," 284 
 Religion of, 13, 31-36, 44, 45 ; as a 
 Churchman, 285 ; in grief, 162, 263, 
 333 
 
 Wordsworth, William — contitiued 
 
 Style of^maginative, 6, 13, 31, 78, 
 228; lacking in charm, 12; in 
 humour, 17, 89; simple, 78, 151^ 
 in sonnets, 185 ; fastidious in diction, 
 292 
 
 Workington, 23 
 
 Wycherley, 322 
 
 Wye district, 45, 91, 129 
 
 Wyke Regis, 164 
 
 Wytheburn, 19, 134, 226 
 
 Yarnall, Ellis, 300-301 
 
 Yarrow, Wordsworth's visit to, 247, 249 
 284 
 
 Yarrow unvisited, 240 
 
 Yeovil, 39 
 
 Yorkshire, comparison of Western, with 
 Lake district, 19 ; Wordsworth's family 
 from, 24 ; Wordsworth in, 170 
 
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