Wordsworth Part 3

The growth of large fortunes in England, and the increased compet.i.tion for land, has swallowed up many of these small independent holdings in the extensive properties of wealthy men. And at the same time the spread of education, and the improved poor-laws and other legislation, by raising the condition of other parts of England, have tended to obliterate the contrast which was so marked in Wordsworth's day. How marked that contrast was, a comparison of Crabbe's poems with Wordsworth's will sufficiently indicate. Both are true painters; but while in the one we see poverty as something gross and degrading, and the _Tales of the Village_ stand out from a background of pauperism and crime; in the other picture poverty means nothing worse than privation, and the poet in the presence of the most tragic outcast of fortune could still

Have laughed himself to scorn, to find In that decrepit man so firm a mind.[3]

[Footnote 3: The previous page ends midsentence, within an ordinary paragraph, sentence finished by this verse (probably an excerpt from a poem).]

Nay, even when a state far below the _Leech-Gatherer's_ has been reached, and mind and body alike are in their last decay, the life of the _Old c.u.mberland Beggar_, at one remove from nothingness, has yet a dignity and a usefulness of its own. His fading days are pa.s.sed in no sad asylum of vicious or gloomy age, but amid neighbourly kindnesses, and in the sanity of the open air; and a life that is reduced to its barest elements has yet a hold on the liberality of nature and the affections of human hearts.

So long as the inhabitants of a region thus solitary and beautiful have neither many arts nor many wishes, save such as the Nature which they know has suggested, and their own handiwork can satisfy, so long are their presence and habitations likely to be in harmony with the scenes around them. Nay, man's presence is almost always needed to draw out the full meaning of Nature, to ill.u.s.trate her bounty by his glad well-being and to hint by his contrivances of precaution at her might and terror. Wordsworth's description of the cottages of c.u.mberland depicts this unconscious adaptation of man's abode to his surroundings, with an eye which may be called at pleasure that of painter or of poet.

"The dwelling-houses, and contiguous outhouses, are in many instances of the colour of the native rock out of which they have been built; but frequently the dwelling--or Fire-house, as it is ordinarily called--has been distinguished from the barn or byre by roughcast and whitewash, which, as the inhabitants are not hasty in renewing it, in a few years acquires by the influence of weather a tint at once sober and variegated. As these houses have been, from father to son, inhabited by persons engaged in the same occupations, yet necessarily with changes in their circ.u.mstances, they have received without incongruity additions and accommodations adapted to the needs of each successive occupant, who, being for the most part proprietor, was at liberty to follow his own fancy, so that these humble dwellings remind the contemplative spectator of a production of Nature, and may (using a strong expression) rather be said to have grown than to have been erected--to have risen, by an instinct of their own, out of the native rock--so little is there in them of formality, such is their wildness and beauty."

"These dwellings, mostly built, as has been said, of rough unhewn stone, are roofed with slates, which were rudely taken from the quarry before the present art of splitting them was understood, and are therefore rough and uneven in their surface, so that both the coverings and sides of the houses have furnished places of rest for the seeds of lichens, mosses, ferns and flowers.

Hence buildings, which in their very form call to mind the processes of Nature, do thus, clothed in part with a vegetable garb, appear to be received into the bosom of the living principle of things, as it acts and exists among the woods and fields, and by their colour and their shape affectingly direct the thoughts to that tranquil course of nature and simplicity along which the humble-minded inhabitants have through so many generations been led. Add the little garden with its shed for bee-hives, its small bed of potherbs, and its borders and patches of flowers for Sunday posies, with sometimes a choice few too much prized to be plucked; an orchard of proportioned size; a cheesepress, often supported by some tree near the door; a cl.u.s.ter of embowering sycamores for summer shade, with a tall fir through which the winds sing when other trees are leafless; the little rill or household spout murmuring in all seasons,--combine these incidents and images together, and you have the representative idea of a mountain cottage in this country--so beautifully formed in itself, and so richly adorned by the hand of Nature."

These brief descriptions may suffice to indicate the general character of a district which in Wordsworth's early days had a distinctive unity which he was the first fully to appreciate, which was at its best during his long lifetime, and which has already begun to disappear. The mountains had waited long for a full adoration, an intelligent worship. At last "they were enough beloved."

And if now the changes wrought around them recall too often the poet's warning, how

All that now delights thee, from the day On which it should be touched, shall melt, and melt away,--

yet they have gained something which cannot be taken from them. Not mines, nor railways, nor monster excursions, nor reservoirs, nor Manchester herself, "toute entiere a sa proie attachee," can deprive lake and hill of Wordsworth's memory, and the love which once they knew.

Wordsworth's life was from the very first so ordered as to give him the most complete and intimate knowledge both of district and people.

There was scarcely a mile of ground in the Lake country over which he had not wandered; scarcely a prospect which was not linked with his life by some tie of memory. Born at c.o.c.kermouth, on the outskirts of the district, his mind was gradually led on to its beauty; and his first recollections were of Derwent's gra.s.sy holms and rocky falls, with Skiddaw, "bronzed with deepest radiance,"

towering in the eastern sky. Sent to school at Hawkshead at eight years old, Wordsworth's scene was transferred to the other extremity of the lake district. It was in this quaint old town, on the banks of Esthwaite Water, that the "fair seed-time of his soul" was pa.s.sed; it was here that his boyish delight in exercise and adventure grew, and melted in its turn into a more impersonal yearning, a deeper absorption into the beauty and the wonder of the world. And even the records of his boyish amus.e.m.e.nts come to us each on a background of Nature's majesty and calm. Setting springs for woodc.o.c.k on the gra.s.sy moors at night, at nine years old, he feels himself "a trouble to the peace" that dwells among the moon and stars overhead; and when he has appropriated a woodc.o.c.k caught by somebody else, "sounds of undistinguishable motion" embody the viewless pursuit of Nemesis among the solitary hills. In the perilous search for the raven's nest, as he hangs on the face of the naked crags of Yewdale, he feels for the first time that sense of detachment from external things which a position of strange unreality will often force on the mind.

Oh, at that time When 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!

The innocent rapine of _nutting_ taught him to feel that there is a spirit in the woods--a presence which too rude a touch of ours will desecrate and destroy.

The neighbouring lakes of Coniston, Esthwaite, Windermere, have left similar traces of the gradual upbuilding of his spirit. It was on a promontory on Coniston that the sun's last rays, gilding the eastern hills above which he had first appeared, suggested the boy's first impulse of spontaneous poetry, in the resolve that, wherever life should lead him, his last thoughts should fall on the scenes where his childhood was pa.s.sing now. It was on Esthwaite that the "huge peak" of Wetherlam, following him (as it seemed) as he rowed across the starlit water, suggested the dim conception of "unknown modes of being," and a life that is not ours. It was round Esthwaite that the boy used to wander with a friend at early dawn, rejoicing in the charm of words in tuneful order, and repeating together their favourite verses, till "sounds of exultation echoed through the groves." It was on Esthwaite that the band of skaters "hissed along the polished ice in games confederate," from which Wordsworth would sometimes withdraw himself and pause suddenly in full career, to feel in that dizzy silence the mystery of a rolling world.

A pa.s.sage, less frequently quoted, in describing a boating excursion on Windermere ill.u.s.trates the effect of some small point of human interest in concentrating and realising the diffused emotion which radiates from a scene of beauty:

But, ere nightfall, When in our pinnace we returned at leisure Over the shadowy lake, and to the beach Of some small island steered our course with one, The minstrel of the troop, and left him there, And rowed off gently, while he blew his flute Alone upon the rock--oh, then the calm And dead still water lay upon my mind Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky, Never before so beautiful, sank down Into my heart, and held me like a dream!

The pa.s.sage which describes the schoolboy's call to the owls--the lines of which Coleridge said that he should have exclaimed "Wordsworth!" if he had met them running wild in the deserts of Arabia,--paint a somewhat similar rush of feeling with a still deeper charm. The "gentle shock of mild surprise" which in the pauses of the birds' jocund din _carries far into his heart the sound of mountain torrents_--the very mingling of the grotesque and the majestic--brings home the contrast between our transitory energies and the mystery around us which returns ever the same to the moments when we pause and are at peace.

It is round the two small lakes of Grasmere and Rydal that the memories of Wordsworth are most thickly cl.u.s.tered. On one or other of these lakes he lived for fifty years,--the first half of the present century; and there is not in all that region a hillside walk or winding valley which has not heard him murmuring out his verses as they slowly rose from his heart. The cottage at Townend, Grasmere, where he first settled, is now surrounded by the out-buildings of a busy hotel; and the noisy stream of traffic, and the sight of the many villas which spot the valley, give a new pathos to the sonnet in which Wordsworth deplores the alteration which even his own residence might make in the simplicity of the lonely scene.

Well may'st thou halt, and gaze with brightening eye!

The lovely Cottage in the guardian nook Hath stirred thee deeply; with its own dear brook, Its own small pasture, almost its own sky!

But covet not the Abode: forbear to sigh, As many do, repining while they look; Intruders--who would tear from Nature's book This precious leaf with harsh impiety.

Think what the home must be if it were thine, Even thine, though few thy wants! Roof, window, door, The very flowers are sacred to the Poor, The roses to the porch which they entwine: Yea, all that now enchants thee, from the day On which it should be touched, would melt, and melt away.

The _Poems on the Naming of Places_ belong for the most part to this neighbourhood. _Emma's Dell_ on Easdale Beck, _Point Rash-Judgment_ on the eastern sh.o.r.e of Grasmere, _Mary's Pool_ in Rydal Park, _William's Peak_ on Stone Arthur, _Joanna's Rock_ on the banks of Rotha, and _John's Grove_ near White Moss Common, have been identified by the loving search of those to whom every memorial of that simple-hearted family group has still a charm.

It is on Greenhead Ghyll--"upon the forest-side in Grasmere Vale"-- that the poet has laid the scene of _Michael_, the poem which paints with such detailed fidelity both the inner and the outward life of a typical Westmoreland "statesman." And the upper road from Grasmere to Rydal, superseded now by the road along the lake side, and left as a winding footpath among rock and fern, was one of his most habitual haunts. Of another such haunt his friend Lady Richardson says, "The _Prelude_ was chiefly composed in a green mountain terrace, on the Easdale side of Helm Crag, known by the name of Under Lancrigg, a place which he used to say he knew by heart. The ladies sat at their work on the hill-side, while he walked to and fro on the smooth green mountain turf, humming out his verses to himself, and then repeating them to his sympathising and ready scribes, to be noted down on the spot, and transcribed at home."

The neighbourhood of the poet's later home at Rydal Mount is equally full of a.s.sociations. Two of the _Evening Voluntaries_ were composed by the side of Rydal Mere. The _Wild Duck's Nest_ was on one of the Rydal islands. It was on the fells of Loughrigg that the poet's fancy loved to plant an imperial castle. And _Wansfell's_ green slope still answers with many a change of glow and shadow to the radiance of the sinking sun.

Hawkshead and Rydal, then, may be considered as the poet's princ.i.p.al centres, and the scenery in their neighbourhood has received his most frequent attention. The Duddon, a seldom-visited stream on the south-west border of the Lake-district, has been traced by him from source to outfall in a series of sonnets. Langdale, and Little Langdale with Blea Tarn lying in it, form the princ.i.p.al scene of the discourses in the _Excursion_. The more distant lakes and mountains were often visited and are often alluded to. The scene of _The Brothers_, for example, is laid in Ennerdale; and the index of the minor poems will supply other instances. But it is chiefly round two lines of road leading from Grasmere that Wordsworth's a.s.sociations cl.u.s.ter,--the route over Dunmailraise, which led him to Keswick, to Coleridge and Southey at Greta Hall, and to other friends in that neighbourhood; and the route over Kirkstone, which led him to Ullswater, and the friendly houses of Patterdale, Hallsteads, and Lowther Castle. The first of these two routes was that over which the _Waggoner_ plied; it skirts the lovely sh.o.r.e of Thirlmere,--a lonely sheet of water, of exquisite irregularity of outline, and fringed with delicate verdure, which the Corporation of Manchester has lately bought to embank it into a reservoir. _Dedecorum pretiosus emptor_! This lake was a favourite haunt of Wordsworth's; and upon a rock on its margin, where he and Coleridge, coming from Keswick and Grasmere, would often meet, the two poets, with the other members of Wordsworth's loving household group, inscribed the initial letters of their names. To the "monumental power" of this Rock of Names Wordsworth appeals, in lines written when the happy company who engraved them had already been severed by distance and death;

O thought of pain, That would impair it or profane!

And fail not Thou, loved Rock, to keep Thy charge when we are laid asleep.

The rock may still be seen, but is to be submerged in the new reservoir. In the vale of Keswick itself, Applethwaite, Skiddaw, St.

Herbert's Island, Lodore, are commemorated in sonnets or inscriptions.

And the Borrowdale yew-trees have inspired some of the poet's n.o.blest lines,--lines breathing all the strange forlornness of Glaramara's solitude, and the withering vault of shade.

The route from Rydal to Ullswater is still more thickly studded with poetic allusions. The _Pa.s.s of Kirkstone_ is the theme of a characteristic ode; Grisdale Tarn and Helvellyn recur again and again; and Aira Force was one of the spots which the poet best loved to describe, as well as to visit. It was on the sh.o.r.es of Further Gowbarrow that the _Daffodils_ danced beneath the trees. These references might be much further multiplied; and the loving diligence of disciples has set before us "the Lake-district as interpreted by Wordsworth" through a mult.i.tude of details. But enough has been said to show how completely the poet had absorbed the influences of his dwelling-place; how unique a representative he had become of the lovely district of his birth; how he had made it subject to him by comprehending it, and his own by love.

He visited other countries and described other scenes. Scotland, Wales, Switzerland, France, Germany, Italy, have all a place in his works. His familiarity with other scenery helped him, doubtless, to a better appreciation of the lake country than he could have gained had he never left it. And, on the other hand, like Caesar in Gaul, or Wellington in the Peninsula, it was because he had so complete a grasp of this chosen base of operations that he was able to come, to see, and to make his own, so swiftly and unfailingly elsewhere.

Happy are those whose deep-rooted memories cling like his about some stable home! Whose notion of the world around them has expanded from some prospect of happy tranquillity, instead of being drawn at random from the confusing city's roar! Happier still if that early picture be of one of those rare scenes which have inspired poets and prophets with the retrospective day-dream of a patriarchal, or a golden, age; of some plot of ground like the Ithaca of Odysseus, [Greek: traechsi all agathae koyrotrophos], "rough, but a nurse of _men_;" of some life like that which a poet of kindred spirit to Wordsworth's saw half in vision, half in reality, among the husbandmen of the Italian hills:--

Peace, peace is theirs, and life no fraud that knows, Wealth as they will, and when they will, repose; On many a hill the happy homesteads stand, The living lakes through many a vale expand: Cool glens are there, and shadowy caves divine, Deep sleep, and far-off voices of the kine;-- From moor to moor the exulting wild deer stray;-- The strenuous youth are strong and sound as they; One reverence still the untainted race inspires, G.o.d their first thought, and after G.o.d their sires;-- These last discerned Astraea's flying hem, And Virtue's latest footsteps walked with them.

CHAPTER V.

MARRIAGE--SOCIETY--HIGHLAND TOUR.

With Wordsworth's settlement at Townend, Grasmere, in the closing days of the last century, the external events of his life may be said to come to an end. Even his marriage to Miss Mary Hutchinson, of Penrith, on October 4, 1802, was not so much an importation into his existence of new emotion, as a development and intensification of feelings which had long been there. This marriage was the crowning stroke of Wordsworth's felicity--the poetic recompense for his steady advocacy of all simple and n.o.ble things. When he wished to ill.u.s.trate the true dignity and delicacy of rustic lives he was always accustomed to refer to the c.u.mbrian folk. And now it seemed that c.u.mberland requited him for his praises with her choicest boon; found for him in the country town of Penrith, and from the small and obscure circle of his connexions and acquaintance,--nay, from the same dame's school in which he was taught to read,--a wife such as neither rank nor young beauty nor glowing genius enabled his brother bards to win.

Mrs. Wordsworth's poetic appreciativeness, manifest to all who knew her, is attested by the poet's a.s.sertion that two of the best lines in the poem of _The Daffodils_--

They flash, upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude,--

were of her composition. And in all other matters, from the highest to the lowest, she was to him a true helpmate, a companion "dearer far than life and light are dear," and able "in his steep march to uphold him to the end." Devoted to her husband, she nevertheless welcomed not only without jealousy but with delight the household companionship through life of the sister who formed so large an element in his being. Admiring the poet's genius to the full, and following the workings of his mind with a sympathy that never tired, she nevertheless was able to discern, and with un.o.btrusive care to hide or avert, those errors of manner into which retirement and sell-absorption will betray even the gentlest spirit. It speaks, perhaps, equally well for Wordsworth's character that this tendency to a lengthy insistence, in general conversation, on his own feelings and ideas is the worst charge that can he brought against him; and for Mrs. Wordsworth's, that her simple and rustic upbringing had gifted her with a manner so gracious and a tact so ready that in her presence all things could not but go well.

The life which the young couple led was one of primitive simplicity.

In some respects it was even less luxurious than that of the peasants around them. They drank water, and ate the simplest fare.

Miss Wordsworth had long rendered existence possible for her brother on the narrowest of means by her unselfish energy and skill in household management; and "plain living and high thinking" were equally congenial to the new inmate of the frugal home. Wordsworth gardened; and all together, or oftenest the poet and his sister, wandered almost daily over the neighbouring hills. If arrow means did not prevent them from offering a generous welcome to their few friends, especially Coleridge and his family, who repeatedly stayed for months under Wordsworth's roof. Miss Wordsworth's unpublished letters breathe the very spirit of hospitality in their naive details of the little sacrifices gladly made for the sake of the presence of these honoured guests. But for the most part their life was solitary and uneventful. Books they had few; neighbours almost none; and Miss Wordsworth's diary of these early years describes a life seldom paralleled in its intimate dependence on external nature.

I take, almost at random, her account of a single day. "November 24, 1801. Read Chaucer. We walked by Gell's cottage. As we were going along we were stopped at once, at the distance, perhaps, of fifty yards from our favourite birch-tree; it was yielding to the gust of wind, with all its tender twigs; the sun shone upon it, and it glanced in the wind like a flying sunshiny shower. It was a tree in shape, with stem and branches; but it was like a spirit of water.

After our return William read Spenser to us, and then walked to John's Grove. Went to meet W." And from an unpublished letter of Miss Wordsworth's, of about the same period (September 10, 1800), I extract her description of the new home. "We are daily more delighted with Grasmere and its neighbourhood. Our walks are perpetually varied, and we are more fond of the mountains as our acquaintance with them increases. We have a boat upon the lake, and a small orchard and smaller garden, which, as it is the work of our own hands, we regard with pride and partiality. Our cottage is quite large enough for us, though very small; and we have made it neat and comfortable within doors; and it looks very nice on the outside; for though the roses and honeysuckles which we have planted against it are only of this year's growth, yet it is covered all over with green leaves and scarlet flowers; for we have trained scarlet beans upon threads, which are not only exceedingly beautiful but very useful, as their produce is immense. We have made a lodging-room of the parlour below stairs, which has a stone floor, therefore we have covered it all over with matting. We sit in a room above stairs, and we have one lodging-room with two single beds, a sort of lumber-room, and a small low unceiled room, which I have papered with newspapers, and in which we have put a small bed. Our servant is an old woman of sixty years of age, whom we took partly out of charity. She was very ignorant, very foolish, and very difficult to teach. But the goodness of her disposition, and the great convenience we should find if my perseverance was successful, induced me to go on."

The sonnets ent.i.tled _Personal Talk_ give a vivid picture of the blessings of such seclusion. There are many minds which will echo the exclamation with which the poet dismisses his visitors and their gossip:

Better than such discourse doth silence long, Long barren silence, square with my desire; To sit without emotion, hope, or aim, In the loved presence of my cottage fire, And listen to the flapping of the flame, Or kettle whispering its faint undersong.

Many will look with envy on a life which has thus decisively cut itself loose from the world; which is secure from the influx of those preoccupations, at once distracting and nugatory, which deaden the mind to all other stimulus, and split the river of life into channels so minute that it loses itself in the sand.

Hence have I genial seasons; hence have I Smooth pa.s.sions, smooth discourse, and joyous thought.

Left to herself, the mind can expatiate in those kingdoms of the spirit bequeathed to us by past generations and distant men, which to the idle are but a garden of idleness, but to those who choose it become a true possession and an ever widening home. Among those "n.o.bler loves and n.o.bler cares" there is excitement without reaction, there is an unwearied and impersonal joy--a joy which can only be held cheap because it is so abundant, and can only disappoint us through our own incapacity to contain it. These delights of study and of solitude Wordsworth enjoyed to the full. In no other poet, perhaps, have the poet's heightened sensibilities been productive of a pleasure so unmixed with pain. The wind of his emotions blew right abaft; he "swam smoothly in the stream of his nature, and lived but one man."