Wordsworth by F. W. H. Myers

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Among the poems describing these sudden shocks of vision and memory
none is more exquisite than the _Reverie of Poor Susan_:

At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears,
Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years;
Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard
In the silence of morning the song of the Bird.

'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees
A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;
Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.

The picture is one of those which come home to many a country heart
with one of those sudden "revulsions into the natural" which
philosophers assert to be the essence of human joy. But noblest and
hest known of all these poems is the _Sonnet on Westminster Bridge_,
"Earth hath not anything to show more fair;" in which nature has
reasserted her dominion over the works of all the multitude of men;
and in the early clearness the poet beholds the great City--as
Sterling imagined it on his dying-bed--"not as full of noise and
dust and confusion, but as something silent, grand and everlasting."
And even in later life, when Wordsworth was often in London, and was
welcome in any society, he never lost this external manner of
regarding it. He was always of the same mind as the group of
listeners in his _Power of Music_:

Now, Coaches and Chariots! Roar on like a stream!
Here are twenty Souls happy as souls in a dream:
They are deaf to your murmurs, they care not for you,
Nor what ye are flying, nor what ye pursue!

He never made the attempt,--vulgarized by so many a "fashionable
novelist," and in which no poet has succeeded yet,--to disentangle
from that turmoil its elements of romance and of greatness; to enter
that realm of emotion where Nature's aspects become the scarcely
noted accessory of vicissitudes that transcend her own; to trace the
passion or the anguish which whirl along some lurid vista toward a
sun that sets in storm, or gaze across silent squares by summer
moonlight amid a smell of dust and flowers.

But although Wordsworth passed thus through London unmodified and
indifferent, the current of things was sweeping him on to mingle in
a fiercer tumult,--to be caught in the tides of a more violent and
feverish life. In November 1791 he landed in France, meaning to pass
the winter at Orleans and learn French. Up to this date the French
Revolution had impressed him in a rather unusual manner,--namely, as
being a matter of course. The explanation of this view is a somewhat
singular one. Wordsworth's was an old family, and his connexions
were some of them wealthy and well placed in the world; but the
chances of his education had been such, that he could scarcely
realize to himself any other than a democratic type of society.
Scarcely once, he tells us, in his school days had he seen boy or
man who claimed respect on the score of wealth and blood; and the
manly atmosphere of Cambridge preserved even in her lowest days a
society

Where all stood thus far
Upon equal ground; that we were brothers all
In honour, as in one community,
Scholars and gentlemen;

while the teachings of nature and the dignity of Cumbrian peasant
life had confirmed his high opinion of the essential worth of man.
The upheaval of the French people, therefore, and the downfall of
privilege, seemed to him no portent for good or evil, but rather the
tardy return of a society to its stable equilibrium. He passed
through revolutionized Paris with satisfaction and sympathy, but
with little active emotion, and proceeded first to Orleans, and then
to Blois, between which places he spent nearly a year. At Orleans he
became intimately acquainted with the nobly-born but republican
general Beaupuis, an inspiring example of all in the Revolution that
was self-devoted and chivalrous and had compassion on the wretched
poor. In conversation with him Wordsworth learnt with what new force
the well-worn adages of the moralist fall from the lips of one who
is called upon to put them at once in action, and to stake life
itself on the verity of his maxims of honour. The poet's heart
burned within him as he listened. He could not indeed help mourning
sometimes at the sight of a dismantled chapel, or peopling in
imagination the forest-glades in which they sat with the chivalry of
a bygone day. But he became increasingly absorbed in his friend's
ardour, and the Revolution--_mulier formosa superne_--seemed to him
big with all the hopes of man.

He returned to Paris in October 1792,--a month after the massacres
of September; and he has described his agitation and dismay at
the sight of such world-wide destinies swayed by the hands of
such men. In a passage which curiously illustrates that reasoned
self-confidence and deliberate boldness which for the most part he
showed only in the peaceful incidents of a literary career, he has
told us how he was on the point of putting himself forward as a
leader of the Girondist party, in the conviction that his
singleheartedness of aim would make him, in spite of foreign birth
and imperfect speech, a point round which the confused instincts of
the multitude might not impossibly rally.

Such a course of action,--which, whatever its other results, would
undoubtedly have conducted him to the guillotine with his political
friends in May 1793,--was rendered impossible by a somewhat
undignified hindrance. Wordsworth, while in his own eyes "a patriot
of the world," was in the eyes of others a young man of twenty-two,
travelling on a small allowance, and running his head into
unnecessary dangers. His funds were stopped, and he reluctantly
returned to England at the close of 1792.

And now to Wordsworth, as to many other English patriots, there came,
on a great scale, that form of sorrow which in private life is one
of the most agonizing of all--when two beloved beings, each of them
erring greatly, become involved in bitter hate. The new-born Republic
flung down to Europe as her battle-gage the head of a king. England,
in an hour of horror that was almost panic, accepted the defiance,
and war was declared between the two countries early in 1793.
"No shock," says Wordsworth,

Given to my moral nature had I known
Down to that very moment; neither lapse
Nor turn of sentiment that might be named
A revolution, save at this one time;

and the sound of the evening gun-fire at Portsmouth seemed at once
the embodiment and the premonition of England's guilt and woe.

Yet his distracted spirit could find no comfort in the thought of
France. For in France the worst came to the worst; and everything
vanished of liberty except the crimes committed in her name.

Most melancholy at that time, O Friend!
Were my day-thoughts, my nights were miserable.
Through months, through years, long after the last beat
Of those atrocities, the hour of sleep
To me came rarely charged with natural gifts--
Such ghastly visions had I of despair,
And tyranny, and implements of death;...
And levity in dungeons, where the dust
Was laid with tears. Then suddenly the scene
Changed, and the unbroken dream entangled me
In long orations, which I strove to plead
Before unjust tribunals,--with a voice
Labouring, a brain confounded, and a sense,
Death-like, of treacherous desertion, felt
In the last place of refuge--my own soul.

These years of perplexity and disappointment, following on a season
of overstrained and violent hopes, were the sharpest trial through
which Wordsworth ever passed. The course of affairs in France, indeed,
was such as seemed by an irony of fate to drive the noblest and
firmest hearts into the worst aberrations. For first of all in that
Revolution, Reason had appeared as it were in visible shape, and
hand in hand with Pity and Virtue; then, as the welfare of the
oppressed peasantry began to be lost sight of amid the brawls of the
factions of Paris, all that was attractive and enthusiastic in the
great movement seemed to disappear, but yet Reason might still be
thought to find a closer realization here than among scenes more
serene and fair; and, lastly, Reason set in blood and tyranny and
there was no more hope from France. But those who, like Wordsworth,
had been taught by that great convulsion to disdain the fetters of
sentiment and tradition and to look on Reason as supreme were not
willing to relinquish their belief because violence had conquered
her in one more battle. Rather they clung with the greater tenacity,--
"adhered," in Wordsworth's words,

More firmly to old tenets, and to prove
Their temper, strained them more;

cast off more decisively than ever the influences of tradition, and
in their Utopian visions even wished to see the perfected race
severed in its perfection from the memories of humanity, and from
kinship with the struggling past.

Through a mood of this kind Wordsworth had to travel now. And his
nature, formed for pervading attachments and steady memories,
suffered grievously from the privation of much which even the
coldest and calmest temper cannot forego without detriment and pain.
For it is not with impunity that men commit themselves to the sole
guidance of either of the two great elements of their being. The
penalties of trusting to the emotions alone are notorious; and every
day affords some instance of a character that has degenerated into a
bundle of impulses, of a will that has become caprice. But the
consequences of making Reason our tyrant instead of our king are
almost equally disastrous. There is so little which Reason,
divested of all emotional or instinctive supports, is able to prove
to our satisfaction that a sceptical aridity is likely to take
possession of the soul. It was thus with Wordsworth; he was driven
to a perpetual questioning of all beliefs and analysis of all motives,--

Till, demanding formal proof,
And seeking it in everything, I lost
All feeling of conviction; and, in fine,
Sick, wearied out with contrarieties,
Yielded up moral questions in despair.

In this mood all those great generalized conceptions which are the
food of our love, our reverence, our religion, dissolve away; and
Wordsworth tells us that at this time

Even the visible universe
Fell under the dominion of a taste
Less spiritual, with microscopic view
Was scanned, as I had scanned the moral world.

He looked on the operations of nature "in disconnection dull and
spiritless;" he could no longer apprehend her unity nor feel her
charm. He retained indeed his craving for natural beauty, but in an
uneasy and fastidious mood,--

Giving way
To a comparison of scene with scene,
Bent overmuch on superficial things,
Pampering myself with meagre novelties
Of colour and proportion; to the moods
Of time and season, to the moral power,
The affections, and the spirit of the place,
Insensible.

Such cold fits are common to all religions: they haunt the artist,
the philanthropist, the philosopher, the saint. Often they are due
to some strain of egoism or ambition which has intermixed itself
with the impersonal desire; sometimes, as in Wordsworth's case, to
the persistent tension of a mind which has been bent too ardently
towards an ideal scarce possible to man. And in this case, when the
objects of a man's habitual admiration are true and noble, they will
ever be found to suggest some antidote to the fatigues of their
pursuit. We shall see as we proceed how a deepening insight into the
lives of the peasantry around him,--the happiness and virtue of
simple Cumbrian homes,--restored to the poet a serener confidence in
human nature, amid all the shame and downfall of such hopes in France.
And that still profounder loss of delight in Nature herself,--that
viewing of all things "in disconnection dull and spiritless," which,
as it has been well said, is the truest definition of Atheism,
inasmuch as a unity in the universe is the first element in our
conception of God,--this dark pathway also was not without its
outlet into the day. For the God in Nature is not only a God of
Beauty, but a God of Law; his unity can be apprehended in power as
well as in glory; and Wordsworth's mind, "sinking inward upon itself
from thought to thought," found rest for the time in that austere
religion,--Hebrew at once and scientific, common to a Newton and a
Job,--which is fostered by the prolonged contemplation of the mere
Order of the sum of things.

Not in vain
I had been taught to reverence a Power
That is the visible quality and shape
And image of right reason.

Not, indeed, in vain! For he felt now that there is no side of truth,
however remote from human interests, no aspect of the universe,
however awful and impersonal, which may not have power at some
season to guide and support the spirit of man. When Goodness is
obscured, when Beauty wearies, there are some souls which still can
cling and grapple to the conception of eternal Law.

Of such stem consolations the poet speaks as having restored him in
his hour of need. But he gratefully acknowledges also another solace
of a gentler kind. It was about this time (1795) that Wordsworth was
blessed with the permanent companionship of his sister, to whom he
was tenderly attached, but whom, since childhood, he had seen only
at long intervals. Miss Wordsworth, after her father's death, had
lived mainly with her maternal grandfather, Mr. Cookson, at Penrith,
occasionally at Halifax with other relations, or at Forncott with
her uncle Dr. Cookson, Canon of Windsor. She was now able to join
her favourite brother: and in this gifted woman Wordsworth found a
gentler and sunnier likeness of himself; he found a love which never
wearied, and a sympathy fervid without blindness, whose suggestions
lay so directly in his mind's natural course that they seemed to
spring from the same individuality, and to form at once a portion of
his inmost being. The opening of this new era of domestic happiness
demands a separate chapter.

CHAPTER III.

MISS WORDSWORTH--LYRICAL BALLADS--SETTLEMENT AT GRASMERE.

From among many letters of Miss Wordsworth's to a beloved friend,
(Miss Jane Pollard, afterwards Mrs. Marshall, of Hallsteads), which
have been kindly placed at my disposal, I may without impropriety
quote a few passages which illustrate the character and the
affection of brother and sister alike. And first, in a letter
(Forncett, February 1792), comparing her brothers Christopher and
William, she says: "Christopher is steady and sincere in his
attachments. William has both these virtues in an eminent degree,
and a sort of violence of affection, if I may so term it, which
demonstrates itself every moment of the day, when the objects of his
affection are present with him, in a thousand almost imperceptible
attentions to their wishes, in a sort of restless watchfulness which
I know not how to describe, a tenderness that never sleeps, and at
the same time such a delicacy of manner as I have observed in few men."
And again (Forncett, June 1793), she writes to the same friend:
"I have strolled into a neighbouring meadow, where I am enjoying the
melody of birds, and the busy sounds of a fine summer's evening. But
oh! How imperfect is my pleasure whilst I am alone! Why are you not
seated with me? And my dear William, why is he not here also? I
could almost fancy that I see you both near me. I hear _you_ point
out a spot, where if we could erect a little cottage and call it our
own we should be the happiest of human beings. I see my brother
fired with the idea of leading his sister to such a retreat. Our
parlour is in a moment furnished, our garden is adorned by magic;
the roses and honeysuckles spring at our command; the wood behind
the house lifts its head, and furnishes us with a winter's shelter
and a summer's noonday shade. My dear friend, I trust that ere long
you will be without the aid of imagination, the companion of my walks,
and my dear William may be of our party.... He is now going upon a
tour in the west of England, with a gentleman who was formerly a
schoolfellow,--a man of fortune, who is to bear all the expenses of
the journey, and only requests the favour of William's company. He
is perfectly at liberty to quit this companion as soon as anything
more advantageous offers. But it is enough to say that I am likely
to have the happiness of introducing you to my beloved brother. You
must forgive me for talking so much of him; my affection hurries me
on, and makes me forget that you cannot be so much interested in the
subject as I am. You do not know him; you do not know how amiable he
is. Perhaps you reply, 'But I know how blinded you are.' Well, my
dearest. I plead guilty at once; I _must_ be blind; he cannot be so
pleasing as my fondness makes him. I am willing to allow that half
the virtues with which I fancy him endowed are the creation of my
love; but surely I may be excused! He was never tired of comforting
his sister; he never left her in anger; he always met her with joy;
he preferred her society to every other pleasure;--or rather, when
we were so happy as to be within each other's reach, he had no
pleasure when we were compelled to be divided. Do not then expect
too much from this brother of whom I have delighted so to talk to you.
In the first place, you must be with him more than once before he
will be perfectly easy in conversation. In the second place, his
person is not in his favour--at least I should think not; but I soon
ceased to discover this--nay, I almost thought that the opinion
which I had formed was erroneous. He is, however, certainly rather
plain; though otherwise has an extremely thoughtful countenance, but
when he speaks it is often lighted up by a smile which I think very
pleasing. But enough, he is my brother; why should I describe him? I
shall be launching again into panegyric."

The brother's language to his sister is equally affectionate.
"How much do I wish," he writes in 1793, "that each emotion of
pleasure or pain that visits your heart should excite a similar
pleasure or a similar pain within me, by that sympathy which will
almost identify us when we have stolen to our little cottage.... I
will write to my uncle, and tell him that I cannot think of going
anywhere before I have been with you. Whatever answer he gives me, I
certainly will make a point of once more mingling my transports with
yours. Alas! My dear sister, how soon must this happiness expire;
yet there are moments worth ages."

And again: in the same year he writes, "Oh, my dear, dear sister!
With what transport shall I again meet you! With what rapture shall
I again wear out the day in your sight!... I see you in a moment
running, or rather flying, to my arms."

Wordsworth was in all things fortunate, but in nothing more
fortunate than in this, that so unique a companion should have been
ready to devote herself to him with an affection wholly free from
egotism or jealousy, an affection that yearned only to satisfy his
subtlest needs, and to transfuse all that was best in herself into
his larger being. And indeed that fortunate admixture or influence,
whencesoever derived, which raised the race of Wordsworth to poetic
fame, was almost more dominant and conspicuous in Dorothy Wordsworth
than in the poet himself. "The shooting lights of her wild eyes"
reflected to the full the strain of imaginative emotion which was
mingled in the poet's nature with that spirit of steadfast and
conservative virtue which has already given to the family a Master of
Trinity, two Bishops, and other divines and scholars of weight and
consideration. In the poet himself the conservative and
ecclesiastical tendencies of his character became more and more
apparent as advancing years stiffened the movements of the mind. In
his sister the ardent element was less restrained; it showed itself
in a most innocent direction, but it brought with it a heavy
punishment. Her passion for nature and her affection for her brother
led her into mountain rambles which were beyond her strength, and
her last years were spent in a condition of physical and mental decay.

But at the time of which we are now speaking there was, perhaps, no
one in the world who could have been to the poet such a companion as
his sister became. She had not, of course, his grasp of mind or his
poetic power; but her sensitiveness to nature was quite as keen as
his, and her disposition resembled his "with sunshine added to
daylight."

Birds in the bower, and lambs in the green field,
Could they have known her, would have loved; methought
Her very presence such a sweetness breathed,
That flowers, and trees, and even the silent hills,
And everything she looked on, should have had
An intimation how she bore herself
Towards them, and to all creatures.

Her journal of a tour in Scotland, and her description of a week on
Ullswater, affixed to Wordsworth's _Guide to the Lakes_,--diaries
not written for publication but merely to communicate her own
delight to intimate friends at a distance,--are surely indescribably
attractive in their naive and tender feeling, combined with a
delicacy of insight into natural beauty which was almost a new thing
in the history of the world. If we compare, for instance, any of her
descriptions of the Lakes with Southey's, we see the difference
between mere literary skill, which can now be rivalled in many
quarters, and that sympathetic intuition which comes of love alone.
Even if we compare her with Gray, whose short notice of Cumberland
bears on every page the stamp of a true poet, we are struck by the
way in which Miss Wordsworth's tenderness for all living things
gives character and pathos to her landscapes, and evokes from the
wildest solitude some note that thrills the heart.

She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,
And humble cares, and delicate fears;
A heart the fountain of sweet tears;
And love, and thought, and joy.

The cottage life in her brother's company which we have seen Miss
Wordsworth picturing to herself with girlish ardour, was destined to
be realized no long time afterwards, thanks to the unlooked-for
outcome of another friendship. If the poet's sister was his first
admirer, Kaisley Calvert may fairly claim the second place. Calvert
was the son of the steward of the Duke of Norfolk, who possessed
large estates in Cumberland. He attached himself to Wordsworth, and
in 1793 and 1794 the friends were much together. Calvert was then
attacked by consumption, and Wordsworth, nursed him with patient care.
It was found at his death that he had left his friend a legacy of 900L.
"The act," says Wordsworth, "was done entirely from a confidence on
his part that I had powers and attainments--which might be of use to
mankind. Upon the interest of the 900L--400L being laid out in
annuity--with 200L deducted from the principal, and 100L a
legacy to my sister, and 100L more which the _Lyrical Ballads_ have
brought me, my sister and I contrived to live seven years, nearly
eight."

Trusting in this small capital, and with nothing to look to in the
future except the uncertain prospect of the payment of Lord
Lonsdale's debt to the family, Wordsworth settled with his sister at
Racedown, near Crewkerne, in Dorsetshire, in the autumn of 1795, the
choice of this locality being apparently determined by the offer of a
cottage on easy terms. Here, in the first home which he had possessed,
Wordsworth's steady devotion to poetry began. He had already,
in 1792 [2], published two little poems, the _Evening Walk_: and
_Descriptive Sketches_, which Miss Wordsworth, (to whom the _Evening
Walk_ was addressed) criticises with candour--in a letter to the same
friend (Forncett, February 1792):--

[Footnote 2: The _Memoirs_ say in 1793, but the following
MS. letter of 1792 speaks of them as already published.]

"The scenes which he describes have been viewed with a poet's eye,
and are portrayed with a poet's pencil; and the poems contain, many
passages exquisitely beautiful; but they also contain many faults,
the chief of which are obscurity and a too frequent use of some
particular expressions and uncommon words; for instance, _moveless_,
which he applies in a sense, if not new, at least different from, its
ordinary one. By 'moveless,' when applied to the swan, he means that
sort of motion which is smooth without agitation; it is a very
beautiful epithet, but ought to have been cautiously used. The word
_viewless_ also is introduced far too often. I regret exceedingly
that he did not submit the works to the inspection of some friend
before their publication, and he also joins with me in this regret."

These poems show a careful and minute observation of nature, but
their versification--still reminding us of the imitators of Pope--
has little originality or charm. They attracted the admiration of
Coleridge, but had no further success.

At Racedown Wordsworth finished _Guilt and Sorrow_, a poem gloomy in
tone and written mainly in his period of depression and unrest,--and
wrote a tragedy called _The Borderers_, of which only a few lines
show any promise of future excellence. He then wrote _The Ruined
Cottage_, now incorporated in the Fist Book of the _Excursion_. This
poem, on a subject thoroughly suited to his powers, was his first
work of merit; and Coleridge, who visited the quiet household in June
1797, pronounces this poem "superior, I hesitate not to aver, to
anything in our language which in any way resembles it." In July
1797 the Wordsworths removed to Alfoxden, a large house in
Somersetshire, near Netherstowey, where Coleridge was at that time
living. Here Wordsworth added to his income by taking as pupil a
young boy, the hero of the trifling poem _Anecdote for Fathers_, a
son of Mr. Basil Montagu; and here he composed many of his smaller
pieces. He has described the origin of the _Ancient Mariner_ and the
_Lyrical Ballads_ in a well-known passage, part of which I must
here repeat:--

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