Wordsworth by F. W. H. Myers

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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 illustrate 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 Cumberland 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
circumstances, 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 cluster 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 Cockermouth, on the
outskirts of the district, his mind was gradually led on to its
beauty; and his first recollections were of Derwent's grassy 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 passed;
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 amusements come to us each on a background of
Nature's majesty and calm. Setting springs for woodcock on the
grassy 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 woodcock 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 passing 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 passage, less frequently quoted, in describing a boating excursion
on Windermere illustrates 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 passage 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 clustered. 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 shore 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 associations. 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 principal
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 principal 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 associations
cluster,--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 shore 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
noblest 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 _Pass 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 shores 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 multitude 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,
God their first thought, and after God 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 noble things. When he wished to
illustrate the true dignity and delicacy of rustic lives he was
always accustomed to refer to the Cumbrian folk. And now it seemed
that Cumberland 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 assertion 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 unobtrusive 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 entitled _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 passions, 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
"nobler loves and nobler 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."

The blessing of meditative and lonely hours must of course be
purchased by corresponding limitations. Wordsworth's conception of
human character retained to the end an extreme simplicity. Many of
life's most impressive phenomena were hid from his eyes. He never
encountered any of those rare figures whose aspect seems to justify
all traditions of pomp and pre-eminence when they appear amid
stately scenes as with a natural sovereignty. He neither achieved
nor underwent any of those experiences which can make all high
romance seem a part of memory, and bestow as it were a password and
introduction into the very innermost of human fates. On the other
hand, he almost wholly escaped those sufferings which exceptional
natures must needs derive from too close a contact with this
commonplace world. It was not his lot--as it has been the lot of so
many poets--to move amongst mankind at once as an intimate and a
stranger; to travel from disillusionment to disillusionment and from
regret to regret; to construct around him a world of ideal beings,
who crumble into dust at his touch; to hope from them, what they can
neither understand nor accomplish, to lavish on them what they can
never repay. Such pain, indeed, may become a discipline; and the
close contact with many lives may teach to the poetic nature lessons
of courage, of self-suppression, of resolute goodwill, and may
transform into an added dignity the tumult of emotions which might
else have run riot in his heart. Yet it is less often from moods of
self-control than from moods of self-abandonment that the fount of
poetry springs; and herein it was that Wordsworth's especial
felicity lay--that there was no one feeling in him which the world
had either repressed or tainted; that he had no joy which might not
be the harmless joy of all; and that therefore it was when he was
most unreservedly himself that he was most profoundly human. All
that was needful for him was to strike down into the deep of his
heart. Or, using his own words, we may compare his tranquil
existence to

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