GRASMERE.

“Calvert! it must not be unheard by themWho may respect my name, that I to theeOwe many years of early liberty.This care was thine, when sickness did condemnThy youth to hopeless wasting, root and stem,That I, if frugal and severe, might strayWhere’er I liked, and finally arrayMy temples with the Muse’s diadem.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 laysOf highest mood, which now I meditate,It gladdens me, O worthy short-lived youth,To think how much of this will be thy praise.”

In a letter which Wordsworth wrote to his dear friend, Sir George Beaumont, Bart., in the year 1806, we learn the manner in which the £900, bequeathed to him by Calvert, were invested. “Upon the interest of the £900, £400 being laid out in annuity, with £200,” says Wordsworth, “deducted from the principal, and £100, a legacy to my sister, and £100 more, which the “Lyrical Ballads” have brought me, my sister and I lived seven years—nearly eight.” And it is certain that this sister, who never left him from this time through his long life, exercised a beautiful and benign influence over the poet, softened the asperities of his character, and cheered him in his despondency. He thanks God that his “beloved sister,”

——“in whose sightThose days were passed,”

maintained for him a saving intercourse withhis true self. It was to her that he was indebted for many salutary admonitions; it was she who, in the midst of the clashing politics and noisy-throated revolutions of Europe, preserved him “still a poet,” and made “him seek beneath that name, and that alone, his office upon earth.”

In 1795, Wordsworth, accompanied by his sister, left Cumberland, for Racedown Lodge, near Cremkerne, in Dorsetshire. The country was delightful, and the house pleasantly situated, with a garden attached to it. They passed their time in reading, gardening, writing, and in translating Ariosto, and other Italian poets. We also find the poet making imitations of Juvenal’s Satires, copies of which he sent to his friend Wrangham, with a view to joint publication. They were never printed, however; and Wordsworth, in 1805, when he was urged by the same friend to allow them to appear, repudiated them altogether, and regretted that he had spent so much time in their composition, declaring that he had come to a “fixed resolution to steer clear,” now and for ever, of all personal satire. During this same year of ’95, he finished his poem on “Guilt and Sorrow,” andbegan his tragedy of “The Borderers,” which was completed before the close of the following year. It is a cumbrous affair, and will not act; but it contains some fine passages. It was first published in 1842, and was offered to Mr. Harris, the manager of the Covent Garden Theatre, through Mr. Knight, the actor, and was, as Wordsworth confesses, “judiciouslyreturned, as not calculated for the stage.”

In the year 1797, Coleridge came to Racedown. Miss Wordsworth describes him in one of her letters as “a wonderful man;” his conversation teeming with “soul, mind, and spirit,”—three things very nearly related to each other, one would think. He is benevolent, too, good-tempered, and cheerful, like her dear brother William, and “interests himself much about every little trifle.” At first she thought him very plain—that is for about “three minutes” for he is “pale, thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, and not very good teeth; longish, loose growing, half-curling, rough black hair.” But he no sooner began to talk than she forgot his want of comeliness, his bad teeth, and wide mouth, and was entranced by the magic of his eloquence. “His eye,” she adds, “is large andfull, not very dark, but grey; such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest expression; but it speaks every emotion of his animated mind; it has more of the ‘poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling,’ than I ever witnessed. He has fine dark eye-brows, and an overhanging forehead.”

Such was the apparition of Coleridge, in Wordsworth’s house at Racedown. The poet himself was delighted with his visitor, and they were soon in deep conversation about literature, and their own several adventures, and proposed argosies on that great and shoreless deep.—Wordsworth read a new poem, which he had just written, called the “Ruined Cottage,”—and Coleridge praised it highly. Then they sat down to tea, and presently the latter “repeated two acts and a half of his tragedy, ‘Osoris.’”

The next morning, the “Borderers” was read, and passages from “twelve hundred lines of blank verse,—superior,” says Coleridge, in a letter to a friend, “I hesitate not to aver, to anything in our language which in any way resembles it.” “I speak with heart-felt sincerity, and I think combined judgment, when Itell you,” he elsewhere writes, “that I feel a little man by his side.”

Coleridge came several times to see his big man, after this; and the two poets grew so much attached to each other, and found such profitable advantages in each other’s conversation and literary judgments, that they resolved to dwell nearer to each other. Accordingly Wordsworth and his sister went to live at Alfoxden, near Stowey, where Coleridge was residing. This was in July, 1797,—and he describes his sojourn there as a very “pleasant and productive time of his life.” The house which Wordsworth occupied belonged to Mr. St. Aubyn, who was a minor,—and the condition of occupancy seems to have been, that the poet should keep the house in repair.

In one of Miss Wordsworth’s letters, dated August 14, 1797, she speaks with great enthusiasm and delight, both of the house and the country. “Here we are,” she says, “in a large mansion, in a large park, with seventy head of deer around us.... Sea, woods wild as fancy ever painted, brooks clear and pebbly as in Cumberland, villages so romantic, &c. The woods are as fine as those at Lowther, and thecountry more romantic; it has the character of the less grand part of the neighbourhood of the Lakes.” She then describes their “favourite parlour,” which, like that of Racedown, looks into the garden. They were three miles from Stowey, and only two from the sea. Look which way they would, their eyes were filled with beauty: smooth downs, and valleys with small brooks running down them, through green meadows, hardly ever intersected with hedges, but scattered over with trees. The hills were covered with bilberries, or oak woods. They could walk for miles over the hill-tops, which was quite smooth, without rocks.

And in this beautiful locality did the poet reside for about twelve months, composing during that time, all the poems contained in the first edition of the “Lyrical Ballads,” with the exception of the “Female Vagrant.” TheseBalladsare in many ways remarkable: in the first place, because they were the joint production of men who subsequently proved themselves to be two of our greatest poets; and, secondly, because they brought these men prominently before the eyes of the public and of the critical world. The Ballads, as theywere called, were likewise of a very high order; and it is not too much to say, that such a book of poems as this had not been published since the Augustan era of our literature, Milton’s alone excepted, if Milton may not be said to have closed that era. Here first appeared the “Ancient Mariner,” and the “Nightingale,” by Coleridge; “Tintern Abbey,” and “Lines left under a Yew-tree Seat,” by Wordsworth; four poems which of themselves were sufficient to float half a dozen volumes. It is true that the “Ancient Mariner,” the “Old Navigator,” as Coleridge loved to call it, is what may be styled amade-uppoem—a wild, unearthly patchwork of the imagination,—but it contains, nevertheless, such passages as it would be rare to match outside those seas. It is full, too, of all kinds of music—sweet, wild, natural, and supernatural—now grand, like the rolling bass of some mighty organ, and now, ærial, celestial; catching up the reader into a strange heaven, and filling him with an unspeakable ecstacy. Wonderful power is likewise manifested in the structure of the tale; and one is amazed how so slender an incident, as that upon which the tale is founded, could be worked out so successfully, and with such deep and thrilling interest. The “Nightingale,” however, is quite a different poem, and is redolent of nature. “Tintern Abbey,” and “Lines left under a Yew-tree Seat,” are in Wordsworth’s best style, and have never been surpassed by him, in the fullest maturity of his genius.

The idea of the “Ballads” originated in the following circumstances: Wordsworth and his sister, accompanied by Coleridge, commenced a pedestrian tour, in November 1797, to Linton, and the Valley of Stones, near it. The whole party, however, were so poor that they could ill afford the expense of the journey, and the two poets resolved to write a poem for the “New Monthly Magazine,” for which they hoped to get £5, and thus balance the outlay which they required for the tour. The course of the friends lay along the Quartock Hills, towards Watchet; and here it was that Coleridge planned his “Old Navigator,” the base of it being, as he said, a dream of Cruikshanks’. Wordsworth and Coleridge were to have written this poem conjointly, but the great dissimilarity of their manner soon compelled them to abandon this idea, and Coleridge was left tocomplete the work by himself. Wordsworth suggested, however, as some crime was to be committed by the Mariner, which was to bring upon him a spectral persecution in his wanderings, as the consequence of that crime, that he should be represented as having killed an Albatross on entering the South-Sea, and that the tutelary spirits of these regions should follow him and avenge the crime. The navigation of the ship by the dead men was also a suggestion of Wordsworth’s. As Coleridge proceeded with his work, it was very soon found that it would be too long for the Magazine, and they began to think of issuing it as a volume, along with other poems, by both bards. These poems were to be founded “on supernatural subjects, taken from common life, but to be looked at, as much as might be, through an imaginative medium.” Wordsworth’s share in the poetical contributions to this volume, besides those already mentioned were, amongst others, “The Idiot Boy,” “Her Eyes are Wild,” “We are Seven,” and “The Thorn.” The last verse of “We are Seven,” was composed first, and Coleridge threw off, impromptu, the first verse of the poem, whilst the little party weresitting down to tea, in the pretty little parlour at Alfoxden, which looked out into the garden. Speaking of the “Idiot Boy,” Wordsworth says:—“The last stanza, ‘The cocks did crow, and moon did shine so cold,’ was the production of the whole. The words were reported to me by my dear friend Thomas Poole; but I have since heard the same reported of other idiots. Let me add, that this long poem was composed in the groves of Alfoxden, almost extempore; not a word, I believe, being corrected, though one stanza was omitted. I mention this in gratitude to those happy moments, for in truth I never wrote anything with so much glee.”

It was in 1798 that the Lines to Tintern Abbey were written. The poet and his sister had been staying for a week with Mr. Cottle, of Bristol, visiting Coleridge by the way, who had a little time before resigned his ministerial engagement with a Unitarian congregation at Bristol, and was now in receipt of an annuity of £150, given to him by the magnificent generosity of “Josiah and Thomas Wedgwood.” From Mr. Cottle’s they proceeded to the Banks of the Wye, crossed the Severn ferry, and walked ten miles further to Tintern Abbey, avery beautiful ruin on the Wye. They proceeded, next morning, along the river, through Monmouth, to Goderich Castle, returning to Tintern in a boat, and from thence in a small vessel back again to Bristol.

“The Wye,” says Wordsworth, “is a stately and majestic river, from its width and depth, but never slow and sluggish—you can always hear its murmur. It travels through a woody country, now varied with cottages and green meadows, and now with huge and fantastic rocks.... No poem of mine was composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember than this [viz., “Tintern Abbey:”]—I began it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye, and concluded it just as I was entering Bristol, in the evening, after a ramble of four or five days with my sister. Not a line of it was uttered, and not any part of it written down, till I reached Bristol. It was published almost immediately after in the “Lyrical Ballads.”

“Peter Bell” was likewise written about this time; and the following interesting particulars, respecting its origin, are furnished by the poet:

“This tale was founded upon an anecdote which I read in a newspaper, of an ass beingfound hanging his head over a canal, in a wretched posture. Upon examination, a dead body was found in the water, and proved to be the body of its master. In the woods of Alfoxden, I used to take great delight in noticing the habits, tricks, and physiognomy of asses; and it was here, no doubt, that I was put upon writing the Poem of ‘Peter Bell,’ out of liking for the creature that is so often dreadfully abused. The countenance, gait, and figure of Peter were taken from a wild rover with whom I walked from Builth, on the river Wye, downwards, nearly as far as the town of Hay. He told me strange stories. It has always been a pleasure to me through life, to catch at every opportunity that has occurred in my rambles, of being acquainted with this class of people. The number of Peter’s wives was taken from the trespasses in this way of a lawless creature who lived in the county of Durham, and used to be attended by many women, sometimes not less than half a dozen, as disorderly as himself; and a story went in the county, that he had been heard to say, whilst they were quarrelling: “Why can’t you be quiet?—there’s none so many of you.’ Benoni, or the child of sorrow,I knew when I was a school-boy. His mother had been deserted by a gentleman in the neighbourhood, she herself being a gentlewoman by birth. The circumstances of her story were told me by my dear old dame, Ann Tyson, who was her confidante. The lady died broken-hearted. The crescent moon, which makes such a figure in the prologue, assumed this character one evening, while I was watching its beauty, in front of Alfoxden House. I intended this poem for the volume before spoken of; but it was not published for more than twenty years afterwards. The worship of the Methodists, or Ranters, is often heard during the stillness of the summer evening, in the country, with affecting accompaniments of moral beauty. In both the psalmody and voice of the preacher there is not unfrequently much solemnity, likely to impress the feelings of the rudest characters, under favourable circumstances.”

It was during Wordsworth’s residence in the South, in 1794, that a circumstance occurred, which has not been alluded to before in these memoirs, but which is interesting in itself, and still more so from the fact that it was the means of making Wordsworth acquainted withColeridge, Southey, Robert Lovell, and George Burnet. I will relate this circumstance in the language of a writer for Chambers’ Papers for the People, and quote still further passages from the same tract, illustrative of the life of Wordsworth and his friends, at this time.[G]

The circumstance was as follows: Coleridge, Southey, Lovell, and Burnet “came down to Bristol, as the most convenient part from which they could embark for the wild banks of the Susquehana. On that remote river they were to found a Platonic Republic, where everything was to be in common, and from which vice and selfishness were to be for ever excluded. These ardent and intellectual adventurers had made elaborate calculations how long it would take them to procure the necessaries of life, and to build their barns, and how they should spend their leisure in what Coleridge sung as

‘Freedom’s undivided dell,Where toil and health with mellowed love shall dwell;Far from folly, far from men,In the rude romantic glen.’

Yet, it is supposed, they knew nothing of theSusquehana more than of any other American river, except that its name was musical and sonorous; and far from having anything wherewith to convey themselves and their moveables across the Atlantic, they had to borrow five pounds to make up their lodging bill. This sum was advanced them, with unalloyed pleasure, by Mr. Cottle, a bookseller in the town, a benevolent and worthy man, who seems almost to have been located there for no other purpose than to introduce the three chief Lake Poets to the world.

“The bubble of the Susquehana, or, as it was called, Pantisocracy, was exploded, by Southey, Coleridge, and Lovell, all getting into the bonds of matrimony, which have a miraculous virtue in testing the solidity of schemes of life. They married three sisters of the name of Fricker. It was the perpetual restlessness of Coleridge which first brought him and his companions into contact with Wordsworth. The former wonderful man, in capabilities perhaps the mightiest of that illustrious group, and in his mental constitution one of the most puzzling psychological phenomena which human nature has ever presented, was the originator of thePantisocratic proposal. He was a man of luxurious imagination, deep emotiveness, various learning, and an exquisite nervous susceptibility. In 1795, he was making excursions through the lovely and tranquil scenery of Somersetshire, when he became acquainted with a most worthy and excellent man, Mr. Poole, resident in the quiet village of Stowey. On his return to Bristol, where he was married, he still exhibited his uneasiness. First he removed to his immortal rose-bound cottage at Clevedon, then back to the pent-up houses at Redcliff Hill, and from these again to the more open situation of Kingsdown. Nothing would then satisfy him but he must set up a serial, to be called ‘The Watchman;’ and his own sketches of his travelling canvass for that periodical, might take rank with some chapters of Don Quixote. Take, for instance, this picture of a great patriot at Birmingham, to whom he applies for his magnificent patronage:—He was ‘a rigid Calvinist, a tallow-chandler by trade. He was a tall, dingy man, in whom length was so predominant over breadth, that he might almost have been borrowed for a foundry poker! Oh, that face!—I have it before meat this moment. The lank, black, twine-like hair, pinguinitescent, cut in a straight line along the black stubble of his thin, gunpowder eyebrows, that looked like a scorched aftermath from a last week’s shaving. His coat-collar behind, in perfect unison, both of colour and lustre, with the coarse yet glib cordage which I suppose he called his hair, and which, with a bend inward at the nape of the neck—the only approach to flexure in his whole figure—slunk in behind his waistcoat; while the countenance, lank, dark, very hard, and with strong, perpendicular furrows—gave me a dim notion of some one looking at me through a gridiron,—all soot, grease, and iron.’ This thoroughbred lover of liberty, who had proved that Mr. Pitt was one of the horns of the second beast in the ‘Revelations’ that spake as a dragon, nevertheless declined to take ‘The Watchman’; and in short, after a disastrous career, that serial died a natural death. The disappointed editor took refuge, for a brief season, with Mr. Poole, at Stowey, and there, for the first time, he met Wordsworth, who then resided about twenty miles off, at Racedown, in Dorsetshire.

“Coleridge returned for a short time to Bristol, but in January, 1797, he removed to Stowey, where he rented a small cottage. This must have been a pleasant episode in the lives of the gifted individuals whom it brought together in that sweet village. Wordsworth, who was now twenty-seven, had come with his sister to Alfoxden, which was within two miles of Stowey. Charles Lloyd, a young man of most sensitive and graceful mind, and of great poetical susceptibility, resided in the family with Coleridge. Charles Lamb, then in the spring-time of his life, was also a frequent inmate; and often afterwards, under the cloud which lowered over his noble devotedness in London, his fancy wandered back to that happy valley.—Why, says he to Charles Lloyd, who unexpectedly looked in upon him in the great Babylon:

‘Why seeks my Lloyd the stranger out?What offering does the stranger bringOf social scenes, home-bred delights,That him in aught compensate mayFor Stowey’s pleasant winter nights,For loves and friendships far away?’

The Pantisocratist, George Burnet, was also avisitor. Mrs. Coleridge herself had a poetical taste, and there is one very graceful piece of hers written on the receipt of a thimble from her kind friend Mr. Cottle. Just such a thimble, sings Sarah Coleridge—

‘Just such a one,mon cher ami(The finger-shield of industry),The inventive gods, I deem, to Pallas gave,What time the vain Arachne, madly brave,Challenged the blue-eyed virgin of the skyA duel in embroidered work to try.And hence the thimbled finger of grave PallasTo the erring needle’s point was more than callous.But, ah! the poor Arachne! she, unarmed,Blundering through hasty eagerness, alarmedWith all a rival’s hopes, a mortal’s fears,Still missed the stitch, and stained the web with tears.’

Hartley Coleridge, the ærial child who awakened the fears and sympathies of Wordsworth, was a fine boy, rejoicing his parents’ hearts; and the happy pair had cut a road into their neighbours’ orchards, that they might pass to their firesides under the arches of blossoms, with a speed suiting to their affections. Alas! that sweet Stowey. Cottle, in his old age, has painted one or two pictures of it and of its gifted habitants, now in their graves, that go to the heart. Take the scene with Coleridge in the jasmine arbour, where the tripod table was laden with delicious bread and cheese, and a mug of the true brown Taunton ale. ‘While the dappled sunbeams,’ says the old man, calling up kindly memories, ‘played on our table through the umbrageous canopy, the very birds seemed to participate in our felicities, and poured forth selectest anthems. As we sat in our sylvan hall of splendour, a company of the happiest mortals, the bright blue heavens, the sportive insects, the balmy zephyrs, the feathered choristers, the sympathy of friends, all augmented the pleasurable to the highest point this side the celestial.... While thus elevated in the universal current of our feelings, Mrs. Coleridge approached with her fine Hartley; we all smiled, but the father’s eye beamed transcendental joy. But all things have an end! Yet pleasant it is for Memory to treasure up in her choicest depository a few such scenes (those sunny spots in existence), on which the spirit may repose when the rough adverse winds shake and disfigure all besides.’ Or take the more lively visit to Alfoxden, on Wordsworth’s invitation. Away they all went from Stowey; the poet and Emmeline, Coleridge and Cottle. They were to dine on philosopher’s fare—a bottle of brandy, a loaf, a piece of cheese, and fresh lettuces from Wordsworth’s garden. The first mishap was a theftuous abstraction of the cheese; and, on the back of it, Coleridge, in the very act of praising the brandy as a substitute, upset the bottle, and knocked it to pieces. They all tried to take off the harness from the horse. Cottle tried it, then the bard of Rydal; but in vain. Coleridge, who had served his apprenticeship as Silas Comberbatch in the cavalry, then twisted the poor animal’s neck almost to strangulation; but was at last compelled to pronounce that the horse’s head must have grown since the collar was put on! It was useless, he said, to try to force so huge anos frontisthrough so narrow a collar. All had given up, when lo! the servant girl turned the collar upside down, and slipped it off in an instant, to the inconceivable wonder and humiliation of the poets, who proceeded to solace themselves with the brown bread, the lettuces, and a jug of sparkling water. Who, knowing the subsequent fate of the tenants of Stowey,would not love to dwell on these delightful pictures of their better days?

“It must not be supposed, however, that the tempter never entered into this Eden; but when he did so, it was generally through the mischief-making pranks of Coleridge, who constantly kept his friends in hot water. He and Lamb had just published a joint volume of poems, and Coleridge could not refrain from satirising and parodying their offspring in the newspapers. Take this epigram as a specimen:—

‘TO THE AUTHOR OF THE ANCIENT MARINER.‘Your poem must eternal be—Dear Sir, it cannot fail;For ’tis incomprehensible,And without head or tail.’

‘TO THE AUTHOR OF THE ANCIENT MARINER.

‘Your poem must eternal be—Dear Sir, it cannot fail;For ’tis incomprehensible,And without head or tail.’

Of course nobody could suspect Coleridge of this; and, indeed, to his infinite amusement, a vain fellow affected to hesitate about being introduced to him, on the ground that he had mortally injured him by the writing of this very epigram! But Lamb could not fail to observe the doings of the poet-metaphysician more closely, and the result was a quarrel, whichinduced that ‘gentle creature’ to send him an unnaturally bitter series of theological questions, such as—‘Whether the vision beatific be anything more or less than a perpetual representment, to each individual angel, of his own present attainments and future capabilities, somehow in the manner of mortal looking-glasses, reflecting a perpetual complacency and self-satisfaction?’ Troubles from without added to this confusion within. The village wiseacres, to whom the habits of Wordsworth and his eccentric friend were totally incomprehensible, had decided that they were terrible scoundrels, who required to be looked after. One sage had seen Wordsworth look strangely at the moon; another had overheard him mutter in some unintelligible and outlandish brogue. Some thought him a conjuror; some a smuggler, from his perpetually haunting the sea-beach; some asserted that he kept a snug private still in his cellar, as they knew by their noses at a hundred yards distance; while others where convinced that he was ‘surely a desperate French Jacobin, for he was so silent nobody ever heard him say one word about politics.’ While the saturnine and stately Wordsworth was thus slanderouslyassailed, his fluent and witty associate could not expect to escape. One day, accordingly while on a pedestrian excursion, Coleridge met a woman who, not knowing who he was, abused him to himself in unmeasured Billingsgate for a whole hour, as a vile Jacobin villain, who had misled George Burnet of her parish. ‘I listened,’ wrote the poet to a friend, ‘very particularly, appearing to approve all she said, exclaiming, “Dear me!” two or three times; and, in fine, so completely won her heart by my civilities, that I had not courage enough to undeceive her.’ This is all very ludicrous and amusing now; but at the time its effect was such, that the person who had the letting of Alfoxden House refused point-blank to relet it to Wordsworth. This was of course a great vexation to Poole and Coleridge, who set about trying to procure another house in the vicinity.

“But the two bards were not a subject of jealousy and suspicion to the ignorant peasantry alone. A country gentleman of the locality became so alarmed, that he called in the aid of that tremendous abstraction—the state; and a spy was sent down from head-quarters, and lodged in mysterious privacy in StoweyInn. The poets could never stir out but this gentleman was at their heels, and they scarcely ever had an out-of-doors conversation which he did not overhear. He used to hide behind a bank at the seaside, which was a favourite seat of theirs. At that time they used to talk a great deal of Spinosa; and as their confidential attendant had a notable Bardolph nose, he at first took it into his head that they were making light of his importance by nicknaming him ‘Spy Nosy;’ but was soon convinced that that was the name of a man ‘who had made a book, and lived long ago.’ On one occasion Bardolph assumed the character of a Jacobin, to draw Coleridge out; but such was the bard’s indignant exposure of the Revolutionists, that even the spy felt ashamed that he had put Jacobinism on. Poor Coleridge was so unsuspicious, that he felt happy he had been the means of shaking the convictions of this awful partisan, and doing the unhappy man some good. At last the spy reported favourably, to the great disgust of the rural magnate who had engaged his services, and who now tried to elicit fresh grounds of suspicion from the village innkeeper. But that worthy was obstinate in his belief that it was totally impossible for Coleridge to harangue the inhabitants, as he talked ‘real Hebrew-Greek,’ which their limited intellects could not understand. This, however, only exasperated his inquisitor, who demanded whether Coleridge had not been seen roving about, taking charts and maps of the district. The poor innkeeper replied, that though he did not wish to say any ill of anybody, yet he must confess he had heard that Coleridge was a poet, and intended to put Quantock into print. Thus the friends escaped this peril, which was then a formidable one. Coleridge was at the time wandering about the romantic coombes of the Quantock Hills, making studies for a poem on the plan afterwards followed out by Wordsworth in his ‘Sonnets to the Duddon;’ and in the heat of the moment he resolved to dedicate it to Government, as containing the traitorous plans which he was to submit to the French, in order to facilitate their schemes of invasion. ‘And these, too,’ says he, ‘for a tract of coast that from Clevedon to Minehead scarcely permits the approach of a fishing-boat.’”

This episode brings us back to Wordsworth,and shows, amongst other things, the reason why he left Alfoxden, although not the slightest allusion is made to this spy business, or to the Pantisocratic scheme in the memoirs of the poet by Doctor Wordsworth. The poet’s removal to Bristol sometime about July, in the year 1798, was caused, according to the doctor, by Wordsworth’s “desire to be nearer the printer,” and he (the doctor) quotes a letter from Miss Wordsworth, bearing date July 18th of that year, in which she says, “William’s poems are now in the press; they will be out in six weeks.” These poems, or “Lyrical Ballads,” as they were called, were printed by Cottle, of Bristol, and Wordsworth received thirty guineas as his share, for the copyright of the volume.

“At his first interview with Wordsworth, Cottle had heard some of the lyrical poems read, and had earnestly advised their publication, offering for them the same sum he had given to Coleridge and Southey for their works, and stating flatteringly that no provincial bookseller might ever again have the honour of ushering such a trio to renown. Wordsworth, however, strongly objected to publication; but in April, 1798, the poet sent for Cottle to hearthem recited ‘under the old trees in the park.’ Coleridge despatched a confirmatory invitation. ‘We will procure a horse,’ wrote persuasive Samuel Taylor, ‘easy as thy own soul, and we will go on a roam to Linton and Limouth, which, if thou comest in May, will be in all their pride of woods and waterfalls, not to speak of its august cliffs, and the green ocean, and the vast Valley of Stones, all which live disdainful of the seasons, or accept new honours only from the winter’s snow.’ The three friends did go on their romantic excursion, saw sweet Linton and Limouth, and arranged the publication of the first volume of the ‘Lyrical Ballads,’ which we have now seen brought to their publication day, and submitted to the judgment of the public. Dr. Wordsworth, however, does not allude in the “Memoirs” to Cottle as one of their party to the Valley of Stones.

The reader of this day, accustomed to dwell with delight and reverence upon the Old Navigator, the Nightingale, Tintern Abbey, &c., will be a little startled to hear that although only five hundred copies of the Lyrical Ballads were printed, Cottle had to dispose of thegreater part of them to a London bookseller at a loss, in consequence of the terrific mud-showers of abuse which the critics poured upon the poems. Nevertheless, and in spite of the failure of the adventure, as a commercial speculation, there were minds of no mean order that detected the genius which produced them. Professor Wilson and De Quincy were amongst the number of these; and the former said, in speaking of the Ballads, that a new sun had risen at midday. Hannah More, also, who, notwithstanding her own milk-and-water productions, was a woman of discernment, was delighted with “Harry Gill,” and deigned to say so in the teeth of the dirty demireps that abused it. But the volume gradually sunk for a time below the public horizon, and when Cottle gave up his business, and disposed of his copyright to the Longmans of London, these publishers returned that of the Ballads as valueless, and Cottle made a present of it to its authors.

In the meanwhile, Wordsworth and his sister, accompanied by Coleridge, with the proceeds of their poetry in their pockets, went to Germany. The writer for Chambers says—

“The different temperaments of the poets displayed themselves very remarkably on the voyage. The bard of Rydal seems to have kept very quiet; but his mercurial companion, after indulging in most questionable potations with a motley group of eccentric foreigners, got up and danced with them a succession of dances, which, he says, might very appropriately have been termedreels. Where Wordsworth was may be conjectured from Coleridge’s remark, that those ‘who lay below in all the agonies of sea-sickness must have found our Bacchanalian merriment

——“a tuneHarsh and of dissonant mood from their complaint.”

One of the party was a Dane, a vain and disgusting coxcomb, whose conversation with Coleridge, whom he first took for a ‘Doctor Teology,’ and then for ‘un philosophe,’ actually outburlesqued burlesque. The astounded bard, for the first time in his life, took notes of a dialogue, of which a single sample is enough.

“The Dane.—Vat imagination! vat language! vat vast science! vat eyes! vat a milkwhite forehead! Oh my heafen! vy, you’re a got!

“Answer.—You do me too much honour, sir.

“The Dane.—Oh me, if you should tink I is flattering you! I haf ten tousand a year—yes, ten tousand a year—yes, ten tousand pound a year! Vell, and vat is dhat? Vy, a mere trifle! I ’ould’nt gif my sincere heart for ten times dhe money! Yes, you’re a got! I a mere man! But, my dear friend, dhink of me as a man! Is—is—I mean to ask you now, my dear friend—is I not very eloquent? Is I not speak English very fine?

“And so his Daneship, in this extraordinary style, went on fishing for compliments, and asking whether he did not speak just like Plato, and Cato, and Socrates, till he lost all opinion of Coleridge on finding that he was a Christian. The discarded poet then wrapped himself in his great-coat, and looked at the water, covered with foam and stars of flame, while every now and then detachments of it ‘darted off from the vessel’s side, each with its own constellation, over the sea, and scoured out of sight like a Tartar troop over a wilderness.’ By and byhe lay down, and ‘looking up at two or three stars, which oscillated with the motion of the sails, fell asleep.’

“They landed at Hamburg, on the Elbe Stairs, at the Boom-House. Wordsworth, with a French emigrant, whose acquaintance he had cultivated at sea, went in search of a hotel, and put up at ‘Die Wilde Man,’ while the other wild man, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, strolled about, amusing himself with looking at the ‘Dutch women, with large umbrella hats shooting out half a yard before them, and a prodigal plumpness of petticoat behind,’ and many similar striking and unusual spectacles.

“In Hamburg the pair were introduced to the brother of the poet Klopstock, and to Professor Ebeling, a lively and intelligent man, but so deaf that they had to ‘drop all their pearls into a huge ear-trumpet.’ At Mr. Klopstock’s they saw a bust of the poet, whom they afterwards visited. It had a solemn and heavy greatness in the countenance, which corresponded with the notions entertained by Coleridge of his style and genius, and which were afterwards discovered not to exist in the prototype himself. Coleridge, whose chief objectin coming to Germany was to become acquainted with the German language and literature, left Wordsworth in Hamburg, and went to Ratzeburg, where he boarded in the pastor’s house. He returned, however, for a few days, to take final leave of his friend, and the two paid a visit to Klopstock together. His house was one of a row of what appeared small summer-houses, with four or five rows of young meagre elms in front, and beyond these a green, bounded by a dead flat. The bard’s physiognomy disappointed them as much as his domicile. Coleridge recognised in it no likeness to the bust, and no traces either of sublimity or enthusiasm. Klopstock could only speak French and German, and Coleridge only English and Latin, so that Wordsworth, who was accomplished in French, acted as interpreter. It may here be mentioned that this ignorance of Coleridge’s brought upon him a peculiar sort of civility at Ratzeburg. Theamtmannof that place, anxious to be civil, and totally unable to find any medium of communication, every day they met, as the only courtesy he had it in his power to offer, addressed to him the whole stock of English hepossessed, which was to this effect:— ‘——ddam your ploot unt eyes, my dearest Englander, vhee goes it?’ The conversation with Klopstock turned entirely upon English and German literature, and in the course of it Wordsworth gave ample proofs of his great taste, industry, and information, and even showed that he was better acquainted with the highest German writers than the author of the ‘Messiah’ himself. On his informing the latter that Coleridge intended to translate some of his odes, the old man said to Coleridge—‘I wish you would render into English some select passages of the “Messiah,” andrevengeme of your countrymen.’ ‘This,’ says Coleridge, ‘was the liveliest thing he produced in the whole conversation.’ That genius was, however, deeply moved, but could not help being disgusted with the venerable bard’s snow-white periwig, which felt to his eye what Mr. Virgil would have been to his ear. After this, Coleridge left Hamburg, and resided four months in Ratzeburg, and five in Gottingen. Wordsworth had two subsequent interviews with Klopstock, and dined with him. He kept notes of these conversations, some of which are given in ‘Satyrane’s Letters,’ in the second volume of the ‘Biographia Literaria.’ One or two incidents strongly illustrate Wordsworth’s peculiar character and poetical taste. He complained, for example, of Lessing making the interest of the ‘Oberon’ turn upon mere appetite. ‘Well, but,’ said Klopstock, ‘you see that such poems please everybody.’ He immediately replied, that ‘it was the province of a great poet to raise a people up to his own level—not to descend to theirs.’ Klopstock afterwards found fault with the Fool in ‘Lear,’ when Wordsworth observed that ‘he gave a terrible wildness to the distress’—a remark which evinced a deep appreciation of that awful drama. Wordsworth subsequently made a short tour, and visited Coleridge at Gottingen on his return.’

Wordsworth, during the greater part of his time in Germany lived at Goslar, and he found the people neither very friendly nor hospitable. Goslar is situate at the foot of the Hartz Mountains, which are covered with fine oaks and beech, and the poet and his sister, to make up for the loss of society in the town, sought solitude amongst these magnificent woods. Among the poems written at this time were, “Strange fits of passion have I known,” “Three yearsshe grew in sun and shower,” “Lines to a Sexton,” “The Danish Boy,” intended as a prelude to a ballad never written; “A Poet’s Epitaph,” “Art thou a Statist?” “Lucy Gray.” All these poems and many more were written in 1799; and the latter is founded on a circumstance related by the poet’s sister “of a little girl, who, not far from Halifax, in Yorkshire, was bewildered in a snow-storm. Her footsteps were tracked by her parents to the middle of the lock of a canal, and no other footsteps of her, backward or forward, could be traced. The body, however, was found in the canal. The way in which the incident was treated, and the spiritualizing of the character, might furnish hints for contrasting the imaginative influences, which I have endeavoured to throw over common life, with Crabbe’s matter-of-fact style of handling subjects of the same kind. This is not spoken to his disparagement,—far from it; but to direct the attention of thoughtful readers into whose hands these notes may fall, to a comparison that may enlarge the circle of their sympathies, and tend to produce in them a catholic judgment.” “Lines written in Germany, ’98-9” have the following noteattached to them in the “Memoirs,” with which I will conclude these extracts.

“A bitter winter it was when these verses were composed, by the side of my sister, in our lodgings at a draper’s house, in the romantic imperial town of Goslar, on the edge of the Hartz Forest. In this town the German emperors of the Franconian line were accustomed to keep their court, and it retains vestiges of ancient splendour. So severe was the cold of this winter that when we passed out of the parlour warmed by the stove, our cheeks were struck by the air as if by cold iron. I slept in a room over a passage that was not ceiled. The people of the house used to say, rather unfeelingly, that they expected I should be frozen to death some night; but with the protection of a pelisse lined with fur, and a dog-skin bonnet, such as was worn by the peasants, I walked daily on the ramparts, in a sort of public ground or garden, in which was a pond. Here I had no companion but a kingfisher, a beautiful creature that used to glance by me. I consequently became much attached to it.” During these walks he composed the ‘Poet’s Epitaph.’ His ‘Poem of Ruth,’ ‘TheAddress to the Scholars of a Village School,’ ‘The two April Mornings,’ ‘The Fountain,’ ‘A Conversation,’ ‘Matthew,’ and a variety of others were likewise written about this time. In his correspondence with Coleridge at this time, the latter speaks in terms of the highest affection for him. ‘I am sure I need but say,’ he writes, ‘how you are incorporated with the better part of my being; how whenever I spring forward into the future with noble affections, I always alight by your side.’”

On the 10th of February, 1799, Wordsworth and his sister left Goslar, and returned towards England. The poet was now nearly thirty years of age; and as the gates of the Imperial City closed behind him, he felt like a bird suddenly released from captivity, and resolved to build up some stately architecture of verse, which men would not willingly let die. Accordingly he commenced the “Prelude,” within the very hum of the city. Six out of the fourteen books which compose it, were written before 1805.

In the spring of 1799 the poet and his sister returned to England; and in a letter to Cottle, written immediately after their arrival, we findthem in “the county of Durham, just on the borders of Yorkshire,” thankful, after sufficient experience of Germany, for the dear face of old England once more.

Thewandering minstrel and his sister—that great-hearted, most beautiful, and devoted sister, whom we cannot help loving so devoutly,—went in the spring of 1799 to visit their friends, the Hutchinsons, at Stockton-on-Tees, and remained there, with occasional exceptions, until the close of the year. Here dwelt Miss Mary Hutchinson, for whom the poet had begun to conceive such passion as he was capable of from the time of her visit to him and his sister, at Alfoxden. For although Dr. Wordsworth is silent also respecting this visit, De Quincy tells us that it actually took place.—And now the lovers—in their saturnine way—had leisure to cement their attachment, and what is more, they took advantage of it, as their subsequent marriage, about the commencement of the present century, sufficiently proves.—Many other things, however, occupied the poet’s attention beside this, and we find him, September 20, planning another tour, and this time through the lake district, with his friends Cottle and Coleridge. It was the first time that the latter had seen the lake country, and he, in writing to Miss Wordsworth, thus speaks of it:—

“At Temple Sowerby we met your brother John, who accompanied us to Hawes-water, Ambleside, and the divine sisters, Rydal and Grasmere. Here we stayed two days. We accompanied John over the fork of Helvellyn, on a day when light and darkness co-existed in contiguous masses, and the earth and sky were but one. Nature lived for us in all her grandest accidents. We quitted him by a wild turn, just as we caught a sight of the gloomy Ullswater.

“Your brother John is one of you; a man who hath solitary usings of his ownintellect, deep in feelings, with a subtle tact, a swift instinct of truth and beauty; he interests me much.

“You can feel what I cannot express for myself, how deeply I have been impressed by a world of scenery, absolutely new to me. At Rydal and Grasmere I received, I think, the deepest delight; yet Hawes-water, through many a varying view, kept my eyes dim with tears; and the evening approaching, Derwent-water, in diversity of harmonious features, in the majesty of its beauties, and in the beauty of its majesty ... and the black crags close under the snowy mountains, whose snows were pinkish with the setting sun, and the reflections from the rich clouds that floated over some, and rested over others!—it was to me a vision of a fair country: why were you not with us?”

It was in this tour that Wordsworth resolved to settle at Grasmere. First he thought of building a house by the lake side, and to enable him to do this, his brother John offered to give him £40 to buy the land. There was a small house to let, however, at Grasmere, which, after much deliberation with his sister, he finallyhired, and the two inseparables entered upon it on St. Thomas’s Day, 1799.

One of the very finest of all Wordsworth’s letters—written to Coleridge four days after the settlement at Grasmere—details, with a graphic and truly poetic power, the wanderings of the sister and brother from Sockburn to their new home. It is too long, however, to quote here, and for a perusal of it the reader is referred to the Memoirs.[H]

The poet lived at Grasmere with his sister for eight years.[I]“The cottage,” says Dr. Wordsworth, in which Wordsworth and his sister took up their abode, and which still retains the form it wore then, stands on the right hand, by the side of what was then the coach road, from Ambleside to Keswick, as it enters Grasmere, or, as that part of the village is called, “Town End.” The front of it faces the lake; behind is a small plot of orchard and garden-ground, in which there is a spring, and rocks; the enclosure shelves upward towards the woody sides of the mountain above it.—Many of his poems, as the reader will remember, are associated with this fair spot:

Back to Index Next