III A Day in Wordsworth’s Country
Our arrival on Saturday evening at the village of Windermere was like the sudden and unexpected realization of a dream. On many a winter night, under the light of our library lamp at home, we had talked of that vague, distant “sometime” when we should visit the English Lakes. And now—by what curious combination of circumstances we did not try to analyze—here we were with the whole beautiful panorama, in all its evening splendors, spread out before us. Through our minds passed, as in a vision, the whole company of poets who are inseparably associated with these scenes: Wordsworth, whose abiding influence upon the spirit of poetry will endure as long as the mountains and vales which taught him to love and reverence nature; Southey, who, himself without the appreciation of nature, was the first to recognize Wordsworth’s rare power of interpreting her true meaning; Coleridge, the most intimate friend of the greater poet, whom Wordsworth declared to be the most wonderful man he ever met, and who, in spite of those shortcomings which caused his life to end in worldly failure, nevertheless possessed a native eloquence and alluring personality.
Nor should we forget De Quincey, who spent twenty of the happiest years of his life at Dove Cottage, as the successor of the Wordsworths. His most intimate companion was the famous Professor Wilson of Edinburgh, known to all readers of “Blackwood’s Magazine” as “Christopher North.” Attracted partly by the beauty of the Lake Country, but more by his desire to cultivate the intimacy of Wordsworth, whose genius he greatly admired, Professor Wilson bought a pretty place in Cumberland, where he lived for several years. He enjoyed the companionship of the friendly group of poets, but, we are told, occasionally sought a different kind of pleasure in measuring his strength with some of the native wrestlers, one of the most famous of whom has testified that he found him “a very bad un to lick.”
At a later time, Dr. Arnold of Rugby found himself drawn to the Lakes by the same double attraction, and built the charming cottage at Fox How on the River Rothay, where his youngest daughter still resides. He wrote in 1832: “Our intercourse with the Wordsworths was one of the brightest spots of all; nothing could exceed their friendliness, and my almost daily walks with him were things not to be forgotten.”
It was not alone the beauty of the Westmoreland scenery that had attracted this group of famous men. There are lovelier lakes in Scotland and more majestic mountains in Switzerland. But Wordsworth was here, in the midst of those charming displays of Nature in her most cheerful as well as most soothing moods. Nature’s best interpreter and Nature herself could be seen together. For a hundred years this same influence has continued to exercise its spell upon travelers, and we are bound to recognize the fact that this, and nothing else, had drawn us away from our prearranged path, that we might enjoy the pleasure of a Sunday in the country of Wordsworth.
The morning dawned, bright and beautiful, suggesting that splendid day when Wordsworth, then a youth of eighteen, found himself possessed of an irresistible desire to devote his life to poetry:
“Magnificent
The morning rose, in memorable pomp,
Glorious as e’er I had beheld—in front,
The sea lay laughing at a distance; near,
The solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds,
Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light;
And in the meadows and the lower grounds
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn—
Dews, vapors, and the melody of birds,
And laborers going forth to till the fields.
Ah! need I say, dear Friend, that to the brim
My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly,
A dedicated spirit.”
We resolved that the whole of this beautiful day should be devoted to catching something of that indefinable spirit of the Westmoreland hills which had made a poet of Wordsworth, and through him taught the love of Nature to countless thousands. A few steps took us away from the town, the inn, and the other tourists, into a quiet woodland path leading toward the lake, at the end of which we stood
“On long Winander’s eastern shore.”
“Winander” is the old form of Windermere. The lake was the scene of many of Wordsworth’s boyhood experiences.
“When summer came,
Our pastime was, on bright half-holidays,
To sweep along the plain of Windermere
With rival oars; and the selected bourne
Was now an Island musical with birds
That sang and ceased not; now a Sister Isle
Beneath the oaks’ umbrageous covert, sown
With lilies of the valley like a field;
And now a third small Island, where survived
In solitude the ruins of a shrine
Once to Our Lady dedicate, and served
Daily with chaunted rites. In such a race,
So ended, disappointment could be none,
Uneasiness, or pain, or jealousy:
We rested in the shade, all pleased alike,
Conquered and conqueror. Thus the pride of strength,
And the vainglory of superior skill,
Were tempered.”
Wordsworth’s boyhood was probably very much like that of other boys. He tells us that he was “stiff, moody, and of a violent temper”—so much so that he went up into his grandfather’s attic one day, while under the resentment of some indignity, determined to destroy himself. But his heart failed. On another occasion he relates that while at his grandfather’s house in Penrith, he and his eldest brother Richard were whipping tops in the large drawing-room. “The walls were hung round with family pictures, and I said to my brother, ‘Dare you strike your whip through that old lady’s petticoat?’ He replied, ’No, I won’t.’ ‘Then,’ said I, ‘here goes!’ and I struck my lash through her hooped petticoat; for which, no doubt, though I have forgotten it, I was properly punished. But, possibly from some want of judgment in the punishments inflicted, I had become perverse and obstinate in defying chastisement, and rather proud of it than otherwise.” Lowell remarks upon this incident: “Just so do we find him afterward striking his defiant lash through the hooped petticoat of the artificial style of poetry, and proudly unsubdued by the punishment of the Reviewers.” When scarcely ten years old, it was his joy
“To range the open heights where woodcocks run.”
He would spend half the night “scudding away from snare to snare,” sometimes yielding to the temptation to take the birds caught in the snare of some other lad. He felt the average boy’s terror inspired by a guilty conscience, for he says:—
“And when the deed was done,
I heard among the solitary hills
Low breathings coming after me, and sounds
Of undistinguishable motion, steps
Almost as silent as the turf they trod.”
Across the lake from where we stood, and over beyond the hills on the other side, is the quaint old town of Hawkshead, where Wordsworth was sent to school at the age of nine years. The little schoolhouse may still be seen, but it is of small import. The real scenes of Wordsworth’s early education were the woods and vales, the solitary cliffs, the rocks and pools, and the Lake of Esthwaite, five miles round, which he was fond of encircling in his early morning walks, that he might sit
“Alone upon some jutting eminence,
At the first gleam of dawn-light, when the Vale,
Yet slumbering, lay in utter solitude.”
In winter-time “a noisy crew” made merry upon the icy surface of the lake.
“All shod with steel,
We hissed along the polished ice in games
Confederate, imitative of the chase
And woodland pleasures,—the resounding horn,
The pack loud chiming, and the hunted hare.
So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
And not a voice was idle.”
Nor were the pleasures of social life lacking. Dances, feasts, public revelry, and
“A swarm
Of heady schemes, jostling each other,”
all seemed for a time to conspire to lure his mind away from the paths of “books and nature,” which he would have preferred. But, curiously enough, it was after one of these nights of revelry that, on his way home, Wordsworth was so much impressed with the beauties of the dawn that he felt the impulse, previously mentioned, to devote himself to poetry.
No other poet ever gave such an account of the development of his own mind as Wordsworth gives in the “Prelude.” And while he recounts enough incidents like the snaring of woodcock, the fishing for trout in the quiet pools and the cascades of the mountain brooks, the flying of kites on the hilltops, the nutting expeditions, the rowing on the lake, and in the winter-time the skating and dancing, to convince us that he was really a boy, yet he continually shows that beneath it all there was a deeper feeling—a prophecy of the man who was even then developing. No ordinary boy would have been conscious of “a sense of pain” at beholding the mutilated hazel boughs which he had broken in his search for nuts. No ordinary lad of ten would be able to hold
“Unconscious intercourse with beauty
Old as creation, drinking in a pure
Organic pleasure from the silver wreaths
Of curling mist, or from the level plain
Of waters colored by impending clouds.”
Even at that early age, in the midst of all his pleasures he felt
“Gleams like the flashing of a shield;—the earth
And common face of Nature spake to me
Rememberable things.”
The secret of Wordsworth’s power lay in the fact that, throughout a long life, nature was to him a vital, living Presence—one capable of uplifting mankind to loftier aspirations, of teaching noble truths, and at the same time providing tranquillity and rest to the soul. As a boy he had felt for nature
“A feeling and a love
That had no need of a remoter charm.”
But manhood brought a deeper joy.
“For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of
Something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains, and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.”
In these noble lines we reach the very summit of Wordsworth’s intellectual power and poetic genius.
We must now retrace our steps to the village and find a carriage to take us on our journey. For we are not like our English friends, who are good walkers, nor do we care to emulate the pedestrian attainments of our poet, who, De Quincey thought, must have traversed a distance of one hundred and seventy-five thousand to one hundred and eighty thousand English miles. So a comfortable landau takes us on our way, skirting the upper margin of the lake, then winding along the river Brathay, pausing for a moment to view the charming little cascade of Skelwith Force, then on again until Red Bank is reached, overlooking the vale of Grasmere. The first glimpse of this placid little lake, “with its one green island,” its shores well fringed with the budding foliage of spring, the gently undulating hills forming as it were a graceful frame to the mirror of the waters, in which the reflection of the blue sky and fleecy white clouds seemed even more beautiful than their original overhead—the first glimpse could scarcely fail to arouse the emotions of the most apathetic and stir up a poetic feeling in the most unpoetic of natures.
To a mind like Wordsworth’s, such a scene was an inspiration, a revelation of Nature’s charms such as could arouse an almost ecstatic enthusiasm in the heart of one who, all his life, had lived amid scenes of beauty and possessed the eyes to see them. He came here first “a roving schoolboy,” on a “golden summer holiday,” and even then said, with a sigh,—
“What happy fortune were it here to live!”
He had no thought, nor even hope, that he would ever realize such good fortune, but only
“A fancy in the heart of what might be
The lot of others never could be his.”
GRASMERE LAKE
Possibly he may have stood on this very knoll where we were enjoying our first view:—
“The station whence we looked was soft and green,
Not giddy, yet aërial, with a depth
Of vale below, a height of hills above.
For rest of body perfect was the spot,
All that luxurious nature could desire;
But stirring to the spirit; who could gaze
And not feel motions there?”
Many years later, in the summer of 1799, Wordsworth and Coleridge were walking together over the hills and valleys of Westmoreland and Cumberland, hoping to find, each for himself, a home where they might dwell as neighbors. Since receiving his degree at Cambridge in 1791 Wordsworth had wandered about in a somewhat aimless way, living for a time in London and in France, visiting Germany, and finally attempting to find a home in the south of England. A small legacy left him in 1795 had given a feeling of independence, and his one consuming desire at this time was to establish a home where his beloved sister Dorothy might be with him and he could devote his entire time to poetry.
A little cottage in a quiet spot just outside the village of Grasmere attracted his eye. It had been a public-house, and bore the sign “The Dove and the Olive Bough.” He called it “Dove Cottage,” and for eight years it became his home. We found the custodian, a little old lady, in a penny shop across the street, and she was glad to show us through the tiny, low-ceilinged rooms. The cottage looks best from the little garden in the rear. The ivy and the roses soften all the harsh angles of the eaves and convert even the chimney-pots into things of beauty. A tangled mass of foliage covers the small back portico and makes a shady nook, where a little bench is invitingly placed. A few yards up the garden walk, over stone steps put in place by Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge, is the rocky well, or spring, where the poet placed “bright gowan and marsh marigold” brought from the borders of the lake. At the farthest end is the little summer-house, the poet’s favorite retreat. How well he loved this garden is shown in the poem written when he left Grasmere to bring home his bride in 1802:—
“Sweet garden orchard, eminently fair,
The loveliest spot that man hath ever found.”
Seating ourselves in this garden, we tried to think of the three interesting personages who had made the place their home. Coleridge said, “His is the happiest family I ever saw.” They had one common object—to work together to develop a rare poetic gift. They were poor, for Wordsworth had only the income of a very small legacy, and the public had not yet come to recognize his genius; the returns from his literary work were therefore extremely meager. They got along with frugal living and poor clothing, but as they made no pretensions they were never ashamed of their poverty. Visitors came and went, and at the cost of many little sacrifices were hospitably entertained.
Perhaps the world will never know how much Wordsworth really owed to the two women of his household. They lived together with no sign of jealousy or distrust. The husband and brother was the object of their untiring and sympathetic devotion. They walked with him, read with him, cared for him. Mrs. Wordsworth seems to have been a plain country-woman of simple manners, yet possessed of a graciousness and tact which made everything in the household go smoothly. De Quincey declared that, “without being handsome or even comely,” she exercised “all the practical fascination of beauty, through the mere compensating charms of sweetness all but angelic, of simplicity the most entire, womanly self-respect and purity of heart speaking through all her looks, acts, and movements.” Wordsworth was never more sincere than when he sang,—
“She was a phantom of delight,”
and closed the poem with that splendid tribute to a most excellent wife:—
“A perfect woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a spirit still, and bright
With something of angelic light.”
He recognized her unusual poetic instinct by giving her full credit for the best two lines in one of his most beautiful poems, “The Daffodils”:—
“They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude.”
To the other member of that household, his sister Dorothy, Wordsworth gave from early boyhood the full measure of his affection. She was his constant companion in his walks, at all hours and in all kinds of weather. She cheerfully performed the irksome task of writing out his verses from dictation. Her observations of nature were as keen as his, and the poet was indebted to Dorothy’s notebook for many a good suggestion. He has been most generous in his acknowledgments of his obligation to her:—
“She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,
And humble cares, and delicate fears,
*******
And love, and thought, and joy.”
In the early days when he was overwhelmed with adverse criticism and brought almost to the verge of despair, it was Dorothy’s helping hand that brought him back to his own.
“She whispered still that brightness would return;
She, in the midst of all, preserved me still
A poet, made me seek beneath that name,
And that alone, my office upon earth.”
DOVE COTTAGE, GRASMERE
But it is De Quincey who gives the best statement of the world’s obligation to Dorothy. Said he:—
Whereas the intellect of Wordsworth was, by its original tendency, too stern, too austere, too much enamored of an ascetic harsh sublimity, she it was—the lady who paced by his side continually through sylvan and mountain tracks, in Highland glens, and in the dim recesses of German charcoal-burners—that first couched his eye to the sense of beauty, humanized him by the gentler charities, and engrafted, with her delicate female touch, those graces upon the ruder growths of nature which have since clothed the forest of his genius with a foliage corresponding in loveliness and beauty to the strength of its boughs and the massiveness of its trunks.
Nearly all of Wordsworth’s best poetry was written in this little cottage, or, to speak more accurately, it was composed while he was living here. For it was never his way to write verses while seated at a desk, pen in hand. His study was out of doors. He could compose a long poem while walking, and remember it all afterward when ready to dictate. Thousands of verses, he said, were composed on the banks of the brook running through Easedale, just north of Grasmere Lake. The tall figure of the poet was a familiar sight to farmers for miles around, as he paced the woods or mountain paths, his head bent down, and his lips moving with audible if not distinguishable sounds. One of his neighbors has left on record an impression of how he seemed when he was “making a poem.”
He would set his head a bit forward, and put his hands behind his back. And then he would start in bumming, and it was bum, bum, bum, stop; and then he’d set down, and git a bit o’ paper out, and write a bit. However, his lips were always goan’ whoole time he was upon gress1 walk. He was a kind mon, there’s no two words about that; and if any one was sick i’ the place, he wad be off to see til’ ’em.
In personal appearance—about which, by the way, he cared little—he was not unlike the dalesmen about him. Nearly six feet high, he looked strong and hardy enough to be a farmer himself. Carlyle speaks of him as “businesslike, sedately confident, no discourtesy, yet no anxiety about being courteous; a fine wholesome rusticity, fresh as his mountain breezes, sat well on the stalwart veteran and on all he said or did.”
On our return from Grasmere we took the road along the north shore of Rydal Water—a small lake with all the characteristic beauty of this fascinating region, and yet not so different from hundreds of others that it would ever attract more than passing notice. But the name of Rydal is linked with that of Grasmere, and the two are visited by thousands of tourists year after year. For fifty years the shores of these two lakes and the hills and valleys surrounding them were the scenes of Wordsworth’s daily walks. As we passed we heard the cuckoo—its mysterious sound seeming to come across the lake—and as our own thoughts were on Wordsworth, “the wandering Voice” seemed appropriate. If we could have heard the skylark at that moment, our sense of satisfaction would have been quite complete, and no doubt we should have cried out, with the poet,—
“Up with me! up with me into the clouds!
For thy song, Lark, is strong;
Up with me, up with me into the clouds!
Singing, singing,
With clouds and sky about thee ringing,
Lift me, guide me till I find
That spot which seems so to thy mind.”
Just north of the eastern end of the lake, beneath the shadow of Nab Scar, is Rydal Mount, where the poet came to live in 1813, remaining until his death, thirty-seven years later. Increasing prosperity enabled him to take this far more pretentious house. It stands on a hill, a little off the main road, and quite out of sight of the tourists who pass through in coaches and chars-à-bancs. The drivers usually jerk their thumbs in the general direction and say, “There is Rydal Mount,” etc., and the tourists, who have seen only a farmhouse—not Wordsworth’s—are left to imagine that they have seen the house of the poet.
It is an old house, but some recent changes in doors and windows give it a more modern aspect. The unaltered portion is thickly covered with ivy. The ground in front is well planted with a profusion of rhododendrons. A very old stone stairway descends from the plaza in front of the house to a kind of mound or rather a double mound, the smaller resting upon a larger one. From this point the house is seen to the best advantage. In the opposite direction is a landscape of rare natural beauty. Far away in the distance lies Lake Windermere glistening like a shield of polished silver, while on the left Wansfell and on the right Nab Scar stand guard over the valley. In the foreground the spire of the little church of Rydal peeps out over the trees.
At the right of the house is a long terrace which formed one of Wordsworth’s favorite walks, where he composed thousands of verses. From here one may see both Windermere and Rydal Water, with mountains in the distance. Passing through the garden we came to a gate leading to Dora’s Field. Here is the little pool where Wordsworth and Dora put the little goldfishes, that they might enjoy a greater liberty. Here is the stone which Wordsworth saved from destruction by the builders of a stone wall. A little flight of stone steps leads down to another boulder containing the following inscription, carved by the poet’s own hand:—
Wouldst thou be gathered to Christ’s chosen flock
Shun the broad way too easily explored
And let thy path be hewn out of the rock
The living Rock of God’s eternal WORD
1838
WORDSWORTH’S WELL
Dora’s field is thickly covered in spring-time with the beautiful golden daffodils, planted by the poet himself. No sight is more fascinating at this season than a field of these bright yellow flowers. We Americans, who only see them planted in gardens, cannot realize what daffodils mean to the English eye, unless we chance to visit England during the early spring. What Wordsworth called a “crowd” of daffodils, growing in thick profusion along the margin of a lake, beneath the trees, ten thousand to be seen at a glance, all nodding their golden heads beside the dancing and foaming waves, is a sight well worth seeing.
“The waves beside them danced; but they
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee;
A poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude:
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.”
But now the time had come to return to Windermere, and reluctantly we turned our backs upon these scenes, so full of pleasant memories. The day, however, was not yet done, for after supper we climbed to the top of Orrest-Head, a little hill behind the village. No more charming spot could have been chosen in which to spend the closing hours of this peaceful day. Far below lay the quiet waters of the lake, only glimpses of its long and narrow surface appearing here and there, like “burnished mirrors” set by Nature for the sole purpose of reflecting a magnificent golden sky. It was “an evening of extraordinary, splendor,” like that one which Wordsworth saw from Rydal Mount:—
“No sound is uttered,—but a deep
And solemn harmony pervades
The hollow vale from steep to steep,
And penetrates the glades.”
As we stood watching the splendid sunset, the village church rang out its chimes, as if to accompany the inspiring scene with sweet and holy music.
“How pleasant, when the sun declines, to view
The spacious landscape change in form and hue!
Here vanish, as in mist, before a flood
Of bright obscurity, hill, lawn, and wood;
Their objects, by the searching beams betrayed,
Come forth and here retire in purple shade;
Even the white stems of birch, the cottage white,
Soften their glare before the mellow light.”
The shadows which had been slowly falling upon the scene had now so far enveloped the mountain-side that the narrow roadways and stone fences marking the boundaries of the fields were barely visible. Suddenly in the distance we saw a moving object, a mere speck upon the hillside. It darted first in one direction and then another, like some frightened being uncertain which way to turn. Then a darker speck appeared, and with rapid movement circled to the rear of the whiter one, the latter moving on ahead. Another sudden movement, and a second white speck appeared in another spot. The black speck as quickly moved to the rear of this second bit of white, driving it in the same direction as the first. The white specks then began to seem more numerous. We tried to count—one—two—three—ten—a dozen—perhaps even twenty. There was but one black speck, and he seemed to be the master of all the others, for, darting here and there after the stragglers, he kept them all together. He drove them along the narrow road. Then, coming to an opening in the fence, he hurried along to the front of the procession; then, facing about, deftly turned the whole flock through the gate into a large field. Through this pasture, with the skill of a military leader, he marshaled his troop, rushing backwards and forwards, allowing none to fall behind nor to stray away from the proper path, finally bringing them up in a compact body to another opening in the opposite end of the field. On he went, driving his small battalion along the road, then at right angles into another road, until the whole flock of sheep and the little black dog who commanded them disappeared for the night among the out-buildings of a far distant farm.
The twilight had almost gone, and in the growing darkness we retraced our steps to the village, well content that, through communion with the Spirit of Wordsworth in the presence of that “mighty Being” who to him was the great Teacher and Inspirer of mankind, our own love of nature had been reawakened, and our time well spent on this peaceful, never-to-be-forgotten day at Windermere.
IV
FROM HAWTHORNDEN TO ROSLIN GLEN
Notes
1 Grass.