English Lands Letters and Kings Part 22

I am disposed to think that all of us, as we grow older, come into larger and fuller appreciation of the wonderful intuitions of this poet and of his marvellous grasp of all the subtler meanings in Nature's aspects. Certainly those lines composed above _Tintern Abbey_, do not offer food for babes. Only older ones know that--

"Nature never did betray The heart that loves her; 'tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead From joy to joy; for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold Is full of blessings."

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So, too, in the Excursion, whose mention we perhaps dwelt upon too lightly--that grand Wordsworthian mating of man with Nature is always s.h.i.+ning through the poet's purpose, and gleaming along his lines: a deep and radical purpose it is; all else sways to it; all else is dwarfed and made small in the comparison. Hence, poor Mary Lamb is half-justified in her outcry--that under its dominance a poor dweller in town has hardly "a soul to be saved."[9] Grand, surely, are many of his utterances, morally and intellectually, and carrying richest adornments of poesy to their livery; immortal--yes; yet not favorites for these many generations: too enc.u.mbered; sheathed about with tamer things, that will not let the sword of his intent gleam with a vital keenness and poignancy. Always the great lesson which the stars and the mountains and rolling rivers sing--sing in his lines; but b.u.t.tressed with over-much building up of supporting and flanking words.

Always the grand appeal to man's moral nature and instincts is imminent; always the verse radiant with the {337} beguiling lights which he has set to burn upon the hills and in the skies; but, too often, even the sunset glories pall, and weary with their over-painting and golden suffusions of language.

If one is tempted to go back to the contemporary criticism of the _Excursion_, he should temper the matter-of-fact admeasurement and antipathies of Jeffrey in the _Edinburgh_, with the kindlier and more feeling discourse of Charles Lamb in the _Quarterly_ (1814). And of this latter, it is to be remembered that its warm unction and earnestness were very much abated by editorial jugglery. Lamb never forgave Gifford for putting "his d----d shoemaker phraseology instead of mine;" and in an explanatory letter to Wordsworth he tells him that many pa.s.sages are cut out altogether, and "what is left is of course the worse for their having been there," and in a wonderful figure continues,--"the eyes are pulled out, and the bleeding sockets are left."

_Personal History._

Wordsworth was a c.u.mberland man by birth, and from the very first opened his young eyes {338} upon such scenes as lay along the Derwent.

His father was an attorney-at-law and agent for the Lonsdale estates; nor does the poet fail to a.s.sure us in his autobiographic notes--with a pride that is only half veiled--of the gentle blood that flowed in his mother's veins. But the family purse was not plethoric; and--his father dying, when Wordsworth was only fourteen--it was through the kindness of his uncles that he had his "innings" at Trinity College, Cambridge, and felt his poetic pulses stirred by the memory of such old Cambridge men as Milton, and Waller, and Gray. The flat meadows bordering the Cam were doubtless tame to his c.u.mberland eyes, nor do University memories count for much in irradiating his future work; perhaps the brightest gleam that comes from those cloistered sources upon his verse is that which is reflected from the wondrous vaulted ceiling of King's College Chapel:--

"That branching roof Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells Where light and shade repose, where music dwells, Lingering and wandering on as loth to die."

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A vacation pa.s.sed in the mountains of Switzerland sharpened an appet.i.te for travel upon the Continent; and thither he went shortly after taking his degree (1791); was in Orleans and in Paris the succeeding year; caught the fever of those revolutionary times, and for a while seriously entertained the purpose of throwing himself into the swirl of that tide of Girondism which was to fall away so shortly after, leaving tracks of blood.

There was a short stay in London on his return--counting for very little in the story of his life. _Westminster Bridge_ and _A Farmer of Tilsbury Vale_ are all that bring a glimmer of remembrance to the lover of his books, out of the tumult and roar of "Lothbury" and Cheapside.

Thereafter came the quiet life in Dorsets.h.i.+re with his good sister Dora--where his poetic moods first came to print--and where Coleridge found him (1796) and cemented that friends.h.i.+p which drew him next year into Somersets.h.i.+re--a friends.h.i.+p, which, with one brief interruption, that promised a bitter quarrel--lasted throughout their lives.

There--at Alfoxden, in Somersets.h.i.+re--was forged that little book of _Lyrical Ballads_, containing the _Ancient {340} Mariner_ and _Tintern Abbey_--the best possible types of the respective powers of the two poets.

In 1799 Wordsworth established himself at Grasmere, in Westmoreland, his sister remaining--as she always did--a beloved inmate of his home.

In 1802 he married, most fortunately, a woman who was always sympathetic and kindly, as well as an excellent and devoted mother of the children born to them;[10] moreover, she was exceptionally endowed to stimulate and give range to his poetic ambitions. Between Grasmere or its neighborhood, and the better-known home of Rydal Mount, the poet pa.s.sed the remainder of his life. There were, indeed, frequent interludes of travel--to Scotland, to Leicesters.h.i.+re, to Southern England, to Ireland, and the Continent--from all which places he came back with an unabated love for the lakes and mountains which bounded his home. Never did there live a more exalted lover of {341} Nature; and specially for those scenes of Nature which cradled him in infancy and which cheered his manhood. Without being largely experienced in the devices of gardening craft, he yet gave frequent and profitable advice to those among his friends who were building up homes in the surrounding lake district; and the Beaumont family of Leicesters.h.i.+re show with pride a winter garden at Coleorton, which is an evergreen remembrancer of the poet's skill and taste. He resented all undue interference with natural surfaces; his art was the larger art of winning one to the reasonableness and beauty of nature's own purposes.

Not a resident in the neighborhood of Ambleside but knew his gaunt figure stalking up and down the hills; yet not counted over-affable; the villagers report him--"distant, vera distant. As for his habits he had none--niver knew him wi' a pot i' his hand or a pipe i' his mouth."

And another says--"As for fis.h.i.+ng, he hadn't a bit of fish in him, hadn't Wordsworth--not a bit o' fish in him!"[11] This sounds strangely to one familiar {342} with _Lines to gold and silver fish in a gla.s.s globe_.

Certainly he did not love babble nor little persiflage; he had neither the art to coin it nor the humor to redeem it. But he was capable of sensible, heavily-charged talk, even upon practical themes, showing a capacity for, and a habit of, consecutive and logical thinking. Often reading and discoursing on poets and their work, but chary of any exuberance of praise; if ever cynical, tending that way under such provocation. Not indisposed--for small cause--to recite from Wordsworth (as Emerson tells us in the story of his first visit to Rydal Mount); but reciting well, and putting large, das.h.i.+ng movement into the verse--as of faraway rebounding water-falls. His egotism, though not easily kept under, was not riotously exacting or audacious; one could see at the bottom of it--not the little vanities of a flibbertigibbet, but respect and reverence for his inborn seers.h.i.+p and for his long priesthood at the altar of the Muses.

He had no musical ear, no power of distinguis.h.i.+ng tunes, yet was rapt into ecstatic fervor by the {343} near and sweet warbling of a bird.

Books he loved only for their uses; he favored no finical "keeping" of them, but plunged into an uncut volume with a smeared fruit-knife--if need were. Southey dreaded his visits to his Keswick library, saying he was "like a bear in a tulip garden." He was parsimonious too; generosity in praise, or in purse, was unknown to him; and he had stiff school-mastery ways with youngish men--craving oblation and large tokens of respect. De Quincey said he never offered to carry a lady's shawl; hardly offered a hand to help her over a stile. He was not mobile, not adaptive, not gossipy; last of men for a picnic or a tea-party. His shaking of hands was "f.e.c.kless;" which to a Scottish ear means a hand-shake not to be run after and with no heartiness in its grip. That home of Rydal Mount was a modest and charming one; within--severely simple; in abstemiousness the poet was almost an anchorite: without--a terrace walk, a velvety stretch of turf, mossy vases, a dial, a few patches of flowers, grayish house-walls on which the clambering vines took hold, quaint stone chimney-tops on which the {344} lichens clung and around which the swallows played, views of Rydal Water, glimpses of Windermere, of Nab-scar, and of nearer heights crowned with foliage.

Wordsworth was never a man of large means; his poems gave only small moneyed returns; nor did he care overmuch for expensive indulgences; travelling was his greatest and most coveted luxury. All new scenes in nature came to his eye as so many new phases of his oldest and tenderest friend.

For a considerable period he was in receipt of a small revenue from a local Commissioners.h.i.+p of Stamps, and during the last eight years of his life received a pension of 300 from the Government. A year after the grant, upon the death of Dr. Southey, he was, through the urgence of friends, and at the solicitation of Sir Robert Peel, induced to accept the post of Poet Laureate--going up to London, at the age of seventy-three, to kiss the hand of the young Queen, in recognition of that honor. This young Queen, then in her twenty-fourth year, was her present gracious lady, Victoria, who had succeeded to her bluff sailor-uncle, {345} William IV., in 1837, and to her sorrier uncle, George IV., who had died in 1830.

Wordsworth was among those stately country gentlemen who believed that with the pa.s.sage of the great Reform Bill of 1832, England was about to enter upon her decadence. Like many another poet, he had faith in established privileges, and faith in grand traditions. He bestirred himself, too, in the latter years of his life, to defeat--if it might be--the scheme for pus.h.i.+ng railways across his quiet and beautiful region among the lakes of Westmoreland and c.u.mberland. Happily he did not live to see the desecration of his charming solitudes; it would have made him wroth to watch the wreaths of vapor from the engines floating around the chimney-tops of Rydal Mount.[12] The lines he wrote fifty years before his death, he lived by to the last:--

"To her fair works did Nature link The human soul that thro' me ran;

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And much it grieved my heart to think What man has made of man.

The budding twigs spread out their fan To catch the breezy air; And I must think, do all I can, That there was pleasure there."

He had not only a poet's, but a Briton's love for that old England--of mossy roofs, and park lands, and smoking chimneys, and great old houses, and gnarled oaks, and way-side cottages. He cherished all Raskin's antipathy to huge manufacturing centres, and the din of machinery and trip-hammers; he would have no pounding to fright the cuckoos, and no reservoirs among the hills to choke the rills; but everywhere the brooks purling their own murmurous ways through leafy solitudes and sweet, open valleys.

Well, those are the sights that win most, I think, toward the celestial visions which the good poet always cherished, and which symbolized best the "dear Jerusalem,"--

"Along whose streets, with pleasing sound, The living waters flow, And on the banks, on either side.

The trees of life do grow."

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Only the name--William Wordsworth--is graven upon the simple stone which marks the poet's grave, in a corner of the church-yard at Grasmere; and the bodies of wife and children lie grouped there beside him.

[1] Samuel Rogers, b. 1768; d. 1855. His _Pleasures of Memory_, published 1792; _Italy_, 1822-28.

[2] Crabb Robinson, chap. ix., 1881, p. 165, vol. ii., says he "was noted for his generosity toward poor artists." The story he tells in confirmation is, that Sir Thomas Lawrence appeared at his door and begged him to save the president of the Royal Academy from disgrace, which must follow except a few thousands were raised next day; he (Sir Thomas) offering his paintings, drawings, etc., in guarantee. Crabb Robinson continues that "Rogers saw Lord Ward [a n.o.bleman of great wealth] next day and arranged for the advance by him;" an advance that never brought loss to either Ward or Rogers. The latter's "generosities" were a good many of them of this color; _i.e._, securing advances which were pretty sure to be repaid.

[3] S. T. Coleridge, b. 1772; d. 1834. Many of his works edited by H.

N. Coleridge, husband of his only daughter Sara. Special mention should be made of the Coleridgean labors of that indefatigable worker, the late J. d.y.k.es Campbell.

[4] He had a son Hartley, whom Crabb Robinson describes in 1816 as "one of the strangest boys I ever saw. He has the features of a foreign Jew, with starched and affected manners." He also speaks of the other son, Derwent, as a "hearty boy, with a good-natured expression." The daughter--afterward Mrs. Henry Nelson Coleridge, editress of many of her father's works (continues Robinson), "has a face of great sweetness."

[5] Southey did not go to Keswick to reside until 1803-4. Coleridge, however, was there as an occupant of a portion of the future Southey home in 1800. Southey paid him a visit in the summer of 1801. See Traill, chap. v. See also _Memorials of Coleorton_, pa.s.sim.

[6] Probably some time between 1803 and 1806.

[7] Charles Lamb, b. 1775; d. 1834.

[8] William Wordsworth, b. 1770; d. 1850. _Evening Walk_ published 1793; _Lyrical Ballads_ (in conjunction with Coleridge), 1798; _Excursion_, 1814; _White Doe of Rylstone_, 1815; first collected edition of poems, 1836-37; _Life_ by W. H. Myers; a much fuller, but somewhat muddled one, by William Knight, 3 vols,, 8vo, 1889. Dowden's edition of Wordsworth's poems (Aldine Series) is latest and best.

[9] See Lamb's Letters, cited in Knight, vol. ii., p. 235.

[10] His wife was Mary Hutchinson, of Penrith. Their children were John, b. 1803; Dorothy, b. 1804 (became Mrs. Quinlan and died before her father); Thomas, b. 1806; Catharine, b. 1808; and William, b.

1810--the last being the only one who survived the poet.

[11] This based on "Mr. Rawnsley's Gleanings amongst the Villagers."

See _Athenaeum_, February 23, 1889.

[12] There is a very interesting account of Wordsworth's home life, etc., in Miss Martineau's _Autobiography_, vol. i., p. 504 _et seq._--but very much colored, as all her pictures are, by her own megrims and disposition to sneer at all the world--except Miss Martineau.