The Prose Works of William Wordsworth Part 138

'After all, poets are but earth. It is the old story,--envy--Cain and Abel. Professions, sects, and communities in general, right or wrong, hold together, men of the pen excepted; if one of their guild is worsted in the battle, they do as the rooks do by their inky brothers--fly from him, cawing and screaming; if they don't fire the shot, they sound the bugle to charge.'

I did not then know that the full-fledged author never reads the writings of his contemporaries, except to cut them up in a review, that being a work of love. In after years, Sh.e.l.ley being dead, Wordsworth confessed this fact; he was then induced to read some of Sh.e.l.ley's poems, and admitted that Sh.e.l.ley was the greatest master of harmonious verse in our modern literature. (Pp. 4-8.)[274]

[274] See our Index, under Sh.e.l.ley, G.

(_l_) FROM 'LETTERS, EMBRACING HIS LIFE, OF JOHN JAMES TAYLER, B.A., PROFESSOR OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIBLICAL THEOLOGY, AND PRINc.i.p.aL OF MANCHESTER NEW COLLEGE. LONDON, 1872' (TWO VOLS. 8vo).

Spring Cottage, Loughrigg, Ambleside, July 26. 1826.

Rydal, where we now are, has an air of repose and seclusion which I have rarely seen surpa.s.sed; the first few days we were here we perfectly luxuriated in the purity and sweetness of the air and the delicious stillness of its pastures and woods. It is interesting, too, on another account, as being the residence of the poet Wordsworth: his house is about a quarter of a mile from ours; and since Osler joined us we have obtained an introduction to him, and he favoured us with his company at tea one evening last week. He is a very interesting man, remarkably simple in his manners, full of enthusiasm and eloquence in conversation, especially on the subject of his favourite art--poetry--which he seems to have studied in a very philosophical spirit, and about which he entertains some peculiar opinions. Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton are his favourites among the English poets, especially the latter, whom he almost idolises. He expressed one opinion which rather surprised me, and in which I could not concur--that he preferred the 'Samson Agonistes' to 'Comus.' He recited in vindication of his judgment one very fine pa.s.sage from the former poem, and in a very striking manner; his voice is deep and pathetic, and thrills with feeling. He is Toryish--at least what would he considered so--in his political principles, though he disclaims all connection with party, and certainly argues with great fairness and temper on controverted topics, such as Parliamentary Reform and Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation. We took a long walk with him the other evening, to the scene of one of his Pastorals in the neighbourhood of Grasmere. He has a good deal of general conversation, and has more the manners of a man of the world than I should have expected from his poems; but his discourse indicates great simplicity and purity of mind; indeed, nothing renders his conversation more interesting than the unaffected tone of elevated morality and devotion which pervades it. We have been reading his long poem, the 'Excursion,' since we came here. I particularly recommend it to your notice, barring some few extra vagancies into which his peculiar theory has led him: his fourth book, the last, contains specimens both of versification, sentiment, and imagery, scarcely inferior to what you will find in the best pa.s.sages of Milton. He spoke with great plainness, and yet with candour, of his contemporaries. He admitted the power of Byron in describing the workings of human pa.s.sion, but denied that he knew anything of the beauties of Nature, or succeeded in describing them with fidelity. This he ill.u.s.trated by examples. He spoke with deserved severity of Byron's licentiousness and contempt of religious decorum. He told us he thought the greatest of modern geniuses, had he given his powers a proper direction, and one decidedly superior to Byron, was Sh.e.l.ley, a young man, author of 'Queen Mab,' who died lately at Rome. (Vol. i. pp. 72-4.)

Manchester, July 16. 1830.

....Though I am busy, I feel rather melancholy; and I am continually reminded how sad my life would be without the society and affection of those we love, and how terribly awful the dispensation of death must be to those who cannot antic.i.p.ate a future reunion, and regard it as the utter extinction of all human interests and affections. I am solacing myself with Wordsworth. Do you know, I shall become a thorough convert to him. Much of his poetry is delicious, and I perfectly adore his philosophy. To me he seems the purest, the most elevated, and the most Christian of poets. I delight in his deep and tender piety, and his spirit of exquisite sympathy with whatever is lovely and grand in the breathing universe around us. (Vol. i. p. 86.)

(_m_) ANECDOTE OF CRABBE.

FROM 'DIARY OF SIR WALTER SCOTT.'

Talking of Wordsworth, he [W.] told Anne a story, the object of which, as she understood it, was to show that Crabbe had no imagination.

Crabbe, Sir George Beaumont, and Wordsworth were sitting together in Murray's room in Albemarle-street. Sir George, after sealing a letter, blew out the candle which had enabled him to do so, and exchanging a look with Wordsworth, began to admire in silence the undulating thread of smoke which slowly arose from the expiring wick, when Crabbe put on the extinguisher. Anne laughed at the instance, and inquired if the taper was wax; and being answered in the negative, seemed to think that there was no call on Mr. Crabbe to sacrifice his sense of smell to their admiration of beautiful and evanescent forms. In two other men I should have said, 'Why, it is affectations,' with Sir Hugh Evans ['Merry Wives of Windsor,' act i. scene 1]; but Sir George is the man in the world most void of affectation; and then he is an exquisite painter, and no doubt saw where the _incident_ would have succeeded in painting. The error is not in you yourself receiving deep impressions from slight hints, but in supposing that precisely the same sort of impression must arise in the mind of men otherwise of kindred feeling, or that the common-place folk of the world can derive such inductions at any time or under any circ.u.mstances.[275]

(_n_) LATER OPINION OF LOUD BROUGHAM.

I am just come from breakfasting with Henry Taylor to meet Wordsworth; the same party as when he had Southey--Mill, Elliot, Charles Villiers.

Wordsworth may be bordering on sixty; hard-featured, brown, wrinkled, with prominent teeth and a few scattered gray hairs, but nevertheless not a disagreeable countenance; and very cheerful, merry, courteous, and talkative, much more so than I should have expected from the grave and didactic character of his writings. He held forth on poetry, painting, politics, and metaphysics, and with a great deal of eloquence; he is more conversible and with a greater flow of animal spirits than Southey.

He mentioned that he never wrote down as he composed, but composed walking, riding, or in bed, and wrote down after; that Southey always composes at his desk. He talked a great deal of Brougham, whose talents and domestic virtues he greatly admires; that he was very generous and affectionate in his disposition, full of duty and attention to his mother, and had adopted and provided for a whole family of his brother's children, and treats his wife's children as if they were his own. He insisted upon taking them both with him to the Drawing-room the other day when he went in state as Chancellor. They remonstrated with him, but in vain.[276]

[275] 'Diary of Sir Walter Scott,' _Life_, by Lockhart, as before, vol.

ix. pp. 62-3.

[276] _The Greville Memoirs_. A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV.

and King William IV. By the late Charles C.F. Greville, Esq., Clerk of the Council to those Sovereigns. Edited by Henry Reeve, Registrar of the Privy Council. 3 vols. 8vo, fourth edition, 1875. Vol. ii. p. 120.

NOTES AND ILl.u.s.tRATIONS.

P. 5. Footnotes: 5a, 'Intake.' Cf. p. 436 (bottom).

P. 6, l. 6. 'Gives one bright glance,' &c. From 'The Seasons,' l. 175, from the end of 'Summer.' Originally (1727) this line ran, 'Gives one faint glimmer, and then disappears.'

P. 17, l. 2. Shelvocke's 'Voyages:' 'A Voyage round the World, by the Way of the Great South Sea.' 1726, 8vo; 2d edition, 1757.

P. 22, l. 27. Milton, History of England, &c. 'The History of Britain, that Part especially now called England; from the first traditional Beginning, continued to the Norman Conquest. In six Books.' Lond. 1670.

(Works by Mitford, Prose, iii. pp. 1-301.)

P. 24, l. 28. Hearne's 'Journey,' &c.; viz. Samuel Hearne's 'Journey from the Prince of Wales's Fort in Hudson's Bay to the Northern Ocean.'

1795, 4to.

P. 31, l. 12. Waterton's 'Wanderings,' &c.; viz. Charles Waterton's 'Wanderings in South America, the North-West of the United States, and the Antilles.' 1825, 4to. Many subsequent editions, being a book that has taken its place beside Walton's 'Angler' and White's 'Selborne.'

P. 32, l. 11. James Montgomery's 'Field Flower.' Nothing gratified this 'sweet Singer' so much as these words of Wordsworth. He used to point them out to visitors if the conversation turned, or was directed, to Wordsworth. The particular poem is a daintily-touched one, found in all the editions of his Poems.

P. 32, l. 33. 'Has not Chaucer noticed it [the small Celandine]'?

Certainly not under this name, nor apparently under any other.

P. 33, l. 2. 'Frederica Brun.' More exactly Frederike. She was a minor poetess; imitator of Matthison, whose own poems can hardly be called original. (See Gostwick and Harrison's 'Outlines of German Literature,'

p. 355, cxxiii., 7th period, 1770-1830.)

P. 36, ll. 13-15. Quotation from Thomson, 'The Seasons,' 'Summer,' l.

980.

P. 44, l. 17. Quotation from Sir John Beaumont, 'The Battle of Bosworth Field,' l. 100. (Poems in the Fuller Worthies' Library, p. 29.) Accurately it is, 'The earth a.s.sists thee with the cry of blood.'

P. 47, ll. 17-19. 'The Triad.' Sara Coleridge thus wrote of this poem: 'Look at "The Triad," written by Mr. Wordsworth four-or five-and-twenty years ago. That poem contains a poetical glorification of Edith Southey (now W.), of Dora, and of myself. There is _truth_ in the sketch of Dora, poetic truth, though such as none but a poet-father would have seen. She was unique in her sweetness and goodness. I mean that her character was most peculiar--a compound of vehemence of feeling and gentleness, sharpness and lovingness, which is not often seen' ('Memoirs and Letters of Sara Coleridge, edited by her Daughter,' 2 vols. 8vo, 3d edition, 1873, p. 68). Later: 'I do confess that I have never been able to rank "The Triad" among Mr. Wordsworth's immortal works of genius. It is just what he came into the poetical world to condemn, and both by practice and theory to supplant. It is to my mind _artificial_ and _unreal_. There is no truth in it as a whole, although bits of truth, glazed and magnified, are embodied in it, as in the lines, "Features to old ideal grace allied"--a most unintelligible allusion to a likeness discovered in dear Dora's contour of countenance to the great Memnon head in the British Museum, with its overflowing lips and width of mouth, which seems to be typical of the ocean. The poem always strikes me as a mongrel,' &c. (p. 352).

P. 56, l. 7. 'Mr. Duppa.' See note in Vol. II. on p. 163, l. 2.

P. 56, l. 27. '179--.' _Sic_ in the MS. He died in January 1795.

P. 60, l. 16. 'Mr. Westall;' viz. William Westall's 'View of the Caves near Ingleton, Gosdale Scar, and Malham Cove, in Yorks.h.i.+re.' 1818, folio.

P. 62, l. 31. 'The itinerant Eidouranian philosopher,' &c. Query--the Walker of the book on the Lakes noticed in Vol. II. on p. 217?

P. 63, l. 6. 'I have reason,' &c. Cf. Letter to Sir W.R. Hamilton, first herein printed, pp. 310-11.

P. 68, l. 24. Dampier's' Voyages, 'etc.; viz.' Collection of Voyages.'

London, 1729, 4 vols. 8vo.

P. 72, l. 29. 'Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke.' His complete Works in Verse and Prose are given in the Fuller Worthies' Library, 4 vols.

P. 76, l. 14. Spenser. An apparent misrecollection of the 'Fairy Queen,'

b. iii. c. viii. st. 32, l. 7, 'Had her from so infamous fact a.s.soyld.'