The result of this meeting of the two poets was that the Wordsworths shifted their abode from Racedown to Alfoxden, near Nether Stowey, in Somersetshire, to be near Coleridge. Alfoxden was a large furnished mansion, which the brother and sister had to themselves. ‘We are three miles from Stowey, the then abode of Coleridge,’ writes the sister, ‘and two miles from the sea. Wherever we turn we have woods, smooth downs, and valleys, with small brooks running down them, through green meadows, hardly ever intersected with hedgerows, but scattered over with trees. The hills that cradle these valleys are either covered with fern and bilberries, or oak woods, which are cut for charcoal. Walks extend for miles over the hill-tops, the great beauty of which is their wild simplicity — they are perfectly smooth, without rocks.’ It was in this neighbourhood, as the two poets loitered in the silvan combs or walked along the smooth Quantock hill-tops, looking seaward, with the ‘sole sister,’ the companion of their walks, that they struck each from the other his finest tones. It was with both of them the heyday of poetic creation. In these walks it was that Coleridge, with slight hints from Wordsworth, first chaunted the vision of the Ancient Mariner, and then alone, ‘The rueful woes of Lady Christabel.’ This, too, was the birthday of some of the finest of the Lyrical Ballads, of ‘We are seven,’ ‘Simon Lee,’ ‘Expostulation and Reply,’ and ‘The Tables Turned,’ ‘It is the first mild day in March,’ and ‘I heard a thousand blended notes.’ Coleridge never knew again such a season of poetic creation, and Wordsworth’s tardier, if stronger, nature, received from contact with Coleridge that quickening impulse which it needed, and which it retained during all its most creative years.
But if Coleridge, with his occasional intercourse and wonderful talk, did much for Wordsworth, his sister, by her continual companionship, did far more. After the great revulsion from the excesses of the French Revolution, she was with him a continually sanative influence. That whole period, which ranged from 1795 till his settling at Grasmere at the opening of the next century, and of which the residence at Racedown and Alfoxden formed a large part, was the healing time of his spirit. And in that healing time she was the chief human minister. Somewhere in the ‘Prelude’ he tells that in early youth there was a too great sternness of spirit about him, a high but too severe moral ideal by which he judged men and things, insensible to gentler and humbler influences. He compares his soul to a high, bare craig, without any crannies in which flowers may lurk, untouched by the mellowing influences of sun and shower. His sister came with her softening influence, and sowed in it the needed flowers, and touched it with mellowing colours:
‘She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,
And humble cares and delicate fears,
A heart, the fountain of sweet tears
And love, and thought and joy.’
Elsewhere in the ‘Prelude’ he describes how at one time his soul had got too much under the dominion of the eye, so that he kept comparing scene with scene, instead of enjoying each for itself — craving new forms, novelties of colour or proportion, and insensible to the spirit of each place and the affections which each awakens. In contrast with this temporary mood of his own he turns to one of another temper: —
’I knew a maid,
A young enthusiast who escaped these bonds,
Her eye was not the mistress of her heart,
She welcomed what was given, and craved no more;
Whate’er the scene presented to her view,
That was the best, to that she was attuned
By her benign simplicity of life.
Birds in the bower, and lambs in the green field,
Could they have known her, would have loved; methought
Her very presence such a sweetness breathed,
That flowers, and trees, and even the silent hills,
And everything she looked on, should have had
An intimation how she bore herself
Towards them and to all creatures. God delights
In such a being; for her common thoughts
Are piety, her life is gratitude.’
But it was not his sister the Poet speaks of here, but of his first meeting with her who afterwards became his wife.
The results of the residence at Racedown, but especially at Alfoxden, appeared in the shape of the first volume of the ‘Lyrical Ballads,’ which were published in the autumn of 1798 by Mr. Cottle at Bristol. This small volume opens with Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,’ and is followed by Wordsworth’s short but exquisite poems of the Alfoxden time, and is closed by the well-known lines on Tintern Abbey. Wordsworth reaches about the highest pitch of his inspiration in this latter poem, which contains more rememberable lines than any other of his, of equal length, save perhaps the Immortality Ode. It was the result of a ramble of four or five days made by him and his sister from Alfoxden in July 1798, and was composed under circumstances ‘most pleasant,’ he says, ‘for me to remember.’ He began it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye, and concluded it as he was entering Bristol in the evening.
Every one will recollect how, after its high reflections he turns at the close to her, ‘his dearest Friend,’ ‘his dear, dear Friend,’ and speaks of his delight to have her by his side, and of the former pleasures which he read in ‘the shooting lights of her wild eyes,’ and then the almost prophetic words with which he forebodes, too surely, that time when ‘solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief should be her portion.’
That September (1798) saw the break-up of the brief, bright companionship near Nether Stowey. Coleridge went with Wordsworth and his sister to Germany, but soon parted from them and passed on alone to Göttingen, there to study German, and lose himself in the labyrinth of German metaphysics. Wordsworth and Dorothy remained at Goslar, and, making no acquaintances, spent the winter — said to have been the coldest of the century — by the German stoves, Wordsworth writing more lyrical poems in the same vein which had been opened so happily at Alfoxden. There is in these poems no tincture of their German surroundings; they deal entirely with those which they had left on English ground. Early in spring they returned to England, to spend the summer with their friends the Hutchinsons at Sockburn-upon-Tees. There Dorothy remained, while in September Wordsworth made with Coleridge the walking tour through the lakes of Westmoreland and Cumberland, which issued in his choice of a home at Grasmere for himself and his sister.
At the close of the year Wordsworth and his sister set off and walked, driven forward by the cold, frosty winds blowing from behind, from Wensleydale over Sedbergh’s naked heights and the high range that divides the Yorkshire dales from the lake country. On the shortest day of the year (St. Thomas’s Day) they reached the small two-story cottage at the Townend of Grasmere, which, for the next eight years, was to be the poet’s home, immortalised by the work he did in it. That cottage has behind it a small orchard-plot or garden ground shelving upwards toward the woody mountains above, and in front it looks across the peaceful lake with its one green island, to the steeps of Silver-how on the farther side. Westward it looks on Helm Craig, and up the long folds of Easedale towards the range that divides Easedale from Borrowdale. In this cottage they two lived on their income of a hundred pounds a year, Dorothy doing all the household work, for they had then, it has been said, no servant. Besides this, she had time to write out all his poems — for Wordsworth himself could never bear the strain of transcribing — to read aloud to him of an afternoon or evening — at one such reading by her of Milton’s Sonnets it was that his soul took fire and rolled off his first sonnets — and to accompany him on his endless walks. Nor these alone — her eye and imagination fed him, not only with subjects for his poetry, but even with images and thoughts. What we are told of the poem of the ‘Beggars’ might be said of I know not how many more. ‘The sister’s eye was ever on the watch to provide for the poet’s pen.’ He had a most observant eye, and she also for him; and his poems are sometimes little more than poetic versions of her descriptions of the objects which she had
seen; and which he treated as seen by himself. Look at the poem on the ‘Daffodils’ and compare with it these words taken from the sister’s Journal. ‘When we were in the woods below Gowbarrow Park, we saw a few daffodils close by the water-side. As we went along there were more and yet more; and at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw there were a long belt of them along the shore. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about them. Some rested their heads on the stones, as on a pillow; the rest tossed, and reeled, and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind, they looked so gay and glancing.’ It may also be noted that the Poet’s future wife contributed to this poem these two best lines —
‘They flash upon that inward eye,
Which is the bliss of solitude.’
Or take another description from Miss Wordsworth’s Journal of a birch-tree, ‘the lady of the woods,’ which her brother has not versified: — ’As we were going along we were stopped at once, at the distance, perhaps, of fifty yards from our favourite birch-tree: it was yielding to the gust of the wind, with all its tender twigs; the sun shone upon it, and it glanced in the wind like a flying sunshiny shower. It was a tree in shape, with stem and branches, but it was like a spirit of water.’
The life which the Poet and his sister lived during the eight years at the Townend of Grasmere stands out with a marked individuality which it is delightful ever so often to recur to. It was as unlike the lives of most literary or other men, as the most original of his poems are unlike the ordinary run of even good poetry. Their outward life was exactly like that of the dalesmen or ‘statesmen’ — for so the native yeomen proprietors are called — with whom they lived on the most friendly footing, and among whom they found their chief society. Outwardly their life was so, but inwardly it was cheered by imaginative visitings to which these were strangers. Sheltered as they then were from the agitations of the world, the severe frugality of the life they led ministered in more than one way to feed that poetry which introduced a new element into English thought. It kept the mind cool, and the eye clear, to feel once more that kinship between the outward world and the soul of man, to perceive that impassioned expression in the countenance of all nature, which, if felt by primeval men, ages of cultivation have long forgotten. It also made them wise to practise the same frugality in emotional enjoyment which they exercised in household economy. It has been well noted that this is one of Wordsworth’s chief characteristics. It is the temptation of the poetic temperament to be prodigal of passion, to demand a life always strung to the highest pitch of emotional excitement, to be never content unless when passing from fervour to fervour. No life can long endure this strain. This is specially seen in such poets as Byron and Shelley, who speedily fell from the heights of passion to the depths of languor and despondency. The same quick using up of the power of enjoyment produces the too common product of the blasé man and the cynic. Wordsworth early perceived that all, even the richest, natures have but a very limited capacity of uninterrupted enjoyment, and that nothing is easier than to exhaust this capacity. Hence he set himself to husband it, to draw upon it sparingly, to employ it only on the purest, most natural, and most enduring objects, and not to speedily dismiss or throw them by and demand more, but to detain them till they had yielded him their utmost. From this in part it came that the commonest sights of earth and sky — a fine spring day, a sunset, even a chance traveller met on a moor, any ordinary sorrow of man’s life — yielded to him an amount of imaginative interest inconceivable to more mundane spirits. The simple healthiness and strict frugality of his household life suited well, and must have greatly assisted, that wholesome frugality of emotion which he exercised.
During those seven or eight Grasmere years, the spring of poetry which burst forth at Alfoxden, and produced the first volume of ‘Lyrical Ballads,’ flowed steadily on and found expression in other poems of like quality and spirit, — ’Hartleap Well,’ ‘The Brothers,’ ‘Michael,’ which, with others of the same order, written in Germany, appeared in the second volume of ‘Lyrical Ballads.’ And after these two volumes had gone forth, Grasmere still gave more of the same high order, — ’The Daffodils,’ ‘The Leech-Gatherer,’ and above all the ‘Ode on Immortality.’ It was too the conclusion of the ‘Prelude,’ and the beginning of the ‘Excursion.’ So that it may be said that those Grasmere years, from 1800 to 1807, mark the period when Wordsworth’s genius was in its zenith. During all this time, sister Dorothy was by his side, ministering to him, equally in body and in mind — doing the part of household servant, and not less that of prompter and inspirer of his highest songs.
But this life of theirs, retired and uneventful as it seems, was not without its own incidents. Such was the homecoming of their younger sailor-brother John, who, in the first year of their residence at Grasmere —
‘Under their cottage roof, had gladly come
From the wild sea a cherished visitant.’
He was, what his brother calls him, ‘a silent poet,’ and had the heart and sense to feel the sterling quality of his brother’s poems, and to foretell with perfect confidence their ultimate acceptance, at the time when the critic wits who ruled the hour treated them with contempt. The two brothers were congenial spirits, and William’s poetry has many affecting allusions to his brother John, whose intention it was, when his last voyage was over, to settle in ‘Grasmere’s happy vale,’ and to devote the surplus of his fortune to his brother’s use. On his last voyage he sailed as captain of the ‘Earl of Abergavenny’ East-Indiaman, at the opening of February 1805; and on the 5th of that month, the ill-fated ship struck on the Shambles of the Bill of Portland, and the captain and most of the crew went down with her. To the brother and sister this became a permanent household sorrow. But in time they found comfort in that thought with which the Poet closes a remarkable letter on his brother’s loss, — ’So good must be better; so high must be destined to be higher.’
Another lesser incident was a short tour to the Continent, in which, as the brother and sister crossed Westminster Bridge, outside the Dover coach, both witnessed that sunrise which remains fixed for ever in the famous sonnet. Another incident, and more important, was Wordsworth’s marriage in October 1802, when he brought home his young wife, Mary Hutchinson, his sister’s long-time friend, to their cottage at Townend. This is she whom he has sung in the lines — ’She was a phantom of delight;’ of whom he said in plain prose, ‘She has a sweetness all but angelic, simplicity the most entire, womanly self-respect and purity of heart speaking through all her looks, acts, and movements.’ The advent of Mrs. Wordsworth brought no change to Dorothy. She still continued to fill to her brother and his wife the same place which she had filled when her brother was alone, sharing in all the household duties and family interests, and still accompanying him in his rambles when Mrs. Wordsworth was detained at home. The year after the marriage, that is, in the fourth year of the Grasmere residence, after the first son was born, the brother and sister, accompanied by Coleridge, set out on that tour the Journal of which is here published. Portions of it have already appeared in the ‘Memoirs’ of Wordsworth, but it is now for the first time given in full, just as it came from the pen of Miss Wordsworth seventy years ago. As I shall have to speak of it again, I may now pass on and note the few facts that still remain to be told in illustration of the writer’s character.
In the years which followed the tour in Scotland, other children were added to Wordsworth’s family, till the small cottage at the Townend could no longer accommodate the household. The second child was the poet’s only daughter, whom after his sister he called Dorothy, generally known as Dora, for, as he tells Lady Beaumont, he could not find it in his heart to call her by another name. This second Dora occupies in Wordsworth’s later poetry the same place which the first Dorothy held in his earlier. Aunt Dorothy’s love, as it expanded to take in each newcomer, did not lose any of its intensity towards her brother. While the uneasiness which the act of writing had always oc
casioned him was not diminished, weakness of eyesight increased. Then she had to write for him, she read to him, she walked with him as of old, besides sharing in all household cares. In November 1806, Wordsworth removed with his family to Coleorton, in Leicestershire, to spend the winter there in a house of Sir George Beaumont’s; ‘Our own cottage,’ he writes, ‘being far too small for our family to winter in, though we manage well enough in it during the summer.’ In the spring of 1807, Wordsworth and his wife visited London. Dorothy, who was left with the children, wrote the poem called ‘The Mother’s Return,’ as a welcome to Mrs. Wordsworth when she came back. This with two other poems, written by her for the children, one on ‘The Wind,’ the other called ‘The Cottager to her Infant,’ afterwards appeared in an edition of her brother’s poems.
This seems the proper place to give the account of Miss Wordsworth, as she appeared to De Quincey, when in 1807 he first made the acquaintance of Wordsworth, just before the Poet and his family quitted their old home in the cottage at Grasmere Townend. After speaking of Mrs. Wordsworth, he continues: —
‘Immediately behind her moved a lady, shorter, slighter, and perhaps, in all other respects, as different from her in personal characteristics as could have been wished for the most effective contrast. “Her face was of Egyptian brown;” rarely, in a woman of English birth, had I seen a more determinate gipsy tan. Her eyes were not soft as Mrs. Wordsworth’s, nor were they fierce or bold; but they were wild and startling, and hurried in their motion. Her manner was warm, and even ardent; her sensibility seemed constitutionally deep; and some subtle fire of impassioned intellect apparently burned within her, which — being alternately pushed forward into a conspicuous expression by the irresistible instincts of her temperament, and then immediately checked in obedience to the decorum of her sex and age and her maidenly condition — gave to her whole demeanour, and to her conversation, an air of embarrassment, and even of self-conflict, that was almost distressing to witness. Even her very utterance and enunciation often suffered in point of clearness and steadiness, from the agitation of her excessive organic sensibility. At times the self-counteraction and self-baffling of her feelings caused her even to stammer. But the greatest deductions from Miss Wordsworth’s attractions, and from the exceeding interest which surrounded her, in right of her character, of her history, and of the relation which she fulfilled towards her brother, were the glancing quickness of her motions, and other circumstances in her deportment (such as her stooping attitude when walking), which gave an ungraceful character to her appearance when out of doors . . . .
Delphi Complete Works of William Wordsworth Page 441
