Full many a time, upon a stormy night,
His voice came to us from the neighbouring height:
Oft did we see him driving full in view
At mid-day when the sun was shining bright;
What ill was on him, what he had to do,
A mighty wonder bred among our quiet crew.
Ah! Piteous sight it was to see this Man
When he came back to us, a withered flower, —
Or like a sinful creature, pale and wan.
Down would he sit; and without strength or power
Look at the common grass from hour to hour:
And oftentimes, how long I fear to say,
Where apple-trees in blossom made a bower,
Retired in that sunshiny shade he lay;
And, like a naked Indian, slept himself away.
Great wonder to our gentle tribe it was
Whenever from our valley he withdrew;
For happier soul no living creature has
Than he had, being here the long day through.
Some thought he was a lover, and did woo:
Some thought far worse of him, and judged him wrong:
But Verse was what he had been wedded to;
And his own mind did like a tempest strong
Come to him thus, and drove the weary wight along.
An excitement which vents itself in bodily exercise carries its own sedative with it. And in comparing Wordsworth’s nature with that of other poets whose career has been less placid, we may say that he was perhaps not less excitable than they, but that it was his constant endeavour to avoid all excitement, save of the purely poetic kind; and that the outward circumstances of his life, — his mediocrity of fortune, happy and early marriage, and absence of striking personal charm, — made it easy for him to adhere to a method of life which was, in the truest sense of the term, stoic — stoic alike in its practical abstinences and in its calm and grave ideal. Purely poetic excitement, however, is hard to maintain at a high point; and the description quoted above of the voice which came through the stormy night should be followed by another — by the same candid and self-picturing hand — which represents the same habits in a quieter light.
“Nine-tenths of my verses,” says the poet in 1843, “have been murmured out in the open air. One day a stranger, having walked round the garden and grounds of Rydal Mount, asked of one of the female servants, who happened to be at the door, permission to see her master’s study. ‘This,’ said she, leading him forward, ‘is my master’s library, where he keeps his books, but his study is out of doors.’ After a long absence from home, it has more than once happened that some one of my cottage neighbours (not of the double-coach-house cottages) has said, ‘Well, there he is! We are glad to hear him booing about again.’“
Wordsworth’s health, steady and robust for the most part, indicated the same restrained excitability. While he was well able to resist fatigue, exposure to weather, &c. there were, in fact, three things which his peculiar constitution made it difficult for him to do, and unfortunately those three things were reading, writing, and the composition of poetry. A frequently recurring inflammation of the eyes, caught originally from exposure to a cold wind when overheated by exercise, but always much aggravated by mental excitement, sometimes prevented his reading for months together. His symptoms when he attempted to hold the pen are thus described, in a published letter to Sir George Beaumont (1803): —
“I do not know from what cause it is, but during the last three years I have never had a pen in my hand for five minutes before my whole frame becomes a bundle of uneasiness; a perspiration starts out all over me, and my chest is oppressed in a manner which I cannot describe.” While as to the labour of composition his sister says (September 1800): “He writes with so much feeling and agitation that it brings on a sense of pain and internal weakness about his left side and stomach, which now often makes it impossible for him to write when he is, in mind and feelings, in such a state that he could do it without difficulty.”
But turning to the brighter side of things — to the joys rather than the pains of the sensitive body and spirit — we find, in Wordsworth’s later years much of happiness 011 which to dwell. The memories which his name recalls are for the most part of thoughtful kindnesses, of simple-hearted joy in feeling himself at last appreciated, of tender sympathy with the young. Sometimes it is a recollection of some London drawing-room, where youth and beauty surrounded the rugged old man with an eager admiration which fell on no unwilling heart. Sometimes it is a story of some assemblage of young and old, rich and poor, from all the neighbouring houses and cottages, at Rydal Mount, to keep the aged poet’s birthday with a simple feast and rustic play. Sometimes it is a report of some fireside gathering at Lancrigg or Foxhow, where the old man grew eloquent as he talked of Burns and Coleridge, of Homer and Virgil, of the true aim of poetry and the true happiness of man. Or we are told of some last excursion to well-loved scenes; of holly-trees planted by the poet’s hands to simulate nature’s decoration on the craggy hill.
Such are the memories of those who best remember him. To those who were young children while his last years went by he seemed a kind of mystical embodiment of the lakes and mountains round him — a presence without which they would not be what they were. And now he is gone, and their untouched and early charm is going too.
Heu, tua nobis
Pæne simul tecum solatia rapta, Menalea!
Rydal Mount, of which he had at one time feared to be deprived, was his to the end. He still paced the terrace-walks — but now the flat terrace oftener than the sloping one — whence the eye travels to lake and mountain across a tossing gulf of green. The doves that so long had been wont to answer with murmurs of their own to his “half-formed melodies” still hung in the trees above his pathway; and many who saw him there must have thought of the lines in which, his favourite poet congratulates himself that he has not been exiled from his home.
Calm as thy sacred streams thy years shall flow;
Groves which thy youth has known thine age shall know;
Here, as of old, Hyblæan bees shall twine
Their mazy murmur into dreams of thine, —
Still from the hedge’s willow-bloom shall come
Through summer silences a slumberous hum, —
Still from the crag shall lingering winds prolong
The half-heard cadence of the woodman’s song, —
While evermore the doves, thy love and care,
Fill the tall elms with sighing in the air.
Yet words like these fail to give the solemnity of his last years, — the sense of grave retrospection, of humble self-judgment, of hopeful looking to the end. “It is indeed a deep satisfaction,” he writes near the close of life, “to hope and believe that my poetry will be while it lasts, a help to the cause of virtue and truth, especially among the young. As for myself, it seems now of little moment how long I may be remembered. When a man pushes off in his little boat into the great seas of Infinity and Eternity, it surely signifies little how long he is kept in sight by watchers from the shore.”
And again, to an intimate friend, “Worldly-minded I am not; on the contrary, my wish to benefit those within my humble sphere strengthens seemingly in exact proportion to my inability to realize those wishes. What I lament most is that the spirituality of my nature does not expand and rise the nearer I approach the grave, as yours does, and as it fares with my beloved partner.”
The aged poet might feel the loss of some vividness of emotion, but his thoughts dwelt more and more constantly on the unseen world. One of the images which recurs oftenest to his friends is that of the old man as he would stand against the window of the dining-room at Rydal Mount and read the Psalms and Lessons for the day; of the tall bowed figure and the silvery hair; of the deep voice which always faltered when among the prayers he came to the words which give thanks for those “who have departed this life in Thy faith and fear.”
There is no n
eed to prolong the narration. As healthy infancy is the same for all, so the old age of all good men brings philosopher and peasant once more together, to meet with the same thoughts the inevitable hour. Whatever the well-fought fight may have been, rest is the same for all.
Retirement then might hourly look
Upon a soothing scene;
Age steal to his allotted nook
Contented and serene;
With heart as calm as lakes that sleep,
In frosty moonlight glistening,
Or mountain torrents, where they creep
Along a channel smooth and deep,
To their own far-off murmurs listening.
What touch has given to these lines their impress of an unfathomable peace? For there speaks from them a tranquillity which seems to overcome our souls; which makes us feel in the midst of toil and passion that we are disquieting ourselves in vain; that we are travelling to a region where these things shall not be; that “so shall immoderate fear leave us, and inordinate love shall die.”
Wordsworth’s last days were absolutely tranquil. A cold caught on a Sunday afternoon walk brought on a pleurisy. He lay for some weeks in a state of passive weakness; and at last Mrs. Wordsworth said to him, “William, you are going to Dora.” “He made no reply at the time, and the words seem to have passed unheeded; indeed, it was not certain that they had been even heard. More than twenty-four hours afterwards one of his nieces came into his room, and was drawing aside the curtain of his chamber, and then, as if awakening from a quiet sleep, he said, ‘Is that Dora?’“
On Tuesday, April 23, 1850, as his favourite cuckoo-clock struck the hour of noon, his spirit passed away. His body was buried, as he had wished, in Grasmere churchyard. Around him the dalesmen of Grasmere lie beneath the shade of sycamore and yew; and Rotha’s murmur mourns the pausing of that “music sweeter than her own.” And surely of him, if of any one, we may think as of a man who was so in accord with Nature, so at one with the very soul of things, that there can be no Mansion of the Universe which shall not be to him a home, no Governor who will not accept him among His servants, and satisfy him with love and peace.
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Delphi Complete Works of William Wordsworth Page 503
