In which the burden of the mystery,
{130}
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened: that serene and blessed mood
In which the affections gently lead us on."
At the end of his Derbyshire journal he says that 'the remembrance of
those happy days in Derbyshire will lie in the landscape of his
memory, like spots of stationary sunshine; they will be to him and
his friend as wells of pure water amid desert sands to which their
souls may fly for refreshment hereafter in hours of weariness amid
the din of towns and cities and the many shapes of joyless delight.'
Did ever city man take back to city roar and barrenness more quiet
and more profit from a country ramble?
In his last letter to Thomas Smith, he spoke of having left the
Manchester neighbourhood. In the autumn of 1820 he gave up his work
in the Manchester Bank. He never could think of his native vale
without a sense of heartsickness; his work was irksome and city life
hateful. In his poem to the river Winster dated 1821, he writes:
'And in the heavy time of after life,
When buried in the midst of toil and strife
In trading towns, if intermission sweet
I sought from my dull toil, my fancy fleet
{131}
Was straight amid thy vernal meads and flowers,
Thy hanging fields, wild woods, and leafy bowers.
Nor could I think of beauty on this earth,
But still 'twas seen with thee--as if thy birth
And mine had been together. Now at ease
And free to wander whereso'er I please,
What charms I find along thy simple stream,
Beloved Winster!'
It is no wonder that a yeoman farmer's son who could thus write,
should have felt irresistibly drawn from exile in Manchester to his
native vale, and we find him back at the Yews, in correspondence, now
with the editor of a county paper, now with Miss Wordsworth, now
writing a ballad or a poem, now a natural history note, now wandering
off down Duddon Vale, and through the Lake District, and now keenly
interested in a little dilapidated estate in the Crosthwaite township
called sometimes Borderside, sometimes Balderside, or perhaps more
accurately in Viking phrase, Bauta-side, and determining to go into
the farming line.
He became purchaser of the Borderside estate in 1822; at once he
determined to let it for five years, and gave his whole time and the
rent to boot, to the improvement of it.
In the summer of the same year that he became an estatesman, he
planned a tour into Scotland. Wordsworth wrote him a full and {132}
particular itinerary, and William Pearson followed the footsteps of
the bard, and really made the same journey as Wordsworth's first
excursion to Scotland.
There is an interesting note of the peasants recollection of Burns in
Ayrshire, and of the Sabbath manners of certain of the Auchterarder
folk, but the journal otherwise is a little tiresome.
The next ten years were spent in the not very profitable work of
mending the fences and outbuildings of Borderside, and then of
attempting to make its crops pay the rent and leave something over.
But in 1841 he 'declined' farming, not without the secret joy of
getting back to his mother's house at the Yews, where all his books
were stored, and where the _Encyclopædia_, just bound, was awaiting
him.
He had not been idle, he had made the Corn Laws a study, and had
concluded that they were unjust, cruel, and impolitic. He had done
what he could to get the Kendal folk to abolish the old system of
selling fruit by baskets, or paniers containing sixteen quarts, and
had introduced the better system of selling by weight.
In the spring of 1842 his mother died, and {133} now, at the age of
sixty-two, William Pearson felt free to marry. He married Ann
Greenhow of Heversham in May.
He was by instinct a tiller of the ground; he used to say that 'no
one felt more dependence upon God than the farmer in his fields.' He
turned his attention to fruit culture, planted a large orchard with
300 trees and two lesser ones, and felt that he had not lived in
vain. It was during this period that he began making notes of the
habits of the bird and beast life round about him. Some observations
on the habits of the hedgehog which he sent in 1836 to Mr. Wordsworth
were sent by the poet to the members of the Kendal Natural History
Society, of which Pearson had been a member almost from the first.
The result of this communication evoked, so Cornelius Nicholson, the
then secretary, tells us, so much enthusiasm, that a class was
determined on for mutual instruction in the habits and distinctive
faculties of birds and beasts. It was Pearson's habit to attend the
monthly discussion meeting of this Society, and he thought nothing of
setting off after an early tea and walking in nearly seven miles to
Kendal and walking back by starlight after the lecture.
{134}
It was to this part of his life between the years 1825 and 1833 that
belong the glimpses of his intimacy with the Rydal Mount family, as
shown by the letters, chiefly from Dorothy Wordsworth, that have been
preserved to us. It is clear that William Pearson was a most welcome
guest at Rydal. Excursions up Helvellyn are planned with the
Wordsworths, and natural history notes are exchanged. The letters
are chiefly interesting as giving us hints of the simplicity of the
life there, and are often full of thanks to him for a panier of
apples, or a leash of partridges, they contain a request for straw
for the stables, they seek his advice in purchase of a pony, they
send requisition for more potatoes and the like. William Pearson was
looked upon as the henchman who could be best trusted to supply the
Rydal Mount with farm produce, and it is clear that to do the bidding
of the bard and be steward of his stable economics was a real
pleasure to him.
He also sent to Dorothy Wordsworth's sick-room just those delightful
little nature anecdotes which cheered her in her retirement. He
admired and honoured the poet's sister. 'Never,' says he in one of
his letters to Smith in 1832, 'have I known a more {135} amiable
woman. Her understanding and judgment are of the highest order. I
have heard Mr. Wordsworth say that he had been more indebted to her
judgment than to that of any other person.'
The correspondence gives little facts and dates of household matters
that are interesting to students of the poet's life at Rydal. For
example, we learn on May 5, 1830, that on the next day will be
finished the new terrace, to the poet's satisfaction; we learn also
of Wordsworth's constant trouble from 1833 and onward by reason of
the inflammation of his eyes. We hear incidentally how poor a
horseman, but how good a walker the poet is, and the simplicities and
hospitalities of Rydal Mount are brought before us.
But it was not only as steward of the farm and orchard that Pearson
was so truly honoured by the Wordsworths. It was because the poet
felt that in him he had a real lover of his art, and a real
understander of his poetry and his philosophy. One is not surprised
to find that Wordsworth thanked him on the occasion when, in the
Kendal paper, the worthy yeoman took up pen in defence of the poet.
And those who years after honoured the dead poet's memory--his {136}
personal friends, Dr. Davy and others--were grateful to William
Pearson when, in 1854, he championed, in a letter full of feeling and
knowledge, the Protestantism of the bard, which had been called in
question by a lecturer of the Protestant Alliance in Kendal, who had
described Wordsworth's poetry as being 'one of the principal means of
the revival of priestly domination in the Church of England.'
It is very touching to see how really he valued the friendship of the
poet he so well understood and so honoured. 'What claim have I,' he
wrote to Dorothy Wordsworth, 'on the notice of a man like your
brother? My chief obligations to him for conferring on me his
society and hospitable notice I hope I shall feel to the latest hours
of my life.' Writing to Wordsworth from Borderside under date 1849,
he says, 'I felt very grateful for your letter. On reading the first
few lines I was sorry to think how much Mrs. Wordsworth's handwriting
had changed, but when I found it was indeed your own hand the tears
came into my eyes. I shall preserve this kind memorial and shall not
part with it till I part with everything in life.' These were the
words of a real hero-worshipper, and he had cause for hero-worship.
{137}
What Wordsworth's poetry did to inspire and keep pure and true and
serene the heart of William Pearson, it will still do for men of
humble country life in the years that are to be. We need to-day more
of soul among our farmer folk, we want a _vade mecum_ for the tiller
of the soil that shall lift his soul to Heaven. I cannot doubt that
if men would study Wordsworth and receive his 'heart into their own,'
there would be dignity and happiness added to many a daleside home.
To return to William Pearson. He found the farm life on the whole a
happy one. He would not have given it up had he not determined to
marry. His orchards prospered, and his hay grass was generally well
got. His frugal ways ensured him competency, and all day and every
day he was learning more of Nature's secrets, more of the pleasant
ways of birds and beasts about him. He was making observations, too,
on the changes that had come over the vale of Lythe and the
neighbouring fells and common lands, since the packhorse had ceased
to be, and the common enclosures and the larch planters had come in.
But his ears were open also to the quaint sayings and superstitions,
and his eyes were on the quaint ways and customs of the dalesmen
{138} amongst whom he dwelt and moved, and these observations bore
good fruit in the paper written in 1841, the year before his
marriage, for the Kendal Natural History Society, entitled 'A Sketch
of some of the Existing and Recent Superstitions of Westmoreland.'
It was doubtless a source of gratification to William Pearson that
the son of the poet should be the officiating minister in Bowness
Church the day he led his wife to the altar, in May of 1842. And he
must needs have been pleased on his return to Low House after a
wedding jaunt through the lakes, to find that Hartley Coleridge, who
had called to congratulate him on his marriage, left behind him an
impromptu sonnet. It had, as most of Hartley's sonnets have, a
little touch of description of the life both of himself and of his
friend, the gentle estatesman:
'A little man of solitary life
And half an idiot too--more helpless still--
Can wish all joy to thee and to thy wife;
Thy love must be as constant as thy will.
My gentle friend, how happy mayst thou be!
Thou hast a wife to pray--and pray with thee.'
During the coming June of 1842 Pearson took his wife to the
Continent. He had long {139} planned this trip; writing to his
friend Thomas Smith in April of 1841, to tell him of his intended
venture on 'that variety of untried being,' marriage, he says that
Mr. Wordsworth has advised him to make a Swiss and Italian tour
before age renders him unfit for foot-travel, and adds that his
future wife 'is an excellent walker, and is quite willing to share
the fatigue, and he is sure she will share the pleasure.' There is a
note of simplicity in this intention to see the Swiss and Italian
lakes afoot--the bridegroom now more than three score years, but a
'young heart travels many a mile,' and William Pearson's heart was
young to the last.
Wordsworth supplied him with an itinerary which he faithfully
followed. After the tour they stayed on until the spring at Versoix,
near Geneva, and his journal shows that he was busy making naturalist
notes all the while. There is a touching note in his journal of his
delight on getting back to his Westmoreland home. The blue mountains
and the well-known fells, and the ivy-covered cottage of Low House,
and the happy greetings from beloved friends. These deeply moved him.
There was no suitable house for the happy couple in Crosthwaite, and
after staying at {140} Low House for the winter, he went into
lodgings at High Crag. Lodgings were not William Pearson's ideal of
home life, and though he was a man of sixty-seven he determined in
1847 to build a house on his own estate.
It was a glad day for him when, as he tells us, on the last day of
July, 1848, he crept into the bosom of his own cheerful cot 'with
measureless content,' a cottage 'unclothed by rough-cast,' as he told
Wordsworth, 'but exhibiting a goodly row of chimneys with pretty
round tops on square pedestals, the only specimens yet in Crosthwaite
of the revived good old fashion.'
We have a poet's description of this Borderside home from the pen of
Perceval Graves, who, writing from Dovenest in 1862, thus describes
it:
'Red roses flush its native stone,
The grassy slope, the rocky mount
Are gay with flowers,--a shadowy fount
Murmurs with cool delicious tone.
Beneath, an orchard far and wide
Its blossom on its front displays;
Across the valley friendly rays
From neighbour houses hail Borderside.'
Here for the next eight years dwelt the refined and thoughtful
yeoman, reading such {141} books as he felt he could afford to buy,
such books as he could borrow from Kendal, or were lent him by
Coleridge or Perceval Graves or Wordsworth; corresponding with such
naturalists as Waterton and Gough, such students as Perceval Graves
and Dr. Davy, keeping up constant communion with the friends at Rydal
Mount; getting hold of the best that could be had of the scientific
treatises of the day; dipping here and there into theologic problems;
studying his Shakespeare and his Milton, enjoying his Carlyle, his
Burns, and his Scott, his Reed's _English Literature_, impressing,
when he met him, such a man as Sir William Hamilton, examining the
theories of Agazziz and Brewster as to moraine and glacier action,
comparing his own natural history observations with those of Waterton
and White of Selborne; and from time to time, when he had returned
from some ride on 'Nep' or 'Camel,' his favourite ponies, sitting
down to chronicle the beauty of the day's outing, or the wild life of
bird and beast he had observed. Amongst the latter must be noted his
papers on the partridge and the squirrel, in 1846; on the woodgrouse,
that 'new bird' which appears to have come to Colthouse first in the
autumn of 1845 (this paper was {142} written in 1850), and again on
the hagworm, 1852; 'Notes on Characters and Habits of Domestic
Animals, 1854'; and 'A few Recent Notices in Natural History, 1855.'
All Pearson's prose has a dignity and simplicity and directness that
makes one realise he had been a reader of the masters of English
style, but it makes one feel also that he is a poet at heart, as he
writes his prose. Take for example his account of the glede or
kite--alas! long vanished from our land, though nesting at the ferry
as late as the beginning of last century;--'I have seen,' says he,
'the glede and his beautiful flight, no words of mine can adequately
describe it. It was on a windy day in autumn or winter that he
generally made his appearance. Imagine a bird measuring five feet
between the tips of his wings. To glide along it required apparently
no mechanical effort, no fluttering of the wings, not the tremor of a
feather. It was not flying but sailing on the bosom of the air, as
if by an effort of the will, such ease, such grace, such dignity.'
The evenings at Borderside were spent in reading. A mellow musical
voice with much feeling in it, would render a passage from some
favourite poet, and as often as not the {143} old man's voice would
falter and he would say, 'I cannot go on,' and with tears rolling
down his cheeks he would put the book down. Perceval Graves, his
great friend of the later years, would ofttimes come over for high
discourse and heart communion from Dovenest to Borderside. He
described those pleasant visits thus:
'And when our cheerful meal was o'er,
A meal which friendship seemed to bless
And elegance and homeliness
With charm we scarce had known before.
How swiftly flew the hours away,
As thought and feeling deeply stored
By mind and heart all forth were poured
In loving faith and lively play!'
The summer of 1856 was memorable for a waterspout that fell in
hay-time on the 8th of August, upon Carnigill, near Borrow Bridge; we
who travel by the L.N.W.R. from Tebay to the south can still see the
wounds upon the mountain side the fury of the torrent made. The
phenomenon was minutely described by the old meteorologist in a
letter to Mr. Davy. It was the last August he would see.
The long walks over fell and moor gave way to pony-back, and
pony-back gave way {144} to a carriage. It was clear to all who knew
that delicately chiselled face and noble brow of the yeoman poet and
naturalist, that with all his mental powers clear and his eye
undimmed, his natural strength was abating. In the spring of 1856
the Winster folk noticed that though he visited, as was his wont, all
the orchards for miles round, he visited them in his gig, and men
knew by his constant cough that his old enemy, bronchitis, was
pressing him sore. But every sunny day found him sitting with his
book under the shadow of the famous ash tree at Borderside, and still
at night time, if the stars were clear, they saw a tall figure
wrapped in a plaid, and stick in hand, pacing slowly the garden path,
before the door was shut and lights went out.
As for his own light, that went out, painlessly almost as it seemed,
on December 16th. A day or two before, he had gone to the window of
his sick room, and said, 'In another month the snowdrops will be
here.' The snowdrops came, but alas! for eyes of others almost too
dim for tears to see them. On the day of his death, or more
properly, his falling on sleep, the sunset brightened in the west,
and the dying man with the instinct of an observer keen to the last,
turned his {145} face to the window to see the glory grow. Then he
sighed and passed to other glory beyond all sunsetting.
Of his work that remains, little need be said. It is always
thoughtful, accurate of observation, pure in style, refined in
diction, and delicate in poetic appreciation. One much regrets that
he who had in 1808 espoused the 'Terza Rima' should have so soon
quitted the sonnet's scanty plot of ground and left so few examples
of his work. Amongst the miscellaneous papers and letters on natural
history that remain are three which we of this county cannot be too
thankful for. One is a paper 'On certain changes that have taken
place of late years in a part of the Lake District,' with its notes
of 'pack-horse-routes,' 'implements of primitive husbandry,' 'the
introduction of larch planting,' 'commons enclosure,' and with its
interesting account of the ancient Lythe Marsh.
Another is a paper in form of six letters to Thomas Gough containing
'notes on a few subjects in the natural history of Crosthwaite and
Lythe, and the valley of Winster.' He prefaced this series of
letters with an apparent quotation which really was his own saying
and which, as a lover of St. Francis and of {146} all his true
followers, I dare to repeat.--'These lonely denizens of the earth,
our fellow pilgrims on the journey of life, have their appointed
tasks as we have, set out by the great Creator.' There spoke the
heart of the wise old Winster estatesman, who long had known the bond
of love that binds the travailing creation into one, who as he moved
among his brother birds and flowers, and felt the glory of his
brother sun, or of his sister the homeside fire, also then
'With bliss ineffable
Could feel the sentiment of Being spread
O'er all that moves and all that seemeth still
O'er all that leaps and runs and shouts and sings
Or beats the gladsome air, or all that glides
Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself
And mighty depth of waters.'
The last two papers to be mentioned are 'The Sketches of some of the
existing and recent Superstitions of Westmoreland': most valuable
these are, as written just in the nick of time. The two generations
that have passed since he collected his material and penned his
notes, have ceased to hand on the traditional sayings and become too
matter of fact to be 'boddered wid sic things as Charms or Boggles or
Dobbies or Barguests or Wisemen or Witches.'
{147}
There is no one in the county of Westmoreland to-day who would care
to take their children when plagued with the kink-cough up to
Cartmel-fell, on chance of clipping a hair from the cross on an ass's
back and then tying it round the bairn's neck as a sovereign remedy
for the troublesome whoop.
But if it had not been for William Pearson I doubt if we should have
known that the Winster dalesfolk, notwithstanding that the Cross was
set here in the clearing so many centuries ago, were actually
fire-worshippers and carrying on the rites of Baal with their
Beltane-fires as late as the year of Our Lord 1840. Pearson tells us
he talked with a farmer who had actually been present at the
sacrifice by fire of a calf in this neighbourhood, and that there
were two places within the memory of men then living, Fell Side in
Crosthwaite and Hodge Hill on Cartmel-fell, where, to prevent the
death of calves after birth, large fires were kindled in the open air
near to the farm house and a living calf laid upon them and burnt to
death.
As for the reality of this superstitious relic of sun-worship, in the
year 1840, William Pearson actually witnessed it here in Crosthwaite,
and, with a quotation from his paper {148} upon this point, I will
close this notice of his life and work:
'The Need Fire has again made its appearance. There is at present a
rumour of a dreadful epidemic among cattle, which has shown itself in
different places in this part of our country, to which it has been
coming slowly up from the South, where it prevailed last summer. On
Sunday afternoon, the 15th of last November, returning from Kendal by
way of Brigsteer, when I reached the brow of the hill that overlooks
that pleasant village, and from whence there is a glorious prospect,
I was somewhat surprised to see, in Crosthwaite, two or three large
masses of white smoke "rising up like the smoke of a furnace." I
thought it was lime-burning, from some kilns that are not usually
occupied. But when I reached Crosthwaite, I found myself in the
immediate neighbourhood of one of these "smokes," which was rising
very thickly below the Church Tower. I enquired of a young woman
standing in the road what was the meaning of all this smoke. "Oh,"
said she, "it is the Need Fire." Well, thought I, much as I have
heard of it, I have never seen the Need Fire. I will not miss this
opportunity of having ocular evidence of all its {149} mysteries. On
reaching che spot, I found the fire burning in the narrow lane called
Kirk Lane, within about twenty yards of the Kirk Tower, and about
half a dozen cattle huddled together and kept close to the fire, and
amongst the smoke, by a number of men and boys standing on each side
of them, in that narrow lane. Sometimes they drove them through the
fire, and such was the thickness of the smoke that I could scarcely
perceive the actors in this strange ceremony--men and cattle. "So,"
said I, "you are giving them a smoke." "Yes," replied the owner of
the cows, "we wish to be like our neighbours." "But have you got the
real Need Fire?" "Yes, we believe so, it came down Crook yesterday."
Now I had heard that it had been at Low Levens a few days before, so
that this superstitious fire was evidently moving about in all
directions through the length and breadth of the land: nor do they
appear to give it any rest, even on Sundays!'
{150}
JOSEPH HAWELL, A SKIDDAW SHEPHERD.
Did you know Joseph Hawell of Lonscale?
Nearly everybody within sight of Skiddaw did, and knew him to honour
him and to speak well of him.