every tree must be questioned, the joy of 'part seen, imagined part'
must be had in mind,--but the work was done at last. We sat down for
rest on the woodland seat on the fourth rocky eminence on Brandelhow.
It is a seat within only a few yards of the high road, yet so
screened from it that it is hardly seen; but it is a hill with so
fair a prospect that indeed I think angels might pass the little
wicket in the wall and visit those who rest here unawares. There is
no better name imaginable for this high resting-place than 'Mons
Angelorum.' As I thought thus the great sun rolled beyond the hills
and all the vale lay darkened. Cat Bels and Brandelhow went black
and grey, while still across the lake Walla and Blencathra lay in
full {216} sunshine; but at that moment, unthought of before, there
rose a band of angels all along the riverside, and tiny cloudlets
swam up into shadow, and again from shadow into sun. The Mount of
the Angels was this height rightly called.
'It is likely getting late,' said the forester, 'and if you do not
start soon you'll happen hardly get through the ice to-night.'
Down to the boat landing in Victoria Bay I went, and as I went the
woodland filled with a mysterious light. I thought of St. Francis
and the visions he had seen at Al Verna; the sun was beyond the
hills, it had faded now even from Walla Crag, but the light from
Brandelhow seemed to leap up from the ground, the larches so dim and
dead before gleamed into gold; the red bracken at my feet burned like
fire; it was an enchanted woodland; the magic after-glow was the
enchanter.
[Illustration: MONS BEATA, BRANDELHOW.]
I pushed off from the shore, gained the ice-pack, crashed through it
but not without difficulty, and won the dark, clear water beyond.
The sun had sunk between Robinson and Grisedale, a dark cloud-bar had
filled the heavenly interspace, but there in the gap it seemed as if
beneath its heavy eyebrow the {217} eye of God was keeping watch and
ward above the quiet land. One had often seen at the seaside the sun
sink and the slender pillar of golden light reach downward to the
shore, but never had I seen such a magnificent golden roadway laid
upon shining water for happy dreams of tired men to follow the flying
day, as I saw that eventide upon the silver ice and the darkling
flood of tranquil Derwentwater.
{218}
WORDSWORTH AT COCKERMOUTH.
It was a difference that arose on the American question, between Sir
James Lowther and his law agent and steward, a certain John Robinson,
in the year 1766, that was the prime cause of the fact that
Wordsworth, the poet, was born here. For John Robinson resigned his
stewardship, and young John Wordsworth, then only 24 years of age, 'a
man of great force of character and real human capacity,' was
appointed in his place to be 'law agent and steward of the manor of
Ennerdale.' To that post, which he occupied for the next 18 years,
the young man came from the Penrith neighbourhood, bringing with him
as his girl wife a certain Ann Cookson, a mercer's daughter, who
could boast, through her descent on her mother's side from the
Crackanthorpes, of Newbiggin {219} Hall, an ancestry that flowed from
as far back as the time of Edward III. She was thus well suited to
marry the son of the land agent of Sockbridge, near Penistone, who
traced his descent through a long unbroken line of sturdy Yorkshire
yeomen away in the Penistone neighbourhood, as far as to the time of
the Norman Conqueror. They took up their abode in the substantial
house now occupied by Mr. Robinson Mitchell, then lately builded by
one Sheriff Luckock. It bears date 1745-46, and is to-day unmarred
and unmodernised, remaining much as it was when John Wordsworth
became its tenant. We know little of this young John Wordsworth, but
he must have been a man 'tender and deep in his excess of love,' for
when, after twelve years of happy married life here in the old manor
house beside the Derwent, his wife died from consumption, caught, as
we are told, by being put into a damp bed in the 'best room' when on
a visit to friends in London, he never seemed to recover his spirits,
and he himself died six years after her, in the year 1783, on the
30th December, and lies buried at the east end of the All Saints'
Church. He lost his way on the fells when {220} returning from some
business engagement at Broughton-in-Furness, and was obliged to stay
out all night; the chill from exposure brought on inflammation of the
lungs, and his strength, sapped by deep domestic sorrow, could not
bear up against it. The orphans whom he left, Richard, William,
Dorothy, John, and Christopher, four of whom were remarkable in after
life, were then removed to the care of their uncle Cookson at
Penrith, and Cockermouth knew them no more. We have been allowed,
from William Wordsworth's autobiographical notes and his poems, to
glean something of those early days. The poet tells us:
Early died
My honoured mother, she who was the heart
And hinge of all our learnings and our loves,
Nor would I praise her, but in perfect love!
We can in fancy see her in earnest converse with Mr. Ellbanks, the
teacher of the school by the churchyard, talking about William's
'moody and stiff temper'; we can hear her say 'that the only one of
the children about whom she has fears is William; and he will be
remarkable for good or evil.' We may note her pinning on the child's
breast the Easter nosegay, for the young lad is to go {221} up to the
church, to say his catechism. Daffodils I expect the flowers were:
years after, in the ecclesiastical sonnets Words worth, speaking of
this act of his mother's, writes:
Sweet flowers at whose inaudible command
Her countenance phantom-like doth reappear.
Or we can see the father, book in hand, hearing the lad recite the
long passages of Shakespeare, and Milton, and Spenser which were
insensibly to mould his ear to music, fire his imagination, and make
a poet of him.
But when I think of Wordsworth in those childish days I do not go off
to the ancient school by the church to hear him stumble through Latin
verbs. He was not as happy there as he was at Mrs. Birkett's, the
dame's school at Penrith; there was no Mary Hutchinson to keep him
company; and he learned, he tells us, when he went to Hawkshead at
the age of ten, more Latin in a fortnight than he had learned the two
previous years at Cockermouth. No, rather when I want to see the
little William Wordsworth at his happiest, I go with him into the old
Manor House Terrace garden {222} by the Derwent's side, and see him
with his sister, that sister 'Emmeline,' as he called her, chasing
the butterfly, or hand in hand peering through the rose and privet
hedge at the sparrow's nest, 'wishing yet fearing to be near it.'
Or, follow him with his nurse, he a child of only five years of age,
bathing and basking alternate, all the hot August day in the shallows
of the mill pool, and leaping naked as an Indian through the tall
garden ragwort on the sands, and clapping his hands to see the
rainbow spring from middle air. Or I go with him by the river,
'winding among its grassy holmes,' whose voice flowed along his
earliest dreams--that Derwent he could never forget--away to the
Castle-hold of the barons of old time, Waldeof, Umfraville, Multon,
Lucies, and Nevilles, and watch him peering with look of awe into the
dark cellar and dungeons, watch him chase the butterfly through the
grim courts or climb after the tufts of golden wallflower upon its
broken battlements.
But happiest of all was he when with his story book he lay full
stretched, as he describes in the _Prelude_, upon the sun-warmed
stones and sandy banks 'beside the {223} bright blue river,' and
there feasted his little heart on fairy tale and filled his soul with
scenes from wonderland.
Wordsworth was never unmindful of the home of his birth. He left
Cockermouth for schooldays at Hawkshead when he was a boy of nine,
and though in the holidays, for the next five years, he paid an
occasional visit to the place, his chief vacation associations were
with Penrith. The Poet's connection with this town ceased at his
father's death in 1784, when he was a lad of fourteen; but he never
forgot it. From nature and her overflowing soul here in his
childhood days he had received so much that all his thoughts were
steeped in a feeling of grateful remembrance of it. He visited the
home of his childhood occasionally to refresh his heart with a cup of
remembrance, and we find a note of a certain visit in Dorothy's
letter to Mrs. Marshall. Writing in September, 1807, she says:--'W.
and M. have just returned. They were at Cockermouth, our native
place you know, and the Terrace Walk--that you have heard me speak of
many a time--with the privet hedge, is still full of roses as it was
thirty years ago. Yes, I remember it for more than thirty years.'
{224}
In 1836 he interests himself in a scheme for building a new church.
He writes to his friend Poole, of Nether Stowey, for assistance to
this object. He tells him that Cockermouth is in a state of much
spiritual destitution, nearly 6000 souls and only 300 sittings for
the poor. Wordsworth cared for the poor. 'I have been the means,'
he says, 'of setting on foot the project of erecting a new church
there, and the inhabitants look to me for much more assistance than I
can possibly afford them, through any influence that I possess.'
As a Keswick parson, I gather with pride further on in that letter,
that it was the fact of the new church of St. John's having been
built there that spurred him on; and that he hopes Cockermouth will
do as Keswick has done, and thus excite other towns to follow so good
an example.
It is interesting to note that the Cockermouthians of that day were
not of one mind in the matter, or the Poet had been misled as to
native church feeling; for the inhabitants having a windfall of £2000
given them by the Lord of Egremont that year, to spend as they
pleased, preferred a new market place to a new church, and the old
Poet {225} writes:--'This was wanted, so we cannot complain.'
But Wordsworth was disappointed and grieved too at the spirit of
unkindness shown by some of the people of his native town to his good
Lord Lonsdale. I have had access to a MS. letter of Wordsworth's,
which shows that the Church-building project fell through, as far as
he was concerned, by reason of what he considered the unfair
treatment of an offer of help, made by the then Lord Lonsdale to the
town, in connection with the church accommodation needed.
So far as I know this was the last public work he attempted to do for
the place that gave him birth. But at least we cannot regret that
his last effort was in a cause near to his heart, the cause of the
religious interests and life of his fellow Cumbrians, the cause of
reverence, worship, and godly fear, of 'pure religion breathing
household laws,' the cause of the worship and praise of Almighty God,
here in his native place.
The seed he sowed, though it lay dormant, did not fall on barren
ground; and in a real sense the present All Saints' Parish Church may
stand as a monument to the immortal Poet, who then, as ever, {226}
championed 'in perilous times the cause of the poor and simple,' and
did what he might in his day for church life and piety in the place
of his nativity, Cockermouth.
{227}
MOUNTAIN SILENCE AND VALLEY SONG.
Once more the Heavenly power makes all things new.
This was the line from Tennyson's poem that kept ringing in my ears,
as on the mid-most day of April I wandered out and away across the
vale to the skirts of Skiddaw.
Opens a door in Heaven;
From skies of glass
A Jacob's ladder falls
On greening grass,
And o'er the mountain walls
Young angels pass.
Before them fleets the shower
And burst the buds,
And shine the level lands,
And flash the floods,
The stars are from their hands
Flung thro' the woods.
No, no! this last couplet was untrue; the anemones had not yet opened
their delicate {228} shells, and the blackthorn buds were only
dimmest seed-pearls of yellowish lustre. But as I gazed from the
fence halfway up Latrigg and watched the Greta flashing, and the
great plain fresh-enamelled with the first faint green of spring, a
Jacob's ladder was let down from above Scafell and Glaramara, and all
the angels that ever came on earth to fill men's hearts with April
jollity came trooping downwards. They took on various forms. Some
of them became tortoise-shell butterflies that lay in sunny content
upon the moist woodland path. Others sailed out of blue air and
became glorious peacock butterflies upon whose underwings in blue and
black one clearly saw the head and face of human kind sketched in
with lustrous powdery pencillings. Other angels ministered to the
pink coral glumes of the sycamore; others, again, daintily untwisted
the leafage of the wild rose in the hedge; others delighted to unfold
the tufts upon the elder. But the angels that seemed to be busiest
were those that made the vivid emerald of the 'dog's mercury'
contrast with the faded red of the bracken in the woods, and where
the purple birches showed against the flowering larches {229} added
moment by moment a deeper, ruddier purple to the trees' beauty and a
finer flash of green to the surrounding wood to set the purple off.
But all the gifts of the angels of that April morning seemed as
nothing when compared with the joy of the sight of one single angel
of the spring--he a lustrous-backed swallow who flashed from
steel-purple into black and from black to steel-purple, and
disappeared from sight behind the larches. I had known of his
coming, for a swift-eyed shepherd had seen one of his kind in the
valley as early as April 1, but April 13 to the 15th was marked in my
calendar as swallowtide, and I had not expected sight of him till
this week. Here he was, glossy with African sun, and full of silent
message that summer was sure. The chiffchaff would be a-trill and
the cuckoo would be calling for a mate within the week. Ah, swallow!
swallow! flying north! How much of hope and happiness you bring.
Then as I moved through the larchen grove, I heard the titmice
whispering that they too were glad, they too felt reassured by sight
of the swallow, and one walked on in a kind of consciousness that man
and {230} swallow and budding larches were more akin than one had
believed, until the joyousness of spring found the selfsame echo in
such divers hearts, and that indeed the over-soul was one, the music
and the melody one voice. Yes, Wordsworth sang truly when he wrote:
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach us more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
I met a child halfway up Latrigg braiding her hat with larch flower.
Truly no rubies ever seemed so rich and rare as these which the
simple village child had twisted in her hat; her sister had a handful
of primroses she was taking to her father in the neighbouring
cottage, for he was but slowly recovering from pneumonia, and the
child knew by instinct that a breath from a primrose posy would do
more for him than all the 'doctors' bottles' in the world.
'You have been up Skiddaw betimes,' I said.
'Ay, ay, sir; you see they've gone to "laate" Herdwicks to-day for
lambing-time, and I went up to the Gale with the dogs.'
Herdwicks! Lambing! What did it all {231} mean? Only that those
great brown slopes of Skiddaw which till this day have been vocal
with flocks and alive with sheep, will by this eventide be as silent
as the grave. For between April 10 and April 20 the shepherds know
that the Herdwicks will become mothers of their springtide young, and
so they will go forth to the fells and upland pastures, to bring
their woolly charges down from the mountain heights to the safety and
the food and care of the dale-farm enclosures. I overtook the
shepherds at the 'Gale,' and went with them. Soon the dogs were seen
scouring the fell-side, now disappearing from sight, now coming back
to get a signal from their master. A wave of the hand to left or
right was all that was needed, and away they went, and slowly and
surely they seemed to be able to search out and bring into a close
company the Herdwicks from all the heathery waste and grey-bleached
mountain hollows.
Then began the home-bringing. Very tenderly and gently did the dogs
urge the sheep, heavy with young, down the fell-side slopes. Now and
again the shepherd cried, 'Hey, Jack!' and away the collies flew back
towards him. 'Ga away by!' {232} and away again the collies flew in
a great circle out beyond and behind the sheep. The sheep were a
little hustled and came on too fast. Then the shepherd whistled and
held up his hand, and the dogs sat like stones till he whistled and
waved his hand again. So down from Lonscale and across the gulfy
Whitbeck the sheep came. The dogs dashed off to where, through a
great carpet of ever-lucent moss, the main fountains break from the
hill. They slaked their thirst, then came back slowly to urge the
flocks homeward and downward toward the Shepherd's Cross, and so over
the Gale to the Lonscale Farm. We stopped at the Cross, and a tall,
'leish,' handsome man, with fair hair and the grey Viking eye, said
in solemn undertone, 'Fadder and brudder cud hev been weal content to
be wid us on sic a day as this, I'se thinking.' And the mist
gathered in his eyes, and he said no more, but just went homeward
with the sheep. Ah, yes, that Shepherd's Cross tells of men--father
and son--who spent their whole lives in following the Herdwicks on
the sides of Skiddaw and Lonscale Fell; wrought for their sheep,
thought of them by day {233} and dreamed of them by night, and were
as proud, as ever David was, of what they looked upon as the finest
life a man need care to live, the mountain shepherd's round of love
and toil.
I waved adieu, and up beyond the huts to 'Jenkin' I went. The red
fern had been washed into faintest ochre, the heather had grown grey
with winter storm, but everywhere beneath the blanched grass one felt
new life and tenderest first flush of April green was astir; and as
one looked down from 'Jenkin' into the circle of the deep blue hills
and the Derwent's perfect mirror, one saw that though the larches
were still brown there was an undertone of something, neither brown
nor green, that flooded not only the larch woods but the great
Latrigg pastures also, and betokened that the spring was even at
their doors, and that the fells would soon rejoice with the emerald
valley below. Gazing at the vale of Crosthwaite, where still all the
trees seem winter white, one was astonished at the darkness of the
hedgerows that divided the meadows, and one saw the new fallows shine
and swim like purple enamel upon the green flood of the springtide
grass. 'Jenkin' was reached, {234} but not until many swathes of
lingering snow, black with the smoke of the blast furnaces of the
coast and of Lancashire and Yorkshire mills, had been passed. Here
at 'Jenkin top' we found two men hard at work 'graaving' peats for
the Coronation bonfires on June 26.
'Well, how goes the peat-graving?' said I, and a ruddy-faced Norseman
from a Threlkeld farm said, 'Aw, gaily weel, sir; but I'm thinking we
mud hev nae mair kings upo' the throane, for this job will finish t'
peat moss, and peats are hard to finnd within reach o' Skiddaw top.
You see,' said he, 'it's lost its wire, and peat widout wire in it is
nae use for makking a "low" wid.'
I saw that what he called 'wire' were the rootlets of the ancient
undergrowth of years gone by, the matted texture of primeval
springtides, and, stooping down, he broke a peat across and showed me
the wire. 'You kna,' he continued, 'we shall just leave peats
ligging here, and thoo mun send up scheul-lads to spreead them in a
forthnet's time. Then they mud coom oop a week laater and shift 'em
and turn them, and then a week laater they mud coom and foot 'em.
{235} That is if thoo want 'em in fettle by Coronation-daay, for they
are ter'ble watter-sick noo.'
'Foot them?' I said. 'What do you mean?' And the shepherd took a
couple and leaned them one against another, and showed me how thus a
draught of air passed between the peats and ensured their drying.
'Well, good-daay, good-daay. But we mud hev nae mair kings to be
crooned,' said he; 'for peat moss ull nobbut howd oot for this un,
I'm thinking.'
I bade farewell, and down to the valley I went, noting how doubly
near and blue the hills and vales all seemed to grow, as one passed
down beneath the veils of haze which had lent both greyness and
distance to the view. Again I saw the swallow skim; again I watched
the gorgeous butterflies, and, with a wand of palm-flower that had
just lost its gold, and the rosy plumelets of the larch in my hand, I
made the best of my way homeward, through air that throbbed and
thrilled with the voice of thrush and blackbird, and felt the deep
contrast between these silent flockless slopes of Skiddaw, and the
ringing singing valley at his feet.
{236}
INDEX
NDX A
Adelaide, Queen, 46.
Ambleside, 18, 22, 44, 53.
_Angler, Complete_, 120.
April song, 81.
Arnold, Dr., 19, 50.
Aveling's town, King, 59.
B
Ballads, Lyrical, by Wordsworth, 125.
Barf, 169.
Bassenthwaite, 97, 102, 105, 107, 169.
Beltane fire, 147.
_Birthright, The Christian_, 162.
Black Hill, 197.
Blencathra, 113, 165, 192, 212, 214, 215.
Boon Beck, 30.
Bootle, 172.
Borderside, 131, 132, 140, 143, 144.
Borrodale, 52, 180, 183, 197, 213, 214.
Borrow Bridge, 143.
Bowness Church, 138.
Brandelhow, 197, 208, 210, 214, 215, 216.
Brankers, 49.
Brigham-cum-Mosser-cum-Lorton, 173.
_Brougham Castle, Feast of_, by Wordsworth, 191.
Broughton-in-Furness, 220.
Browne, William George, 98.
Browning, Robert, note, 5.
Brownrigg of Brownrigg, 202.
Brundholme, 157.
Butcher lad's reminiscences of Wordsworth, 8.
Burns, 141.
C
Caermote, 104, 106.
_Calling, The Gentleman's_, 162.
Carlisle, City arms of, 96.
Carlyle, 96, 141, 164.
Carnigill, 143.
Cartmell Fell, 121, 125, 147.
Castle Hill, 213, 214.
Castrigg Fell, 191.
Cat Bels, 212, 215.
Cat Ghyll, 181.
Causey Pike, 109.
_Cavalier, Memoirs of a_, 120.
Chartres Cathedral, 90.
Chestnut Hill, 110.
Christmas season in Grasmere, 71.
Clappersgate, 49.
"Clock, The Village," 30.
Cockermouth, 173, 218, 220, 221, 223, 224, 226.
Coleridge, Hartley, 12, 19, 23, 24, 25, 31, 36, 38, 43, 44, 50, 58,
138.
Colthouse, 141.
Coniston, 2; Fells, 125.
_Contentment, The Art of_, 162.
Cookson, Ann, 218.
Coronation peat-fires, 234.
Cornwall, 197.
Crackenthorpes, 218.
Cropper, James, of Ellergreen, 86.
Crosthwaite, 116, 131, 139, 147, 148, 233; valley, 110, 157; school,
120; church, 197.
Crozier, John, 192, 196, 200, 202, 205.
Curling, 112.
Cuthbert, St., 112.
D
Dalesmen, Characteristics of, 3; Truthfulness of, 5; Comeliness of,
45; Mourning etiquette of, 194; Love of hunting of, 195.
Davy, Dr., 136, 141.
Day, A Winter, on Derwentwater, 207.
Day with Roman and Norse, 94.
Defoe, 120.
De Quincey, 76.
Derwent, 65, 103, 219, 222, 233.
Derwent Hill, 67.
Derwentwater, 97, 109, 181, 217.
Devon, 197.
Druid's Circle, 191, 199.
Dungeon Ghyll, 39.
E
Egremont, Lord of, 224.
_Elizabeth, Spacious times of Great_, 155.
Elleray, 51.
Esk, 59.
Esthwaite Lake, 29.
_Excursion, The_, by Wordsworth, 127.
_Exploits, Nelson's_, 155.
F
Falcon Crag, 181, 182.
Fell Side, 147.
Fiddler's Farm, 17, 19.
Fire-worshippers, 147.
Fox, George, 172; his Journal, 166, 173.
Fox head, Price of, 193.
Foxhow, 17, 19.
Fox hunting, 193, 197.
Friar's Crag, 208.
Francis, St., 145, 216.
Frozen Fell, 152.
G
Gardener lad's reminiscences of Wordsworth, 10.
_Gaul, Amadis de_, 120.
George the Waller, 17; his wrestling match, 22.
Gimmer Crag, 102.
Glaramara, 109, 213, 228.
Glenderaterra, 157.
Goodwin, Harvey, Bishop of Carlisle, 88.
Gough, Benjamin, 121, 141.
Gough, Thomas, 145.
Gowder Crag, 178, 184.
Grasmere, 6, 35, 38, 70.
Grasmere actors, 70; stage managers, 72.
Grasmere Common, 31, 32 f.
Grasmoor, 109, 169, 172, 178, 207.
Graves, Perceval, 141; quotations from, 140, 143.
Greenhead Ghyll, 30.
Greta, 157, 179, 228.
Grisedale, 28, 33, 109, 178, 207, 216; Pass, 31.
_Guide to the Lakes_, 20, 21.
Gulls, With the black-headed, 59.
Gummershow, 125.
H
Hawell, Joseph, a Skiddaw Shepherd, 150.
Hawkshead, 223.
Helvellyn, 109, 113, 134, 207.
Herdhouse, 172.
Heversham, 133; Grammar School, 88.
High Crag, 140.
High Stile, 172.
Hindscarth, 109.
Hobcarton Crag, 169.
Hodge Hill, 147.
Honister, 213.
Hope Ghyll, 171.
Hounds, Training of, 197; Breed of, 201.
Hunt, Master of the, 191.
Hunting song, 199.
Hutchinson, Mary, 221.
I
Ireby, 99.
Irt, 59.
K
Keats, 187.