Stranger still it is to tell that, for the first time in his life,

Wordsworth became inebriated at Cambridge. It is but fair to add that

the first time was also the last time. But perhaps the strangest

part of the story is the occasion of this drunkenness; which was in

celebration of his first visit to the very rooms at Christ College once

occupied by Milton--intoxication by way of homage to the most temperate

of men; and this homage offered by one who has turned out himself to

the full as temperate! Every man, meantime, who is not a churl, must

grant a privilege and charter of large enthusiasm to such an occasion.

And an older man than Wordsworth (at that era not fully nineteen), and

a man even without a poet's blood in his veins, might have leave to

forget his sobriety in such circumstances. Besides which, after all, I

have heard from Wordsworth's own lips that he was not too far gone to

attend chapel decorously during the very acmé of his elevation.[108]

[108] Wordsworth has told the story himself in his _Prelude_,

thus:--

"Among the band of my compeers was one

Whom chance had stationed in the very room

Honoured by Milton's name. O temperate Bard!

Be it confest that, for the first time, seated

Within thy innocent lodge and oratory,

One of a festive circle, I poured out

Libations, to thy memory drank, till pride

And gratitude grew dizzy in a brain

Never excited by the fumes of wine

Before that hour, or since. Then, forth I ran

From the assembly; through a length of streets

Ran, ostrich-like, to reach our chapel door

In not a desperate or opprobrious time,

Albeit long after the importunate bell

Had stopped, with wearisome Cassandra voice

No longer haunting the dark winter night....

Call back, O Friend! a moment to thy mind

The place itself and fashion of the rites.

With careless ostentation shouldering up

My surplice, through the inferior throng I clove

Of the plain Burghers, who in audience stood

On the last skirts of their permitted ground,

Under the pealing organ."

M.

The rooms which Wordsworth occupied at St. John's were singularly

circumstanced; mementoes of what is highest and what is lowest in

human things solicited the eye and the ear all day long. If the

occupant approached the outdoors prospect, in one direction, there was

visible, through the great windows in the adjacent chapel of Trinity,

the statue of Newton "with his silent face and prism," memorials of

the abstracting intellect, serene and absolute, emancipated from

fleshly bonds. On the other hand, immediately below, stood the college

kitchen; and, in that region, "from noon to dewy eve," resounded

the shrill voice of scolding from the female ministers of the head

cook, never suffering the mind to forget one of the meanest amongst

human necessities. Wordsworth, however, as one who passed much of his

time in social gaiety, was less in the way of this annoyance than a

profounder student would have been. Probably he studied little beyond

French and Italian during his Cambridge life; not, however, at any

time forgetting (as I had so much reason to complain, when speaking

of my Oxonian contemporaries) the literature of his own country. It

is true that he took the regular degree of A.B., and in the regular

course; but this was won in those days by a mere nominal examination,

unless where the mathematical attainments of the student prompted his

ambition to contest the splendid distinction of Senior Wrangler. This,

in common with all other honours of the University, is won in our days

with far severer effort than in that age of relaxed discipline; but

at no period could it have been won, let the malicious say what they

will, without an amount of mathematical skill very much beyond what has

ever been exacted of its _alumni_ by any other European University.

Wordsworth was a profound admirer of the sublimer mathematics; at least

of the higher geometry. The secret of this admiration for geometry

lay in the antagonism between this world of bodiless abstraction and

the world of passion. And here I may mention appropriately, and I hope

without any breach of confidence, that, in a great philosophic poem of

Wordsworth's, which is still in MS., and will remain in MS. until after

his death, there is, at the opening of one of the books, a dream, which

reaches the very _ne plus ultra_ of sublimity, in my opinion, expressly

framed to illustrate the eternity, and the independence of all social

modes or fashions of existence, conceded to these two hemispheres, as

it were, that compose the total world of human power--mathematics on

the one hand, poetry on the other.[109]

[109] The reference is to the Fifth Book of _The Prelude_.--M.

I scarcely know whether I am entitled to quote--as my memory (though

not refreshed by a sight of the poem for more than twenty years) would

well enable me to do--any long extract; but thus much I may allowably

say, as it cannot in any way affect Mr. Wordsworth's interests, that

the form of the dream is as follows; and, by the way, even this form

is not arbitrary; but, with exquisite skill in the art of composition,

is made to arise out of the situation in which the poet had previously

found himself, and is faintly prefigured in the elements of that

situation. He had been reading "Don Quixote" by the sea-side; and,

oppressed by the heat of the sun, he had fallen asleep, whilst gazing

on the barren sands before him. Even in these circumstances of the

case--as, first, the adventurous and half-lunatic knight riding about

the world, on missions of universal philanthropy, and, secondly, the

barren sands of the sea-shore--one may read the germinal principles of

the dream. He dreams that, walking in some sandy wilderness of Africa,

some endless Zahara, he sees at a distance

"An Arab of the desert, lance in rest,

Mounted upon a dromedary."

The Arab rides forward to meet him; and the dreamer perceives, in the

countenance of the rider, the agitation of fear, and that he often

looks behind him in a troubled way, whilst in his hand he holds two

books--one of which is "Euclid's Elements"; the other (which is a

book and yet not a book) seeming, in fact, a shell as well as a

book--seeming neither, and yet both at once. The Arab directs him to

apply the shell to his ear; upon which,

"In an unknown tongue, which yet I understood,"

the dreamer says that he heard

"A wild prophetic blast of harmony,

An ode, as if in passion utter'd, that foretold

Destruction to the people of this earth

By deluge near at hand."

The Arab, with grave countenance, assures him that it is even so; that

all was true which had been said; and that he himself was riding upon a

divine mission, having it in charge

"To bury those two books;

The one that held acquaintance with the stars,

... undisturb'd by Space or Time;

The other, that was a god, yea, many gods,

Had voices more than all the winds, and was

A joy, a consolation, and a hope!"

That is, in effect, his mission is to secure the two great interests of

poetry and mathematics from sharing in the watery ruin. As he talks,

suddenly the dreamer perceives that the Arab's "countenance grew

more disturbed," and that his eye was often reverted; upon which the

dreaming poet also looks along the desert in the same direction; and in

the far horizon he descries "a glittering light." What is it? he asks

of the Arab rider. "It is," said the Arab, "the waters of the earth,"

that even then were travelling on their awful errand. Upon which, the

poet sees this apostle of the desert riding

"Hurrying o'er the illimitable waste,

With the fleet waters of a drowning world

In chase of him: whereat I [meaning the poet] waked in terror,

And saw the sea before me, and the book

In which I had been reading at my side."[110]

[110] On comparing these quotations with the original passages in

_The Prelude_, one finds that De Quincey, quoting from memory, is

not exact to the text in any of them save the last.--M.

The sketch I have here given of this sublime dream sufficiently

attests the interest which Wordsworth took in the mathematic studies

of the place, and the exalted privilege which he ascribed to them of

co-eternity with "the vision and the faculty divine" of the poet--the

destiny common to both, of an endless triumph over the ruins of

nature and of time. Meantime, he himself travelled no farther in

these studies than through the six elementary books usually selected

from the fifteen of Euclid. Whatever might be the interests of his

speculative understanding, whatever his admiration, practically he

devoted himself to the more agitating interests of man, social and

political, just then commencing that vast career of revolution which

has never since been still or stationary; interests which in his mind

alternated, nevertheless, with another and different interest, in

the grander forms of external nature, as found amongst mountains and

forests. In obedience to this latter passion it was--for a passion it

had become--that during one of his long Cambridge vacations, stretching

from June to November, he went over to Switzerland and Savoy, for

a pedestrian excursion amongst the Alps; taking with him for his

travelling companion a certain Mr. J----, of whom (excepting that he

is once apostrophized in a sonnet, written at Calais in the year 1802)

I never happened to hear him speak: whence I presume to infer that Mr.

J---- owed this flattering distinction, not so much to any intellectual

graces of his society, as, perhaps, to his powers of administering

"punishment" (in the language of the "fancy") to restive and mutinous

landlords; for such were abroad in those days,--people who presented

huge reckonings with one hand, and with the other a huge cudgel, by

way of opening the traveller's eyes to the propriety of settling them

without demur, and without discount. I do not positively know this to

have been the case; but I have heard Wordsworth speak of the ruffian

landlords who played upon his youth in the Grisons; and, however well

qualified to fight his own battles, he might find, amongst such savage

mountaineers, two combatants better than one.

Wordsworth's route, on this occasion, lay at first through Austrian

Flanders, then (1788, I think) on the fret for an insurrectionary war

against the capricious innovations of the imperial coxcomb, Joseph

II. He passed through the camps then forming, and thence ascended the

Rhine to Switzerland; crossed the Great St. Bernard, visited the Lake

of Como, and other interesting scenes in the north of Italy, where,

by the way, the tourists were benighted in a forest--having, in some

way or other, been misled by the Italian clocks and their peculiar

fashion of striking round to twenty-four o'clock. On his return,

Wordsworth published a quarto pamphlet of verses, describing, with

very considerable effect and brilliancy, the grand scenery amongst

which he had been moving.[111] This poem, as well as another in the

same quarto form, describing the English lake scenery of Westmoreland

and Cumberland, addressed by way of letter "to a young lady" (viz.,

Miss Wordsworth),[112] are remarkable, in the first place, as the

earliest effort of Wordsworth in verse, at least as his earliest

publication; but, in the second place, and still more so, from their

style of composition. "Pure description," even where it cannot be said,

sneeringly, "to hold the place of sense," is so little attractive as

the direct exclusive object of a poem, and in reality it exacts so

powerful an effort on the part of the reader to realize visually,

or make into an apprehensible unity, the scattered elements and

circumstances of external landscapes painted only by words, that,

inevitably, and reasonably, it can never hope to be a popular form

of composition; else it is highly probable that these "Descriptive

Sketches" of Wordsworth, though afterwards condemned as vicious in

their principles of composition by his own maturer taste, would really

have gained him a high momentary notoriety with the public, had they

been fairly brought under its notice; whilst, on the other hand, his

revolutionary principles of composition, and his purer taste, ended in

obtaining for him nothing but scorn and ruffian insolence.

[111] _Descriptive Sketches during a Pedestrian Tour on the

Italian, Swiss, and Savoyard Alps._ London, 1793.--M.

[112] _An Evening Walk: an Epistle in Verse._ London, 1793.--M.

This seems marvellous; but, in fact, it is not so: it seems, I mean,

_primâ facie_, marvellous that the inferior models should be fitted

to gain a far higher reputation; but the secret lies here--that these

were in a style of composition which, if sometimes false, had been

long reconciled to the public feelings, and which, besides, have a

specific charm for certain minds, even apart from all fashions of the

day; whereas, his later poems had to struggle against sympathies long

trained in an opposite direction, to which the recovery of a healthier

tone (even where nature had made it possible) presupposed a difficult

process of weaning, and an effort of discipline for re-organizing the

whole internal economy of the sensibilities that is both painful and

mortifying: for--and that is worthy of deep attention--the misgivings

of any vicious or unhealthy state, the impulses and suspicious

gleams of the truth struggling with cherished error, the instincts

of light conflicting with darkness--these are the real causes of

that hatred and intolerant scorn which is ever awakened by the first

dawnings of new and important systems of truth. Therefore it is, that

Christianity was so much more hated than any mere variety of error.

Therefore are the first feeble struggles of nature towards a sounder

state of health always harsh and painful; for the false system which

this change for the better disturbs had, at least, this soothing

advantage--that it was self-consistent. Therefore, also, was the

Wordsworthian restoration of elementary power, and of a higher or

transcendent truth of nature (or, as some people vaguely expressed

the case, of _simplicity_), received at first with such malignant

disgust. For there was a galvanic awakening in the shock of power, as

it jarred against the ancient system of prejudices, which inevitably

revealed so much of truth as made the mind jealous; enlightened it

enough to descry its own wanderings, but not enough to recover the

right road. The more energetic, the more spasmodically potent, are

the throes of nature towards her own re-establishment in the cases of

suspended animation--by drowning, strangling, &c.--the more keen is the

anguish of revival. And, universally, a transition state is a state

of suffering and disquiet. Meantime, the early poems of Wordsworth,

that _might_ have suited the public taste so much better than his more

serious efforts, if the fashion of the hour, or the sanction of a

leading review, or the _prestige_ of a name, had happened to bring them

under the public eye, did, in fact, drop unnoticed into the market.

Nowhere have I seen them quoted--no, not even since the author's

victorious establishment in the public admiration. The reason may be,

however, that not many copies were printed at first; no subsequent

edition was ever called for; and yet, from growing interest in the

author, every copy of the small impression had been studiously bought

up. Indeed, I myself went to the publisher's (Johnson's) as early as

1805 or 1806, and bought up all the remaining copies (which were but

six or seven of the Foreign Sketches, and two or three of the English),

as presents, and as _future_ curiosities in literature to literary

friends whose interest in Wordsworth might assure one of a due value

being put upon the poems. Were it not for this extreme scarcity,

I am disposed to think that many lines or passages would long ere

this have been made familiar to the public ear. Some are delicately,

some forcibly picturesque; and the selection of circumstances is

occasionally very original and felicitous. In particular, I remember

this one, which presents an accident in rural life that must by

thousands of repetitions have become intimately known to every dweller

in the country, and yet had never before been consciously taken up for

a poet's use. After having described the domestic cock as "sweetly

ferocious"--a prettiness of phraseology which he borrows from an

Italian author--he notices those competitions or defiances which are

so often carried on interchangeably between barn-door cocks from great

distances:--

"Echoed by faintly answering farms remote."

This is the beautiful line in which he has caught and preserved so

ordinary an occurrence--one, in fact, of the commonplaces which lend

animation and a moral interest to rural life.

After his return from this Swiss excursion, Wordsworth took up his

parting residence at Cambridge, and prepared for a final adieu to

academic pursuits and academic society.

It was about this period that the French Revolution broke out; and the

reader who would understand its appalling effects--its convulsing,

revolutionary effects upon Wordsworth's heart and soul--should consult

the history of the Solitary, as given by himself in "The Excursion";

for that picture is undoubtedly a leaf from the personal experience of

Wordsworth:--

"From that dejection I was roused--but how?"

Mighty was the transformation which it wrought in the whole economy of

his thoughts; miraculous almost was the expansion which it gave to his

human sympathies; chiefly in this it showed its effects--in throwing

the thoughts inwards into grand meditations upon man, his final

destiny, his ultimate capacities of elevation; and, secondly, in giving

to the whole system of the thoughts and feelings a firmer tone, and a

sense of the awful _realities_ which surround the mind; by comparison

with which the previous literary tastes seemed (even where they were

fine and elegant, as in Collins or Gray, unless where they had the

self-sufficing reality of religion, as in Cowper) fanciful and trivial.

In all lands this result was accomplished, and at the same time:

Germany, above all, found her new literature the mere creation and

rebound of this great moral tempest; and, in Germany or England alike,

the poetry was so entirely regenerated, thrown into moulds of thought

and of feeling so new, that the poets everywhere felt themselves to be

putting away childish things, and now first, among those of their own

century, entering upon the dignity and the sincere thinking of mature

manhood.

Wordsworth, it is well known to all who know anything of his history,

felt himself so fascinated by the gorgeous festival era of the

Revolution--that era when the sleeping snakes which afterwards stung

the national felicity were yet covered with flowers--that he went over

to Paris, and spent about one entire year between that city, Orleans,

and Blois. There, in fact, he continued to reside almost too long. He

had been sufficiently connected with public men to have drawn upon

himself some notice from those who afterwards composed the Committee

of Public Safety. And, as an Englishman, when that partiality began

to droop which at an earlier period had protected the English name,

he became an object of gloomy suspicion with those even who would

have grieved that he should fall a victim to undistinguishing popular

violence. Already _for_ England, and in her behalf, he was thought

to be that spy which (as Coleridge tells us in his "Biographia

Literaria") afterwards he was accounted by Mr. Pitt's emissaries, in

the worst of services _against_ her. I doubt, however (let me say it

without impeachment of Coleridge's veracity--for he was easily duped),

this whole story about Mr. Pitt's Somersetshire spies; and it has often

struck me with astonishment that Coleridge should have suffered his

personal pride to take so false a direction as to court the humble

distinction of having been suspected as a conspirator, in those very

years when poor empty tympanies of men, such as Thelwall, Holcroft,

&c., were actually recognised as enemies of the state, and worthy of

a state surveillance, by ministers so blind and grossly misinformed

as, on this point, were Pitt and Dundas. Had I been Coleridge, instead

of saving Mr. Pitt's reputation with posterity, by ascribing to him a

jealousy which he or his agents had not the discernment to cherish, I

would have boldly planted myself upon the fact, the killing fact, that

he had utterly ignored both myself (Coleridge, to wit) and Wordsworth.

Even with Dogberry, _I_ would have insisted upon that--"Set down, also,

that I am an ass!" Clamorous should have been my exultation in this

fact.[113]

[113] The reader, who may happen not to have seen Coleridge's

"Biographia Literaria," is informed that Coleridge tells a long

story about a man who followed and dogged himself and Wordsworth

in all their rural excursions, under a commission (originally

emanating from Mr. Pitt) for detecting some overt acts of treason,

or treasonable correspondence, or, in default of either, some

words of treasonable conversation. Unfortunately for his own

interests as an active servant, even in a whole month that spy had

collected nothing at all as the basis of a report, excepting only

something which they (Coleridge and Wordsworth, to wit) were

continually saying to each other, now in blame, now in praise, of

one _Spy Nosy_; and this, praise and blame alike, the honest spy

very naturally took to himself, seeing that the world accused him

of having a _nose_ of unreasonable dimensions, and his own

conscience accused him of being a spy. "Now," says Coleridge, "the

very fact was that Wordsworth and I were constantly talking about

Spinosa." This story makes a very good Joe Miller; but, for other

purposes, is somewhat damaged. However, there is one excellent

story in the case. Some country gentleman from the neighbourhood

of Nether Stowey, upon a party happening to discuss the

probabilities that Wordsworth and Coleridge might be traitors, and

in correspondence with the French Directory, answered thus:--"Oh,

as to that Coleridge, he's a rattlebrain, that will say more in a

week than he will stand to in a twelvemonth. But

Wordsworth--that's the traitor: why, bless you, he's so close,

that you'll never hear him open his lips on the subject from

year's end to year's end!"

In France, however, Wordsworth had a chance, in good earnest, of

passing for the traitor that, in England, no rational person ever

thought him. He had chosen his friends carelessly; nor could any

man, the most sagacious, have chosen them safely, in a time when the

internal schisms of the very same general party brought with them

worse hostilities and more personal perils than even, upon the broader

divisions of party, could have attended the most _ultra_ professions of

anti-national politics, and when the rapid changes of position shifted

the peril from month to month. One individual is especially recorded

by Wordsworth, in the poem on his own life, as a man of the highest

merit, and personal qualities the most brilliant, who ranked first

upon the list of Wordsworth's friends; and this man was so far a safe

friend, at one moment, as he was a republican general--finally, indeed,

a commander-in-chief. This was Beaupuis; and the description of his

character and position is singularly interesting. There is, in fact, a

special value and a use about the case; it opens one's eyes feelingly

to the fact that, even in this thoughtless people, so full of vanity

and levity, nevertheless, the awful temper of the times, and the dread

burden of human interests with which it was charged, had called to a

consciousness of new duties, had summoned to an audit, as if at some

great final tribunal, even the gay, radiant creatures that, under less

solemn auspices, under the reign of a Francis I. or a Louis XIV, would

have been the merest painted butterflies of the court sunshine. This

Beaupuis was a man of superb person--beautiful in a degree which made

him a painter's model, both as to face and figure; and, accordingly, in

a land where conquests of that nature were so easy, and the subjects of

so trifling an effort, he had been distinguished, to his own as well

as the public eyes, by a rapid succession of _bonnes fortunes_ amongst

women. Such, and so glorified by triumphs the most unquestionable and

flattering, had the earthquake of the Revolution found him. From that

moment he had no leisure, not a thought, to bestow upon his former

selfish and frivolous pursuits. He was hurried, as one inspired by some

high apostolic passion, into the service of the unhappy and desolate

serfs amongst his own countrymen--such as are described, at an earlier

date, by Madame de Sevigné, as the victims of feudal institutions;

and one day, as he was walking with Wordsworth in the neighbourhood

of Orleans, and they had turned into a little quiet lane, leading off

from a heath, suddenly they came upon the following spectacle:--A girl,

seventeen or eighteen years old, hunger-bitten, and wasted to a meagre

shadow, was knitting, in a dejected, drooping way; whilst to her arm

was attached, by a rope, the horse, equally famished, that earned the

miserable support of her family. Beaupuis comprehended the scene in a

moment; and, seizing Wordsworth by the arm, he said,--"Dear English

friend!--brother from a nation of freemen!--_that_ it is which is the

curse of our people, in their widest section; and to cure this it is,

as well as to maintain our work against the kings of the earth, that

blood must be shed and tears must flow for many years to come!" At

that time the Revolution had not fulfilled its tendencies; as yet,

the king was on the throne; the fatal 10th of August 1792 had not

dawned; and thus far there was safety for a subject of kings.[114] The

irresistible stream was hurrying forwards. The king fell; and (to pause

for a moment) how divinely is the fact recorded by Wordsworth, in the

MS. poem on his own life, placing the awful scenes past and passing

in Paris under a pathetic relief from the description of the golden,

autumnal day, sleeping in sunshine--

"When I

Towards the fierce metropolis bent my steps,

The homeward road to England. From his throne

The king had fallen," &c.

What a picture does he give of the fury which there possessed the

public mind; of the frenzy which shone in every eye, and through

every gesture; of the stormy groups assembled at the Palais Royal, or

the Tuileries, with "hissing factionists" for ever in their centre,

"hissing" from the self-baffling of their own madness, and incapable

from wrath of speaking clearly; of fear already creeping over the

manners of multitudes; of stealthy movements through back streets;

plotting and counter-plotting in every family; feuds to extermination,

dividing children of the same house for ever; scenes such as those

of the Chapel Royal (now silenced on that _public_ stage), repeating

themselves daily amongst private friends; and, to show the universality

of this maniacal possession--that it was no narrow storm discharging

its fury by local concentration upon a single city, but that it

overspread the whole realm of France--a picture is given, wearing the

same features, of what passed daily at Orleans, Blois, and other towns.

The citizens are described in the attitudes they assumed at the daily

coming in of the post from Paris; the fierce sympathy is portrayed

with which they echoed back the feelings of their compatriots in the

capital: men of all parties had been there up to this time--aristocrats

as well as democrats; and one, in particular, of the former class is

put forward as a representative of his class. This man, duly as the

hour arrived which brought the Parisian newspapers, read restlessly

of the tumults and insults amongst which the Royal Family now passed

their days; of the decrees by which his own order were threatened or

assailed; of the self-expatriation, now continually swelling in amount,

as a measure of despair on the part of myriads, as well priests as

gentry--all this and worse he read in public; and still, as he read,

"His hand

Haunted his sword, like an uneasy spot

In his own body."

In short, as there never has been so strong a national convulsion

diffused so widely, with equal truth it may be asserted, that no

describer, so powerful, or idealizing so magnificently what he deals

with, has ever been a real living spectator of parallel scenes. The

French, indeed, it may be said, are far enough from being a people

profound in feeling. True; but, of all people, they most exhibit their

feeling on the surface; are the most _demonstrative_ (to use a modern

term), and most of all (except Italians) mark their feelings by outward

expression of gesticulation: not to insist upon the obvious truth--that

even a people of shallow feeling may be deeply moved by tempests which

uproot the forest of a thousand years' growth; by changes in the very

organization of society, such as throw all things, for a time, into one

vast anarchy; and by murderous passions, alternately the effect and

the cause of that same chaotic anarchy. Now, it was in this autumn of

1792, as I have already said, that Wordsworth parted finally from his

illustrious friend--for, all things considered, he may be justly so

entitled--the gallant Beaupuis. This great season of public trial had

searched men's natures; revealed their real hearts; brought into light

and action qualities oftentimes not suspected by their possessors;

and had thrown men, as in elementary states of society, each upon his

own native resources, unaided by the old conventional forces of rank

and birth. Beaupuis had shone to unusual advantage under this general

trial; he had discovered, even to the philosophic eye of Wordsworth,

a depth of benignity very unusual in a Frenchman; and not of local,

contracted benignity, but of large, illimitable, apostolic devotion to

the service of the poor and the oppressed--a fact the more remarkable

as he had all the pretensions in his own person of high birth and

high rank, and, so far as he had any personal interest embarked in

the struggle, should have allied himself with the aristocracy. But of

selfishness in any shape he had no vestiges; or, if he had, it showed

itself in a slight tinge of vanity; yet, no--it was not vanity, but a

radiant quickness of sympathy with the eye which expressed admiring

love--sole relic of the chivalrous devotion once dedicated to the

service of ladies. Now, again, he put on the garb of chivalry; it

was a chivalry the noblest in the world, which opened his ear to the

Pariah and the oppressed all over his misorganized country. A more

apostolic fervour of holy zealotry in this great cause had not been

seen since the days of Bartholomew las Casas, who showed the same

excess of feeling in another direction. This sublime dedication of his

being to a cause which, in his conception of it, extinguished all petty

considerations for himself, and made him thenceforwards a creature of

the national will--"a son of France," in a more eminent and loftier

sense than according to the heraldry of Europe--had extinguished even

his sensibility to the voice of worldly honour. "Injuries," says

Wordsworth--

"Injuries

Made him more gracious."

And so utterly had he submitted his own will or separate interests

to the transcendent voice of his country, which, in the main, he

believed to be now speaking authentically for the first time since the

foundations of Christendom, that, even against the motions of his own

heart, he adopted the hatreds of the young republic, growing cruel in

his purposes towards the ancient oppressor, out of very excess of love

for the oppressed; and, against the voice of his own order, as well as

in stern oblivion of many early friendships, he became the champion

of democracy in the struggle everywhere commencing with prejudice

or feudal privilege. Nay, he went so far upon the line of this new

crusade against the evils of the world that he even accepted, with a

conscientious defiance of his own quiet homage to the erring spirit of

loyalty embarked upon that cause, a commission in the Republican armies

preparing to move against La Vendée; and, finally, in that cause,

as commander-in-chief, he laid down his life. "He perished," says

Wordsworth--

"He perished fighting, in supreme command,

Upon the banks of the unhappy Loire."

Homewards fled all the English from a land which now was fast making

ready the shambles for its noblest citizens. Thither also came

Wordsworth; and there he spent his time for a year and more chiefly

in London, overwhelmed with shame and despondency for the disgrace

and scandal brought upon Liberty by the atrocities committed in that

holy name. Upon this subject he dwells with deep emotion in the poem

on his own life; and he records the awful triumph for retribution

accomplished which possessed him when crossing the sands of the great

Bay of Morecamb from Lancaster to Ulverstone, and hearing from a

horseman who passed him, in reply to the question--_Was there any

news?_--"Yes, that Robespierre had perished." Immediately a passion

seized him, a transport of almost epileptic fervour, prompting him, as

he stood alone upon this perilous[115] waste of sands, to shout aloud

anthems of thanksgiving for this great vindication of eternal justice.

Still, though justice was done upon one great traitor to the cause,

the cause itself was overcast with clouds too heavily to find support

and employment for the hopes of a poet who had believed in a golden

era ready to open upon the prospects of human nature. It gratified and

solaced his heart that the indignation of mankind should have wreaked

itself upon the chief monsters that had outraged their nature and

their hopes; but for the present he found it necessary to comfort his

disappointment by turning away from politics to studies less capable of

deceiving his expectations.

[114] How little has any adequate power as yet approached this

great theme! Not the Grecian stage, not "the dark sorrows of the

line of Thebes," in any of its scenes, unfold such tragical

grouping of circumstances and situations as may be gathered from

the memoirs of the time. The galleries and vast staircases of

Versailles, at early dawn, on some of the greatest days--filled

with dreadful faces--the figure of the Duke of Orleans obscurely

detected amongst them--the growing fury--the growing panic--the

blind tumult--and the dimness of the event,--all make up a scene

worthy to blend with our images of Babylon or of Nineveh with the

enemy in all her gates, Memphis or Jerusalem in their agonies.

But, amongst all the exponents of the growing agitation that

besieged the public mind, none is so profoundly impressive as the

scene (every Sunday renewed) at the Chapel Royal. Even in the most

penitential of the litanies, in the presence when most immediately

confessed of God himself--when the antiphonies are chanted, one

party singing, with fury and gnashing of teeth, _Salvum fac

Regem_, and another, with equal hatred and fervour, answering _Et

Reginam_ (the poor queen at this time engrossing the popular

hatred)--the organ roared into thunder--the semi-chorus swelled

into shouting--the menaces into defiance--again the crashing

semi-choir sang with shouts their _Salvum fac Regem_--again the

vengeful antiphony hurled back its _Et Reginam_--and one person,

an eye-witness of these scenes, which mounted in violence on each

successive Sunday, declares that oftentimes the semi-choral bodies

were at the point of fighting with each other in the presence of

the king.

[115] That tract of the lake country which stretches southwards

from Hawkshead and the lakes of Esthwaite, Windermere, and

Coniston, to the little town of Ulverstone (which may be regarded

as the metropolis of the little romantic English Calabria called

Furness), is divided from the main part of Lancashire by the

estuary of Morecamb. The sea retires with the ebb tide to a vast

distance, leaving the sands passable through a few hours for

horses and carriages. But, partly from the daily variation in

these hours, partly from the intricacy of the pathless track which

must be pursued, and partly from the galloping pace at which the

returning tide comes in, many fatal accidents are continually

occurring--sometimes to the too venturous traveller who has

slighted the aid of guides--sometimes to the guides themselves,

when baffled and perplexed by mists. Gray the poet mentions one of

the latter class as having then recently occurred, under affecting

circumstances. Local tradition records a long list of such cases.

From this period, therefore--that is, from the year 1794-95--we may

date the commencement of Wordsworth's entire self-dedication to poetry

as the study and main business of his life. Somewhere about this period

also (though, according to my remembrance of what Miss Wordsworth once

told me, I think one year or so later) his sister joined him; and they

began[116] to keep house together: once at Race Down, in Dorsetshire;

once at Clevedon, on the coast of Somersetshire; then amongst the

Quantock Hills, in the same county, or in that neighbourhood;

particularly at Alfoxton, a beautiful country-house, with a grove and

shrubbery attached, belonging to Mr. St. Aubyn, a minor, and let (I

believe) on the terms of keeping the house in repair. Whilst resident

at this last place it was, as I have generally understood, and in

the year 1797 or 1798, that Wordsworth first became acquainted with

Coleridge; though possibly in the year I am wrong; for it occurs to me

that, in a poem of Coleridge's dated in 1796, there is an allusion to a

young writer of the name of Wordsworth as one who had something austere

in his style, but otherwise was more original than any other poet of

the age; and it is probable that this knowledge of the poetry would

be subsequent to a personal knowledge of the author, considering the

little circulation which any poetry of a Wordsworthian stamp would be

likely to attain at that time.[117]

[116] I do not, on consideration, know when they might begin to

keep house together: but, by a passage in "The Prelude," they must

have made a tour together as early as 1787.

[117] In the Memoir of Coleridge prefaced to Messrs. Macmillan's

four-volume edition of his poetical works (1880) one reads:--"In

the summer of 1797 Coleridge and Wordsworth, if they did not

actually meet for the first time, first became familiarly

acquainted with each other at Racedown in Dorsetshire. Wordsworth

was then in his twenty-eighth and Coleridge in his twenty-fifth

year."--M.

It was at Alfoxton that Miss Mary Hutchinson visited her cousins the

Wordsworths, and there, or previously in the north of England, at

Stockton-upon-Tees and Darlington, that the attachment began between

Miss Mary Hutchinson and Wordsworth which terminated in their marriage

about the beginning of the present century. The marriage took place

in the north; somewhere, I believe, in Yorkshire; and, immediately

after the ceremony, Wordsworth brought his bride to Grasmere; in which

most lovely of English valleys he had previously obtained, upon a

lease of seven or eight years, the cottage in which I found him living

at my first visit to him in November 1807. I have heard that there

was a paragraph inserted on this occasion in the "Morning Post" or

"Courier"--and I have an indistinct remembrance of having once seen it

myself--which described this event of the poet's marriage in the most

ludicrous terms of silly pastoral sentimentality; the cottage being

described as "the abode of content and all the virtues," the vale

itself in the same puerile slang, and the whole event in the style of

allegorical trifling about the Muses, &c. The masculine and severe

taste of Wordsworth made him peculiarly open to annoyance from such

absurd trifling; and, unless his sense of the ludicrous overpowered

his graver feelings, he must have been much displeased with the

paragraph. But, after all, I have understood that the whole affair was

an unseasonable jest of Coleridge's or Lamb's.

To us who, in after years, were Wordsworth's friends, or, at least,

intimate acquaintances--viz., to Professor Wilson and myself--the most

interesting circumstance in this marriage, the one which perplexed us

exceedingly, was the very possibility that it should ever have been

brought to bear. For we could not conceive of Wordsworth as submitting

his faculties to the humilities and devotion of courtship. That

self-surrender--that prostration of mind by which a man is too happy

and proud to express the profundity of his service to the woman of his

heart--it seemed a mere impossibility that ever Wordsworth should be

brought to feel for a single instant; and what he did not sincerely

feel, assuredly he was not the person to profess. Wordsworth, I take

it upon myself to say, had not the feelings within him which make this

total devotion to a woman possible. There never lived a woman whom he

would not have lectured and admonished under circumstances that should

have seemed to require it; nor would he have conversed with her in

any mood whatever without wearing an air of mild condescension to her

understanding. To lie at her feet, to make her his idol, to worship her

very caprices, and to adore the most unreasonable of her frowns--these

things were impossible to Wordsworth; and, being so, never could he, in

any emphatic sense, have been a lover.

A lover, I repeat, in any passionate sense of the word, Wordsworth

could not have been. And, moreover, it is remarkable that a woman who

could dispense with that sort of homage in her suitor is not of a

nature to inspire such a passion. That same meekness which reconciles

her to the tone of superiority and freedom in the manner of her suitor,

and which may afterwards in a wife become a sweet domestic grace,

strips her of that too charming irritation, captivating at once and

tormenting, which lurks in feminine pride. If there be an enchantress's

spell yet surviving in this age of ours, it is the haughty grace

of maidenly pride--the womanly sense of dignity, even when most in

excess, and expressed in the language of scorn--which tortures a man

and lacerates his heart, at the same time that it pierces him with

admiration:--

"Oh, what a world of scorn looks beautiful

In the contempt and anger of her lip!"

And she who spares a man the agitations of this thraldom robs him no

less of its divinest transports. Wordsworth, however, who never could

have laid aside his own nature sufficiently to have played _his_ part

in such an impassioned courtship, by suiting himself to this high

sexual pride with the humility of a lover, quite as little could have

enjoyed the spectacle of such a pride, or have viewed it in any degree

as an attraction: it would to him have been a pure vexation. Looking

down even upon the lady of his heart, as upon the rest of the world,

from the eminence of his own intellectual superiority--viewing her, in

fact, as a child--he would be much more disposed to regard any airs of

feminine disdain she might assume as the impertinence of girlish levity

than as the caprice of womanly pride; and much I fear that, in any case

of dispute, he would have called even his mistress, "Child! child!" and

perhaps even (but this I do not say with the same certainty) might have

bid her hold her tongue.

If, however, no lover, in a proper sense,--though, from many exquisite

passages, one might conceive that at some time of his life he was, as

especially from the inimitable stanzas beginning--

"When she I loved was strong and gay,

And like a rose in June,"

or perhaps (but less powerfully so, because here the passion, though

profound, is less the _peculiar_ passion of love) from the impassioned

lamentation for "the pretty Barbara," beginning--

"'Tis said that some have died for love:

And here and there, amidst unhallow'd ground

In the cold north," &c.,--

yet, if no lover, or (which some of us have sometimes thought) a lover

disappointed at some earlier period, by the death of her he loved, or

by some other fatal event (for he always preserved a mysterious silence

on the subject of that "Lucy," repeatedly alluded to or apostrophized

in his poems); at all events he made what for him turned out a happy

marriage. Few people have lived on such terms of entire harmony and

affection as he lived with the woman of his final choice. Indeed, the

sweetness, almost unexampled, of temper, which shed so sunny a radiance

over Mrs. Wordsworth's manners, sustained by the happy life she led,

the purity of her conscience, and the uniformity of her good health,

made it impossible for anybody to have quarrelled with _her_; and

whatever fits of ill-temper Wordsworth might have--for, with all his

philosophy, he had such fits--met with no fuel to support them, except

in the more irritable temperament of his sister. She was all fire, and

an ardour which, like that of the first Lord Shaftesbury,

"O'er-informed its tenement of clay";

and, as this ardour looked out in every gleam of her wild eyes (those

"wild eyes" so finely noticed in the "Tintern Abbey"), as it spoke

in every word of her self-baffled utterance, as it gave a trembling

movement to her very person and demeanour--easily enough it might

happen that any apprehension of an unkind word should with her kindle

a dispute. It might have happened; and yet, to the great honour of

both, having such impassioned temperaments, rarely it did happen; and

this was the more remarkable, as I have been assured that both were,

in childhood, irritable or even ill-tempered, and they were constantly

together; for Miss Wordsworth was always ready to walk out--wet or dry,

storm or sunshine, night or day; whilst Mrs. Wordsworth was completely

dedicated to her maternal duties, and rarely left the house, unless

when the weather was tolerable, or, at least, only for short rambles. I

should not have noticed this trait in Wordsworth's occasional manners,

had it been gathered from domestic or confidential opportunities.

But, on the contrary, the first two occasions on which, after months'

domestic intercourse with Wordsworth, I became aware of his possible

ill-humour and peevishness, were so public, that others, and those

strangers, must have been equally made parties to the scene. This scene

occurred in Kendal.

* * * * *

Having brought down the history of Wordsworth to the time of his

marriage, I am reminded by that event to mention the singular good

fortune, in all points of worldly prosperity, which has accompanied him

through life. His marriage--the capital event of life--was fortunate,

and inaugurated a long succession of other prosperities. He has himself

described, in his "Leech-Gatherer,"[118] the fears that at one time, or

at least in some occasional moments of his life, haunted him, lest at

some period or other he might be reserved for poverty. "Cold, pain, and

hunger, and all fleshly ills," occurred to his boding apprehension, and

"mighty poets in their misery dead."

[118] Now entitled _Resolution and Independence_.--M.

"He thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy,

The sleepless soul that perished in its pride;

Of him who walked in glory and in joy

Following his plough along the mountain-side."

And, at starting on his career of life, certainly no man had plainer

reasons for anticipating the worst evils that have ever persecuted

poets, excepting only two reasons which might warrant him in hoping

better; and these two were--his great prudence, and the temperance of

his daily life. He could not be betrayed into foolish engagements; he

could not be betrayed into expensive habits. Profusion and extravagance

had no hold over him, by any one passion or taste. He was not luxurious

in anything; was not vain or even careful of external appearances

(not, at least, since he had left Cambridge, and visited a mighty

nation in civil convulsions); was not even in the article of books

expensive. Very few books sufficed him; he was careless habitually of

all the current literature, or indeed of any literature that could not

be considered as enshrining the very ideal, capital, and elementary

grandeur of the human intellect. In this extreme limitation of his

literary sensibilities he was as much assisted by that accident of

his own intellectual condition--viz. extreme, intense, unparalleled

_onesidedness_ (_einseitigkeit_)--as by any peculiar sanity of feeling.

Thousands of books that have given rapturous delight to millions of

ingenuous minds for Wordsworth were absolutely a dead letter--closed

and sealed up from his sensibilities and his powers of appreciation,

not less than colours from a blind man's eye. Even the few books which

his peculiar mind had made indispensable to him were not in such a

sense indispensable as they would have been to a man of more sedentary

habits. He lived in the open air, and the enormity of pleasure which

both he and his sister drew from the common appearances of nature and

their everlasting variety--variety so infinite that, if no one leaf of

a tree or shrub ever exactly resembled another in all its filaments and

their arrangement, still less did any one day ever repeat another in

all its pleasurable elements. This pleasure was to him in the stead of

many libraries:--

"One impulse, from a vernal wood,

Could teach him more of Man,

Of moral evil and of good,

Than all the sages can."

And he, we may be sure, who could draw,

"Even from the meanest flower that blows,

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,"--

to whom the mere daisy, the pansy, the primrose, could furnish

pleasures--not the puerile ones which his most puerile and worldly

insulters imagined, but pleasures drawn from depths of reverie and

meditative tenderness far beyond all power of _their_ hearts to

conceive: that man would hardly need any large variety of books. In

fact, there were only two provinces of literature in which Wordsworth

could be looked upon as decently well read--Poetry and Ancient History.

Nor do I believe that he would much have lamented, on his own account,

if all books had perished, excepting the entire body of English Poetry,

and, perhaps, "Plutarch's Lives."[119]

[119] I do not mean to insinuate that Wordsworth was at all in the

dark about the inaccuracy and want of authentic weight attaching

to Plutarch as a historian; but his business with Plutarch was not

for purposes of research: he was satisfied with his fine moral

effects.

With these simple or rather austere tastes, Wordsworth (it might seem)

had little reason to fear poverty, supposing him in possession of any

moderate income; but meantime he had none. About the time when he left

college, I have good grounds for believing that his whole regular

income was precisely = 0. Some fragments must have survived from the

funds devoted to his education; and with these, no doubt, he supported

the expenses of his Continental tours, and his year's residence in

France. But, at length, "cold, pain, and hunger, and all fleshly ills,"

must have stared him in the face pretty earnestly. And hope of longer

evading an unpleasant destiny of daily toil, in some form or other,

there seemed absolutely none. "For," as he himself expostulates with

himself--

"For how can _he_ expect that others should

Sow for him, build for _him_, and, at his call,

Love him, who for himself will take no thought at all?"

In this dilemma, he had all but resolved, as Miss Wordsworth once told

me, to take pupils; and perhaps _that_, though odious enough, was the

sole resource he had; for Wordsworth never acquired any popular talent

of writing for the current press; and, at that period of his life, he

was gloomily unfitted for bending to such a yoke. In this crisis of

his fate it was that Wordsworth, for once, and once only, became a

martyr to some nervous affection. _That_ raised pity; but I could not

forbear smiling at the remedy, or palliation, which his few friends

adopted. Every night they played at cards with him, as the best mode

of beguiling his sense of distress, whatever that might be: _cards_,

which, in any part of the thirty-and-one years since I have known

Wordsworth, could have had as little power to interest him, or to

cheat him of sorrow, as marbles or a top. However, so it was; for my

information could not be questioned: it came from Miss Wordsworth.

The crisis, as I have said, had arrived for determining the future

colour of his life. Memorable it is, that exactly in those critical

moments when some decisive step had first become necessary, there

happened the first instance of Wordsworth's good luck; and equally

memorable that, at measured intervals throughout the long sequel of his

life since then, a regular succession of similar but superior windfalls

have fallen in, to sustain his expenditure, in exact concurrence with

the growing claims upon his purse. A more fortunate man, I believe,

does not exist than Wordsworth. The aid which now dropped from heaven,

as it were, to enable him to range at will in paths of his own

choosing, and

"Finally array

His temples with the Muses diadem,"

came in the shape of a bequest from Raisley Calvert, a young man of

good family in Cumberland, who died about this time of pulmonary

consumption. A very remarkable young man he must have been, this

Raisley Calvert, to have discerned, at this early period, that future

superiority in Wordsworth which so few people suspected. He was the

brother of a Cumberland gentleman, whom slightly I know; a generous

man, doubtless; for he made no sort of objections (though legally, I

have heard, he might) to his brother's farewell memorial of regard;

a good man to all his dependants, as I have generally understood, in

the neighbourhood of Windy Brow, his mansion, near Keswick; and, as

Southey always said (who must know better than I could do), a man of

strong natural endowments; else, as his talk was of oxen, I might have

made the mistake of supposing him to be, in heart and soul, what he

was in profession--a mere farming country gentleman, whose ambition

was chiefly directed to the turning up of mighty turnips. The sum

left by Raisley Calvert was £900; and it was laid out in an annuity.

This was the basis of Wordsworth's prosperity in life; and upon this

he has built up, by a series of accessions, in which each step, taken

separately for itself, seems perfectly natural, whilst the total result

has undoubtedly something wonderful about it, the present goodly

edifice of his fortunes. Next in the series came the present Lord

Lonsdale's repayment of his predecessor's debt. Upon that, probably, it

was that Wordsworth felt himself entitled to marry. Then, I believe,

came some fortune with Miss Hutchinson; then--that is, fourthly--some

worthy uncle of the same lady was pleased to betake himself to a better

world, leaving to various nieces, and especially to Mrs. Wordsworth,

something or other--I forget what, but it was expressed by thousands

of pounds. At this moment, Wordsworth's family had begun to increase;

and the worthy old uncle, like everybody else in Wordsworth's case,

finding his property very clearly "wanted," and, as people would tell

him, "bespoke," felt how very indelicate it would look for him to

stay any longer in this world; and so off he moved. But Wordsworth's

family, and the wants of that family, still continued to increase;

and the next person--viz., the fifth--who stood in the way, and must,

therefore, have considered himself rapidly growing into a nuisance,

was the stamp-distributor for the county of Westmoreland. About March

1814, I think it was, that his very comfortable situation was wanted.

Probably it took a month for the news to reach him; because in April,

and not before, feeling that he had received a proper notice to quit,

he, good man (this stamp-distributor), like all the rest, distributed

himself and his office into two different places--the latter falling,

of course, into the hands of Wordsworth.

This office, which it was Wordsworth's pleasure to speak of as

"a little one," yielded, I believe, somewhere about £500 a year.

Gradually, even _that_, with all former sources of income, became

insufficient; which ought not to surprise anybody; for a son at Oxford,

as a gentleman commoner, would spend, at the least, £300 per annum; and

there were other children. Still, it is wrong to say that it _had_

become insufficient; as usual, it had not come to that; but, on the

first symptoms arising that it soon _would_ come to that, somebody, of

course, had notice to consider himself a sort of nuisance-elect;--in

this case, it was the distributor of stamps for the county of

Cumberland. His district was absurdly large; and what so reasonable as

that he should submit to a Polish partition of his profits--no, not

Polish; for, on reflection, such a partition neither was nor could be

attempted with regard to an actual incumbent. But then, since people

had such consideration for him as not to remodel the office so long

as he lived, on the other hand, the least he could do for "people"

in return--so as to show his sense of this consideration--was not

to trespass on so much goodness longer than necessary. Accordingly,

here, as in all cases before, the _Deus ex machinâ_ who invariably

interfered when any _nodus_ arose in Wordsworth's affairs, such as

could be considered _vindice dignus_, caused the distributor to

begone into a region where no stamps are wanted, about the very

month, or so, when an additional £400 per annum became desirable.

This, or perhaps more, was understood to have been added, by the new

arrangement, to the Westmoreland distributorship; the small towns of

Keswick and Cockermouth, together with the important one of Whitehaven,

being severed, under this remodelling, from their old dependency on

Cumberland (to which geographically they belonged), and transferred

to the small territory of rocky Westmoreland, the sum total of whose

inhabitants was at that time not much above 50,000; of which number,

one-third, or nearly so, was collected into the only important town

of Kendal; but, of the other two-thirds, a larger proportion was a

simple agricultural or pastoral population than anywhere else in

England. In Westmoreland, therefore, it may be supposed that the stamp

demand could not have been so great, not perhaps by three-quarters,

as in Cumberland; which, besides having a population at least three

times as large, had more and larger towns. The result of this new

distribution was something that approached to an equalization of the

districts--giving to each, as was said, in round terms, a thousand a

year.

Thus I have traced Wordsworth's ascent through its several steps and

stages, to what, for his moderate desires and habits so philosophic,

may be fairly considered opulence. And it must rejoice every man who

joins in the public homage _now_ rendered to his powers (and what man

is to be found that, more or less, does not?) to hear, with respect

to one so lavishly endowed by nature, that he has not been neglected

by fortune; that he has never had the finer edge of his sensibilities

dulled by the sad anxieties, the degrading fears, the miserable

dependencies of debt; that he has been blessed with competency even

when poorest; has had hope and cheerful prospects in reversion through

every stage of his life; that at all times he has been liberated from

_reasonable_ anxieties about the final interests of his children;

that at all times he has been blessed with leisure, the very amplest

that ever man enjoyed, for intellectual pursuits the most delightful;

yes, that, even as regards those delicate and coy pursuits, he has

possessed, in combination, all the conditions for their most perfect

culture--the leisure, the ease, the solitude, the society, the

domestic peace, the local scenery--Paradise for his eye, in Miltonic

beauty, lying outside his windows, Paradise for his heart, in the

perpetual happiness of his own fireside; and, finally, when increasing

years might be supposed to demand something more of modern luxuries,

and expanding intercourse with society something more of refined

elegancies, that his means, still keeping pace in almost arithmetical

ratio with his wants, had shed the graces of art upon the failing

powers of nature, had stripped infirmity of discomfort, and (so far as

the necessities of things will allow) had placed the final stages of

life, by means of many compensations, by universal praise, by plaudits

reverberated from senates, benedictions wherever his poems have

penetrated, honour, troops of friends--in short, by all that miraculous

prosperity can do to evade the primal decrees of nature, had placed the

final stages upon a level with the first.

But now, reverting to the subject of Wordsworth's prosperity, I

have numbered up six separate stages of good luck--six instances of

pecuniary showers emptying themselves into his very bosom, at the very

moments when they _began_ to be needed, on the first symptoms that

they might be wanted--accesses of fortune stationed upon his road like

repeating frigates, connecting, to all appearance, some preconcerted

line of operations, and, amidst the tumults of chance, wearing as much

the air of purpose and design as if they supported a human plan. I

have come down to the sixth case. Whether there were any seventh, I

do not know: but confident I feel that, had a seventh been required

by circumstances, a seventh would have happened. So true it is that

still, as Wordsworth needed a place or a fortune, the holder of that

place or fortune was immediately served with a summons to surrender it:

so certainly was this impressed upon my belief, as one of the blind

necessities making up the prosperity and fixed destiny of Wordsworth,

that, for myself, had I happened to know of any peculiar adaptation

in an estate or office of mine to an existing need of Wordsworth's,

forthwith, and with the speed of a man running for his life, I would

have laid it down at his feet. "Take it," I should have said; "take it,

or in three weeks I shall be a dead man."

Well, let me pause: I think the reader is likely by this time to have

a slight notion of _my_ notion of Wordsworth's inevitable prosperity,

and the sort of _lien_ that he had upon the incomes of other men who

happened to stand in his way. The same prosperity attended the other

branches of the family, with the single exception of John, the brother

who perished in the _Abergavenny_: and even he was prosperous up to

the moment of his fatal accident. As to Miss Wordsworth, who will, by

some people, be classed amongst the non-prosperous, I rank her amongst

the most fortunate of women; or, at least, if regard be had to that

period of life which is most capable of happiness. Her fortune, after

its repayment by Lord Lonsdale, was, much of it, confided, with a

sisterly affection, to the use of her brother John; and part of it,

I have heard, perished in his ship. How much, I never felt myself

entitled to ask; but certainly a part was on that occasion understood

to have been lost irretrievably. Either it was that only a partial

insurance had been effected; or else the nature of the accident, being

in home waters (off the coast of Dorsetshire), might, by the nature of

the contract, have taken the case out of the benefit of the policy.

This loss, however, had it even been total, for a single sister

amongst a family of flourishing brothers, could not be of any lasting

importance. A much larger number of voices would proclaim her to have

been unfortunate in life because she made no marriage connexion; and

certainly, the insipid as well as unfeeling ridicule which descends so

plentifully upon those women who, perhaps from strength of character,

have refused to make such a connexion where it promised little of

elevated happiness, _does_ make the state of singleness somewhat of a

trial to the patience of many; and to many the vexation of this trial

has proved a snare for beguiling them of their honourable resolutions.

Meantime, as the opportunities are rare in which all the conditions

concur for happy marriage connexions, how important it is that the

dignity of high-minded women should be upheld by society in the

honourable election they make of a self-dependent virgin seclusion,

by preference to a heartless marriage! Such women, as Mrs. Trollope

justly remarks, fill a place in society which in their default would

_not_ be filled, and are available for duties requiring a tenderness

and a punctuality that could not be looked for from women preoccupied

with household or maternal claims. If there were no regular fund (so to

speak) of women free from conjugal and maternal duties, upon what body

could we draw for our "sisters of mercy," &c.? In another point Mrs.

Trollope is probably right: few women live unmarried from necessity.

Miss Wordsworth had several offers; amongst them, to my knowledge, one

from Hazlitt; all of them she rejected decisively. And she did right. A

happier life, by far, was hers in youth, coming as near as difference

of scenery and difference of relations would permit to that which was

promised to Ruth--the Ruth of her brother's creation[120]--by the

youth who came from Georgia's shore; for, though not upon American

savannah, or Canadian lakes,

"With all their fairy crowds

Of islands, that together lie

As quietly as spots of sky

Amongst the evening clouds,"

yet, amongst the loveliest scenes of sylvan England, and (at intervals)

of sylvan Germany--amongst lakes, too, far better fitted to give the

_sense_ of their own character than the vast inland _seas_ of America,

and amongst mountains more romantic than many of the chief ranges in

that country--her time fleeted away like some golden age, or like the

life of primeval man; and she, like Ruth, was for years allowed

"To run, though _not_ a bride,

A sylvan huntress, by the side"

of him to whom she, like Ruth, had dedicated her days, and to whose

children, afterwards, she dedicated a love like that of mothers. Dear

Miss Wordsworth! How noble a creature did she seem when I first knew

her!--and when, on the very first night which I passed in her brother's

company, he read to me, in illustration of something he was saying, a

passage from Fairfax's "Tasso," ending pretty nearly with these words,

"Amidst the broad fields and the endless wood,

The lofty lady kept her maidenhood,"

I thought that, possibly, he had his sister in his thoughts. Yet

"lofty" was hardly the right word. Miss Wordsworth was too ardent

and fiery a creature to maintain the reserve essential to dignity;

and dignity was the last thing one thought of in the presence of one

so natural, so fervent in her feelings, and so embarrassed in their

utterance--sometimes, also, in the attempt to check them. It must

not, however, be supposed that there was any silliness or weakness of

enthusiasm about her. She was under the continual restraint of severe

good sense, though liberated from that false shame which, in so many

persons, accompanies all expressions of natural emotion; and she had

too long enjoyed the ennobling conversation of her brother, and his

admirable comments on the poets, which they read in common, to fail

in any essential point of logic or propriety of thought. Accordingly,

her letters, though the most careless and un-elaborate--nay, the

most hurried that can be imagined--are models of good sense and just

feeling. In short, beyond any person I have known in this world, Miss

Wordsworth was the creature of impulse; but, as a woman most thoroughly

virtuous and well-principled, as one who could not fail to be kept

right by her own excellent heart, and as an intellectual creature from

her cradle, with much of her illustrious brother's peculiarity of

mind--finally, as one who had been, in effect, educated and trained

by that very brother--she won the sympathy and the respectful regard

of every man worthy to approach her. Properly, and in a spirit of

prophecy, was she named _Dorothy_; in its Greek meaning,[121] _gift of

God_, well did this name prefigure the relation in which she stood to

Wordsworth, the mission with which she was charged--to wait upon him as

the tenderest and most faithful of domestics; to love him as a sister;

to sympathize with him as a confidante; to counsel him; to cheer him

and sustain him by the natural expression of her feelings--so quick, so

ardent, so unaffected--upon the probable effect of whatever thoughts or

images he might conceive; finally, and above all other ministrations,

to ingraft, by her sexual sense of beauty, upon his masculine austerity

that delicacy and those graces which else (according to the grateful

acknowledgments of his own maturest retrospect) it never could have

had:--

"The blessing of my later years

with me when I was a boy:

She gave me hopes, she gave me fears,

A heart the fountain of sweet tears,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

And love, and thought, and joy."

And elsewhere he describes her, in a philosophic poem, still in

MS.,[122] as one who planted flowers and blossoms with her feminine

hand upon what might else have been an arid rock--massy, indeed, and

grand, but repulsive from the severity of its features. I may sum up

in one brief abstract the amount of Miss Wordsworth's character, as

a companion, by saying, that she was the very wildest (in the sense

of the most natural) person I have ever known; and also the truest,

most inevitable, and at the same time the quickest and readiest in her

sympathy with either joy or sorrow, with laughter or with tears, with

the realities of life or the larger realities of the poets!

[120] "_The Ruth of her brother's creation_":--So I express it;

because so much in the development of the story and situations

necessarily belongs to the poet. Else, for the mere outline of the

story, it was founded upon fact. Wordsworth himself told me, in

general terms, that the case which suggested the poem was that of

an American lady, whose husband forsook her at the very place of

embarkation from England, under circumstances and under

expectations, upon her part, very much the same as those of Ruth.

I am afraid, however, that the husband was an attorney; which is

intolerable; _nisi prius_ cannot be harmonized with the dream-like

fairyland of Georgia.

[121] Of course, therefore, it is essentially the same name as

_Theodora_, the same elements being only differently arranged. Yet

how opposite is the impression upon the mind! and chiefly, I

suppose, from the too prominent emblazonment of this name in the

person of Justinian's scandalous wife; though, for my own part, I

am far from believing all the infamous stories which we read about

her.

[122] In the concluding Book of the _Prelude_.--M.

Meantime, amidst all this fascinating furniture of her mind, won from

nature, from solitude, from enlightened companionship, Miss Wordsworth

was as thoroughly deficient (some would say painfully deficient--I say

charmingly deficient) in ordinary female accomplishments as "Cousin

Mary" in dear Miss Mitford's delightful sketch. Of French, she might

have barely enough to read a plain modern page of narrative; Italian,

I question whether any; German, just enough to insult the German

literati, by showing how little she had found them or their writings

necessary to her heart. The "Luise" of Voss, the "Hermann und Dorothea"

of Goethe she had begun to translate, as young ladies do "Télémaque";

but, like them, had chiefly cultivated the first two pages[123]; with

the third she had a slender acquaintance, and with the fourth she

meditated an intimacy at some future day. Music, in her solitary and

out-of-doors life, she could have little reason for cultivating; nor

is it possible that any woman can draw the enormous energy requisite

for this attainment, upon a _modern_ scale of perfection, out of

any other principle than that of vanity (at least of great value for

social applause) or else of deep musical sensibility; neither of which

belonged to Miss Wordsworth's constitution of mind. But, as everybody

agrees in our days to think this accomplishment of no value whatever,

and, in fact, _unproduceable_, unless existing in an exquisite state

of culture, no complaint could be made on that score, nor any surprise

felt. But the case in which the irregularity of Miss Wordsworth's

education _did_ astonish one was in that part which respected her

literary knowledge. In whatever she read, or neglected to read, she had

obeyed the single impulse of her own heart; where that led her, _there_

she followed: where that was mute or indifferent, not a thought had

she to bestow upon a writer's high reputation, or the call for some

acquaintance with his works to meet the demands of society. And thus

the strange anomaly arose, of a woman deeply acquainted with some great

authors, whose works lie pretty much out of the fashionable beat; able,

moreover, in her own person, to produce brilliant effects; able on some

subjects to write delightfully, and with the impress of originality

upon all she uttered; and yet ignorant of great classical works in her

own mother tongue, and careless of literary history in a degree which

at once exiled her from the rank and privileges of _bluestockingism_.

[123] Viz., "Calypso ne savoit se consoler du départ," &c. For how

long a period (viz., nearly two centuries) has Calypso been

inconsolable in the morning studies of young ladies! As Fénélon's

most dreary romance always opened at one or other of these three

earliest and dreary pages, naturally to my sympathetic fancy the

poor unhappy goddess seemed to be eternally aground on this

Goodwin Sand of inconsolability. It is amongst the standing

hypocrisies of the world, that most people affect a reverence for

this book, which nobody reads.

The reader may, perhaps, have objected silently to the illustration

drawn from Miss Mitford, that "Cousin Mary" does not effect her

fascinations out of pure negations. Such negations, from the mere

startling effect of their oddity in this present age, might fall

in with the general current of her attractions; but Cousin Mary's

undoubtedly lay in the _positive_ witcheries of a manner and a

character transcending, by force of irresistible nature (as in a

similar case recorded by Wordsworth in "The Excursion") all the pomp

of nature and art united as seen in ordinary creatures. Now, in

Miss Wordsworth, there were certainly no "Cousin Mary" fascinations

of manner and deportment, that snatch a grace beyond the reach

of art: _there_ she was, indeed, painfully deficient; for hurry

mars and defeats even the most ordinary expression of the feminine

character--viz. its gentleness: abruptness and trepidation leave often

a joint impression of what seems for an instant both rudeness and

ungracefulness: and the least painful impression was that of unsexual

awkwardness. But the point in which Miss Wordsworth made the most ample

amends for all that she wanted of more customary accomplishments, was

this very originality and native freshness of intellect, which settled

with so bewitching an effect upon some of her writings, and upon

many a sudden remark or ejaculation, extorted by something or other

that struck her eye, in the clouds, or in colouring, or in accidents

of light and shade, of form or combination of form. To talk of her

"writings" is too pompous an expression, or at least far beyond any

pretensions that she ever made for herself. Of poetry she has written

little indeed; and that little not, in my opinion, of much merit.

The verses published by her brother, and beginning, "Which way does

the wind come?", meant only as nursery lines, are certainly wild and

pretty; but the other specimen is likely to strike most readers as

feeble and trivial in the sentiment. Meantime, the book which is in

very deed a monument to her power of catching and expressing all the

hidden beauties of natural scenery, with a felicity of diction, a

truth and strength, that far transcend Gilpin, or professional writers

on those subjects, is her record of a _first_ tour in Scotland, made

about the year 1802. This MS. book (unless my recollection of it,

from a period now gone by for thirty years, has deceived me greatly)

is absolutely unique in its class; and, though it never could be very

popular, from the minuteness of its details, intelligible only to the

eye, and the luxuriation of its descriptions, yet I believe no person

has ever been favoured with a sight of it that has not yearned for

its publication. Its own extraordinary merit, apart from the interest

which _now_ invests the name of Wordsworth, could not fail to procure

purchasers for one edition on its first appearance.[124]

[124] It was published in full in 1874, with the title

_Recollections of a Tour made in Scotland, A.D. 1803, by Dorothy

Wordsworth_. _Edited by J. C. Shairp, LL.D._--M.

Coleridge was of the party at first; but afterwards, under some

attack of rheumatism, found or thought it necessary to leave them.

Melancholy it would be at this time, thirty-six years and more from

the era of that tour, to read it under the afflicting remembrances

of all which has been suffered in the interval by two at least out

of the three who composed the travelling party; for I fear that Miss

Wordsworth has suffered not much less than Coleridge, and, in any

general expression of it, from the same cause, viz. an excess of

pleasurable excitement and luxurious sensibility, sustained in youth

by a constitutional glow from animal causes, but drooping as soon as

that was withdrawn. It is painful to point a moral from any story

connected with those whom one loves or has loved; painful to look for

one moment towards any "improvement" of such a case, especially where

there is no reason to tax the parties with any criminal contribution

to their own sufferings, except through that relaxation of the will

and its potential energies through which most of us, at some time or

other--I myself too deeply and sorrowfully--stand accountable to our

own consciences. Not, therefore, with any intention of speaking in a

monitorial or censorial character, do I here notice a defect in Miss

Wordsworth's self-education of something that might have mitigated the

sort of suffering which, more or less, ever since the period of her

too genial, too radiant youth, I suppose her to have struggled with.

I have mentioned the narrow basis on which her literary interests had

been made to rest--the exclusive character of her reading, and the

utter want of pretension, and of all that looks like _bluestockingism_,

in the style of her habitual conversation and mode of dealing with

literature. Now, to me it appears, upon reflection, that it would

have been far better had Miss Wordsworth condescended a little to the

ordinary mode of pursuing literature; better for her own happiness

if she _had_ been a bluestocking; or, at least, if she had been, in

good earnest, a writer for the press, with the pleasant cares and

solicitudes of one who has some little ventures, as it were, on that

vast ocean.

We all know with how womanly and serene a temper literature has

been pursued by Joanna Baillie, by Miss Mitford, and other women

of admirable genius--with how absolutely no sacrifice or loss of

feminine dignity they have cultivated the profession of authorship;

and, if we could hear their report, I have no doubt that the little

cares of correcting proofs, and the forward-looking solicitudes

connected with the mere business arrangements of new publications,

would be numbered amongst the minor pleasures of life; whilst the

more elevated cares connected with the intellectual business of such

projects must inevitably have done much to solace the troubles which,

as human beings, they cannot but have experienced, and even to scatter

flowers upon their path. Mrs. Johnstone of Edinburgh has pursued the

profession of literature--the noblest of professions, and the only

one open to both sexes alike--with even more assiduity, and as a

_daily_ occupation; and, I have every reason to believe, with as much

benefit to her own happiness as to the instruction and amusement of

her readers; for the petty cares of authorship are agreeable, and its

serious cares are ennobling.[125] More especially is such an occupation

useful to a woman without children, and without any _prospective_

resources--resources in objects that involve hopes growing and

unfulfilled. It is too much to expect of any woman (or man either) that

her mind should support itself in a pleasurable activity, under the

drooping energies of life, by resting on the past or on the present;

some interest in reversion, some subject of hope from day to day, must

be called in to reinforce the animal fountains of good spirits. Had

that been opened for Miss Wordsworth, I am satisfied that she would

have passed a more cheerful middle-age, and would not, at any period,

have yielded to that nervous depression (or is it, perhaps, nervous

irritation?) which, I grieve to hear, has clouded her latter days.

Nephews and nieces, whilst young and innocent, are as good almost as

sons and daughters to a fervid and loving heart that has carried them

in her arms from the hour they were born. But, after a nephew has grown

into a huge hulk of a man, six feet high, and as stout as a bullock;

after he has come to have children of his own, lives at a distance,

and finds occasion to talk much of oxen and turnips--no offence to

him!--he ceases to be an object of any very profound sentiment.

There is nothing in such a subject to rouse the flagging pulses of

the heart, and to sustain a fervid spirit, to whom, at the very best,

human life offers little of an adequate or sufficing interest, unless

when idealized by the magic of the mighty poets. Farewell, Miss

Wordsworth! farewell, impassioned Dorothy! I have not seen you for many

a day--shall, too probably, never see you again; but shall attend your

steps with tender interest so long as I hear of you living: so will

Professor Wilson; and, from two hearts at least, that knew and admired

you in your fervid prime, it may sometimes cheer the gloom of your

depression to be assured of never-failing remembrance, full of love and

respectful pity.[126]

[125] Mrs. Johnstone (1781-1857) was the authoress of several

novels, a contributor to various periodicals, and editor of

_Tait's Magazine_ through a portion at least of De Quincey's

connexion with it.--M.

[126] In the recast by De Quincey, for the collective edition of

his writings in 1853, of his _Tait_ articles on Wordsworth in

1839, there were some omissions of matter that had appeared in the

magazine. One was this concluding paragraph in the article for

April 1839:--"I have traced the history of each [_i.e._ of William

and Dorothy Wordsworth] until the time when I became personally

acquainted with them; and, henceforwards, anything which it may be

interesting to know with respect to either will naturally come

forward, not in a separate narrative, but in connexion with my own

life; for in the following year I became myself the tenant of that

pretty cottage in which I found them; and from that time, for many

years, my life flowed on in daily union with theirs."--M.