LIFE AT GRASMERE. CAPTAIN WORDSWORTH.
A visit paid by Coleridge to Grasmere, shortly after the Scottish tour,
is thus alluded to in a letter written by him to his friend, Mr. Thomas
Wedgewood, in January, 1804. He says:--"I left my home December 20th,
1803, intending to stay a day and a half at Grasmere and then walk to
Kendal, whither I had sent all my clothes and viatica, from thence to go
to London, and to see whether or no I could arrange my pecuniary
matters, so as, leaving Mrs. Coleridge all that was necessary to her
comforts, to go myself to Madeira, having a persuasion strong as the
life within me, that one winter spent in a really warm, genial climate,
would completely restore me.... I stayed at Grasmere (Mr. Wordsworth's)
a month; three-fourths of the time bedridden; and deeply do I feel the
enthusiastic kindness of Wordsworth's wife and sister, who sat up by me,
the one or the other, in order to awaken me at the first symptoms of
distressful feeling; and even when they went to rest continued often and
often to weep and watch for me even in their dreams."
The death of her brother, Captain John Wordsworth, in the early part of
1805, was a great sorrow to Miss Wordsworth, as well as to the other
members of the family. Captain Wordsworth was a younger brother of the
poet, and a great favourite with him and his sister. In consequence of
their early orphaned condition, and subsequent separation, they had not
enjoyed much of each other's society until the time of Wordsworth's
residence at Grasmere. Previously to this, and since the two brothers
had been at school together at Hawkshead, they had only occasionally
seen each other.
After the settlement of Wordsworth and his sister at Grasmere, this
brother, who was in the service of the East India Company, had paid them
a prolonged visit, extending over eight months. The fraternal ties were
then renewed and strengthened, cemented as they became by mature
sympathies. A kinship of thought and feeling, added to warm natural
affections, bound together these three poetic souls in mutual love more
than usually devoted. Captain Wordsworth recognised his brother's genius
and greatness of soul, and felt assured that the time would arrive when
they would be widely acknowledged. Writing of him to Miss Wordsworth,
Coleridge says:--"Your brother John is one of you--a man who hath
solitary usings of his own intellect, deep in feeling, with a subtle
tact, and swift instinct of true beauty." Himself so thoroughly in
harmony with his brother's pursuits, and an ardent lover of the
beautiful in Nature, as well as in life, he became, as Wordsworth says,
"a silent poet," and was known among those of his own craft as "The
Philosopher." Captain Wordsworth had so identified himself in heart with
his brother's pursuits, and had become so enamoured of the life led by
him and their sister in this quiet and beautiful vale, "far from the
madding crowd's ignoble strife," that he had formed the idea, if
prospered during a few voyages, of settling at Grasmere, and adding his
worldly store to theirs, in the hope of thus enabling Wordsworth to
devote his attention to his muse, unfettered by anxious thoughts of a
monetary character. With this loving object before him, he had made a
voyage in the year 1801 without success. Again, in the spring of 1803,
he sailed with the same hope in his heart, but only on this occasion
also to return, without having in any degree been able to further its
realisation.
In the meantime, money which had been long withheld from the Wordsworths
by the former Earl of Lonsdale, had been honourably paid by his
successor. Although the main object which Captain Wordsworth had in view
in his former expeditions thus no longer existed, he decided once more
to brave the fortunes of the deep. Being, in the year 1804, appointed to
the command of the East Indiaman, _Abergavenny_, bound for the East, he
sailed from Portsmouth, in the early part of 1805, upon a voyage on
which many hopes were built. We are informed that on this occasion the
value of the cargo (including specie) was £270,000, and that there were
on board 402 persons. Not only did Captain Wordsworth take with him the
share which had come to him of the money paid by the Earl of Lonsdale,
but also £1,200 belonging to his brother William and his sister. The
bright hopes were, however, doomed to end in the saddest of disaster.
Owing to the incompetence of a pilot, the ship struck off the Bill of
Portland on the 5th February, 1805. Captain Wordsworth died, as he had
lived, cheerfully doing his duty. Though he might have saved his own
life, he bravely remained at his post to the last, and perished with
most of the crew.
Writing of the sad occurrence to Sir George Beaumont shortly after,
Wordsworth says:--"My poor sister and my wife, who loved him almost as
we did (for he was one of the most amiable of men) are in miserable
affliction, which I do all in my power to alleviate; but, Heaven knows,
I want consolation myself. I can say nothing higher of my ever-dear
brother than that he was worthy of his sister, who is now weeping beside
me, and of the friendship of Coleridge; meek, affectionate, silently
enthusiastic, loving all quiet things, and a poet in everything but
words." In a postscript he adds:--"I shall do all in my power to sustain
my sister under her sorrow, which is, and long will be, bitter and
poignant. We did not love him as a brother merely, but as a man of
original mind, and an honour to all about him. Oh! dear friend, forgive
me for talking thus. We have had no tidings from Coleridge. I tremble
for the moment when he is to hear of my brother's death; it will
distress him to the heart,--and his poor body cannot bear sorrow. He
loved my brother, and he knows how we at Grasmere loved him."
The friendship between the Wordsworths and Charles and Mary Lamb, formed
during the Nether Stowey period, had continued, and they had been
regular correspondents. Shortly after the sad death of her brother Miss
Wordsworth had, in the fulness of her heart, written to Miss Lamb.
Although the response to the communication is well known it should find
a place here. Miss Lamb's reply shows how well qualified she was to
sympathise in her friend's sufferings. She had, indeed, been taught in
the same school. She says:--"I thank you, my kind friend, for your most
comfortable letter; till I saw your own handwriting I could not persuade
myself that I should do well to write to you, though I have often
attempted it; but I always left off dissatisfied with what I had
written, and feeling that I was doing an improper thing to intrude upon
your sorrow. I wished to tell you that you would one day feel the kind
of peaceful state of mind, and sweet memory of the dead, which you so
happily describe as now almost begun; but I felt that it was improper
and most grating to the feelings of the afflicted to say to them that
the memory of their affliction would in time become a constant part, not
only of their dream, but of their most wakeful sense of happiness. That
you would see every object with and through your lost brother, and that
that would at last become a real and everlasting source of comfort to
you I felt, and well knew from my own experience in sorrow; but till you
yourself began to feel this I didn't dare tell you so; but I send you
some poor lines, which I wrote under this conviction of mind, and before
I heard Coleridge was returning home. I will transcribe them now before
I finish my letter, lest a false shame prevent me then, for I know they
are much worse than they ought to be, written as they were with strong
feeling and on such a subject; every line seems to me to be borrowed;
but I had no better way of expressing my thoughts, and I never have the
power of altering or amending anything I have once laid aside with
dissatisfaction:--
"'Why is he wandering on the sea?
Coleridge should now with Wordsworth be.
By slow degrees he'd steal away
Their woe and gently bring a ray
(So happily he'd time relief)
Of comfort from their very grief.
He'd tell them that their brother dead,
When years have passed o'er their head,
Will be remembered with such holy,
True, and perfect melancholy,
That ever this lost brother John
Will be their heart's companion.
His voice they'll always hear,
His face they'll always see;
There's nought in life so sweet
As such a memory.'"
Miss Wordsworth's reply to this letter has not been preserved. It came
to the hands of Charles Lamb when his sister was undergoing one of her
temporary but most sad confinements, in the asylum she periodically
visited. On the 14th of June, 1805, Charles wrote for her to acknowledge
the letter, one from which the following extract may be given:--"Your
long, kind letter has not been thrown away (for it has given me great
pleasure to find you are all resuming your old occupations and are
better); but poor Mary, to whom it is addressed, cannot yet relish it.
She has been attacked by one of her severe illnesses, and is at present
_from home_. Last Monday week was the day she left me, and I hope I may
calculate upon having her again in a month or little more. I am rather
afraid late hours have, in this case, contributed to her indisposition.
I have every reason to suppose that this illness, like all the former
ones, will be but temporary; but I cannot always feel so. Meantime she
is dead to me, and I miss a prop. All my strength is gone, and I am like
a fool, bereft of her co-operation. I dare not think lest I should think
wrong, so used am I to look up to her in the least as in the biggest
perplexity. To say all that I know of her would be more than I think
anybody could believe, or even understand; and when I hope to have her
well again with me, it would be sinning against her feelings to go about
to praise her, for I can conceal nothing that I do from her. She is
older and wiser and better than I, and all my wretched imperfections I
cover to myself by resolutely thinking on her goodness. She would share
life and death, heaven and hell with me. She lives but for me; and I
know I have been wasting and teasing her life for five years past
incessantly with my cursed drinking and ways of going on. But even in
this upbraiding of myself I am offending against her, for I know that
she has clung to me for better for worse; and if the balance has been
against her hitherto it was a noble trade."
The following letter of Charles Lamb, addressed "to Mr. and Miss
Wordsworth," on the 28th of September, 1805, enclosing his "Farewell to
Tobacco" may also find a place here:--"I wish you may think this a
handsome farewell to my 'Friendly Traitress.' Tobacco has been my
evening comfort and my morning curse for nearly five years; and you
know how difficult it is from refraining to pick one's lips even, when
it has become a habit. This poem is the only one which I have finished
since so long as when I wrote 'Hester Savory.' I have had it in my head
to do this two years, but tobacco stood in its own light when it gave me
headaches that prevented my singing its praises. Now you have got it,
you have got all my store, for I have absolutely not another line. No
more has Mary. We have nobody about us that cares for poetry; and who
will rear grapes when he shall be the sole eater? Perhaps if you
encourage us to show you what we may write, we may do something now and
then before we absolutely forget the quantity of an English line for
want of practice. The 'Tobacco' being a little in the way of Withers
(whom Southey so much likes) perhaps you will somehow convey it to him
with my kind remembrances. Then, everybody will have seen it that I wish
to see it, I having sent it to Malta.
"I remain, dear W. and D.,
"Yours truly,
"C. LAMB."