No other English poet had touched me quite so closely as Wordsworth. All
cultivated men delight in Shakespeare; he is the universal genius; but
Wordsworth's poetry has more the character of a message, and a message
special and personal, to a comparatively small circle of readers. He
stands for a particular phase of human thought and experience, and his
service to certain minds is like an initiation into a new order of
truths. Note what a revelation he was to the logical mind of John Stuart
Mill. His limitations make him all the more private and precious, like
the seclusion of one of his mountain dales. He is not and can never be
the world's poet, but more especially the poet of those who love
solitude and solitary communion with nature. Shakespeare's attitude
toward nature is for the most part like that of a gay, careless reveler,
who leaves his companions for a moment to pluck a flower or gather a
shell here and there, as they stroll
"By paved fountain, or by rushy brook,
Or on the beachéd margent of the sea."
He is, of course, preëminent in all purely poetic achievements, but his
poems can never minister to the spirit in the way Wordsworth's do.
One can hardly appreciate the extent to which the latter poet has
absorbed and reproduced the spirit of the Westmoreland scenery until he
has visited that region. I paused there a few days in early June, on my
way south, and again on my return late in July. I walked up from
Windermere to Grasmere, where, on the second visit, I took up my abode
at the historic Swan Inn, where Scott used to go surreptitiously to get
his mug of beer when he was stopping with Wordsworth.
The call of the cuckoo came to me from over Rydal Water as I passed
along. I plucked my first foxglove by the roadside; paused and listened
to the voice of the mountain torrent; heard
"The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;"
caught many a glimpse of green, unpeopled hills, urn-shaped dells,
treeless heights, rocky promontories, secluded valleys, and clear,
swift-running streams. The scenery was sombre; there were but two
colors, green and brown, verging on black; wherever the rock cropped out
of the green turf on the mountain-sides, or in the vale, it showed a
dark face. But the tenderness and freshness of the green tints were
something to remember,--the hue of the first springing April grass,
massed and widespread in midsummer.
Then there was a quiet splendor, almost grandeur, about Grasmere vale,
such as I had not seen elsewhere,--a kind of monumental beauty and
dignity that agreed well with one's conception of the loftier strains of
its poet. It is not too much dominated by the mountains, though shut in
on all sides by them; that stately level floor of the valley keeps them
back and defines them, and they rise from its outer margin like rugged,
green-tufted, and green-draped walls.
It is doubtless this feature, as De Quincey says, this floor-like
character of the valley, that makes the scenery of Grasmere more
impressive than the scenery in North Wales, where the physiognomy of the
mountains is essentially the same, but where the valleys are more
bowl-shaped. Amid so much that is steep and rugged and broken, the eye
delights in the repose and equilibrium of horizontal lines,--a bit of
table-land, the surface of the lake, or the level of the valley bottom.
The principal valleys of our own Catskill region all have this stately
floor, so characteristic of Wordsworth's country. It was a pleasure
which I daily indulged in to stand on the bridge by Grasmere Church,
with that full, limpid stream before me, pausing and deepening under the
stone embankment near where the dust of the poet lies, and let the eye
sweep across the plain to the foot of the near mountains, or dwell upon
their encircling summits above the tops of the trees and the roofs of
the village. The water-ouzel loved to linger there, too, and would sit
in contemplative mood on the stones around which the water loitered and
murmured, its clear white breast alone defining it from the object upon
which it rested. Then it would trip along the margin of the pool, or
flit a few feet over its surface, and suddenly, as if it had burst like
a bubble, vanish before my eyes; there would be a little splash of the
water beneath where I saw it, as if the drop of which it was composed
had reunited with the surface there. Then, in a moment or two, it would
emerge from the water and take up its stand as dry and unruffled as
ever. It was always amusing to see this plump little bird, so unlike a
water-fowl in shape and manner, disappear in the stream. It did not seem
to dive, but simply dropped into the water, as if its wings had suddenly
failed it. Sometimes it fairly tumbled in from its perch. It was gone
from sight in a twinkling, and, while you were wondering how it could
accomplish the feat of walking on the bottom of the stream under there,
it reappeared as unconcerned as possible. It is a song-bird, a thrush,
and gives a feature to these mountain streams and waterfalls which ours,
except on the Pacific coast, entirely lack. The stream that winds
through Grasmere vale, and flows against the embankment of the
churchyard, as the Avon at Stratford, is of great beauty,--clean,
bright, full, trouty, with just a tinge of gypsy blood in its veins,
which it gets from the black tarns on the mountains, and which adds to
its richness of color. I saw an angler take a few trout from it, in a
meadow near the village. After a heavy rain the stream was not roily,
but slightly darker in hue; these fields and mountains are so turf-bound
that no particle of soil is carried away by the water.
Falls and cascades are a great feature all through this country, as they
are a marked feature in Wordsworth's poetry. One's ear is everywhere
haunted by the sound of falling water; and, when the ear cannot hear
them, the eye can see the streaks or patches of white foam down the
green declivities. There are no trees above the valley bottom to
obstruct the view, and no hum of woods to muffle the sounds of distant
streams. When I was at Grasmere there was much rain, and this stanza of
the poet came to mind:--
"Loud is the Vale! The voice is up
With which she speaks when storms are gone,
A mighty unison of streams!
Of all her voices, one!"
The words "vale" and "dell" come to have a new meaning after one has
visited Wordsworth's country, just as the words "cottage" and "shepherd"
also have so much more significance there and in Scotland than at home.
"Dear child of Nature, let them rail!
--There is a nest in a green dale,
A harbor and a hold,
Where thou, a wife and friend, shalt see
Thy own delightful days, and be
A light to young and old."
Every humble dwelling looks like a nest; that in which the poet himself
lived had a cozy, nest-like look; and every vale is green,--a cradle
amid rocky heights, padded and carpeted with the thickest turf.
Wordsworth is described as the poet of nature. He is more the poet of
man, deeply wrought upon by a certain phase of nature,--the nature of
those sombre, quiet, green, far-reaching mountain solitudes. There is a
shepherd quality about him; he loves the flocks, the heights, the tarn,
the tender herbage, the sheltered dell, the fold, with a kind of
poetized shepherd instinct. Lambs and sheep and their haunts, and those
who tend them, recur perpetually in his poems. How well his verse
harmonizes with those high, green, and gray solitudes, where the silence
is broken only by the bleat of lambs or sheep, or just stirred by the
voice of distant waterfalls! Simple, elemental yet profoundly tender and
human, he had
"The primal sympathy
Which, having been, must ever be."
He brooded upon nature, but it was nature mirrored in his own heart. In
his poem of "The Brothers" he says of his hero, who had gone to sea:--
"He had been rear'd
Among the mountains, and he in his heart
Was half a shepherd on the stormy seas.
Oft in the piping shrouds had Leonard heard
The tones of waterfalls, and inland sounds
Of caves and trees;"
and, leaning over the vessel's side and gazing into the "broad green
wave and sparkling foam," he
"Saw mountains,--saw the forms of sheep that grazed
On verdant hills."
This was what his own heart told him; every experience or sentiment
called those beloved images to his own mind.
One afternoon, when the sun seemed likely to get the better of the soft
rain-clouds, I set out to climb to the top of Helvellyn. I followed the
highway a mile or more beyond the Swan Inn, and then I committed myself
to a footpath that turns up the mountain-side to the right, and crosses
into Grisedale and so to Ulleswater. Two schoolgirls whom I overtook put
me on the right track. The voice of a foaming mountain torrent was in my
ears a long distance, and now and then the path crossed it. Fairfield
Mountain was on my right hand, Helm Crag and Dunmail Raise on my left.
Grasmere plain soon lay far below. The haymakers, encouraged by a gleam
of sunshine, were hastily raking together the rain-blackened hay. From
my outlook they appeared to be slowly and laboriously rolling up a great
sheet of dark brown paper, uncovering beneath it one of the most fresh
and vivid green. The mown grass is so long in curing in this country
(frequently two weeks) that the new blades spring beneath it, and a
second crop is well under way before the old is "carried." The long
mountain slopes up which I was making my way were as verdant as the
plain below me. Large coarse ferns or bracken, with an under-lining of
fine grass, covered the ground on the lower portions. On the higher,
grass alone prevailed. On the top of the divide, looking down into the
valley of Ulleswater, I came upon one of those black tarns, or mountain
lakelets, which are such a feature in this strange scenery. The word
"tarn" has no meaning with us, though our young poets sometimes use it
as they do this Yorkshire word "wold;" one they get from Wordsworth, the
other from Tennyson. But when you have seen one of those still, inky
pools at the head of a silent, lonely Westmoreland dale, you will not be
apt to misapply the word in future. Suddenly the serene shepherd
mountain opens this black, gleaming eye at your feet, and it is all the
more weird for having no eyebrow of rocks, or fringe of rush or bush.
The steep, encircling slopes drop down and hem it about with the most
green and uniform turf. If its rim had been modeled by human hands, it
could not have been more regular or gentle in outline. Beneath its
emerald coat the soil is black and peaty, which accounts for the hue of
the water and the dark line that encircles it.
"All round this pool both flocks and herds might drink
On its firm margin, even as from a well,
Or some stone basin, which the herdsman's hand
Had shaped for their refreshment."
The path led across the outlet of the tarn, and then divided, one branch
going down into the head of Grisedale, and the other mounting up the
steep flank of Helvellyn. Far up the green acclivity I met a man and two
young women making their way slowly down. They had come from Glenridding
on Ulleswater, and were going to Grasmere. The women looked cold, and
said I would find it wintry on the summit.
Helvellyn has a broad flank and a long back, and comes to a head very
slowly and gently. You reach a wire fence well up on the top that
divides some sheep ranges, pass through a gate, and have a mile yet to
the highest ground in front of you; but you could traverse it in a
buggy, it is so smooth and grassy. The grass fails just before the
summit is reached, and the ground is covered with small fragments of the
decomposed rock. The view is impressive, and such as one likes to sit
down to and drink in slowly,--a
"Grand terraqueous spectacle,
From centre to circumference, unveil'd."
The wind was moderate and not cold. Toward Ulleswater the mountain drops
down abruptly many hundred feet, but its vast western slope appeared one
smooth, unbroken surface of grass. The following jottings in my
notebook, on the spot, preserve some of the features of the scene: "All
the northern landscape lies in the sunlight as far as Carlisle,
"A tumultuous waste of huge hilltops;"
not quite so severe and rugged as the Scotch mountains, but the view
more pleasing and more extensive than the one I got from Ben Venue. The
black tarns at my feet,--Keppel Cove Tarn one of them, according to my
map,--how curious they look! I can just discern the figure of a man
moving by the marge of one of them. Away beyond Ulleswater is a vast
sweep of country flecked here and there by slowly moving cloud shadows.
To the northeast, in places, the backs and sides of the mountains have a
green, pastoral voluptuousness, so smooth and full are they with thick
turf. At other points the rock has fretted through the verdant carpet.
St. Sunday's Crag to the west, across Grisedale, is a steep acclivity
covered with small, loose stones, as if they had been dumped over the
top, and were slowly sliding down; but nowhere do I see great bowlders
strewn about. Patches of black peat are here and there. The little
rills, near and far, are white as milk, so swiftly do they run. On the
more precipitous sides the grass and moss are lodged, and hold like
snow, and are as tender in hue as the first April blades. A multitude of
lakes are in view, and Morecambe Bay to the south. There are sheep
everywhere, loosely scattered, with their lambs; occasionally I hear
them bleat. No other sound is heard but the chirp of the mountain pipit.
I see the wheat-ear flitting here and there. One mountain now lies in
full sunshine, as fat as a seal, wrinkled and dimpled where it turns to
the west, like a fat animal when it bends to lick itself. What a
spectacle is now before me!--all the near mountains in shadow, and the
distant in strong sunlight; I shall not see the like of that again. On
some of the mountains the green vestments are in tatters and rags, so to
speak, and barely cling to them. No heather in view. Toward Windermere
the high peaks and crests are much more jagged and rocky. The air is
filled with the same white, motionless vapor as in Scotland. When the
sun breaks through,--
"Slant watery lights, from parting clouds, apace
Travel along the precipice's base,
Cheering its naked waste of scatter'd stone."
Amid these scenes one comes face to face with nature,
"With the pristine earth,
The planet in its nakedness,"
as he cannot in a wooded country. The primal, abysmal energies, grown
tender and meditative, as it were, thoughtful of the shepherd and his
flocks, and voiceful only in the leaping torrents, look out upon one
near at hand and pass a mute recognition. Wordsworth perpetually refers
to these hills and dales as lonely or lonesome; but his heart was still
more lonely. The outward solitude was congenial to the isolation and
profound privacy of his own soul. "Lonesome," he says of one of these
mountain dales, but
"Not melancholy,--no, for it is green
And bright and fertile, furnished in itself
With the few needful things that life requires.
In rugged arms how soft it seems to lie,
How tenderly protected."
It is this tender and sheltering character of the mountains of the Lake
district that is one main source of their charm. So rugged and lofty,
and yet so mellow and delicate! No shaggy, weedy growths or tangles
anywhere; nothing wilder than the bracken, which at a distance looks as
solid as the grass. The turf is as fine and thick as that of a lawn. The
dainty-nosed lambs could not crave a tenderer bite than it affords. The
wool of the dams could hardly be softer to the foot. The last of July
the grass was still short and thick, as if it never shot up a stalk and
produced seed, but always remained a fine, close mat. Nothing was more
unlike what I was used to at home than this universal tendency (the same
is true in Scotland and in Wales) to grass, and, on the lower slopes, to
bracken, as if these were the only two plants in nature. Many of these
eminences in the north of England, too lofty for hills and too smooth
for mountains, are called fells. The railway between Carlisle and
Preston winds between them, as Houghill Fells, Tebay Fells, Shap Fells,
etc. They are, even in midsummer, of such a vivid and uniform green that
it seems as if they must have been painted. Nothing blurs or mars the
hue; no stalk of weed or stem of dry grass. The scene, in singleness and
purity of tint, rivals the blue of the sky. Nature does not seem to
ripen and grow sere as autumn approaches, but wears the tints of May in
October.