lie just beyond it--of Wordsworth, and that sister with the “wild eyes,”
who is scarcely less sure of immortality than himself, of Mary
Wordsworth too, the “perfect woman, nobly planned,” at whose feet, in
her white-haired old age, I myself as a small child of five can remember
sitting, nearly sixty years ago. A little further, trees and buildings
hide what was once the grassy margin of the lake, and the old coach road
from Ambleside, with Wordsworth’s cottage upon it. Dove Cottage, where
“mighty poets” gathered, and poetry that England will never let die was
written, is now, as all the world knows, a national possession, and is
full of memorials not only of Wordsworth, his sister and his wife, but
of all the other famous men who haunted there--De Quincey, who lived
there for more than twenty years, Southey and Coleridge; or of
Wordsworth’s younger contemporaries and neighbours in the Lakes, such as
Arnold of Rugby, and Arnold’s poet son Matthew. Generally the tiny house
and garden are thronged by Americans in August, who crowd--in the
Homeric phrase--about the charming place, like flies about the milk
pails in summer.
But this year there are no Americans, there are few visitors, indeed, of
any kind as yet, though the coaches are beginning to bring
them--scantily. But Grasmere does not distress itself as it would in
other years, Wordsworth’s village is thinking too much about the war.
Before the war--so I learn from a gentle lady, who is one of the most
eager guardians of Grasmere traditions, and has made remarkable and
successful efforts, through the annual “Grasmere play,” which is her
creation, to maintain the rich old dialect of the dales--there were
_two_ Grasmere men in the Navy, _two_ soldiers in the Regular army, and
_three_ Reservists--out of a total male population of all ages of three
hundred and eighty-nine. No one ever saw a soldier, and wages, as all
over the north, were high. There was some perplexity of mind among the
dale-folk when war broke out. France and Belgium seemed a long way
off--more than “t’oother side o’ Kendal,” a common measure of distance
in the mind of the old folks, whose schooling lies far behind them; and
fighting seemed a strange thing to these men of peace. “What!--there’ll
be nea fightin’!” said an old man in the village, the day before war was
declared. “There’s nea blacks amongst ’em [meaning the Germans]--they’se
civilised beings!” But the fighting came, and Grasmere did as Grasmere
did in 1803, when Pitt called for volunteers for Home Defence. “At
Grasmere,” wrote Wordsworth, “we have turned out almost to a man.” Last
year, within a few months of the outbreak of war, seventy young men from
the village offered themselves to the army; over fifty are serving.
Their women left behind have been steadily knitting and sewing since
they left. Every man from Grasmere got a Christmas present of two pairs
of socks. Two sisters, washerwomen, and hard worked, made a pair each,
in four consecutive weeks, getting up at four in the morning to knit.
Day after day, women from the village have gone up to the fells to
gather the absorbent sphagnum moss, which they dry and clean, and send
to a manufacturing chemist to be prepared for hospital use. Half a ton
of feather-weight moss has been collected and cleaned by women and
school-children. One old woman who could not give money gathered the
tufts of wool which the sheep leave behind them on the brambles and
fern, washed them, and made them into the little pillows which prop
wounded limbs in hospital. The cottages and farms send eggs every week
to the wounded in France. The school-children alone bring fifty a week.
One woman, whose main resource was her fowls, offered twelve eggs a
week; which meant starving herself. And all the time, two pence, three
pence, six pence a week was being collected by the people themselves,
from the poorest homes, towards the support of the Belgian colony in the
neighbouring village of Ambleside.
One sits and ponders these things, as the golden light recedes from
Loughrigg, and that high crag above Wordsworth’s cottage. Little
Grasmere has indeed done all she could, and in this lovely valley, the
heart of Wordsworth’s people, the descendants of those dalesmen and
daleswomen whom he brought into literature, is one--passionately
one--with the heart of the Allies. Lately the war has bitten harder into
the life of the village. Of its fifty young sons, many are now in the
thick of the Dardanelles struggle; three are prisoners of war, two are
said to have gone down in the Royal Edward, one officer has fallen,
others are wounded. Grasmere has learnt much geography and history this
last year; and it has shared to the full in the general deepening and
uplifting of the English soul, which the war has brought about. France,
that France which Wordsworth loved in his first generous youth, is in
all our hearts,--France, and the sufferings of France; Belgium, too, the
trampled and outraged victim of a Germany eternally dishonoured. And
where shall we find nobler words in which to clothe the feeling of
England towards a France which has lost Rheims, or a Belgium which has
endured Louvain, than those written a hundred years ago in that cottage
across the lake?
Air, earth and skies--
There’s not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man’s unconquerable mind!
To Germany, then, the initial weight of big battalions, the initial
successes of a murderous science: to the nations leagued against her,
the unconquerable power of those moral faiths which fire our clay, and
in the end mould the history of men!
... Along the mountain-side, the evening wind rises. The swell and beat
of it among the rocks and fern, as the crags catch it, echo it, and
throw it back reverberate, are as the sound of marching feet....
I hear it in the tread--irresistible, inexorable--of an avenging
Humanity. The living and the dead are there, and in their hands they
bear both Doom and Comforting.
MARY A. WARD
[Illustration: text decoration] _Of this book, in addition to the
regular edition, there have been printed and numbered one hundred and
seventy-five copies de luxe, of larger format._
_Numbers 1-50 on French hand-made paper, containing four facsimiles
of manuscripts and a second set of illustrations in portfolio._
_Numbers 51-175 on Van Gelder paper._
End of Project Gutenberg's The Book of the Homeless, by Edith Wharton