so much as beauty that captivated his imagination. What little there is
may well be passed over for the poems connected with Ullswater--that
English Lake Lucerne--and Helvellyn. Three years after his marriage he
visited these regions in a stormy November. Of this short tour he has
left a journal, and to its credit we place several of his descriptive
verses, notably 'The Pass of Kirkstone,' omitted in some editions of his
works. Therein he tells us how the mists, though they obscured the
distant views, magnified even the smaller objects close at hand, so that
a stone wall might be taken for a monument of ancient grandeur, and the
grassy tracts in the semi-light for tarns. The rocks appeared like ruins
left by the Deluge, or to altars fit for Druid service, but never
carrying the sacred fire unless the glow-worm lit the nightly sacrifice.
On another tour it was that his sister Dorothy, always his good genius,
called his attention to the gorgeous bed of daffodils, in the woods
below Gowbarrow Park--afterwards made famous by his sonnet. 'I never saw
daffodils,' he records in his journal, 'so beautiful. They grew among
the mossy stones about them. Some rested their heads on these stones
like a pillow, the others tossed, and reeled, and danced, and seemed as
if they half laughed in the wind, they looked so gay and glancing.'
There is also in the journal a paragraph about a singular and magnified
reflection about Lyulph's Tower in this lake, though the tower itself
was hidden from him behind an eminence. It was on this second tour he
wrote, near Brothers Water, verses, somewhat too like a catalogue of
articles on view, that close with this happy lilt:
'There's joy in the mountains,
There's life in the fountains,
Small clouds are sailing,
Blue sky prevailing--
The rain is over and gone.'
It is among these lines the fancy occurs of which the critics made such
surpassing fun--for themselves, certainly:
'The cattle are grazing,
Their heads never raising,
There are forty feeding like one.'
Not a bad illustration, after all, is this of the facile descent from
the sublime into bathos. To the Ullswater period we owe, of course, 'The
Somnambulist,' a legend of Aira Force, and a sonnet to Clarkson, the
abolitionist, who lived at the foot of the lake. Helvellyn appears in
many poems. Grasmere and Rydal, as is only natural, still more often,
with their ancient mountains imparting to him 'dream and visionary
impulses,' their 'thick umbrage' of beech-trees, their fir-trees beyond
the Wishing Gate, and their 'massy ways carried across these heights by
human perseverance.' Of the River Duddon he has given us a series of
sonnets, some three dozen in number, of which we may hold 'The
Stepping-Stones' to be the best, and 'The After-Thought' the best for me
to close with, for it is representative of his subtler feelings:
'I thought of thee, my partner and my guide[A]
As being past away.--Vain sympathies!
For, backward, Duddon! as I cast my eyes,
I see what was, and is, and will abide;
Still glides the stream, and shall for ever glide;
The form remains, the function never dies;
While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise,
We men, who in the morn of youth, defied
The elements, must vanish;--be it so!
Enough, if something from our hands have power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour;
And if, as toward the silent tomb we go,
Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower,
We feel that we are greater than we know.'
[A] The river.
HIS PRAYER FOR POETIC INSPIRATION
'Celestial Spirit which erewhile didst deign
Our elder Milton's hallowed prayer to hear,
Do thou inspire my tributary strain,
Breathe thou through every word that sense severe
Of TRUTH; and if ought eloquent appear,
Let it to everyone be manifest,
That it flows from that empyrian clear,
Where thou beside God's throne, a heavenly guest,
With vision beatific evermore art blessed!'
CHARLES LLOYD: _Stanzas_.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Herbert Bell, Ambleside._
OLD BRATHAY.
The Home of Charles Lloyd.]
XI
A FRIEND OF GREAT POETS
CHARLES LLOYD
'Long, long, within my aching heart,
The grateful sense shall cherished be;
I'll think less meanly of myself,
That Lloyd will sometimes think on me.'
CHARLES LAMB.
Many will, no doubt, ask who this man was, and where he lived? Such a
question shows small acquaintance with either the biographies or
writings of the great poets of the Lake School, or of Charles Lamb or
Thomas De Quincey. He was the personal and highly-valued friend of them
all, and his name and residence are too frequently mentioned in their
letters and publications to escape the notice of even casual readers. He
was the collaborateur of S. T. Coleridge and Charles Lamb in their first
joint volume of poems, published by Joseph Cottle, bookseller, of
Bristol, their kind patron in early days of struggle. He became a
'celebrity' of this district when he went to reside at Low Brathay, near
Ambleside, fixing his home by the rushing rivulet of the Langdales, and
beneath the lofty summit of Loughrigg, the mountain beloved of Fosters,
and Arnolds, and their compeers and neighbours. He was born in 1775 at
Birmingham, his father being a member of the Society of Friends, one of
the wealthy banking firm, and a philanthropist and man of culture. He,
the elder Lloyd, was a lover and translator of Homer and Horace, and
specially a student of Greek literature, thereby helping to disprove the
random assertion of a recent novelist that the Quakerism of the past
generation was utterly antagonistic to the culture and spirit of old
Greece.
When Charles was about of age, and had declined entering his father's
bank, that he might give himself up to poesy, Coleridge visited
Birmingham on the profitless errand of obtaining subscriptions to his
magazine. He took a great liking to the new and rising author, and
followed him to Bristol. Coleridge was very poor (Wedgewood's pension
had not yet been granted), and was very shiftless to boot. Lloyd
provided him with a free home and with access to sorely-needed books.
When Coleridge removed to Nether Stowey, on the Quantock Hills, Lloyd
went too, and again kept house. Here they were near Wordsworth, then
residing at Alfoxden. One result of this acquaintance was the marriage
of Lloyd's sister to a younger brother of the future Laureate. A
strange, unpractical company these poets and philosophers were, and
their ways were erratic. The story of their inability to put a collar on
their pony till shown by a servant-girl, is well known. The landlord of
Alfoxden refused to renew the letting of the house to Wordsworth because
of his rumoured odd manners and habits. Here, at Nether Stowey, poor
Lloyd appears first to have developed the epilepsy that, increasing in
intensity, at last ended in madness. He was, no doubt in consequence of
these fits, liable to extreme depression, and his morbidness, a source
of anxiety and irritation to his friends, may have lain at the root of a
quarrel between them, which the indispensable Cottle helped to settle,
relating to their joint authorship, to which Lloyd had contributed the
larger quantity of MSS. and the larger share of funds, if not the more
excellent material.
As a poet and novelist he is now virtually forgotten. I can find no
copies of his works in any public or subscription library in this
locality, nor is there one of them in the invaluable London Library
among all its hundreds of thousands of volumes. Yet those that exist are
worth much money. In a second-hand dealer's catalogue I see there is a
copy of the poems priced at no less than fifty shillings, at least ten
times its original price. His novels I have failed altogether to find.
'Edmund Oliver' embodies the account, transferred to a fictitious hero,
of Coleridge's disappointment in love while at Cambridge, an event which
led to his enlisting in a cavalry regiment. It tells nothing but the
truth when it humorously narrates the rough-riding experiences and the
torture of the unhorsemanlike student-soldier, and pictures the
astonishment of a cultured officer on discovering a Latin inscription on
a stable wall, and on inquiry a trooper able to converse in Greek and
ready to discuss at egregious length the most abstruse questions in
philosophy. This episode alone makes the book interesting to collectors.
But though neither 'Edmund Oliver,' a novel in two volumes; nor 'The Duc
d'Ormond,' a tragedy; nor 'Beritola,' a tale; nor even 'Desultory
Thoughts in London,' are easy to find outside the British Museum
Library, yet Lloyd clearly deserves a nearer approach to immortality
than he has attained. De Quincey writes of him in his 'Literary
Reminiscences': 'At Brathay lived Charles Lloyd. Far as he might be
below the others I have mentioned, he could not be called a common man.
Common! He was a man never to be forgotten! He was somewhat too
Rousseauish, but he had in conversation the most extraordinary powers
for analysis of a certain kind, applied to the philosophy of manners and
the most delicate nuances of social life.' He could not be a mere
hanger-on to greater men to whom several poets addressed sonnets of
affection and admiration. Charles Lamb, whose contributions to the early
joint volume were few, while he speaks of Lloyd's as over a hundred,
'though only his choice fish,' is quite enthusiastic, exclaiming:
'Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother,
Why were't thou not born in my father's dwelling,
So we might talk of the old familiar faces?'
One, and the chief, labour undertaken by Lloyd at Brathay, after his
marriage and permanent settlement there, was a voluminous translation of
Alfieri's poetical works from the Italian. It is spoken of as faithful
to the original and full of the truest poetic insight. In the judgment
of competent critics his translations were better than his own
compositions, even of those of his later years, such as his 'Nugæ
Canoræ,' published about the same time as Professor Wilson's 'Isle of
Palms,' of which, by-the-by he received a presentation copy as a token
of regard from the author, with whom he was on intimate terms. Lamb in
writing to Lloyd, gives him rather a back-handed testimonial when he
says, 'Your verses are as good and wholesome as prose,' while in another
letter he says, 'Your lines are not to be understood on one leg! They
are sinuous and to be won with wrestling.' Probably the key to this
remark is contained in Talfourd's statement that Lloyd wrote 'with a
facility fatal to excellence.' On the other hand, the spitefully
sarcastic and foolish sentences of Byron, uttered against Wordsworth and
his 'school,' inclusive of the subject of this paper, seem almost
beneath contempt:
'Vulgar Wordsworth,' quoth he, 'the meanest object of
the holy group,
Whose verse of all but childish prattle void,
Seems blessed harmony to Lambe and Lloyd.'
Lambe (whose name should have no 'e' at the end) and Lloyd, he adds in a
footnote, are 'the most ignoble followers of Southey and Co.' Fancy a
Byron sneering at Southey, Wordsworth, and Lamb! These, at least, are
equal, if not superior, to himself, even if Lloyd is confessedly beneath
him in merit. However, I can, fortunately, give my readers a specimen of
one of Lloyd's sonnets, admired and preserved by Bernard Barton. It is
addressed to God on behalf of his own father, the Birmingham
philanthropist:
'Oh Thou who, when Thou mad'st the heart of man,
Implanted'st there, as paramount to all,
Immortal conscience; do Thou deign to scan
With favouring eye these lays which would recall
Man to his due allegiance. Nothing can
Thrive without Thee; hence at Thy throne I fall
And Thee implore to go forth in the van
Of these my numbers, Lord of great and small!
Bless Thou these lays, and, with a reverent voice,
Next to Thyself would I my father place
Close at Thy threshold; true to his youth's choice
His deeds with conscience ever have kept pace;
Great Father, bid my "earthly sire" rejoice,
A white-robed Christian in Thy safe embrace.'
Bernard Barton calls it a 'noble sonnet.'
But the end was nearing. The fits and morbid impressions were followed
by illusory voices and cries, and at last Wilson writes his wife: 'Poor
Lloyd is in a madhouse.' He seems to have been for awhile in the
well-known 'Retreat' at York, from whence he escaped, and was ultimately
removed to an asylum in France, where, after some years, he died. In
happier days he had married a Miss Pemberton, who is said to have been
carried off by Southey on his friend's behalf. She was a capable and
appreciated housewife, but her sanity did not prevent the transmission
of her husband's disease to his son, the Rev. Owen Lloyd, a highly
respected clergyman, with his father's poetic tastes and genius, and a
close friend of 'lile' Hartley Coleridge.
Such, in brief, is the story, interesting yet melancholy, of one whose
high character and culture and rare social qualities endeared him to a
wide circle of men in the first literary ranks, and who was cordially
esteemed by another and outer circle, in which was Leigh Hunt, who
writes of him as 'a Latinist--much shaken by illness, but of an acute
mind, and metaphysical.'
[Illustration: CHARLES LLOYD AND HIS WIFE. From a rare Painting. By
permission of J. M. Dent, Esq.]
THE COMING OF THE YACHTS TO WINDERMERE
REGATTA
'Bowness Bay is the rendezvous for the Fleet. And lo! from all the
airts, coming in the sunshine, flights of felicitous wide-winged
creatures, whose snow-white lustre, in bright confusion hurrying to
and fro, adorns, disturbs, and dazzles the broad blue bosom of the
Queen of Lakes. Southwards from forest Fell-Foot beneath the Beacon
Hill, gathering glory from the sylvan bays of green Graithwaite, and
the templed promontory of stately Storrs, before the sea-borne wind,
the wild swans, all, float up the watery vale of beauty and of
peace. Out from that still haven, overshadowed by the Elm-grove,
where the old parsonage sleeps, comes the _Emma_ murmuring from the
water-lilies, and as her mainsail rises to salute the sunshine, in
proud impatience lets go her anchor the fair _Gazelle_. As if to
breathe themselves before the start, cutter and schooner in amity
stand across the ripple, till their gaffs seem to cut the sweet
woods of Furness Fells, and they put about, each on less than her
own length, ere that breezeless bay may show, among the inverted
umbrage, the drooping shadows of their canvass. Lo! Swinburne the
Skilful sallies from his pebbly pier, in his tiny skiff that seems
all sail; and the _Norway Nautilus_, as the wind slackens, leads the
van of the Fairy squadron which heaven might now cover with one of
her small clouds, did she choose to drop it from the sky.'--JOHN
WILSON: _Christopher at the Lakes_.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Herbert Bell, Ambleside_
ELLERAY, WINDERMERE.
The Home of Professor John Wilson, as it then was.]
XII
'CHRISTOPHER NORTH'
JOHN WILSON
'Tories! Yes! we are Tories. Our faith is in the Divine right of
kings. But easy, my boys, easy; all free men are kings, and they
hold their empire from heaven. That is our political, philosophical,
moral, religious creed. In its spirit we have lived, and in its
spirit we hope to die.'--_Recreations of Christopher North._
In the days of my youth--say half a century ago--with extraordinary
avidity my reading contemporaries devoured the 'Noctes Ambrosianæ' of
'Christopher North,' mastering the barbaric Scotch dialect of Galloway,
in which the Ettrick Shepherd is made to speak, for the delightsomeness
of his imagination and his quaintly-expressed notions about men and
matters. Nowadays, if I mention the books to any young fellow of
twenty-five to thirty-five, I am stared at as blankly as if I had asked
was he intimately acquainted with the man in the moon! In Alfred Miles's
fine volumes, 'The Poets of the Century,' his poems are not even quoted,
and his very name is merely lumped in with a number of the smaller fry
of North Britain; while Mr. Stedman, in 'Victorian Poets,' will have it
that his verses had become 'antiquated' even before their author's
death. Wilson has been overshadowed by our Southeys, Coleridges,
Wordsworths, and Ruskins, though he was greater, more interesting, more
lovable as a mere human being than any of them, and deserves to be as
long remembered for his books. A generation that calls Kipling a poet,
and makes an Alfred Austin its Laureate, may indeed be expected to
forget many of the men of true genius honoured by their fathers.
Wilson came into the Lake Country in 1807 from Paisley, where he was
born twenty-two years previously. He had recently buried his father,
from whom he had inherited some £40,000. The property he purchased, and
retained in his possession till his decease in 1854, was a small
farmhouse and its lands, known as Elleray. It is situated on the slopes
of Orrest Head, so well beloved of Windermere residents, and so
frequented by tourists on account of the magnificent prospect it
commands. He added to the house, and converted it into a charming home
for a wife and growing family, and a haven of rest for himself in his
frequent retirements from his future busy professional life in
Edinburgh. It was pulled down about forty years ago, when the estate
changed hands. From either of the lofty ranges enclosing the romantic
Troutbeck Valley there is one of the most magnificent mountain views in
all England. The tumbled masses, immortal weather-beaten
monarchs--Wansfell, Loughrigg, and their compeers and allies, and,
farther off, the Langdale Pikes (twin cloud-piercing giants), and
Cringle Crags, and 'The Old Man' of Coniston, and, on a clearer day than
usual, the dominating summit of distant Scafell--these, their sunshine
and shadows, their waving woodlands, their stretches of purple heather
and vast brown beds of bracken, their foaming cascades and garrulous
streams, and the blue inland sea at their feet dotted with verdant
islands and white-sailed yachts, and traversed by elegant steam
gondolas thronged with happy 'trippers,' are all visible in one
never-to-be-forgotten picture arranged in the wisdom of the Almighty for
the pleasure of His people. Such an outlook, but from a lower altitude,
delighted daily the eyes of Nature-loving Wilson, whose very prose was
poetry, of a calibre not less than Kingsley's in his celebrated
'Devonshire Idylls,' or than Ruskin's rhapsodies on Switzerland. His
ardent temperament and unusual virility compelled him to throw himself
heartily into almost every possible form of physical and intellectual
enjoyment. There never was such a man as he for undertaking everything
and anything, and for doing nothing badly, including the art of
'loafing,' when he was in the cue for it. Nearly six feet high,
broad-shouldered--'lish,' as they say here (meaning 'lissom,' as
Southerners say, or 'lithe,' as the dictionaries have it)--blue-eyed,
loosely arrayed, and collarless, he strode along the vales or over the
fells, doing his thirty and forty miles at a stretch, or rode his famous
pony Colonsay in a still-remembered trotting-match, or, with a couple of
like-minded friends he chased a bull by moonlight across the uplands,
each of the huntsmen being armed with a long spear. He was a mighty
fisherman, storing numberless rods and artificial flies among the books
of his library, and even whiling away the tedium of his last illness by
arranging and rearranging the latter, and recalling as he did so the
exploits of former days accomplished with the aid of this one or that,
for sometimes his catches had amounted to as many as eighteen and
twenty dozen of trouts in a day. He was an adept at wrestling and at
boxing, throwing or being thrown with keen enjoyment of the tussle, and
attacking and punishing professional pugilists or bullies of the fair,
if in his opinion oppression or unfair play were evidenced. He kept a
fleet of sailing-boats on the lake, and was dubbed 'Lord High Admiral of
Windermere,' and he was as expert a swimmer as he was a sailor,
delighting in occasionally frightening his shipmates by feigned
accidents, and then having a boisterous laugh at their fears for him.
Cock-fighting was at that time a 'gentlemanly' sport, and his breed of
game-cocks was celebrated far and near. He seems never to have kept
fewer than fifty at once. As great a conversationist and humorous and
jovial companion as he was an athlete, he was much sought after for
dinner and supper parties, while at balls he was accounted the best of
dancers. So universal a genius in all manly outdoor pastimes, and so
genial a friend within doors, was liable to many temptations in that
sadly too 'drinking' age, and as a young man he certainly was often the
worse for liquor, as his own letters help to prove. Yet was he never
quarrelsome, never did he put forth his strength and skill for any low
or mean purpose, never but in play or in defence of the ill-used.
'Everybody loved him,' records his daughter, rich and poor, and the dumb
animals also. Many stories are told of his chivalrous and gallant
conduct, especially towards womanhood, and of the wonderful combination
in his character of almost feminine tenderness and sympathy with the
roistering vigour of an ancient Viking. He would keep patient watch at
night by a sick servant's bed, tend with his own hands some wounded dog;
and there is on record the fact of a fledgling sparrow taking refuge in
his study, and being fed and cared for and so tamed that it stayed as a
denizen of the same room for at least eleven years.
The delightful time at Elleray was crowned with a still higher happiness
when he married a beautiful and engaging lady, every way his peer in
bodily graces and in mind, whom he loved passionately, and for whose
death in middle life he grieved so deeply that he never fully recovered
the blow, though so exceptionally blessed with affectionate and able
children and eminent sons-in-law. His married days at Elleray were by no
means all spent in mere physical enjoyments and recreation. They were
full of literary and social occupations. All his great contemporaries
and neighbours were frequent guests. At their reunions there was
first-rate talk, and often competitions in versifying some given theme,
or some other proof was forthcoming that the circle was one of learning
and talent. De Quincey was, though insignificant in stature, and obliged
to trot by the side of the stalwart Wilson, one of his most valued
touring companions. Hartley Coleridge was always welcomed, and on one
occasion he was detained a prisoner in his own interest for a fortnight,
in order to prevent an outbreak of intoxication, and to secure some
promised contribution for an editor who was to pay him cash for his
needs. Here, too, came other well-known litterateurs to see and converse
with the rising poet and journalist, and perchance to go a-fishing with
him in the becks and tarns of the neighbourhood. It was at this period
that his greatest poems were written, and some published--for instance,
'The Isle of Palms,' and 'The City of the Plague,' the former a story of
shipwrecked lovers, and the latter one of London during the Great
Plague, introducing a wandering Magdalene from Grasmere whose memory
goes back, in the hour of trouble, to her 'beautiful land of mountains,
lakes, and woods,' to the 'green and primrose banks of her own Rydal
Lake,' and the 'deep hush of Grasmere Vale,' and the waters 'reflecting
all the heavens.' His society and surroundings, as well as his
instincts, encouraged the poetic vein, already evinced by his having won
the Oxford Newdigate Prize during his University days.
Alas, these halcyon hours were over all too soon for the
hitherto-fortunate couple! The wife's dower was a handsome one, but the
far larger property of the husband was swept away by the fraudulence of
a relative who was his trustee. The family had to leave Elleray for the
home of Mrs. Wilson, senior, in Edinburgh, though the Windermere house
was retained, and frequently returned to after the early stress of
changed circumstances was over. Cruel as was the wrench, it brought out
the better side of Wilson's disposition. He murmured not, bowing before
the trial with real Christian resignation, and at the same moment
bracing himself to the task of earning a subsistence with truly noble
fortitude. In the Scotch metropolis he soon became connected with the
newly-started _Blackwood's Magazine_, and was, with Lockhart, one of the
ruling spirits of that famous periodical. For long years his wit, his
rhetoric, his trenchant and slashing criticisms, his keen insight into
literary merit, his almost incredible fertility of subject-matter (he
sometimes, under pressure, wrote the whole of the articles for a
particular number), speedily lifted it to the foremost place among
similar journals, and made it the fiercest organ of the most rampant
intellectual Toryism that Britain has ever known, bitterly hated, sorely
dreaded, yet bought by friend and foe alike, and read wherever our
language was understood. It is worth any reader's while to buy at some
second-hand bookseller's 'The Recreations of Christopher North' and the
'Noctes,' both reprints from 'Old Ebony.'