CHAPTER VI.
Visit to Coleridge at Greta Hall.—Wordsworth and his Sister in London.—Letters to Miss Stoddart.—Coleridge goes to Malta.—Letter to Dorothy Wordsworth on the Death of her Brother John.
1802-1805.—Æt. 38-41.
In the summer of 1802, when holiday time came round Charles was seized with 'a strong desire of visiting remote regions;' and after some whimsical deliberations his final resolve was to go with Mary to see Coleridge at the Lakes.
"I set out with Mary to Keswick," he tells Manning, "without giving any notice to Coleridge [who was now living at Greta Hall, soon to become Southey's home for the rest of his life] for my time being precious did not admit of it. We got in in the evening, travelling in a post-chaise from Penrith, in the midst of a gorgeous sunset which transmuted the mountains into all colours, purple, &c. We thought we had got into fairy-land; but that went off (and it never came again while we stayed we had no more fine sunsets) and we entered Coleridge's comfortable study just in the dusk when the mountains were all dark with clouds upon their heads. Such an impression I never received from objects of sight before nor do I suppose I ever can again. Glorious creatures, fine old fellows, Skiddaw, &c., I shall never forget ye, how ye lay about that night like an intrenchment; gone to bed, as it seemed, for the night but promising that ye were to be seen in the morning. Coleridge had got a blazing fire in his study which is a large antique, ill-shaped room with an old-fashioned organ, never played upon, big enough for a church; shelves of scattered folios, an Æolian harp and an old sofa half-bed, &c. And all looking out upon the last fading view of Skiddaw and his broad-breasted brethren. What a night!"
The Poet had now a second son, or rather a third (for the second had died in infancy), Derwent, a fine bright, fair, broad-chested little fellow not quite two years old, with whom Charles and Mary were delighted. A merry sprite he was, in a yellow frock which obtained for him the nick-name of Stumpy Canary, who loved to race from kitchen to parlour and from parlour to kitchen just putting in his head at the door with roguish smile to catch notice, then off again, shaking his little sides with laughter. He fairly won their hearts and long after figures in their letters as Pi-pos Pot-pos, his own way of pronouncing striped opossum and spotted opossum, which he would point out triumphantly in his picture book. Hartley, now six, was a prematurely grave and thoughtful child who had already, as a curious anecdote told by Crabb Robinson shows, begun to take surprising plunges into "the metaphysic well without a bottom"; for once when asked something about himself and called by name he said, "Which Hartley?" "Why, is there more than one Hartley?" "Yes, there's a deal of Hartleys; there's Picture Hartley [Hazlitt had painted his portrait] and Shadow Hartley and there's Echo Hartley and there's Catch-me-fast Hartley," seizing his own arm with the other hand; thereby showing, said his father, that "he had begun to reflect on what Kant calls the great and inexplicable mystery that man should be both his own subject and object and that these should yet be one!"
Three delightful weeks they stayed. "So we have seen," continues Lamb to Manning, "Keswick, Grasmere, Ambleside, Ulswater (where the Clarksons live), and a place at the other end of Ulswater; I forget the name [Patterdale] to which we travelled on a very sultry day, over the middle of Helvellyn. We have clambered up to the top of Skiddaw and I have waded up the bed of Lodore. Mary was excessively tired when she got about half-way up Skiddaw but we came to a cold rill (than which nothing can be imagined more cold, running over cold stones) and, with the reinforcement of a draught of cold water, she surmounted it most manfully. Oh its fine black head! and the bleak air atop of it with the prospect of mountains all about and about making you giddy; and then Scotland afar off and the border countries so famous in song and ballad! It was a day that will stand out like a mountain, I am sure, in my life."
Wordsworth was away at Calais but the Lambs stayed a day or so in his cottage with the Clarksons (he of slavery abolition fame and she "one of the friendliest, comfortablest women we know who made the little stay one of the pleasantest times we ever passed"); saw Lloyd again but remained distrustful of him on account of the seeds of bitterness he had once sown between the friends, and finally got home very pleasantly: Mary a good deal fatigued, finding the difference between going to a place and coming from it, but not otherwise the worse. "Lloyd has written me a fine letter of friendship," says Lamb, soon after his return, "all about himself and Sophia and love and cant which I have not answered. I have not given up the idea of writing to him but it will be done very plainly and sincerely, without acrimony."