Prose remains of Arthur Hugh Clough, with a selection from his letters and a memoir

by Arthur Hugh Clough

Chance, however, carried him back to England. Sympathising strongly with the original revolutionary movement, and continuing long, in spite of its crimes and horrors, to cling to republican feelings, he showed, to the mortification of his friends, no disposition to carry out their views by taking orders in the Church. He loitered, living in a desultory manner, partly alone in London, partly among his friends in the country, and was, at one time, on the point of engaging in the drudgery of writing for the newspapers. At last, in 1795, his twenty-sixth year, he found himself made what he considered to be independent, by a bequest of 900l., left him by a young friend in the faith of his vocation to literary achievement. He now settled down into domesticity with his sister in a country place in Somersetshire. This sister was one of the two persons whose minds, he said, had been most operative upon his. The other was Coleridge, whom he met for the first time in June 1797.

Coleridge, youngest son of a clergyman and schoolmaster at Ottery St. Mary, Devon, born two years after Wordsworth, bred up at Christ’s Hospital and at Cambridge—which Wordsworth, when he came up, was just quitting—had for the last three years been engaged with Southey, a young Oxford student, in wild schemes for a Pantisocratic settlement on the banks of the Susquehanna (a situation selected for the sweetness of the sound); had been publishing poems, lecturing and neglecting to lecture, preaching in a blue coat and yellow waistcoat, here and there and everywhere, especially at Bristol. Finally he had run into the most imprudent of marriages, and had settled himself at the village of Nether Stowey. Here, during more than a year, Wordsworth had continual intercourse with him, residing at a beautiful spot not far from it—Allfoxden.

Some years before 1793 he had published verses, not particularly promising, written in the established metre and manner—that of Pope and Dryden. But if Hawkshead had made the inner Wordsworth, Allfoxden, Coleridge, and his own sister gave us the expressed Wordsworth. The effect of this time on Coleridge was remarkable: his high poetic period is just this of his intercourse with Wordsworth; but to Wordsworth it was more distinctly an epoch.

His first characteristic poems were published, together with Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner,’ under the title of ‘Lyrical Ballads,’ in 1798. They obtained considerable notice, and made his name well known; but that notice was not favourable, and his name was known rather for ridicule and censure than praise.

The following winter he spent in Germany, where Coleridge was proceeding to lose himself in metaphysics; Wordsworth returned, and, after some little wandering in Yorkshire, he and his sister finally settled, with their petty income, in a cottage at Grasmere, in December 1799.

In 1800, a new volume of Lyrical Ballads, containing some of his best poems, was published. Quite undaunted by their want of popularity and the adverse judgment of the highest critics, relying on his own feelings and perceptions, he worked in his mountain retirement steadily on, devoting himself chiefly at this time to the biographical poem which, with the name of ‘The Prelude,’ was published, for the first time, after his death in July 1850.

So ends his story before he was thirty years old. After his settlement at Grasmere we do not imagine that his mind or genius developed or grew at all. It grew perhaps in bulk, we may say, but never altered its form or character, attaining merely more and more what he himself calls ‘the monumental pomp of age.’ In 1803 he made a tour in Scotland, of which a very pleasing record remains, not only in the occasional poems suggested by its incidents, but in the journal of his companion—his sister. Returning southward, they paid a visit, on September 17, to Mr. and Mrs. Scott, at their cottage at Lasswade, near Edinburgh. They received a promise that their host would join them again at Melrose, and, stopping on their way thither at the inn of Clovenford, were assured by the landlady that Mr. Scott was a very clever man. At Melrose they met and spent the evening together. The landlady here, says Miss Wordsworth, made some difficulty about beds, and refused to settle anything till she ascertained from the sheriff himself, i.e. Scott, that he had no objection to sleeping in the same room with William, i.e. Wordsworth.

Mr. Scott was already known in the literary world as a translator of German, and an editor of Scottish ballad poetry. But he had published nothing original; and it was not till two years after this, that (as it stands recorded) nothing in the history of British poetry ever equalled the demand for the ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel,’ the first four cantos of which Wordsworth and his sister had heard their author read during their visit at the cottage of Lasswade. In the same year, 1803, Wordsworth married, without, however, any great internal or domestic revolution. In 1832 Scott died. This is also the date of the collected edition, in four volumes, of ‘Wordsworth’s Poems,’ including ‘The Excursion,’ which, under general unpopularity, he had steadily gone on writing and publishing.

In 1839, in the theatre at Oxford, he received an honorary degree with unusual acclamation.

In 1840, on the death of Southey, he was, with a general feeling that it was his due, made Poet Laureate: 1850 conveyed his body to the quiet churchyard of Grasmere.