"That branching roof
Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells
Where light and shade repose, where music dwells,
Lingering and wandering on as loth to die."
A vacation passed in the mountains of Switzerland sharpened an appetite for travel upon the Continent; and thither he went shortly after taking his degree (1791); was in Orleans and in Paris the succeeding year; caught the fever of those revolutionary times, and for a while seriously entertained the purpose of throwing himself into the swirl of that tide of Girondism which was to fall away so shortly after, leaving tracks of blood.
There was a short stay in London on his return—counting for very little in the story of his life. Westminster Bridge and A Farmer of Tilsbury Vale are all that bring a glimmer of remembrance to the lover of his books, out of the tumult and roar of "Lothbury" and Cheapside. Thereafter came the quiet life in Dorsetshire with his good sister Dora—where his poetic moods first came to print—and where Coleridge found him (1796) and cemented that friendship which drew him next year into Somersetshire—a friendship, which, with one brief interruption, that promised a bitter quarrel—lasted throughout their lives. There—at Alfoxden, in Somersetshire—was forged that little book of Lyrical Ballads, containing the Ancient Mariner and Tintern Abbey—the best possible types of the respective powers of the two poets.
In 1799 Wordsworth established himself at Grasmere, in Westmoreland, his sister remaining—as she always did—a beloved inmate of his home. In 1802 he married, most fortunately, a woman who was always sympathetic and kindly, as well as an excellent and devoted mother of the children born to them;[[10]] moreover, she was exceptionally endowed to stimulate and give range to his poetic ambitions. Between Grasmere or its neighborhood, and the better-known home of Rydal Mount, the poet passed the remainder of his life. There were, indeed, frequent interludes of travel—to Scotland, to Leicestershire, to Southern England, to Ireland, and the Continent—from all which places he came back with an unabated love for the lakes and mountains which bounded his home. Never did there live a more exalted lover of Nature; and specially for those scenes of Nature which cradled him in infancy and which cheered his manhood. Without being largely experienced in the devices of gardening craft, he yet gave frequent and profitable advice to those among his friends who were building up homes in the surrounding lake district; and the Beaumont family of Leicestershire show with pride a winter garden at Coleorton, which is an evergreen remembrancer of the poet's skill and taste. He resented all undue interference with natural surfaces; his art was the larger art of winning one to the reasonableness and beauty of nature's own purposes.
Not a resident in the neighborhood of Ambleside but knew his gaunt figure stalking up and down the hills; yet not counted over-affable; the villagers report him—"distant, vera distant. As for his habits he had none—niver knew him wi' a pot i' his hand or a pipe i' his mouth." And another says—"As for fishing, he hadn't a bit of fish in him, hadn't Wordsworth—not a bit o' fish in him!"[[11]] This sounds strangely to one familiar with Lines to gold and silver fish in a glass globe.
Certainly he did not love babble nor little persiflage; he had neither the art to coin it nor the humor to redeem it. But he was capable of sensible, heavily-charged talk, even upon practical themes, showing a capacity for, and a habit of, consecutive and logical thinking. Often reading and discoursing on poets and their work, but chary of any exuberance of praise; if ever cynical, tending that way under such provocation. Not indisposed—for small cause—to recite from Wordsworth (as Emerson tells us in the story of his first visit to Rydal Mount); but reciting well, and putting large, dashing movement into the verse—as of faraway rebounding water-falls. His egotism, though not easily kept under, was not riotously exacting or audacious; one could see at the bottom of it—not the little vanities of a flibbertigibbet, but respect and reverence for his inborn seership and for his long priesthood at the altar of the Muses.
He had no musical ear, no power of distinguishing tunes, yet was rapt into ecstatic fervor by the near and sweet warbling of a bird. Books he loved only for their uses; he favored no finical "keeping" of them, but plunged into an uncut volume with a smeared fruit-knife—if need were. Southey dreaded his visits to his Keswick library, saying he was "like a bear in a tulip garden." He was parsimonious too; generosity in praise, or in purse, was unknown to him; and he had stiff school-mastery ways with youngish men—craving oblation and large tokens of respect. De Quincey said he never offered to carry a lady's shawl; hardly offered a hand to help her over a stile. He was not mobile, not adaptive, not gossipy; last of men for a picnic or a tea-party. His shaking of hands was "feckless;" which to a Scottish ear means a hand-shake not to be run after and with no heartiness in its grip. That home of Rydal Mount was a modest and charming one; within—severely simple; in abstemiousness the poet was almost an anchorite: without—a terrace walk, a velvety stretch of turf, mossy vases, a dial, a few patches of flowers, grayish house-walls on which the clambering vines took hold, quaint stone chimney-tops on which the lichens clung and around which the swallows played, views of Rydal Water, glimpses of Windermere, of Nab-scar, and of nearer heights crowned with foliage.
Wordsworth was never a man of large means; his poems gave only small moneyed returns; nor did he care overmuch for expensive indulgences; travelling was his greatest and most coveted luxury. All new scenes in nature came to his eye as so many new phases of his oldest and tenderest friend.
For a considerable period he was in receipt of a small revenue from a local Commissionership of Stamps, and during the last eight years of his life received a pension of £300 from the Government. A year after the grant, upon the death of Dr. Southey, he was, through the urgence of friends, and at the solicitation of Sir Robert Peel, induced to accept the post of Poet Laureate—going up to London, at the age of seventy-three, to kiss the hand of the young Queen, in recognition of that honor. This young Queen, then in her twenty-fourth year, was her present gracious lady, Victoria, who had succeeded to her bluff sailor-uncle, William IV., in 1837, and to her sorrier uncle, George IV., who had died in 1830.