‘The sister’s eye was ever on the watch to provide for the poet’s pen.’ He had a most observant eye, and she also for him; and his poems are sometimes little more than poetic versions of her descriptions of the objects which she had seen; and which he treated as seen by himself. Look at the poem on the ‘Daffodils’ and compare with it these words taken from the sister’s Journal. ‘When we were in the woods below Gowbarrow Park, we saw a few daffodils close by the water-side. As we went along there were more and yet more; and at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw there were a long belt of them along the shore. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about them. Some rested their heads on the stones, as on a pillow; the rest tossed, and reeled, and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind, they looked so gay and glancing.’ It may also be noted that the Poet’s future wife contributed to this poem these two best lines—
‘They flash upon that inward eye,
Which is the bliss of solitude.’
Or take another description from Miss Wordsworth’s Journal of a birch-tree, ‘the lady of the woods,’ which her brother has not versified:—‘As we were going along we were stopped at once, at the distance, perhaps, of fifty yards from our favourite birch-tree: it was yielding to the gust of the wind, with all its tender twigs; the sun shone upon it, and it glanced in the wind like a flying sunshiny shower. It was a tree in shape, with stem and branches, but it was like a spirit of water.’
The life which the Poet and his sister lived during the eight years at the Townend of Grasmere stands out with
a marked individuality which it is delightful ever so often to recur to. It was as unlike the lives of most literary or other men, as the most original of his poems are unlike the ordinary run of even good poetry. Their outward life was exactly like that of the dalesmen or ‘statesmen’—for so the native yeomen proprietors are called—with whom they lived on the most friendly footing, and among whom they found their chief society. Outwardly their life was so, but inwardly it was cheered by imaginative visitings to which these were strangers. Sheltered as they then were from the agitations of the world, the severe frugality of the life they led ministered in more than one way to feed that poetry which introduced a new element into English thought. It kept the mind cool, and the eye clear, to feel once more that kinship between the outward world and the soul of man, to perceive that impassioned expression in the countenance of all nature, which, if felt by primeval men, ages of cultivation have long forgotten. It also made them wise to practise the same frugality in emotional enjoyment which they exercised in household economy. It has been well noted [0a] that this is one of Wordsworth’s chief characteristics. It is the temptation of the poetic temperament to be prodigal of passion, to demand a life always strung to the highest pitch of emotional excitement, to be never content unless when passing from fervour to fervour. No life can long endure this strain. This is specially seen in such poets as Byron and Shelley, who speedily fell from the heights of passion to the depths of languor and despondency. The same quick using up of the power of enjoyment produces the too common product of the
blasé man and the cynic. Wordsworth early perceived that all, even the richest, natures have but a very limited capacity of uninterrupted enjoyment, and that nothing is easier than to exhaust this capacity. Hence he set himself to husband it, to draw upon it sparingly, to employ it only on the purest, most natural, and most enduring objects, and not to speedily dismiss or throw them by and demand more, but to detain them till they had yielded him their utmost. From this in part it came that the commonest sights of earth and sky—a fine spring day, a sunset, even a chance traveller met on a moor, any ordinary sorrow of man’s life—yielded to him an amount of imaginative interest inconceivable to more mundane spirits. The simple healthiness and strict frugality of his household life suited well, and must have greatly assisted, that wholesome frugality of emotion which he exercised.
During those seven or eight Grasmere years, the spring of poetry which burst forth at Alfoxden, and produced the first volume of ‘Lyrical Ballads,’ flowed steadily on and found expression in other poems of like quality and spirit,—‘Hartleap Well,’ ‘The Brothers,’ ‘Michael,’ which, with others of the same order, written in Germany, appeared in the second volume of ‘Lyrical Ballads.’ And after these two volumes had gone forth, Grasmere still gave more of the same high order,—‘The Daffodils,’ ‘The Leech-Gatherer,’ and above all the ‘Ode on Immortality.’ It was too the conclusion of the ‘Prelude,’ and the beginning of the ‘Excursion.’ So that it may be said that those Grasmere years, from 1800 to 1807, mark the period when Wordsworth’s genius was in its zenith. During all this time, sister Dorothy was by his side, ministering to him, equally in body and in mind—doing the part of household servant,
and not less that of prompter and inspirer of his highest songs.
But this life of theirs, retired and uneventful as it seems, was not without its own incidents. Such was the homecoming of their younger sailor-brother John, who, in the first year of their residence at Grasmere—
‘Under their cottage roof, had gladly come
From the wild sea a cherished visitant.’