WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
'The Age grew sated with her frail wit,
Herself waxed weary on her loveless throne.
Men felt life's tide, the sweep and surge of it,
And craved a living voice, a natural tone.'
From Wordsworth's Grave, by William Watson.
WORDSWORTH is, of course, the greatest poet of the English Lake school. He is also the only one born in the lake counties, educated and, with slight exception, resident all his life within them. His birthplace was Cockermouth, his school the Grammar School of Hawkshead; his residences—except what time he briefly dwelt among the southern Quantock Hills—were at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, and Rydal Mount; his burial-place was among his kinsfolk in a quiet corner of Grasmere Churchyard, beneath the sycamores and yews. Most of his compeers and friends—Coleridge, Southey, De Quincey, Charles Lloyd, John Wilson, and even Hartley Coleridge—were born elsewhere, and came to live among these northern mountains in youth or manhood.
He wrote, also, more about our district, and wrote it better, than any other. This was partly due to patriotic devotion to his native corner of our common fatherland, partly because the love of rambling was ingrained in his being, chiefly because he was intuitively a Nature-poet, looking below the grand and the lovely into the mystical heart and core of sights and sounds that conceal and yet reveal their Creator, Fashioner, and Upholder. He was the inspired interpreter of things which ordinary men have not spiritual knowledge to understand—which, indeed, the majority do not so much as behold dimly until one of God's seers lifts the enshrouding veil.
Born in 1770, he died at noon on April 23, 1850. No one now living was contemporary with his birth. Middle-aged admirers of his poems, middle-aged controverters of his claim to pre-eminence, well remember the shadow of death that fell across the nation's heart when they heard the laureate had passed away. 'Surely,' writes F. W. H. Myers, 'of him, if of anyone, we may think as a man who was so in accord with Nature, so at one with the very soul of things, that there can be no mansion of the universe which shall not be to him a home, no governor that will not accept him among his servants, and satisfy him with love and peace.' There are few events to record between his earthly birth and his birth into the upper kingdom—or shall we say his return to that kingdom?—if there is anything in his own suggestion that—
'Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home.'
His was a domestic life after he left Cambridge, and had done some Continental travel and some in Scotland. It was spent in cottage homes with his beloved sister Dorothy, for a short while in Dorsetshire, another short while at Alfoxden, in Somerset, and then till his marriage at Grasmere. He was married to Mary Hutchinson at Penrith in 1802. As his family grew he removed successively into two larger houses, and eventually settled at Rydal Mount. Here his life was one of attention to his small Government appointment of stamp distributor, wandering 'lonely as a cloud,' and muttering to himself so much that the peasants deemed him half crazy; meditating upon and composing his immortal poems; and, after he had become famous, receiving literary guests from all the English-speaking peoples. His biography is a biography of the mind, a history of mental processes and tendencies, a record of the gradual creation of his own anthology. There are innumerable lives of him, of less or greater length, from the old one of Paxton Hood, and the most full and capable by his own nephew, and by Professor Knight, to the latest in the 'English Men of Letters Series.' Professor Knight, too, has given the world excellent editions of his poems, excellent selections therefrom, and a charming review of his connection with the lakes. All these are accessible to ordinary readers and hero-worshippers. It will answer my purpose best in this place to note only his local Nature-verses. Yet I may, perhaps, remind this generation that Wordsworth had to win his spurs—the recognition of his right to be ranked in any degree as a poet—and still more to be considered a teacher of his race. His earlier effusions passed through a veritable fire of scornful criticism. 'Primroses,' 'Daffodils,' 'Pet Lambs,' 'Idle Shepherd Boys,' 'Alice Fells' and 'Lucy Grays,' and 'Lines to a Friend's Spade,' were altogether too trivial themes for the responsible and serious muse, while 'Peter Bell' was a special subject of scorn. 'Poems of Sentiment' were merely 'sentimental.' The sonnets and larger pieces, particularly 'The Excursion,' were too heavy, and too laboured to be readable. Pantheism was charged upon him as an objectionable creed. Time justified him largely, and Wordsworth Societies helped to do so still further, though in some respects the slashing critics may have had fair ground. No other poet of his calibre is so unequal in the quality of his output. Wordsworth's poems are by no means, it cannot be too much insisted upon, all on the same high plane of merit, and many will never pass into the world's best thought, as nearly all Tennyson's have, to say nothing of Shakespeare's or Milton's.
He was pre-eminently a revealer of the kingdom of Nature, as seen in the mountains and lakes, the birds, the flowers, the peasantry of the counties of Westmorland and Cumberland, and the over-sea portion of Lancashire. Not only did he write an admirable guide for travellers and tourists in these regions, but there is scarcely a section of this land that he has not rendered classic ground by connecting with it some incident, some allusion, some poetical idealizing. Where shall I begin? With Windermere, of course. You remember this in the Prelude?
'When summer came,
Our pastime was, on bright half-holidays,
To sweep along the plain of Windermere
With rival oar; and the selected bourne
Was now an island musical with birds
That sang and ceased not; now a sister isle
Beneath the oak's umbrageous covert—sown
With lilies of the valley like a field;
And now a third small island, where survived
In solitude the ruins of a shrine
Once to Our Lady dedicate, and served
Daily with chanted rites.'
Better still than this is another passage from the same poem: