In one of Miss Wordsworth’s letters, dated August 14, 1797, she speaks with great enthusiasm and delight, both of the house and the country. “Here we are,” she says, “in a large mansion, in a large park, with seventy head of deer around us.... Sea, woods wild as fancy ever painted, brooks clear and pebbly as in Cumberland, villages so romantic, &c. The woods are as fine as those at Lowther, and the country more romantic; it has the character of the less grand part of the neighbourhood of the Lakes.” She then describes their “favourite parlour,” which, like that of Racedown, looks into the garden. They were three miles from Stowey, and only two from the sea. Look which way they would, their eyes were filled with beauty: smooth downs, and valleys with small brooks running down them, through green meadows, hardly ever intersected with hedges, but scattered over with trees. The hills were covered with bilberries, or oak woods. They could walk for miles over the hill-tops, which was quite smooth, without rocks.
And in this beautiful locality did the poet reside for about twelve months, composing during that time, all the poems contained in the first edition of the “Lyrical Ballads,” with the exception of the “Female Vagrant.” These Ballads are in many ways remarkable: in the first place, because they were the joint production of men who subsequently proved themselves to be two of our greatest poets; and, secondly, because they brought these men prominently before the eyes of the public and of the critical world. The Ballads, as they were called, were likewise of a very high order; and it is not too much to say, that such a book of poems as this had not been published since the Augustan era of our literature, Milton’s alone excepted, if Milton may not be said to have closed that era. Here first appeared the “Ancient Mariner,” and the “Nightingale,” by Coleridge; “Tintern Abbey,” and “Lines left under a Yew-tree Seat,” by Wordsworth; four poems which of themselves were sufficient to float half a dozen volumes. It is true that the “Ancient Mariner,” the “Old Navigator,” as Coleridge loved to call it, is what may be styled a made-up poem—a wild, unearthly patchwork of the imagination,—but it contains, nevertheless, such passages as it would be rare to match outside those seas. It is full, too, of all kinds of music—sweet, wild, natural, and supernatural—now grand, like the rolling bass of some mighty organ, and now, ærial, celestial; catching up the reader into a strange heaven, and filling him with an unspeakable ecstacy. Wonderful power is likewise manifested in the structure of the tale; and one is amazed how so slender an incident, as that upon which the tale is founded, could be worked out so successfully, and with such deep and thrilling interest. The “Nightingale,” however, is quite a different poem, and is redolent of nature. “Tintern Abbey,” and “Lines left under a Yew-tree Seat,” are in Wordsworth’s best style, and have never been surpassed by him, in the fullest maturity of his genius.
The idea of the “Ballads” originated in the following circumstances: Wordsworth and his sister, accompanied by Coleridge, commenced a pedestrian tour, in November 1797, to Linton, and the Valley of Stones, near it. The whole party, however, were so poor that they could ill afford the expense of the journey, and the two poets resolved to write a poem for the “New Monthly Magazine,” for which they hoped to get £5, and thus balance the outlay which they required for the tour. The course of the friends lay along the Quartock Hills, towards Watchet; and here it was that Coleridge planned his “Old Navigator,” the base of it being, as he said, a dream of Cruikshanks’. Wordsworth and Coleridge were to have written this poem conjointly, but the great dissimilarity of their manner soon compelled them to abandon this idea, and Coleridge was left to complete the work by himself. Wordsworth suggested, however, as some crime was to be committed by the Mariner, which was to bring upon him a spectral persecution in his wanderings, as the consequence of that crime, that he should be represented as having killed an Albatross on entering the South-Sea, and that the tutelary spirits of these regions should follow him and avenge the crime. The navigation of the ship by the dead men was also a suggestion of Wordsworth’s. As Coleridge proceeded with his work, it was very soon found that it would be too long for the Magazine, and they began to think of issuing it as a volume, along with other poems, by both bards. These poems were to be founded “on supernatural subjects, taken from common life, but to be looked at, as much as might be, through an imaginative medium.” Wordsworth’s share in the poetical contributions to this volume, besides those already mentioned were, amongst others, “The Idiot Boy,” “Her Eyes are Wild,” “We are Seven,” and “The Thorn.” The last verse of “We are Seven,” was composed first, and Coleridge threw off, impromptu, the first verse of the poem, whilst the little party were sitting down to tea, in the pretty little parlour at Alfoxden, which looked out into the garden. Speaking of the “Idiot Boy,” Wordsworth says:—“The last stanza, ‘The cocks did crow, and moon did shine so cold,’ was the production of the whole. The words were reported to me by my dear friend Thomas Poole; but I have since heard the same reported of other idiots. Let me add, that this long poem was composed in the groves of Alfoxden, almost extempore; not a word, I believe, being corrected, though one stanza was omitted. I mention this in gratitude to those happy moments, for in truth I never wrote anything with so much glee.”
It was in 1798 that the Lines to Tintern Abbey were written. The poet and his sister had been staying for a week with Mr. Cottle, of Bristol, visiting Coleridge by the way, who had a little time before resigned his ministerial engagement with a Unitarian congregation at Bristol, and was now in receipt of an annuity of £150, given to him by the magnificent generosity of “Josiah and Thomas Wedgwood.” From Mr. Cottle’s they proceeded to the Banks of the Wye, crossed the Severn ferry, and walked ten miles further to Tintern Abbey, a very beautiful ruin on the Wye. They proceeded, next morning, along the river, through Monmouth, to Goderich Castle, returning to Tintern in a boat, and from thence in a small vessel back again to Bristol.
“The Wye,” says Wordsworth, “is a stately and majestic river, from its width and depth, but never slow and sluggish—you can always hear its murmur. It travels through a woody country, now varied with cottages and green meadows, and now with huge and fantastic rocks.... No poem of mine was composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember than this [viz., “Tintern Abbey:”]—I began it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye, and concluded it just as I was entering Bristol, in the evening, after a ramble of four or five days with my sister. Not a line of it was uttered, and not any part of it written down, till I reached Bristol. It was published almost immediately after in the “Lyrical Ballads.”
“Peter Bell” was likewise written about this time; and the following interesting particulars, respecting its origin, are furnished by the poet:
“This tale was founded upon an anecdote which I read in a newspaper, of an ass being found hanging his head over a canal, in a wretched posture. Upon examination, a dead body was found in the water, and proved to be the body of its master. In the woods of Alfoxden, I used to take great delight in noticing the habits, tricks, and physiognomy of asses; and it was here, no doubt, that I was put upon writing the Poem of ‘Peter Bell,’ out of liking for the creature that is so often dreadfully abused. The countenance, gait, and figure of Peter were taken from a wild rover with whom I walked from Builth, on the river Wye, downwards, nearly as far as the town of Hay. He told me strange stories. It has always been a pleasure to me through life, to catch at every opportunity that has occurred in my rambles, of being acquainted with this class of people. The number of Peter’s wives was taken from the trespasses in this way of a lawless creature who lived in the county of Durham, and used to be attended by many women, sometimes not less than half a dozen, as disorderly as himself; and a story went in the county, that he had been heard to say, whilst they were quarrelling: “Why can’t you be quiet?—there’s none so many of you.’ Benoni, or the child of sorrow, I knew when I was a school-boy. His mother had been deserted by a gentleman in the neighbourhood, she herself being a gentlewoman by birth. The circumstances of her story were told me by my dear old dame, Ann Tyson, who was her confidante. The lady died broken-hearted. The crescent moon, which makes such a figure in the prologue, assumed this character one evening, while I was watching its beauty, in front of Alfoxden House. I intended this poem for the volume before spoken of; but it was not published for more than twenty years afterwards. The worship of the Methodists, or Ranters, is often heard during the stillness of the summer evening, in the country, with affecting accompaniments of moral beauty. In both the psalmody and voice of the preacher there is not unfrequently much solemnity, likely to impress the feelings of the rudest characters, under favourable circumstances.”
It was during Wordsworth’s residence in the South, in 1794, that a circumstance occurred, which has not been alluded to before in these memoirs, but which is interesting in itself, and still more so from the fact that it was the means of making Wordsworth acquainted with Coleridge, Southey, Robert Lovell, and George Burnet. I will relate this circumstance in the language of a writer for Chambers’ Papers for the People, and quote still further passages from the same tract, illustrative of the life of Wordsworth and his friends, at this time.[G]
The circumstance was as follows: Coleridge, Southey, Lovell, and Burnet “came down to Bristol, as the most convenient part from which they could embark for the wild banks of the Susquehana. On that remote river they were to found a Platonic Republic, where everything was to be in common, and from which vice and selfishness were to be for ever excluded. These ardent and intellectual adventurers had made elaborate calculations how long it would take them to procure the necessaries of life, and to build their barns, and how they should spend their leisure in what Coleridge sung as
‘Freedom’s undivided dell,
Where toil and health with mellowed love shall dwell;
Far from folly, far from men,
In the rude romantic glen.’