So once it would have been—‘tis so no more;
I have submitted to a new control;
A power is gone, which nothing can restore;
A deep distress hath humanised my soul.
Not for a moment could I now behold
A smiling sea, and be what I have been;
The feeling of my loss will ne’er be old;
This, which I know, I speak with mind serene.
Then, Beaumont, friend! who would have been the friend,
If he had lived, of him whom I deplore,
This work of thine I blame not, but commend;
This sea in anger, and that dismal shore.
O ’tis a passionate work!—yet wise and well;
Well chosen is the spirit that is here;
That hulk, which labours in the deadly swell,
This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear!
And this huge castle, standing here sublime,
I love to see the look with which it braves,
Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time,
The lightning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves.
Farewell, farewell, the heart that lives alone,
Housed in a dream, at distance from the kind!
Such happiness, wherever it be known,
Is to be pitied, for ’tis surely blind.
But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer,
And frequent sights of what is to be borne!
Such sights, or worse, as are before me here.—
Not without hope we suffer, and we mourn.”
—1805.
About a month after his brother’s death, Wordsworth concluded his “Prelude,” upon which he had been employed for upwards of six years. In allusion to this poem, Coleridge, in the “Table Talk,” says: “I cannot help regretting that Wordsworth did not first publish his thirteen books (there are fourteen of them,) “On the growth of an individual mind,”—superior, as I used to think, on the whole, to the “Excursion!” ... Then the plan laid out, and I believe partly suggested by me was, that Wordsworth should assume the station of a man in mental repose, one whose principles were made up, and so prepared to deliver upon authority a system of philosophy. He was to treat man as man, a subject of eye, ear, touch and taste, in contact with external nature, and inferring the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out of the senses; then he was to describe the pastoral and other states of society, assuming something of the Juvenalian spirit as he approached the high civilization of cities and towns, and opening a melancholy picture of the present state of degeneracy and vice; thence he was to infer and reveal the proof of, and necessity for, the whole state of man and society being subject to, and illustrative of, a redemptive process in operation, showing how this idea reconciled all the anomalies, and promised future glory and restoration.”
Wordsworth himself unfolds his own plan of the poem to Sir George Beaumont, in a letter dated December 25th, 1804. It was to consist, first of all, of a poem to be called “The Recluse,” wherein the poet was to express in verse, his own feelings concerning Man, Nature, and Society—and, secondly, a poem on his earlier life or the growth of his own mind. This latter poem was “The Prelude,” two thousand verses of which, he says, in the same letter, he had written during the last ten weeks. “The Prelude,” therefore, which was not published till after the poet’s death, was first written, and “The Recluse,” subsequently. Only a part of this poem, however—viz., “The Excursion,” except, of course, “The Prelude,” is published; “The Recluse” Proper, being still in MS.
Besides these larger works, Wordsworth threw off—not without care and meditation,—for no man ever wrote with more method and purpose—many minor poems, and amongst them was “The Waggoner,” dedicated to Charles Lamb, but not published until 1819. It was in this year (1805) that Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, and Sir Humphry Davy ascended Helvellyn together; and learned the sad story of poor Charles Gough, who perished in attempting to cross over Helvellyn to Grasmere, by slipping from a steep part of the rock, where the ice was not thawed, and beside whose remains his faithful dog was found many days afterwards, almost starved to death. This affecting incident afforded a theme for both poets—viz., Sir Walter and Wordsworth, and each wrote upon it without knowing that the other was similarly engaged. Scott’s poem is entitled “Helvellyn,” and Wordsworth’s “Fidelity.”