WORDSWORTH AT COCKERMOUTH.
It was a difference that arose on the American question, between Sir James Lowther and his law agent and steward, a certain John Robinson, in the year 1766, that was the prime cause of the fact that Wordsworth, the poet, was born here. For John Robinson resigned his stewardship, and young John Wordsworth, then only 24 years of age, 'a man of great force of character and real human capacity,' was appointed in his place to be 'law agent and steward of the manor of Ennerdale.' To that post, which he occupied for the next 18 years, the young man came from the Penrith neighbourhood, bringing with him as his girl wife a certain Ann Cookson, a mercer's daughter, who could boast, through her descent on her mother's side from the Crackanthorpes, of Newbiggin Hall, an ancestry that flowed from as far back as the time of Edward III. She was thus well suited to marry the son of the land agent of Sockbridge, near Penistone, who traced his descent through a long unbroken line of sturdy Yorkshire yeomen away in the Penistone neighbourhood, as far as to the time of the Norman Conqueror. They took up their abode in the substantial house now occupied by Mr. Robinson Mitchell, then lately builded by one Sheriff Luckock. It bears date 1745-46, and is to-day unmarred and unmodernised, remaining much as it was when John Wordsworth became its tenant. We know little of this young John Wordsworth, but he must have been a man 'tender and deep in his excess of love,' for when, after twelve years of happy married life here in the old manor house beside the Derwent, his wife died from consumption, caught, as we are told, by being put into a damp bed in the 'best room' when on a visit to friends in London, he never seemed to recover his spirits, and he himself died six years after her, in the year 1783, on the 30th December, and lies buried at the east end of the All Saints' Church. He lost his way on the fells when returning from some business engagement at Broughton-in-Furness, and was obliged to stay out all night; the chill from exposure brought on inflammation of the lungs, and his strength, sapped by deep domestic sorrow, could not bear up against it. The orphans whom he left, Richard, William, Dorothy, John, and Christopher, four of whom were remarkable in after life, were then removed to the care of their uncle Cookson at Penrith, and Cockermouth knew them no more. We have been allowed, from William Wordsworth's autobiographical notes and his poems, to glean something of those early days. The poet tells us:
Early died
My honoured mother, she who was the heart
And hinge of all our learnings and our loves,
Nor would I praise her, but in perfect love!
We can in fancy see her in earnest converse with Mr. Ellbanks, the teacher of the school by the churchyard, talking about William's 'moody and stiff temper'; we can hear her say 'that the only one of the children about whom she has fears is William; and he will be remarkable for good or evil.' We may note her pinning on the child's breast the Easter nosegay, for the young lad is to go up to the church, to say his catechism. Daffodils I expect the flowers were: years after, in the ecclesiastical sonnets Words worth, speaking of this act of his mother's, writes:
Sweet flowers at whose inaudible command
Her countenance phantom-like doth reappear.
Or we can see the father, book in hand, hearing the lad recite the long passages of Shakespeare, and Milton, and Spenser which were insensibly to mould his ear to music, fire his imagination, and make a poet of him.
But when I think of Wordsworth in those childish days I do not go off to the ancient school by the church to hear him stumble through Latin verbs. He was not as happy there as he was at Mrs. Birkett's, the dame's school at Penrith; there was no Mary Hutchinson to keep him company; and he learned, he tells us, when he went to Hawkshead at the age of ten, more Latin in a fortnight than he had learned the two previous years at Cockermouth. No, rather when I want to see the little William Wordsworth at his happiest, I go with him into the old Manor House Terrace garden by the Derwent's side, and see him with his sister, that sister 'Emmeline,' as he called her, chasing the butterfly, or hand in hand peering through the rose and privet hedge at the sparrow's nest, 'wishing yet fearing to be near it.'
Or, follow him with his nurse, he a child of only five years of age, bathing and basking alternate, all the hot August day in the shallows of the mill pool, and leaping naked as an Indian through the tall garden ragwort on the sands, and clapping his hands to see the rainbow spring from middle air. Or I go with him by the river, 'winding among its grassy holmes,' whose voice flowed along his earliest dreams—that Derwent he could never forget—away to the Castle-hold of the barons of old time, Waldeof, Umfraville, Multon, Lucies, and Nevilles, and watch him peering with look of awe into the dark cellar and dungeons, watch him chase the butterfly through the grim courts or climb after the tufts of golden wallflower upon its broken battlements.
But happiest of all was he when with his story book he lay full stretched, as he describes in the Prelude, upon the sun-warmed stones and sandy banks 'beside the bright blue river,' and there feasted his little heart on fairy tale and filled his soul with scenes from wonderland.
Wordsworth was never unmindful of the home of his birth. He left Cockermouth for schooldays at Hawkshead when he was a boy of nine, and though in the holidays, for the next five years, he paid an occasional visit to the place, his chief vacation associations were with Penrith. The Poet's connection with this town ceased at his father's death in 1784, when he was a lad of fourteen; but he never forgot it. From nature and her overflowing soul here in his childhood days he had received so much that all his thoughts were steeped in a feeling of grateful remembrance of it. He visited the home of his childhood occasionally to refresh his heart with a cup of remembrance, and we find a note of a certain visit in Dorothy's letter to Mrs. Marshall. Writing in September, 1807, she says:—'W. and M. have just returned. They were at Cockermouth, our native place you know, and the Terrace Walk—that you have heard me speak of many a time—with the privet hedge, is still full of roses as it was thirty years ago. Yes, I remember it for more than thirty years.'