And so ended my Easter Monday talk with the poet's quondam gardener's boy, the now typical beerhouse-keeper, half pleased, half proud, to remember his old master in such service as he rendered him, in the days when it was judged that to keep a boy out of mischief and from bad company it was advisable to get him a place at Rydal Mount.
I must ask you next to take a seat with me in a waller's cottage. If tea and bread and butter is offered, you had better take it also, it is almost sure to be pressed upon you, and it is of the best. I will be interrogator, only by way of introduction saying, that our host is a splendid type of the real Westmoreland gentleman labourer, who was in his days a wrestler too, and whose occupation at the building of Foxhow and Fiddler's Farm in the Rydal Valley, often allowed him to see the poet in old times.
'Well, George, what sort o' a man in personal appearance was Mr. Wordsworth?'
'He was what you might ca' a ugly man,—mak of John Rigg much,—much about seame height, 6 feet or 6 feet 2,—smaller, but deal rougher in the face.'
I knew John Rigg by sight, and can fancy from the pictures of the poet that the likeness is striking in the brow and profile.
'But he was,' continued George, 'numbledy in t' kneas, walked numbledy, ye kna, but that might o' wussened wi' age.' In George's mind age accounted for most of the peculiarities he had noticed in the poet, but George's memory could go back fifty years, and he ought to have remembered Wordsworth as hale and hearty. 'He wozn't a man as said a deal to common fwoak. But he talked a deal to hissen. I often seead his lips a gaäin', and he'd a deal o' mumblin' to hissel, and 'ud stop short and be a lookin' down upo' the ground, as if he was in a thinkin' waäy. But that might ha' growed on him wi' age, an' aw, ye kna.'
How true, thought I, must have been the poet's knowledge of himself.
And who is he with modest looks,
And clad in sober russet gown?
He murmurs by the running brooks,
A music sweeter than their own;
He is retired as noontide dew,
Or fountain in a noonday grove.
And indeed, in all the reminiscences I have obtained among the peasantry, these lines force themselves upon one as corroborated by their evidence.