We cannot patronise the practice of walking in large parties of ten or a score, ram-stam and helter-skelter, on to the front-green or gravel-walk of any private nobleman's or gentleman's house, to enjoy, from a commanding station, an extensive or picturesque view of the circumjacent country. It is too much in the style of the Free and Easy. The family within, sitting perhaps at dinner with the windows open, or sewing and reading in a cool dishabille, cannot like to be stared in upon by so many curious and inquisitive pupils all a-hunt for prospects; nor were these rose-bushes planted there for public use, nor that cherry-tree in vain netted against the blackbirds. Not but that a party may now and then excusably enough pretend to lose their way in a strange country; and looking around them in well-assumed bewilderment, bow hesitatingly and respectfully to maid or matron at door or window, and, with a thousand apologies, lingeringly offer to retire by the avenue gate, on the other side of the spacious lawn, that terrace-like hangs over vale, lake, and river. But to avoid all possible imputation of impertinence, follow you our example, and make all such incursions by break of day. We hold that, for a couple of hours before and after sunrise, all the earth is common property. Nobody surely would think for a moment of looking black on any number of freebooting lakers coming full sail up the avenue, right against the front, at four o'clock in the morning? At that hour, even the poet would grant them the privilege of the arbour where he sits when inspired, and writing for immortality. He feels conscious that he ought to have been in bed; and hastens, on such occasions, to apologise for his intrusion on strangers availing themselves of the rights and privileges of the Dawn.
Leaving Ivy-cottage, then, and its yet unbreathing chimneys, turn in at the first gate to your right (if it be not built up, in which case leap the wall), and find your way the best you can through among old pollarded and ivied ash-trees, intermingled with yews, and over knolly ground, brier-woven, and here and there whitened with the jagged thorn, till you reach, through a slate-stile, a wide gravel walk, shaded by pine-trees, and open on the one side to an orchard. Proceed—and little more than a hundred steps will land you on the front of Rydal-mount, the house of the great Poet of the Lakes. Mr Wordsworth is not at home, but away to cloudland in his little boat so like the crescent moon. But do not by too much eloquence awaken the family, or scare the silence, or frighten "the innocent brightness of the new-born day." We hate all sentimentalism; but we bid you, in his own words,
"With gentle hand
Touch, for there is a spirit in the leaves."
From a quaint platform of evergreens you see a blue gleam of Windermere over the grove-tops—close at hand are Rydal-hall and its ancient woods—right opposite the Loughrigg-fells, ferny, rocky, and sylvan, but the chief breadth of breast pastoral—and to the right Rydal-mere, seen, and scarcely seen, through embowering trees, and mountain-masses bathed in the morning light, and the white-wreathed mists for a little while longer shrouding their summits. A lately erected private chapel lifts its little tower from below, surrounded by a green, on which there are yet no graves—nor do we know if it be intended for a place of burial. A few houses are sleeping beyond the chapel by the river-side; and the people beginning to set them in order, here and there a pillar of smoke ascends into the air, giving cheerfulness and animation to the scene.
The Lake-Poets! ay, their day is come. The lakes are worthy of the poets, and the poets of the lakes. That poets should love and live among lakes, once seemed most absurd to critics whose domiciles were on the Nor-Loch, in which there was not sufficient water for a tolerable quagmire. Edinburgh Castle is a noble rock—so are the Salisbury Craigs noble craigs—and Arthur's seat a noble lion couchant, who, were he to leap down on Auld Reekie, would break her backbone and bury her in the Cowgate. But place them by Pavey-ark, or Red-scaur, or the glamour of Glaramara, and they would look about as magnificent as an upset pack of cards. Who, pray, are the Nor-Loch poets? Not the Minstrel—he holds by the tenure of the Tweed. Not Campbell—"he heard in dreams the music of the Clyde." Not Joanna Baillie—her inspiration was nursed on the Calder's sylvan banks and the moors of Strathaven. Stream-loving Coila nurtured Burns; and the Shepherd's grave is close to the cot in which he was born—within hearing of the Ettrick's mournful voice on its way to meet the Yarrow. Skiddaw overshadows, and Greta freshens the bower of him who framed,
"Of Thalaba, the wild and wondrous song."
Here the woods, mountains, and waters of Rydal imparadise the abode of the wisest of nature's bards, with whom poetry is religion. And where was he ever so happy as in that region, he who created "Christabelle," "beautiful exceedingly;" and sent the "Auncient Mariner" on the wildest of all voyagings, and brought him back with the ghastliest of all crews, and the strangest of all curses that ever haunted crime?
Of all Poets that ever lived Wordsworth has been at once the most truthful and the most idealising; external nature from him has received a soul, and becomes our teacher; while he has so filled our minds with images from her, that every mood finds some fine affinities there, and thus we all hang for sustenance and delight on the bosom of our mighty Mother. We believe that there are many who have an eye for Nature, and even a sense of the beautiful, without any very profound feeling; and to them Wordsworth's finest descriptive passages seem often languid or diffuse, and not to present to their eyes any distinct picture. Perhaps sometimes this objection may be just; but to paint to the eye is easier than to the imagination—and Wordsworth, taking it for granted that people can now see and hear, desires to make them feel and understand; of his pupil it must not be said,
"A primrose by the river's brim
A yellow primrose is to him,
And it is nothing more;"
the poet gives the something more till we start at the disclosure as at a lovely apparition—yet an apparition of beauty not foreign to the flower, but exhaling from its petals, which till that moment seemed to us but an ordinary bunch of leaves. In these lines is a humbler example of how recondite may be the spirit of beauty in any most familiar thing belonging to the kingdom of nature; one higher far—but of the same kind—is couched in two immortal verses—