[264] “On Sunday, August 1st, ½ after 12, I had a shirt, cravat, 2 pairs of stockings, a little paper, and half dozen pens, a German book (Voss’s Poems), and a little tea and sugar, with my night cap, packed up in my natty green oil-skin, neatly squared, and put into my net knapsack, and the knapsack on my back and the besom stick in my hand, which for want of a better, and in spite of Mrs. C. and Mary, who both raised their voices against it, especially as I left the besom scattered on the kitchen floor, off I sallied over the bridge, through the hop-field, through the Prospect Bridge, at Portinscale, so on by the tall birch that grows out of the centre of the huge oak, along into Newlands.” MS. Journal of tour in the Lake District, August 1-9, 1802, sent in the form of a letter to the Wordsworths and transcribed by Miss Sarah Hutchinson.
[265] “The following month, September (1802), was marked by the birth of his first child, a daughter, named after her paternal grandmother, Margaret.” Southey’s Life and Correspondence, ii. 192.
[266] Southey’s reply, which was not in the affirmative, has not been preserved. The joint-residence at Greta Hall began in September, 1803.
[267] Charles and Mary Lamb’s visit to Greta Hall, which lasted three full weeks, must have extended from (about) August 12 to September 2, 1802. Letters of Charles Lamb, i. 180-184.
“Here melancholy, on the pale crags laid,
Might muse herself to sleep; or Fancy come,
Watching the mind with tender cozenage
And shaping things that are not.”
“Coombe-Ellen, written in Radnorshire, September, 1798.” “Poems of William Lisle Bowles,” Galignani, p. 139. For “Melancholy, a Fragment,” see Poetical Works, p. 34.
[269] I have not been able to verify this reference.
[270] “O my God! what enormous mountains there are close by me, and yet below the hill I stand on.... And here I am, lounded [i. e., sheltered],—so fully lounded,—that though the wind is strong and the clouds are hastening hither from the sea, and the whole air seaward has a lurid look, and we shall certainly have thunder,—yet here (but that I am hungered and provisionless), here I could be warm and wait, methinks, for to-morrow’s sun—and on a nice stone table am I now at this moment writing to you—between 2 and 3 o’clock, as I guess. Surely the first letter ever written from the top of Sca Fell.”
“After the thunder-storm I shouted out all your names in the sheep-fold—where echo came upon echo, and then Hartley and Derwent, and then I laughed and shouted Joanna. It leaves all the echoes I ever heard far, far behind, in number, distinctness and humanness of voice; and then, not to forget an old friend, I made them all say Dr. Dodd etc.” MS. Journal, August 6, 1802. Compare Lamb’s Latin letter of October 9, 1802:—