Mr. Wilson and most of his family I had already known for six years. We had projected journeys together through Spain and Greece, all of which had been nipped in the bud by Napoleon's furious and barbarous mode of making war. It was no joke, as it had been in past times, for an Englishman to be found wandering in continental regions; the pretence that he was, or might be, a spy—a charge so easy to make, so impossible to throw off—at once sufficed for the hanging of the unhappy traveller. In one of his Spanish bulletins, Napoleon even boasted[178] of having hanged sixteen Englishmen, "merchants or others of that nation," whom he taxed with no suspicion even of being suspected, beyond the simple fact of being detected in the act of breathing Spanish air. These atrocities had interrupted our continental schemes; and we were thus led the more to roam amongst home scenes. How it happened I know not—for we had wandered together often in England—but, by some accident, it was not until 1814 that we visited Edinburgh together. Then it was that I first saw Scotland.
I remember a singular incident which befell us on the road. Breakfasting together, before starting, at Mr. Wilson's place of Elleray, we had roamed, through a long and delightful day, by way of Ulleswater, &c. Reaching Penrith at night, we slept there; and in the morning, as we were sunning ourselves in the street, we saw, seated in an arm-chair, and dedicating himself to the self-same task of apricating his jolly personage, a rosy, jovial, portly man, having something of the air of a Quaker. Good nature was clearly his predominating quality; and, as that happened to be our foible also, we soon fell into talk; and from that into reciprocations of good will; and from those into a direct proposal, on our new friend's part, that we should set out upon our travels together. How—whither—to what end or object—seemed as little to enter into his speculations as the cost of realizing them. Rare it is, in this business world of ours, to find any man in so absolute a state of indifference and neutrality that for him all quarters of the globe, and all points of the compass, are self-balanced by philosophic equilibrium of choice. There seemed to us something amusing and yet monstrous in such a man; and, perhaps, had we been in the same condition of exquisite indetermination, to this hour we might all have been staying together at Penrith. We, however, were previously bound to Edinburgh; and, as soon as this was explained to him, that way he proposed to accompany us. We took a chaise, therefore, jointly, to Carlisle; and, during the whole eighteen miles, he astonished us by the wildest and most frantic displays of erudition, much of it levelled at Sir Isaac Newton. Much philosophical learning also he exhibited; but the grotesque accompaniment of the whole was that, after every bravura, he fell back into his corner in fits of laughter at himself. We began to find out the unhappy solution of his indifference and purposeless condition; he was a lunatic; and, afterwards, we had reason to suppose that he was now a fugitive from his keepers. At Carlisle he became restless and suspicious; and, finally, upon some real or imaginary business, he turned aside to Whitehaven. We were not the objects of his jealousy; for he parted with us reluctantly and anxiously. On our part, we felt our pleasure overcast by sadness; for we had been much amused by his conversation, and could not but respect the philological learning which he had displayed. But one thing was whimsical enough:—Wilson purposely said some startling things—startling in point of decorum, or gay pleasantries contra bonos mores; at every sally of which he looked as awfully shocked as though he himself had not been holding the most licentious talk in another key, licentious as respected all truth of history or of science. Another illustration, in fact, he furnished of what I have so often heard Coleridge say—that lunatics, in general, so far from being the brilliant persons they are thought, and having a preternatural brightness of fancy, usually are the very dullest and most uninspired of mortals. The sequel of our poor friend's history—for the apparent goodness of his nature had interested us both in his fortunes, and caused us to inquire after him through all probable channels—was, that he was last seen by a Cambridge man of our acquaintance, but under circumstances which confirmed our worst fears. It was in a stage-coach; and, at first, the Cantab suspected nothing amiss; but, some accident of conversation having started the topic of La Place's Mechanique Celeste, off flew our jolly Penrith friend in a tirade against Sir Isaac Newton; so that at once we recognised him, as the Vicar of Wakefield his "cosmogony friend" in prison; but—and that was melancholy to hear—this tirade was suddenly checked, in the rudest manner, by a brutal fellow in one corner of the carriage, who, as it now appeared, was attending him as a regular keeper, and, according to the custom of such people, always laid an interdict upon every ebullition of fancy or animated thought. He was a man whose mind had got some wheel entangled, or some spring overloaded, but else was a learned and able person; and he was to be silent at the bidding of a low, brutal fellow, incapable of distinguishing between the gaieties of fancy and the wandering of the intellect. Sad fate! and sad inversion of the natural relations between the accomplished scholar and the rude illiterate boor!
Of Edinburgh I thought to have spoken at length. But I pause, and retreat from the subject, when I remember that so many of those whom I loved and honoured at that time—some, too, among the gayest of the gay—are now lying in their graves. Of Professor Wilson's sisters, the youngest, at that time a child almost, and standing at the very vestibule of womanhood, is alone living; she has had a romantic life; has twice traversed, with no attendance but her servants, the gloomy regions of the Caucasus, and once with a young child by her side. Her husband, Mr. M'Neill, is now the English Envoy at the court of Teheran. On the rest, one of whom I honoured and loved as a sister, the curtain has fallen; and here, in the present mood of my spirits, I also feel disposed to drop a curtain over my subsequent memoirs. Farewell, hallowed recollections!
Thus, I have sketched the condition of the Lake District, as to society of an intellectual order, at the time (viz. the winter of 1808-9) when I became a personal resident in that district; and, indeed, from this era, through a period of about twenty years in succession, I may describe my domicile as being amongst the lakes and mountains of Westmoreland. It is true, I often made excursions to London, Bath, and its neighbourhood, or northwards to Edinburgh, and, perhaps, on an average, passed one-fourth part of each year at a distance from this district; but here only it was that henceforwards I had a house and small establishment. The house, for a very long course of years, was that same cottage in Grasmere, embowered in roses and jessamine, which I have already described as a spot hallowed to the admirers of Mr. Wordsworth by his seven years' occupation of its pretty chambers and its rocky orchard: a little domain, which he has himself apostrophized as the "lowest stair in that magnificent temple" forming the north-eastern boundary of Grasmere. The little orchard is rightly called "the lowest stair"; for within itself all is ascending ground; hardly enough of flat area on which to pitch a pavilion, and even that scanty surface an inclined plane; whilst the rest of the valley, into which you step immediately from the garden gate, is (according to the characteristic beauty of the northern English valleys, as first noticed by Mr. Wordsworth himself) "flat as the floor of a temple."
In sketching the state of the literary society gathered or gathering about the English lakes, at the time of my settling amongst them, I have of course authorized the reader to suppose that I personally mixed freely amongst the whole; else I should have had neither the means for describing that society with truth, nor any motive for attempting it. Meantime the direct object of my own residence at the lakes was the society of Mr. Wordsworth. And it will be a natural inference that, if I mingled on familiar or friendly terms with this society, a fortiori would Mr. Wordsworth do so, as belonging to the lake district by birth, and as having been, in some instances, my own introducer to members of this community. But it was not so; and never was a grosser blunder committed than by Lord Byron when, in a letter to Mr. Hogg (from which an extract is given in some volume of Mr. Lockhart's "Life of Sir Walter Scott"), he speaks of Wordsworth, Southey, &c., in connexion with Sir Walter, as all alike injured by mixing only with little adoring coteries, which each severally was supposed to have gathered about himself as a centre.[179] Now, had this really been the case, I know not how the objects of such a partial or exclusive admiration could have been injured by it in any sense with which the public were concerned. A writer may—and of that there are many instances—write the worse for meeting nobody of sympathy with himself; no admiration sufficient to convince him that he has written powerfully: that misfortune, when it occurs, may injure a writer, or may cause him to cease cultivating his genius. But no man was ever injured by the strong reflection of his own power in love and admiration; not as a writer, I mean: though it is very true, from the great variety of modes in which praise, or the indirect flattery of silent homage, acts upon different minds, that some men may be injured as social companions: vanity, and, still more, egotism—the habit of making self the central point of reference in every treatment of every subject—may certainly be cherished by the idolatry of a private circle, continually ascending; but arrogance and gloomy anti-social pride are qualities much more likely to be favoured by sympathy withheld, and the unjust denial of a man's pretensions. This, however, need not be discussed with any reference to Mr. Wordsworth; for he had no such admiring circle: no applauding coterie ever gathered about him.[180] Wordsworth was not a man to be openly flattered; his pride repelled that kind of homage, or any homage that offered itself with the air of conferring honour; and repelled it in a tone of loftiness or arrogance that never failed to kindle the pride of the baffled flatterer. Nothing in the way of applause could give Wordsworth any pleasure, unless it were the spontaneous and half-unconscious utterance of delight in some passage—the implicit applause of love, half afraid to express itself; or else the deliberate praise of rational examination, study, and comparison, applied to his writings: these were the only modes of admiration which could recommend themselves to Wordsworth. But, had it been otherwise, there was another mistake in what Lord Byron said:—The neighbouring people, in every degree, "gentle and simple," literary or half-educated, who had heard of Wordsworth, agreed in despising him. Never had poet or prophet less honour in his own country. Of the gentry, very few knew anything about Wordsworth. Grasmere was a vale little visited at that time, except for an hour's admiration. The case is now [1840] altered; and partly by a new road, which, having pierced the valley by a line carried along the water's edge, at a most preposterous cost, and with a large arrear of debt for the next generation, saves the labour of surmounting a laborious hill. The case is now altered no less for the intellect of the age; and Rydal Mount is now one of the most honoured abodes in the island. But, at that time, Grasmere did not differ more from the Grasmere of to-day than Wordsworth from the Wordsworth of 1809-20. I repeat that he was little known, even as a resident in the country; and, as a poet, strange it would have been had the little town of Ambleside undertaken to judge for itself, and against a tribunal which had for a time subdued the very temper of the age. Lord Byron might have been sure that nowhere would the contempt for Mr. Wordsworth be rifer than exactly amongst those who had a local reason for curiosity about the man, and who, of course, adopting the tone of the presiding journals, adopted them with a personality of feeling unknown elsewhere.
Except, therefore, with the Lloyds, or occasionally with Thomas Wilkinson the Quaker, or very rarely with Southey, Wordsworth had no intercourse at all beyond the limits of Grasmere: and in that valley I was myself, for some years, his sole visiting friend; as, on the other hand, my sole visitors as regarded that vale, were himself and his family.
Among that family, and standing fourth in the series of his children, was a little girl, whose life, short as it was, and whose death, obscure and little heard of as it was amongst all the rest of the world, connected themselves with the records of my own life by ties of passion so profound, by a grief so frantic, and so memorable through the injurious effects which it produced of a physical kind, that, had I left untouched every other chapter of my own experience, I should certainly have left behind some memorandum of this, as having a permanent interest in the psychological history of human nature. Luckily the facts are not without a parallel, and in well authenticated medical books; else I should have scrupled (as what man does not scruple who values, above all things, the reputation for veracity?) to throw the whole stress of credibility on my own unattached narration. But all experienced physicians know well that cases similar to mine, though not common, occur at intervals in every large community.
When I first settled in Grasmere, Catherine Wordsworth was in her infancy, but, even at that age, noticed me more than any other person, excepting, of course, her mother. She had for an attendant a young girl, perhaps thirteen years old—Sarah, one of the orphan children left by the unfortunate couple, George and Sarah Green, whose tragical end in a snow-storm I have already narrated.[181] This Sarah Green was as far removed in character as could be imagined from that elder sister who had won so much admiration in her childish days, by her premature display of energy and household virtues. She was lazy, luxurious, and sensual: one, in fact, of those nurses who, in their anxiety to gossip about young men, leave their infant or youthful charges to the protection of chance. It was, however, not in her out-of-door ramblings, but at home, that the accident occurred which determined the fortunes of little Catherine. Mr. Coleridge was at that time a visitor to the Wordsworths at Allan Bank, that house in Grasmere to which Wordsworth had removed upon quitting his cottage. One day about noon, when, perhaps, he was coming down to breakfast, Mr. Coleridge passed Sarah Green, playing after her indolent fashion with the child; and between them lay a number of carrots. He warned the girl that raw carrots were an indigestible substance for the stomach of an infant. This warning was neglected: little Catherine ate—it was never known how many; and, in a short time, was seized with strong convulsions. I saw her in this state about two P.M. No medical aid was to be had nearer than Ambleside; about six miles distant. However, all proper measures were taken; and, by sunset, she had so far recovered as to be pronounced out of danger. Her left side, however, left arm, and left leg, from that time forward, were in a disabled state: not what could be called paralyzed, but suffering a sort of atony or imperfect distribution of vital power.