Cold, vapourish, miry, wet,
to the “rampire” of Pillesdon, even the “nameless rivulet” (the minutest trickle of a stream at the foot of Lewesdon Hill), which, he rejoices,
Yet flows along
Untainted with the commerce of the world.
William Lisle Bowles, author of faint and forgotten verses, is remembered by Coleridge’s early admiration for his sonnets. His father, the Rev. W. Bowles (rector of Uphill), planted and improved Barton Hill House, in Dorset, which the poet sold. On leaving it the poet wrote verses full of regret for
These woods, that whispering wave
My father rear’d and nurst.
An author unknown outside his county is John Fitzgerald Pennie (buried July 17th, 1848). He was born at East Lulworth, March 25th, 1782, and is known as a dramatic writer. He published Scenes in Palestine, or Dramatic Sketches from the Bible, 1825; Ethelwolf, a tragedy, 1821, etc. He followed in his early years the profession of an actor, but after a chequered and unsuccessful career, settled in his native village and devoted himself to literary pursuits. He published his autobiography in 1827, The Tale of a Modern Genius, or the Miseries of Parnassus. In 1810 he married Cordelia Elizabeth, daughter of Jerome Whitfield, a London attorney. He and his wife died within a few days of each other, and were buried in the same grave.
Wordsworth’s connection with Dorset is of short duration, but is of interest as occurring at a critical period in his career. On his receiving Raisley Calvert’s legacy, he was able to live with his sister Dorothy at a farmhouse at Racedown,[73] which he was allowed to occupy rent free on condition that the owner might spend a few weeks there from time to time. It was in the autumn of 1795 that he settled there. His house is set upon the north-west slope of the “rampire” Pillesdon, in a hollow among hills cultivated to their summits, or patched with gorse and broom, which open here and there to allow glimpses of the sea. The Dorset peasants in Wordsworth’s time were wretchedly poor, their shapeless cottages “not at all beyond what might be expected in savage life,” as Dorothy Wordsworth wrote. Very little trace of the peculiar quality of the place is to be found in Wordsworth’s poems, but it was here he wrote the first of his poems of country life, modelled with an experience so personal as to keep every sentence vividly accurate.
It was here that he watched[74] the “unquiet widowhood” of Margaret, drawing out the hemp which she had wound round her waist like a belt, and spinning, as she walked backwards before her cottage door. Here, no doubt, he saw her ruined cottage—there are many crumbling shells and ruined cottages in the district to-day—with the red stains and tufts of wool in the corner-stone of the porch where the sheep were permitted to come and “couch unheeded.” The garden, run wild, too, is to be met with to-day: