[From Grasmere they made their way to Keswick, the capital town of the lake district, and the home of Southey and Coleridge.]
When Southey came to Greta Hall, in 1803, Coleridge, the “noticeable man with large gray eyes,” was living there, delighting the reading world with his vast and luminous intellect and his Miltonic conceptions, reaching “the caverns measureless to man.” Here that marvellous boy Hartley ran about, and so charmed Coleridge’s landlord that he could scarcely be persuaded to take the rent for Greta Hall, considering the joy of the child’s company a full equivalent. For three years Coleridge and Southey occupied the Hall together; then Coleridge became the slave of that opium-habit which made his comings and goings more uncertain than a comet’s. He flitted about between Southey and Wordsworth; and never since Shakespeare’s time have three men of equal genius lived on such terms. Landor called them “three towers of one castle.” Very soon De Quincey made a fourth in this remarkable group. And two of them were wise, and two of them were stranded on the same poppy-covered coast, the land of the Lotos-Eaters.
We wandered about Keswick, but wherever we went the shades of these great men followed us, and half a mile out of it, on the Penrith road, we were suddenly met by another wraith of genius, for there stood the pretty cottage to which Shelley brought his first wife, the lovely woman of humble birth whom he offended society by marrying. Here they were visited by the Southeys and De Quincey, and the latter in his “Sketches” has a very charming picture of the girl-wife playing gravity before her visitors and running about the garden with Percy when they were tired of the house. Shelley was then nineteen and Southey thirty-seven; and Southey says, “Shelley acts upon me as my own ghost might do; he has all my old dreams and enthusiasms: the only difference is the difference of age.”
Many bitter things were said of the handsome, gifted Shelley in his day; but, as Dr. Arnold in his quaint, Luther-like phraseology observes, “Doubtless it is good for a man to have to do with Mr. Posterity,” for that impartial judge has done Shelley justice. We bought his “Alastor” as we went back to the hotel, and in the evening twilight read it, remembering the while that it was written “in the contemplation of death, which he felt to be certain and near.”...
The next day we went around Derwentwater in a boat,—certainly the best way to see it, for the bays and islands and points of interest on this lovely sheet of water can thus be leisurely visited. Soon after leaving Keswick, Skiddaw appears to rise from within a stone’s cast of the shore, and continues a magnificent object during most of the way. At the head of the lake the mountains rise, height above height, from the Lodore crags to the lofty summits of Scawfell Pike and Scawfell, the latter the highest mountain in England. Southey had told us how “the water comes down at Lodore,” but we wished to see it for ourselves: so we landed at the long wooden pier belonging to the Lodore Hotel, and, guided by the tremendous roar, scrambled a short distance among the crags and boulders, and saw the wild waters
“Retreating and beating, and meeting and sheeting,
Delaying and straying, and playing and spraying,
Advancing and prancing, and glancing and dancing,
Recoiling, turmoiling, and toiling and boiling,
And gleaming and streaming, and steaming and beaming,
And rushing and flushing, and brushing and gushing,
And curling and whirling, and purling and twirling,
And flapping and rapping, and clapping and slapping,
And dashing and flashing, and splashing and crashing,
And so never ending, but always descending,
Sounds and motions for ever and ever are blending,
All at once and all over, with mighty uproar,
And this way the water comes down at Lodore.”