With something of angelic light.”
Song seemed to gush from Wordsworth's soul as naturally and copiously as water from a mountain spring. Some of his verses were written with a slate-pencil on stones in lonely places; for instance, in a deserted quarry on one of the islands at Rydal, on a stone half way up the grim mountain of Black Comb, in Cumberland, or with a common pencil on a stone in an outhouse on the island at Grasmere. He lived poetry. Everything with him was a pretext for verse; neither the commonest household occurrence nor the sublimest spectacle of nature up there among those rocky fells and green valleys lying under awful shadows of coming storms, was a stranger to his ready pen. He says of himself that
“The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colors and their forms were then to me
An appetite, a feeling, and a love.”
There are few places so thoroughly fitted for a poet's home as the lake country of Cumberland and Westmoreland, yet more so then than now, when it has become the fashion to make a tour among the lakes, even as one does down the Rhine. England has wakened to the consciousness of her own beauty within the last forty years, and a home-tour often takes the place of a foreign one; yet to those who first visited these Eden-spots the rare charm is gone, for sight-seers have taken the place of the “wanderer,” and regular guides usurp the simple escort of a stray shepherd whom in old times you might have happened to meet by some force, on the cool banks of which he would have told you, in his racy dialect, the old traditions and legends of the neighborhood—the legend of the horn of Egremont Castle, for instance, a Cumberland tale, telling how Sir Eustace Lucie and his brother Hubert rode away to the Holy Land, and the former, pointing to the “horn of the inheritance” that hung by the gate-way, and which none could sound,
“Save he who came as rightful heir
To Egremont's domains and castle fair,”