"'This sequestered scene was almost inaccessible till of late, that ridings have been cut on both sides of the River, and the most interesting points laid open by judicious thinnings in the woods. Here a tributary stream rushes from a waterfall, and bursts through a woody glen to mingle its waters with the Wharf: there the Wharf itself is nearly lost in a deep cleft in the rock, and next becomes a horned flood enclosing a woody island—sometimes it reposes for a moment, and then resumes its native character, lively, irregular, and impetuous.
"'The cleft mentioned above is the tremendous Strid. This chasm, being incapable of receiving the winter floods, has formed, on either side, a broad strand of naked gritstone full of rock-basons, or "pots of the Linn," which bear witness to the restless impetuosity of so many Northern torrents. But, if here Wharf is lost to the eye, it amply repays another sense by its deep and solemn roar, like "the Voice of the angry Spirit of the Waters," heard far above and beneath, amidst the silence of the surrounding woods.
"'The terminating object of the landscape is the remains of Barden Tower, interesting from their form and situation, and still more so from the recollections which they excite.'"
[The White Doe of Rylstone] has been assigned chronologically to the year 1808; although part of it—probably the larger half—was written during the autumn of the previous year, and it remained unfinished in 1810, while the Dedication was not written till 1815. In the Fenwick note, Wordsworth tells us that the "earlier half" was written at Stockton-on-Tees "at the close" of 1807, and "proceeded with" at Dove Cottage, after his return to Grasmere, which was in April 1808. But on the 28th February, 1810, Dorothy Wordsworth, writing from Allan Bank to Lady Beaumont, says, "Before my brother turns to any other labour, I hope he will have finished three books of The Recluse. He seldom writes less than 50 lines every day. After this task is finished he hopes to complete [The White Doe], and proud should we all be if it should be honoured by a frontispiece from the pencil of Sir George Beaumont. Perhaps this is not impossible, if you come into the north next summer."
A frontispiece was drawn by Sir George Beaumont for the quarto edition of 1815.
When part of the poem was finished, Wordsworth showed it to Southey; and Southey, writing to Walter Scott, in February 1808, said,—
"Wordsworth has just completed a most masterly poem upon the fate of the Nortons; two or three lines in the old ballad of The Rising of the North gave him the hint. The story affected me more deeply than I wish to be affected; younger readers, however, will not object to the depth of the distress, and nothing was ever more ably treated. He is looking, too, for a narrative subject, pitched in a lower key."
One of the most interesting letters of S. T. Coleridge to Wordsworth is an undated one, sent from London in the spring of 1808, containing a characteristic criticism of [The White Doe]. The Wordsworth family had asked Coleridge to discuss the subject of the publication of the poem with the Longmans' firm. It is more than probable that it was Coleridge's criticism of the structural defects in the poem, that led Wordsworth to postpone its publication. The following is part of the letter:—
"... In my reperusals of the poem, it seemed always to strike on my feeling as well as judgment, that if there were any serious defect, it consisted in a disproportion of the Accidents to the spiritual Incidents; and, closely connected with this,—if it be not indeed the same,—that Emily is indeed talked of, and once appears, but neither speaks nor acts, in all the first three-fourths of the poem. Then, as the outward interest of the poem is in favour of the old man's religious feelings, and the filial heroism of his band of sons, it seemed to require something in order to place the two protestant malcontents of the family in a light that made them beautiful as well as virtuous. In short, to express it far more strongly than I mean or think, in order (in the present anguish of my spirits) to be able to express it at all, that three-fourths of the work is everything rather than Emily; and then, the last—almost a separate and doubtless an exquisite poem—wholly of Emily. The whole of the rest, and the delivering up of the family by Francis, I never ceased to find, not only comparatively heavy, but to me quite obscure as to Francis's motives. On the few, to whom, within my acquaintance, the poem has been read, either by yourself or me (I have, I believe, read it only at the Beaumonts'), it produced the same effect.