In the summer of 1836 I went on the Northern Circuit with Baron Parke. We took Bowness and Storrs, in our way from Appleby to Lancaster; and I visited Wordsworth, and my dear friend Arnold from Storrs. It was my fortune to have to try the great Hornby Castle cause, as it was called; this I did at the end of the circuit, returning from Liverpool to Lancaster for the purpose. Arnold was kind enough to lend me his house (Foxhow) for the vacation; and when the circuit ended, my wife and children accompanied me to it, and we remained there six weeks. During that time Mr. and Mrs. Wordsworth were our only neighbours, and we scarcely saw any one besides; but we needed no other addition to the lovely and loveable country in which we were. He was extremely kind, both in telling us where to go, and very often going with us. He was engaged in correcting the press for a new edition of his poems. The London post, I think, went out at 2 P.M., and then, he would say, he was at our service. A walk with him in that country was a real treat: I never met with a man who seemed to know a country and the people so well, or to love them better, nor one who had such exquisite taste for rural scenery: he had evidently cultivated it with great care; he not only admired the beauties, but he could tell you what were the peculiar features in each scene, or what the incidents to which it owed its peculiar charm. He combined, beyond any man with whom I ever met, the unsophisticated poetic delight in the beauties of nature with a somewhat artistic skill in developing the sources and conditions of them. In examining the parts of a landscape he would be minute; and he dealt with shrubs, flower-beds, and lawns with the readiness of a practiced landscape-gardener. His own little grounds afforded a beautiful specimen of his skill in this latter respect; and it was curious to see how he had imparted the same faculty in some measure to his gardener—James Dixon, I think, was his name. I found them together one morning in the little lawn by the Mount. 'James and I,' said he, 'are in a puzzle here. The grass here has spots which offend the eye; and I told him we must cover them with soap-lees. "That," he says, "will make the green there darker than the rest." "Then," I said, "we must cover the whole." He objected: "That will not do with reference to the little lawn to which you pass from this." "Cover that," I said. To which he replies, "You will have an unpleasant contrast with the foliage surrounding it."'
Beside this warm feeling and exquisite taste, which made him so delightful a guide, his favourite spots had a human interest engrafted on them,—some tradition, some incident, some connection with his own poetry, or himself, or some dear friend. These he brought out in a striking way. Apart from these, he was well pleased to discourse on poetry or poets; and here appeared to me to be his principal scholarship. He was extremely well read in English poetry; and he would in his walk review a poem or a poet with admirable precision and fairness. He did not intrude his own poetry or himself, but he did not decline to talk about either; and he spoke of both simply, unboastingly, and yet with a manly consciousness of their worth. It was clear he thought he had achieved a high place among poets: it had been the aim of his life, humanly speaking; and he had taken worthy pains to accomplish and prepare himself for the enterprise. He never would sacrifice anything he thought right on reflection, merely to secure present popularity, or avert criticism which he thought unfounded; but he was a severe critic on himself, and would not leave a line or an expression with which he was dissatisfied until he had brought it to what he liked. He thought this due to the gift of poetry and the character of the poet. Carelessness in the finish of composition he seemed to look on almost as an offence. I remember well, that after speaking with love and delight of a very popular volume of poetry, he yet found great fault with the want of correctness and finish. Reciting one of the poems, and pointing out inaccuracies in it, he said, 'I like the volume so much, that, if I was the author, I think I should never rest till I had nearly rewritten it.' No doubt he carried this in his own case to excess, when he corrected so largely, in the decline of life, poems written in early manhood, under a state of feelings and powers which it was impossible to reproduce, and yet which was necessary, generally speaking, for successful alteration. I cannot but agree with many who think that on this account the earlier copies of his poems are more valuable than the later.
1836. September. Wednesday 21.—Wordsworth and I started in my carriage for Lowther, crossed Kirkstone to Paterdale, by Ulleswater, going through the Glenridding Walks,[236] and calling at Hallsteads. We reached the castle time enough before dinner for him to give me a walk.
After luncheon, on Thursday 22d, we had an open carriage, and proceeded to Haweswater. It is a fine lake, entirely unspoilt by bad taste. On one side the bank rises high and steep, and is well clothed with wood; on the other it is bare and more sloping. Wordsworth conveyed a personal interest in it to me, by telling me that it was the first lake which my uncle[237] had seen on his coming into this country: he was in company with Wordsworth and his brother John. Wordsworth pointed out to me somewhere about the spot on the hill-side, a little out of the track, from which they first saw the lake; and said, he well remembered how his face brightened, and how much delight he appeared to feel. Yesterday morning we returned to this place. We called on our way and took our luncheon at Hallsteads, and also called at Paterdale Hall. At both it was gratifying to see the cordial manner of W.'s reception: he seemed loved and honoured; and his manner was of easy, hearty, kindness to them.
My tour with him was very agreeable, and I wish I could preserve in my memory more of his conversation than I shall be able to do. I was anxious to get from him anecdotes of himself and my uncle, and of their works. He told me of himself, that his first verses were a Popian copy written at school on the 'Pleasure of Change;' then he wrote another on the 'Second Centenary of the School's Foundation;' that he had written these verses on the holidays, and on the return to school; that he was rather the poet of the school. The first verses from which he remembered to have received great pleasure, were Miss Carter's 'Poem on Spring,' a poem in the six-line stanza, which he was particularly fond of, and had composed much in, for example, 'Ruth.' He said there was some foundation in fact, however slight, for every poem he had written of a narrative kind; so slight indeed, sometimes, as hardly to deserve the name; for example, 'The Somnambulist' was wholly built on the fact of a girl at Lyulph's Tower being a sleep-walker; and 'The Water Lily,' on a ship bearing that name. 'Michael' was founded on the son of an old couple having become dissolute and run away from his parents; and on an old shepherd having been seven years in building up a sheepfold in a solitary valley: 'The Brothers,' on a young shepherd, in his sleep, having fallen down a crag, his staff remaining suspended midway. Many incidents he seemed to have drawn from the narration of Mrs. Wordsworth, or his sister, 'Ellen' for example, in 'The Excursion;' and they must have told their stories well, for he said his principle had been to give the oral part as nearly as he could in the very words of the speakers, where he narrated a real story, dropping, of course, all vulgarisms or provincialisms, and borrowing sometimes a Bible turn of expression: these former were mere accidents, not essential to the truth in representing how the human heart and passions worked; and to give these last faithfully was his object. If he was to have any name hereafter, his hope was on this, and he did think he had in some instances succeeded;[238] that the sale of his poems increased among the classes below the middle; and he had had, constantly, statements made to him of the effect produced in reading 'Michael' and other such of his poems. I added my testimony of being unable to read it aloud without interruption from my own feelings. 'She was a phantom of delight' he said was written on 'his dear wife,' of whom he spoke in the sweetest manner; a manner full of the warmest love and admiration, yet with delicacy and reserve. He very much and repeatedly regretted that my uncle had written so little verse; he thought him so eminently qualified, by his very nice ear, his great skill in metre, and his wonderful power and happiness of expression. He attributed, in part, his writing so little, to the extreme care and labour which he applied in elaborating his metres. He said, that when he was intent on a new experiment in metre, the time and labour he bestowed were inconceivable; that he was quite an epicure in sound. Latterly he thought he had so much acquired the habit of analysing his feelings, and making them matter for a theory or argument, that he had rather dimmed his delight in the beauties of nature and injured his poetical powers. He said he had no idea how 'Christabelle' was to have been finished, and he did not think my uncle had ever conceived, in his own mind, any definite plan for it; that the poem had been composed while they were in habits of daily intercourse, and almost in his presence, and when there was the most unreserved intercourse between them as to all their literary projects and productions, and he had never heard from him any plan for finishing it. Not that he doubted my uncle's sincerity in his subsequent assertions to the contrary; because, he said, schemes of this sort passed rapidly and vividly through his mind, and so impressed him, that he often fancied he had arranged things, which really and upon trial proved to be mere embryos. I omitted to ask him, what seems obvious enough now, whether, in conversing about it, he had never asked my uncle how it would end. The answer would have settled the question. He regretted that the story had not been made to end the same night in which it begun. There was difficulty and danger in bringing such a personage as the witch to the daylight, and the breakfast-table; and unless the poem was to have been long enough to give time for creating a second interest, there was a great probability of the conclusion being flat after such a commencement.
A great number of my uncle's sonnets, he said, were written from the 'Cat and Salutation,' or a public-house with some such name, in Smithfield, where my uncle imprisoned himself for some time; and they appeared in a newspaper, I think he said the Morning Chronicle.
He remembered his writing a great part of the translation of 'Wallenstein,' and he said there was nothing more astonishing than the ease and rapidity with which it was done.
Sept. 29th, Foxhow.—We are just setting out, in a promising day, for a second trip to Keswick, intending, if possible, to penetrate into Wastdale, over the Sty Head. Before I go, I wish to commemorate a walk with the Poet, on a drizzly muddy day, the turf sponging out water at every step, through which he stalked as regardless as if he were of iron, and with the same fearless, unchanged pace over rough and smooth, slippery and sound. We went up by the old road[239] from Ambleside to Keswick, and struck off from the table-land on the left, over the fell ground, till he brought me out on a crag, bounded, as it were, by two ascents, and showing me in front, as in a frame, Grasmere Lake, 'the one green island,' the church, village, &c., and the surrounding mountains. It is a lovely scene, strikingly described in his verses beginning,