William Wordsworth

“ Coleridge should now with Wordsworth be.
By slow degrees he'd steal away
Their woes, and gently bring a ray
(So happily he'd time relief,)
Of comfort from their very grief.
He'd tell them that their brother dead,
When years have passed o'er their head,
Will be remembered with such holy,
True and tender melancholy,
That ever this lost brother John
Will be their heart's companion.
His voice they'll always hear,
His face they'll always see;
There's naught in life so sweet
As such a memory."
(See Final Memorials of Charles Lamb, by Thomas Noon Talfourd, vol. ii. pp. 233, 234.) ”

“ Birds make hiding-places for themselves in these oak and hazel bushes by the stream. Following it up, we find it receives, at a tiny ford, the tribute of another stream from the north-west, and comes down between the adjacent hills (well wooded to the summit) from meadows of short-cropped grass, and to these from the open moorland, where it takes its rise. Every conceivable variety of beauty of sound and sight in streamlet life is found as we follow the course of this Town Beck. We owe much of Wordsworth's intimate acquaintance with streamlet beauty to it. ”

“ Rawnsley for the following note:
"From the village, nay, from the poet's very door when he lived at Anne Tyson's, a good path leads on, past the vicarage, quite to its upland place of birth. It has eaten its way deeply into the soil; in one place there is a series of still pools, that overflow and fall into others, with quiet sound; at other spots, it is bustling and busy. ”

“ The sketches of hill and valley in this poem have a lightness, and spirit—an Allegro touch—distinguishing them from the grave and elevated splendour which characterises Mr. Wordsworth's representations of Nature in general, and from the passive tenderness of those in 'The White Doe', while it harmonises well with the human interest of the piece; indeed it is the harmonious sweetness of the composition which is most dwelt upon by its special admirers. In its course it describes, with bold brief touches, the striking mountain tract from Grasmere to Keswick ”

“ Meek women, men as true and brave
As ever went to a hopeful grave:
Their hands and mine, when side by side
With kindred zeal and mutual pride,
We worked until the Initials took
Shapes that defied a scornful look.—
Long as for us a genial feeling
Survives, or one in need of healing,
The power, dear Rock, around thee cast,
Thy monumental power, shall last
For me and mine! ”

“ No other hill-road is visible from the house or garden at Cockermouth. The view from the front of the old mansion is limited by houses, doubtless more so now than in last century; but there is no hill towards the Lorton Fells on the south or south-east, with a road over it, visible from any part of the town. Besides, as this was a very early experience of Wordsworth's—it was in "the morn of childhood" that the road was "daily present to his sight"—it must have been seen, either from the house or from the garden. ”

“ At such circumstances I believe we feel as much for others as for ourselves; just as a violent blow occasions the same pain as a wound, and he who breaks his shin feels as acutely at the moment as the man whose leg is shot off. In fact, I am writing to you merely because this dreadful shipwreck has left me utterly unable to do anything else. It is the heaviest calamity Wordsworth has ever experienced, and in all probability I shall have to communicate it to him, as he will very likely be here before the tidings can reach him. ”

“ O William, we 'receive' but what we 'give':
And in our life alone does Nature live.
...
Yes, dearest William! Yes!
There was a time when though my Path was rough
This Joy within me dallied with distress.
The MS. copy is described by Coleridge as "imperfect"; and it breaks off abruptly at the lines:
Suspends what Nature gave me at my birth
My shaping spirit of Imagination.
And he continues:
I am so weary of this doleful poem, that I must leave off.... ”

“ It has this much in its favour, that a wall of considerable age crests its summit, and one can whilst sitting down on a rock close behind it be sheltered from the north and east, and yet obtain an extensive view of the subadjacent country. If it were certain that the ponies when they got to Pullwyke did not go up towards Water Barngates, and so to Hawkshead, then there is no crag in the district which would so thoroughly answer to all the needs of the boys, and to all the points of description the poet has placed on record. ”

“ A more truly disinterested man I never met with; severely frugal, yet almost carelessly generous; and yet he got all his money as a common carrier, by hard labour, and by pennies and pennies. He is one instance among many in this country of the salutary effect of the love of knowledge—he was from a boy a lover of learning."
(See 'Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, vol. ii. pp. 147, 148.)
Charles Lamb—to whom The Waggoner was dedicated—wrote thus to Wordsworth on 7th June 1819:
"My dear Wordsworth,—You cannot imagine how proud we are here of the dedication. ”

“ The eight lines which follow are a recast, in the blank verse of The Prelude, of the youthful lines entitled Extract from the Conclusion of a Poem, composed in Anticipation of leaving School. These were composed in Wordsworth's sixteenth year. As the contrast is striking, the earlier lines may be transcribed:
'Dear native regions, I foretell,
From what I feel at this farewell,
That, wheresoe'er my steps may tend,
And whensoe'er my course shall end,
If in that hour a single tie
Survive of local sympathy,
My soul will cast the backward view,
The longing look alone on you. ”

“ You may judge how I felt about them by my own Poem upon the occasion. Then the plan laid out, and, I believe, partly suggested by me, was, that Wordsworth should assume the station of a man in mental repose, one whose principles were made up, and so prepared to deliver upon authority a system of philosophy. He was to treat man as man,—a subject of eye, ear, touch, and taste in contact with external nature, and informing the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out of the senses ”

“ As there are no "naked crags" with "half-inch fissures in the slippery rocks" in the "cultured vale" of Esthwaite, the locality referred to is probably the Hohne Fells above Yewdale, to the north of Coniston, and only a few miles from Hawkshead, where a crag, now named Raven's Crag, divides Tilberthwaite from Yewdale. In his Epistle to Sir George Beaumont, Wordsworth speaks of Yewdale as a plain
'spread
Under a rock too steep for man to tread,
Where sheltered from the north and bleak north-west
Aloft the Raven hangs a visible nest,
Fearless of all assaults that would her brood molest.' ”

“ He spoke of the MS. as forming a sort of portico to his larger work—the poem on Man, Nature, and Society—which he meant to call The Recluse, and of which one portion only, viz. The Excursion, was finished. It is clear that throughout the composition of The Prelude, he felt that he was experimenting with his powers. He wished to find out whether he could construct "a literary work that might live," on a larger scale than his Lyrics; and it was on the writing of a "philosophical poem," dealing with Man and Nature, in their deepest aspects, that his thoughts had been fixed for many years. ”

“ If he had, and was returning from the party in one of the Yewdale farms, he would, as he ascended towards Tarn Howes, and faced about south, to gain the main Coniston road, by traversing the meadows between Berwick ground and the top of the Hawkshead and Coniston Hill, command a view of the sea that lay laughing at a distance; and near, the solid mountains—Wetherlam and Coniston Old Man—would shine bright as the clouds. I think this is likely to have been the poet's track, because he speaks of labourers going forth to till the fields ”

“ The boys could not be so certain of not missing the ponies, at any other place than here at Pullwyke.
The crag exactly answers the poet's description, a rising ground, the meeting-place of two highways. For in the poet's time the old Hawkshead and Outgate road at the Pullwyke corner ran at the very foot of the rising ground (roughly speaking) parallel to and some 60 to 100 yards west of the present road from the Pull to Wray.
It is true that no trace of wall is visible at its summit, but the summit has been planted since with trees, and walls are often removed at time of planting. ”

“ Cradock,—to whom I am indebted for this, and for many other suggestions as to localities alluded to by Wordsworth,—thinks that
"a point, marked on the map as High Crag between the two roads, and about three-quarters of a mile from their point of divergence, answers the description as well as any other. It may be nearly two miles from Hawkshead, a distance of which an active eager school-boy would think nothing. The blasted hawthorn and the naked wall are probably things of the past as much as the single sheep." ”

“ Never human being was more thoroughly modest, and his courage I need not speak of. He was 'seen speaking with apparent cheerfulness to the first mate a few minutes before the ship went down;' and when nothing more could be done, He said, 'the will of God be done.' I have no doubt when he felt that it was out of his power to save his life he was as calm as before, if some thought of what we should endure did not awaken a pang.... ”

“ I have never seen anything so like a continental scene at the gathering at Hawkshead spout-house.
Lastly, there is a very aged thorn-tree in the churchyard—blown over but propped up—in which the forefathers of the hamlet used to sit as boys (in the thorn, that is, not the churchyard) , and which has been worn smooth by many Hawkshead generations. The tradition is, that Wordsworth used to sit a deal in it when at school. ”

“ The Poem
Note: This poem underwent no change in successive editions. The title in all the earlier ones (1815 to 1843) was The Cottager to her Infant. By a Female Friend; and in the preface to the edition of 1815, Wordsworth wrote,
"Three short pieces (now first published) are the work of a Female Friend; ... if any one regard them with dislike, or be disposed to condemn them, let the censure fall upon him, who, trusting in his own sense of their merit, and their fitness for the place which they occupy, extorted them from the Authoress." ”

“ There is no copse-clad bank fronting Anne Tyson's cottage at Hawkshead. It may have been a rock on the wooded slope of the rounded hill that rises west of Cowper Ground, north-west of Hawkshead. A rock "wet with springs" existed there, till it was quarried for road-metal a few years since. But it is quite possible that the cottage referred to is Dove Cottage, Grasmere. ”

“ If the farm-house where Wordsworth spent the evening before this memorable morning walk was either at Elterwater or High Arnside, and the homeward pathway led across the ridge of Ironkeld, either by the old mountain road (now almost disused) , or over the pathless fells, there are two points from either of which the sea might be seen in the distance. The one is from the heights looking down to the Duddon estuary, across the Coniston valley; the other is from a spot nearer Hawkshead, where Morecambe Bay is visible. In the former case "the meadows and the lower grounds" would be those in Yewdale ”

“ Cradock wrote to me that "Wordsworth pointed out the tree to Miss Cookson a few days before Dora Wordsworth's death. The tree is near the upper wall and tells its own tale." The Fir-grove—"John's Grove"— can easily be entered by a gate about a hundred yards beyond the Wishing-gate, as one goes toward Rydal. The view from it, the "visionary scene,"
'the spectacle
Of clouded splendour, ... this dream-like sight
Of solemn loveliness,'
is now much interfered with by the new larch plantations immediately below the firs. ”

“ while the "huge peak, black and huge, as if with voluntary power instinct," may he either the summit of Wetherlam, or of Pike o'Blisco. ”