Part 5

“There was one bit iv ground nigh han’ to the cabin, that puzzled me intirely. It was very poor and sandy, an’ little better than a rabbit burrow; an’ telling the Squire’s Scotch steward iv it, he bade me thry some flax, an’ sure enuf, so I did, an’ a fine crap iv flax I had, as you might wish to see; an’ the stame-mills being beginnin’ in the counthry at that time, I sould my flax for a very good price—my wife having dhried it, beetled it, an’ scutched it with her own two hands. I should have said before, that the Squire himself came up here with a lot iv fine ladies and jontlemen to see what I had done; an’ you never in your life seed a man so well plased as he was, an’ a Mimber of Parlimint from Scotland was with him, an’ he tould me I was a credit to ould Ireland; and sure, didn’t Father Connor read upon the papers, how he tould the whole story in the Parlimint House before all the lords an’ quality: but faix, he didn’t forgit me; for a month or two after he was here, an’ it coming on the winter, comes word for me an’ the powney to go down to the mentioned (mansion) house, for the steward wanted me; so away I wint, an’ there, shure enuf, was an illigant Scotch plough, every inch of iron, an’ a lot of young Norroway pines—the same you see shiltering the house an’ yard—an’ all was a free prisint for me from the Scotch jontleman that was the Mimber of Parliment. ’Twas that plough that did the meracles iv work hereabouts; for I often lint it to any that I knew to be a careful hand; an’ it was the manes iv havin’ the farmers all round send an’ buy ’em. At last I was able to build a brave snug house; and praised be Providence, I have never had an hour’s ill health, nor a moment’s grief, but when poor Biddy, the cratur, died from us. It is thirty years since that morning that I tuk up the first spadeful from the wild mountain side; an’ twelve acres are good labour land, an’ fifteen drained, an’ good grazin’. I have been payin’ rint twinty years, an’ am still, thank God, able to take my own part iv any day’s work,—plough, spade, or flail.”

“Have you got a lease?” said I.

“No, indeed; not a schrape of a pin; nor I never axed it. Have I not my _tinnant-rite_?”

From that subject, Mr. Mc Nale diverged slightly into politics, touching on the state of the _counthry_, and untwisting some entanglements of the ‘Irish difficulty’ that might be usefully made known in the neighbourhood of Westminster.

“Troth, Sir,” said Con, “you English are mighty grand in all your doings. You dale wholesale in all sorts iv things; good luck to you—in charity as well as in pigs, praties, an’ sich like. Well you want to improve Ireland by wholesale; you set up illigant schames for puttin’ us all to rights by the million; for clanin’ an’ dranin’ a whole province at onst; for giving labour to everybody; an’ all mighty purty on paper, with figures all as round an’ nate as copybooks, with long rigiments of O’s, after ’em. I’ve heard iv whole stacks of papers piled up an’ handsomely ticketed in tidy big offices—all ‘rules and riglations’ for labourers, which the boys can’t follow, and the inspectors can’t force. Why not,” continued Mr. Con, giving his spade a thrust into the ground that sent it up to the maker’s name, “Why not tache the boys to do as I have done?”

“But all are not so persevering, so knowing, and so fond of work as you.”

Whether Mr. Mc Nale was impressed by his own modesty, or by the force of my suggestion, I know not. But he was silent.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

William Wordsworth was born on the 7th of April, 1770; he died on the 23d of April, 1850. His life was prolonged for ten years beyond the space attributed to man by the inspired Psalmist. He lived in an age unprecedented for its social and civil revolutions; for its discoveries in science, and their practical application. He was fourteen years of age when the new North American Republic was finally recognised as one of the brotherhood of nations; he witnessed the French Revolution; the subjection of every monarchy in Europe, except England and Russia, to the absolute will of a French emperor; the instalment and evaporation of the Holy Alliance; the European war of twenty years, and the European peace of thirty-two years; one Pope carried into exile by a foreign conqueror, another driven into exile by his own subjects: and at home, the trials of Hardy and Thelwall; the Bank Restriction Act; the origination of the Bell and Lancaster systems of Education; the visit of the allied monarchs to London; the passing of Peel’s Bill; the introduction of Palmer’s mail-coaches and M‘Adam’s roads; the invention of steam navigation; the pausing of the Reform Bill; the development of the Railway system, and the Electric telegraph. He was the contemporary of Davey, Herschell, Bentham, Godwin, Malthus and Ricardo, Byron, Scott, Wilkie, Chantrey, Fox, Pitt, Canning and Brougham.

Wordsworth’s age was one of stirring events and great changes. The character of his poetry is in startling contrast to that age. It is passionless, a record of the poet’s own mind; simple and austere, emanating from his own independent thoughts and fancies; receiving little of its form and colour from external events, or the feelings and opinions of men. For eighty long years, Wordsworth would almost appear to have lived ‘_among_ men, not _of_ them;’ sympathising as little with the ephemeral pursuits of his contemporaries as the colossal Memnon does with the Copts, Turks, and Arabs who now tenant the banks of the Nile.

William Wordsworth was born in the little county town of Cockermouth; his father was an attorney—not a wealthy man, but in circumstances that enabled him to give his family a fair education. One son entered the merchant service, rose to command a vessel, and perished at sea. Another has acquired a name as master of Harrow, and the author of a delightful book on Greece, full of delicate beauty and fine classical feeling. The allusions by William to his favourite sister are among the most touching passages in his poems; and one or two little pieces of verse, and some extracts from her journals, which he has published, show that she was every way deserving of his love. The poetical dedication of the River Duddon to Dr. Wordsworth, is full of delightful allusions to the boyhood of the brothers, and conveys a pleasing impression of their family relations.

Our poet received the rudiments of his education at the grammar school of Hawkeshead, in Westmoreland, conducted in his time by a master of more than ordinary attainments. In 1787, he matriculated at St. John’s College, Cambridge. Even in his boyhood it was obvious that he possessed superior abilities, but they were not of the showy and ambitious kind which achieve school or college distinction. He was partial to solitary rambles; fond of reading and reciting verses; a boy whom elder men ‘singled out for his grave looks,’ as he has said in the Excursion, and liked to converse with.

It was intended that he should enter the Church, the family circumstances rendering it necessary that he should adopt a profession. But, independently of his wish to devote himself exclusively to literary pursuits, he had caught the prevalent spirit of the time—the aversion to conventional forms and opinions. A moderate income, settled upon him by Raisley Calvert, the victim of a premature decline, enabled him to follow his inclinations. This benefit the poet has gratefully acknowledged:—

‘Calvert, it must not be unheard by them Who may respect my name, that I to thee Owed many years of early liberty. This care was thine, when sickness did condemn Thy youth to hopeless wasting, root and stem; That I, if frugal and severe, might stray Where’er I liked; and finally array My temples with the Muse’s diadem.’

After leaving College he made extensive tours on foot, in Scotland and on the Continent with a youthful friend. In 1793 he for the first time ventured into print. Two small volumes appeared in that year: “Descriptive Sketches, in verse, taken during a Pedestrian Tour among the Alps;” and “An Evening Walk, an Epistle in Verse, addressed to a young Lady from the Lakes in the North of England.” In these poems we find no traces of the poetical theory which he subsequently adopted. But they are characterised by the same, almost exclusive, preference for lakes, cataracts and mountains, the elementary beauty of external nature, human passions and incidents, and they contain many passages of glaring imagination powerfully expressed.

In 1796 he took up his abode with his sister at Allfaxden, at the foot of the Quantock Hills, in Somersetshire. This was an important era in the development of his intellect and imagination. During his residence at Allfaxden he was in constant and unreserved communication with Coleridge. Totally dissimilar as the two men were in character, they had many sympathies. Upon both, the classical tastes and ecclesiastical opinions inculcated at English schools and colleges, had, without their being aware of it, made a deep and indelible impression. Both had been animated by the vague but ardent longings after an undefined liberty, and perfection of human nature, then prevalent. They were isolated from general sympathy without knowing it; from the revolutionary party by their literary tastes and strong attachment to traditional English morals; from the Church and State party by their freedom from sectarian narrowness. The resolute independence of thought of the young poets is worthy of all admiration; their frank and cordial communication of all their thoughts, equally so. A pleasing though brief sketch of them at that time has been given by Hazlitt, in an essay, entitled, ‘My first Acquaintance with Poets;’ a more petulant and shallow account, which yet contains some valuable information, by Cottle.

The result of this literary alliance was the first volume of the “Lyrical Ballads.” The quiet but perfect melody of Wordsworth’s versification and the depth of the human sentiment in his reflections, the more swelling tone of Coleridge’s verse and his wild unearthly imaginings, might have secured a more favourable reception for his work, had it not been announced as the result of a new theory of poetry. That theory was misapprehended by the critics of the day, and was indeed inadequately expressed by its authors themselves. Coleridge subsequently developed it in more precise and unexceptionable language in his Biographia Literaria. The effect of its premature announcement was, that the Lyrical Ballads were judged, not by their own intrinsic merits, but by the theory upon which they were said to have been constructed.

The insurmountable indolence of Coleridge—always planning works too great for human accomplishment, and resting satisfied with projects—left Wordsworth to pursue his path alone. This he did with characteristic pertinacity of purpose; if criticism had any influence on him at all, it was only to confirm him in his foregone conclusions. After an excursion to Germany, in which he was accompanied by his sister and Coleridge, he returned to his native country, ‘with the hope,’ as he has told us in his Preface to the Excursion, ‘of being enabled to construct a literary work that might live.’

In 1803, Wordsworth married his cousin, Miss Mary Hutchinson, and settled at Grasmere. He removed in a few years to Rydal Mount, where he continued to reside till his death. Subsequently to this time his life is utterly devoid of personal incident, and may be briefly recapitulated before proceeding to chronicle his poetical productions, which are indeed his life. By his wife, who survives him, he had one daughter, who died before him, and two sons, one of whom holds a vicarage in Cumberland, the other is a distributor of stamps. In 1814, Wordsworth, by the patronage of the Earl of Lonsdale, was appointed distributor of stamps for Cumberland and Westmoreland—a recognition of the claims of genius to public support only second in eccentricity to the making of Burns an exciseman. After holding this office for twenty-eight years, he was allowed to relinquish it to his eldest son, and retire upon a pension of 300_l._ a year. In 1843, he succeeded Southey in the limited emoluments and questionable dignity of the Laureateship. His slender inheritance, the beneficence of Raisley Calvert, his office under Government, his retiring pension, and his emoluments as Laureate, sufficed, with his simple tastes, to enable him to wait the slow pecuniary returns of his literary labours.

While the critical storm awakened by the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads was still raging, he composed his Peter Bell and his Waggoner, which were not, however, published till many years later. They are full of fine and deep-felt poetry. Their language is genuine racy English, and their versification unsurpassed for sweetness. It cannot, however, be denied that they are marked by a self-willed, exaggerated adherence to the theory of poetry he had promulgated, the effect of something that is very like a spirit of contradiction. In a playful adaptation of Milton’s sonnet, Tetrachordon, Wordsworth defends his choice of subjects by the admiration felt or professed for Tam o’ Shanter. He overlooks the utter difference between the mode in which Burns conceived and executed that poem, and himself his Benjamin the Waggoner. Burns was for the time the hero himself. In Tam o’ Shanter, and still more in the Jolly Beggars, he expresses the very passions of the characters he presents to us. Wordsworth, constitutionally incapable of the emotions of a boon companion, merely describes and moralises on the waywardness of his Benjamin. We sympathise with the common humanity of Burns’s genial reprobates; we feel the cold shadow of Wordsworth’s Benjamin to be a hideous intruder among the fine poetical imagery and thought with which he is mixed up.

In 1807, Wordsworth published two volumes, containing his own contributions to the Lyrical Ballads, with many additional poems. Minute detached criticism is not the object of this sketch. Suffice it to say that many pieces in these volumes are unsurpassed in English poetry, or in the poetry of any language. The Song at the feast of Brougham Castle has a rich lyrical exuberance of feeling; the Laodamia is as severely beautiful as a Greek statue; Hartleap Well is full of mellow humanity; Rob Roy’s Grave, the Highland Girl, ‘She was a phantom of delight,’—every piece, in short, is replete with delightful sentiment and graphic pictures of rural nature. The objects of some of these poems obviously originate in a mistaken apprehension of the scope and purpose of poetry. Wordsworth was a curious observer of the workings of the human mind, and he sometimes confounded the pleasure derived from such metaphysical scrutiny with the pleasure derived from the presentation of poetical imaginings. Hence, what is questionable in his Idiot Boy, his Harry Gill, and some others.

The Excursion, the most ambitious, and, with all its defects, the greatest of his works, was published in 1814. Here the poet was in his true element. Wordsworth’s genius was essentially moralising and reflective. Incidents and adventure had no charm for him. He arrived at his knowledge of character by an inductive process, not like Shakespeare, by the intuition of sympathy and imagination. He had no power of perceiving those light and graceful peculiarities of men and society, generally designated manners, vivid presentations of which constitute the charm of so many poets; but he was tremulously alive to the charms of inanimate nature.

‘——The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were there to me An appetite; a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, or any interest Unborrowed from the eye.’

His soul was full of lofty and imaginative conceptions of moral truths. He, therefore, after severe examination of his own poems, resolved to rest his claims to immortality on his composition of ‘a philosophical poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society; and to be entitled The Recluse, as having for its principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement.’

How far this projected work has been advanced to completion, we have no means of knowing. A preliminary work, descriptive of the growth of his own powers, is, he has informed us, finished. The Recluse was to consist of three parts, the first and third containing chiefly meditations in the author’s own person; the intermediate introducing characters in a semi-dramatic form. It is to be regretted that his second part has alone been published, for Wordsworth’s genius was essentially undramatic. But notwithstanding the disadvantages under which the poet laboured from the selection of an uncongenial form, and his imperfect mastery of blank verse (a measure of which, perhaps. Milton alone among our English poets has developed the full measure, and varied power of modulation), the Excursion is, undoubtedly, a poem in the highest and truest sense of the word. The philosophical musings with which it abounds, are alike profound and elevating. And nothing can surpass the deep pathos of the episodes of Margaret and Ellen.

The subsequent publications of Wordsworth may be briefly enumerated. Peter Bell and the Waggoner appeared within two years after the Excursion; and the White Doe of Rylstone soon followed them. A miscellaneous volume, of which the River Duddon was the most prominent, was published in 1820, and Yarrow Revisited, in 1835. Of all these works, it may suffice to say that they are highly characteristic of the author, and contain many beauties.

Wordsworth’s poetry had long to contend against the conventional prepossessions of the literary world. From the beginning, however, his genius was felt by superior minds, and by a few young unprejudiced enthusiasts. His first admirers were literally a sect, and their admiration was, like the devotion of all sectarians, ardent and indiscriminating. They have, however, served as interpreters between him and the reading public, and thus his merits have come to be generally acknowledged. His writings lent a tone to the works of some who, like Shelley, dissented from his theory; and some who, like Byron, systematically scoffed at them. The public taste was thus insensibly approximated to them. Even yet, however, Wordsworth is probably more praised than liked. But the process will go on, and in time what is really valuable in his poems will take the place that is due to it in the land’s literature.

Of the first writings of Wordsworth little need be said. Though they contain valuable thoughts, they are lumbering and sufficiently unreadable. The once furious controversy about his literary creed as heresy, need not be resuscitated; there were great errors on both sides. If his merits were individually depreciated, there was much in his seemingly supercilious re-assertion, rather than defence and explanation of his views, to extenuate the petulance with which he was often treated. As for his wanderings in the fields of politics and polemics, he is no exception to the general truth, that the warmest admirers of poets must regret their deviations into such uncongenial by-ways.

The man was like his poetry; simple and therefore conservative in his tastes: self-reliant and sometimes repulsive from his austerity, yet with a rich fund of benevolence beneath the hard exterior. His frame was strong and sinewy from his habits of exercise; his look heavy, and, at first sight, unimpressive; but there was an inexpressible charm in his smile. He was the antithesis of the materialist and practical activity of the time. He did not understand, and therefore could not appreciate, the ennobling tendencies of the social and scientific career on which this age has entered—an age into which he had lingered, rather than to which he belonged. He looked out upon the world from his egotistic isolation rather as a critical spectator, than as a sympathiser. His views of it were rusted over with the conservative prejudices of the past. Railways he hated, and against them waged a sonneteering war. Although they were rapidly increasing the commerce, comforts, intercourse, affluence, and happiness of the whole community, they invaded the selfish solitude of the one man; and single-handed he did battle against the armies of invading tourists, who came to share with him the heathful pleasures of the mountain and the lake, in which he would have almost preserved a patent right for the few.

This anti-natural spirit, however, did not always lead him astray from the right path. In the Excursion, were promulgated, for the first time, these views respecting the embruting tendency of the unintermitting toil of our factory labourers, the necessity of universal education by the State, and the vocation of the English race to colonise the earth, which have been so many zealous missionaries. We cannot better conclude these desultory remarks,—an imperfect prelude to the lip of a truly good and great man—than by quoting part of his weighty words in the Excursion, respecting National Education:—

‘Oh! for the coming of that glorious time When, prizing Knowledge as her noblest wealth And best protection, this Imperial Realm, While she exacts allegiance, shall admit An obligation, on her part, to _teach_ Them who are born to serve her and obey; Binding herself by statute to secure To all her children whom her soil maintains, The rudiments of Letters, and to inform The mind with moral and religious truth, Both understood and practised—so that none, However destitute, be left to droop By timely culture unsustained; or run Into a wild disorder; or be forced To drudge through weary life without the aid Of intellectual implements and tools; A savage horde among the civilised, A servile band among the lordly free!

· · · · ·

‘The discipline of slavery is unknown Amongst us—hence the more do we require The discipline of virtue; order else Cannot subsist, nor confidence, nor peace. Thus duties rising out of good possess’d, And prudent caution, needful to avert Impending evil, do alike require That permanent provision should be made For the whole people to be taught and trained. So shall licentiousness and black resolve Be rooted out, and virtuous habits take Their place; and genuine piety descend, Like an inheritance, from age to age.’

These are indeed worthy to become Household words.

FATHER AND SON.

One evening in the month of March, 1798,—that dark time in Ireland’s annals whose memory (overlooking all minor subsequent _émeutes_) is still preserved among us, as ‘the year of the rebellion’—a lady and gentleman were seated near a blazing fire in the old-fashioned dining-room of a large lonely mansion. They had just dined; wine and fruit were on the table, both untouched, while Mr. Hewson and his wife sat silently gazing at the fire, watching its flickering light becoming gradually more vivid as the short Spring twilight faded into darkness.

At length the husband poured out a glass of wine, drank it off, and then broke silence, by saying—