Part 7 (1/2)
LIFE AT GRASMERE. CAPTAIN WORDSWORTH.
A visit paid by Coleridge to Grasmere, shortly after the Scottish tour, is thus alluded to in a letter written by him to his friend, Mr. Thomas Wedgewood, in January, 1804. He says:--”I left my home December 20th, 1803, intending to stay a day and a half at Grasmere and then walk to Kendal, whither I had sent all my clothes and viatica, from thence to go to London, and to see whether or no I could arrange my pecuniary matters, so as, leaving Mrs. Coleridge all that was necessary to her comforts, to go myself to Madeira, having a persuasion strong as the life within me, that one winter spent in a really warm, genial climate, would completely restore me.... I stayed at Grasmere (Mr. Wordsworth's) a month; three-fourths of the time bedridden; and deeply do I feel the enthusiastic kindness of Wordsworth's wife and sister, who sat up by me, the one or the other, in order to awaken me at the first symptoms of distressful feeling; and even when they went to rest continued often and often to weep and watch for me even in their dreams.”
The death of her brother, Captain John Wordsworth, in the early part of 1805, was a great sorrow to Miss Wordsworth, as well as to the other members of the family. Captain Wordsworth was a younger brother of the poet, and a great favourite with him and his sister. In consequence of their early orphaned condition, and subsequent separation, they had not enjoyed much of each other's society until the time of Wordsworth's residence at Grasmere. Previously to this, and since the two brothers had been at school together at Hawkshead, they had only occasionally seen each other.
After the settlement of Wordsworth and his sister at Grasmere, this brother, who was in the service of the East India Company, had paid them a prolonged visit, extending over eight months. The fraternal ties were then renewed and strengthened, cemented as they became by mature sympathies. A kins.h.i.+p of thought and feeling, added to warm natural affections, bound together these three poetic souls in mutual love more than usually devoted. Captain Wordsworth recognised his brother's genius and greatness of soul, and felt a.s.sured that the time would arrive when they would be widely acknowledged. Writing of him to Miss Wordsworth, Coleridge says:--”Your brother John is one of you--a man who hath solitary usings of his own intellect, deep in feeling, with a subtle tact, and swift instinct of true beauty.” Himself so thoroughly in harmony with his brother's pursuits, and an ardent lover of the beautiful in Nature, as well as in life, he became, as Wordsworth says, ”a silent poet,” and was known among those of his own craft as ”The Philosopher.” Captain Wordsworth had so identified himself in heart with his brother's pursuits, and had become so enamoured of the life led by him and their sister in this quiet and beautiful vale, ”far from the madding crowd's ign.o.ble strife,” that he had formed the idea, if prospered during a few voyages, of settling at Grasmere, and adding his worldly store to theirs, in the hope of thus enabling Wordsworth to devote his attention to his muse, unfettered by anxious thoughts of a monetary character. With this loving object before him, he had made a voyage in the year 1801 without success. Again, in the spring of 1803, he sailed with the same hope in his heart, but only on this occasion also to return, without having in any degree been able to further its realisation.
In the meantime, money which had been long withheld from the Wordsworths by the former Earl of Lonsdale, had been honourably paid by his successor. Although the main object which Captain Wordsworth had in view in his former expeditions thus no longer existed, he decided once more to brave the fortunes of the deep. Being, in the year 1804, appointed to the command of the East Indiaman, _Abergavenny_, bound for the East, he sailed from Portsmouth, in the early part of 1805, upon a voyage on which many hopes were built. We are informed that on this occasion the value of the cargo (including specie) was 270,000, and that there were on board 402 persons. Not only did Captain Wordsworth take with him the share which had come to him of the money paid by the Earl of Lonsdale, but also 1,200 belonging to his brother William and his sister. The bright hopes were, however, doomed to end in the saddest of disaster.
Owing to the incompetence of a pilot, the s.h.i.+p struck off the Bill of Portland on the 5th February, 1805. Captain Wordsworth died, as he had lived, cheerfully doing his duty. Though he might have saved his own life, he bravely remained at his post to the last, and perished with most of the crew.
Writing of the sad occurrence to Sir George Beaumont shortly after, Wordsworth says:--”My poor sister and my wife, who loved him almost as we did (for he was one of the most amiable of men) are in miserable affliction, which I do all in my power to alleviate; but, Heaven knows, I want consolation myself. I can say nothing higher of my ever-dear brother than that he was worthy of his sister, who is now weeping beside me, and of the friends.h.i.+p of Coleridge; meek, affectionate, silently enthusiastic, loving all quiet things, and a poet in everything but words.” In a postscript he adds:--”I shall do all in my power to sustain my sister under her sorrow, which is, and long will be, bitter and poignant. We did not love him as a brother merely, but as a man of original mind, and an honour to all about him. Oh! dear friend, forgive me for talking thus. We have had no tidings from Coleridge. I tremble for the moment when he is to hear of my brother's death; it will distress him to the heart,--and his poor body cannot bear sorrow. He loved my brother, and he knows how we at Grasmere loved him.”
The friends.h.i.+p between the Wordsworths and Charles and Mary Lamb, formed during the Nether Stowey period, had continued, and they had been regular correspondents. Shortly after the sad death of her brother Miss Wordsworth had, in the fulness of her heart, written to Miss Lamb.
Although the response to the communication is well known it should find a place here. Miss Lamb's reply shows how well qualified she was to sympathise in her friend's sufferings. She had, indeed, been taught in the same school. She says:--”I thank you, my kind friend, for your most comfortable letter; till I saw your own handwriting I could not persuade myself that I should do well to write to you, though I have often attempted it; but I always left off dissatisfied with what I had written, and feeling that I was doing an improper thing to intrude upon your sorrow. I wished to tell you that you would one day feel the kind of peaceful state of mind, and sweet memory of the dead, which you so happily describe as now almost begun; but I felt that it was improper and most grating to the feelings of the afflicted to say to them that the memory of their affliction would in time become a constant part, not only of their dream, but of their most wakeful sense of happiness. That you would see every object with and through your lost brother, and that that would at last become a real and everlasting source of comfort to you I felt, and well knew from my own experience in sorrow; but till you yourself began to feel this I didn't dare tell you so; but I send you some poor lines, which I wrote under this conviction of mind, and before I heard Coleridge was returning home. I will transcribe them now before I finish my letter, lest a false shame prevent me then, for I know they are much worse than they ought to be, written as they were with strong feeling and on such a subject; every line seems to me to be borrowed; but I had no better way of expressing my thoughts, and I never have the power of altering or amending anything I have once laid aside with dissatisfaction:--
”'Why is he wandering on the sea?
Coleridge should now with Wordsworth be.
By slow degrees he'd steal away Their woe 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 pa.s.sed o'er their head, Will be remembered with such holy, True, and perfect 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 nought in life so sweet As such a memory.'”
Miss Wordsworth's reply to this letter has not been preserved. It came to the hands of Charles Lamb when his sister was undergoing one of her temporary but most sad confinements, in the asylum she periodically visited. On the 14th of June, 1805, Charles wrote for her to acknowledge the letter, one from which the following extract may be given:--”Your long, kind letter has not been thrown away (for it has given me great pleasure to find you are all resuming your old occupations and are better); but poor Mary, to whom it is addressed, cannot yet relish it.
She has been attacked by one of her severe illnesses, and is at present _from home_. Last Monday week was the day she left me, and I hope I may calculate upon having her again in a month or little more. I am rather afraid late hours have, in this case, contributed to her indisposition.
I have every reason to suppose that this illness, like all the former ones, will be but temporary; but I cannot always feel so. Meantime she is dead to me, and I miss a prop. All my strength is gone, and I am like a fool, bereft of her co-operation. I dare not think lest I should think wrong, so used am I to look up to her in the least as in the biggest perplexity. To say all that I know of her would be more than I think anybody could believe, or even understand; and when I hope to have her well again with me, it would be sinning against her feelings to go about to praise her, for I can conceal nothing that I do from her. She is older and wiser and better than I, and all my wretched imperfections I cover to myself by resolutely thinking on her goodness. She would share life and death, heaven and h.e.l.l with me. She lives but for me; and I know I have been wasting and teasing her life for five years past incessantly with my cursed drinking and ways of going on. But even in this upbraiding of myself I am offending against her, for I know that she has clung to me for better for worse; and if the balance has been against her hitherto it was a n.o.ble trade.”
The following letter of Charles Lamb, addressed ”to Mr. and Miss Wordsworth,” on the 28th of September, 1805, enclosing his ”Farewell to Tobacco” may also find a place here:--”I wish you may think this a handsome farewell to my 'Friendly Traitress.' Tobacco has been my evening comfort and my morning curse for nearly five years; and you know how difficult it is from refraining to pick one's lips even, when it has become a habit. This poem is the only one which I have finished since so long as when I wrote 'Hester Savory.' I have had it in my head to do this two years, but tobacco stood in its own light when it gave me headaches that prevented my singing its praises. Now you have got it, you have got all my store, for I have absolutely not another line. No more has Mary. We have n.o.body about us that cares for poetry; and who will rear grapes when he shall be the sole eater? Perhaps if you encourage us to show you what we may write, we may do something now and then before we absolutely forget the quant.i.ty of an English line for want of practice. The 'Tobacco' being a little in the way of Withers (whom Southey so much likes) perhaps you will somehow convey it to him with my kind remembrances. Then, everybody will have seen it that I wish to see it, I having sent it to Malta.
”I remain, dear W. and D.,
”Yours truly,
”C. LAMB.”
CHAPTER XI.
DE QUINCEY.--HIS DESCRIPTION OF MISS WORDSWORTH.--ALLAN BANK.
It was in the year 1807 that De Quincey was added to the number of the literary friends of the Wordsworths. He has given an interesting account of the way in which the acquaintances.h.i.+p was first formed. He had, indeed, been for some years an ardent admirer of the poet, and had had some correspondence with him in 1803. The characteristic timidity of this wayward genius is ill.u.s.trated by the fact, that although De Quincey had conceived an eager longing to form the personal acquaintance of Wordsworth, and had been favoured with a standing invitation to visit him, he allowed upwards of four years to pa.s.s without availing himself of the privilege of the meeting, ”for which, beyond all things under heaven, he longed.”
He has recorded how he had on two occasions taken a long journey with no other object. On one of these occasions he had proceeded as far only as Coniston--a distance from Grasmere of eight miles--when, his courage failing him, he returned.
The second time he actually so far kept up his courage as to traverse the distance between Coniston and the Vale of Grasmere, and came in sight of the ”little white cottage gleaming among trees,” which was the goal of his desire. After, however, he had caught ”one hasty glimpse of this loveliest of landscapes,” he ”retreated like a guilty thing.” This was in 1806. During the following year circ.u.mstances combined to bring about the much desired meeting.
A short time after an introduction to Coleridge, in the summer of this year, De Quincey learnt that Coleridge, who was engaged to lecture in town, desired to send his family to Keswick, and he was glad to accept De Quincey's offer to escort them. As Grasmere lay in their route, and Mrs. Coleridge was a cherished friend of the Wordsworths, a call upon them was the most natural thing, as was also an invitation to spend the night, and resume their journey on the following day.