92 WORDSWORTH AND MILTON. him by the hand, to give tenderness to his sterner moods; to guide his eye to the softening unity of things-from the world of men and objects his only retreat was to the world of books-he alternated his life between these two, and thus many of those fountains and lakes of softer soothings in his soul were dried up, and he sank into a comparatively stern and cheerless man, and when he married, he married uncongenially, not the little playmate of his infancy-the object of a long choice and admiration, but a woman who came from quite another hemisphere to that on which he had passed his days, unsympathising with his pursuits, his studies, his feelings, and perhaps alarmed by his vacant moods-it is no wonder that his verses rise like mighty cliffs, and that his beauties and tendernesses seem much more like the mossy lichen upon the rock, than the vein of beauty tracking its way within. How can we doubt that we are to seek in the homes of the Poets for most of the ruling principles which have governed their genius, or moulded their verse. Never was bard so surrounded by good, true, and beautiful women, at that period of his life when he might have perhaps lapsed into the darker sternness of brooding and clouded thought, we have seen how his Sister accompanied him in all his travels-walked with him, talked with him, was silent with him, wrote for him, thought for him, seems indeed to have lived for him; then a Wife, the worthy and sympathising partner of his aspirations, frequently of his journeys; and then as years declined, the two were reproduced in OBLIGATIONS TO WOMAN. 93 one, his dear Dora, his Daughter. All these influences must have been felt by him every day; whenever was bard so favoured before? Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton, Pope, Byron, Campbell-not one enjoyed such happiness, and we question whether one of all we have mentioned was capable of so much enjoyment-whether one among them could have treated woman with so much mental and moral deference, he was not polite or amiable, he was more, he was tender and manly. It is usually true, "the measure we mete is measured out to us again." In the language of our author, "Those who have little to confer, Find little to receive." And it must infallibly be the law that when we case ourselves in a lofty and impervious reserve, forbidding the outgoings of tenderness, we by that same act close the pores of our moral nature against the admission of the healthy atmosphere too. On returning from France one of the first places in which Mr. Wordsworth settled for some time was a place called Racedown Lodge, near Crewkerne, in Dorsetshire, with his sister. His life here, as the reader will be aware was the case with most of his life, had much the appearance of desultoriness; the country was lovely, his sister writes with enthusiasm of it, and of her travels over it; they spent their time in reading (the house itself was well stocked with books) and in gardeningthe place was quite retired, having little or no Society, and Post, once a week. Racedown was made remarkable 94 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. in the life of our Poet by many circumstances, the most important of which perhaps was that here he became acquainted with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These two men were destined to exert no little reactive influence on each other's lives and minds. Miss Wordsworth gives a very interesting description of him and of his first visit. "At first," she says, "I thought him very plain, that is for about three minutes-he is pale, thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, and not very good teeth; longish, loose growing, half curling, rough black hair; but if you hear him speak for five minutes you think no more of them. His eye is large and full, and not very dark but grey, such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest expression, but it speaks every emotion of his animated mind: it has more of the Poet's eye, in a fine phrensy rolling,' than I ever witnessed. He has fine dark eyebrows, and an overhanging forehead." The friends were mutually delighted with each other. Coleridge writing to a friend at this time declares that he feels himself but a very little man by the side of Wordsworth, while of Miss Wordsworth he writes, "She is a woman indeed in mind and in heart, for her person is such that if you expected to see a pretty woman you would think her ordinary; if you expected to see an ordinary woman you would think her pretty, but her manners are simple, ardent, impressive; in every motion her innocent soul out-beams so brightly that who saw her would say 'Guilt was a thing impossible with her.' Her information various, her eye watchful in minutest observation of nature, and her taste a perfect Electrometer." After staying in Racedown about two years they left and took a house at Allfoxden, principally to enjoy the benefit of Coleridge's society. Allfoxden is a village near Nether Stowey, in Somersetshire, not far from Bristol, among the Quantock hills, and of his dwelling here he has afforded us some very beautiful and interesting descriptions in many of his poems, and in the poems of Coleridge too, who was his constant companion, we find some very lively and more than graphic traces of the beauty of the spot they had chosen. Miss Wordsworth indeed expresses herself with rapture of their residence here, and speaks of it with greater delight than any of their other residences in England. It was at this time when at Racedown and Allfoxden that Wordsworth made his only effort at dramatic writing, and produced The Borderers, which however was not published until nearly half a century afterwards, in 1842. We confess we do not turn to it with any especial feelings of pleasure; it wants most of the high tones and interests of such writing. Wordsworth had perhaps few of the elements of the Dramatist, and chose a subject which it is marvellous to suppose was interesting to him. He had not the ready sympathy the Dramatist needs-he had not that various style which gives to the Drama the perpetual charm of novelty— he could not sketch many portraits, and in this piece 96 THE BORDERERS. there is a great likeness in the whole Dramatis Persona. The action of the piece too is very harrowing; very repulsive-the character of Oswald is even far more horrible than Iago, in Othello; his criminality is apparently motiveless; he is described as one of those whose nature it is to "Spin motives out of their own bowels, There needs no other motive Than that most strange incontinence in crime The production of this piece belongs to that period when the mind of our author was ill at ease with itself, and how prone the mind in such moods is to turn to a process of moral and mental anatomy the reader may perhaps very well know. Such a period in the life of Shakspeare produced the moralizing and soliloquizing Jacques; such a period in the life of Schiller produced the character of Woolf, not altogether unlike Oswald, but having nevertheless the redeeming circumstance of motive for his atrocious and unnatural iniquities. Minds disposed to the pressure of their own character and individuality, are also usually disposed to watch the movements of other minds with a morbid interest; they are the men who would say "We dissect The senseless body, and why not the mind? There are strange sights—the mind of man upturned, In some a hideous one." |