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ever." But, dark or moonlight alike, in every instance throughout so long a course of years, the road was entirely our own for the whole twenty miles. After nine o'clock not

many people are abroad, after ten absolutely none, upon the roads of Westmoreland; a circumstance which gives a peculiar solemnity to a traveller's route amongst these quiet valleys upon a summer evening of latter May, of June, or early July; since, in a latitude so much higher than that of London, broad daylight prevails to an hour long after nine. Nowhere is the holiness of vesper hours more deeply felt.

And now, in 1839, from all these flying journeys and their stinging remembrances, hardly a wreck survives of what composed their living equipage: the men who chiefly drove in those days (for I have ascertained it) are gone; the horses are gone; darkness rests upon all, except myself. I, woe is me! am the solitary survivor from scenes that now seem to me as fugitive as the flying lights from our lamps as they shot into the forest recesses. God forbid that on such

a theme I should seem to affect sentimentalism! It is from overmastering recollections that I look back on those distant days; and chiefly I have suffered myself to give way before the impulse that haunts me of reverting to those bitter, bitter thoughts, in order to notice one singular waywardness or caprice (as it might seem) incident to the situation, which, I doubt not, besieges many more people than myself: it is, that I find a more poignant suffering, a pang more searching, in going back, not to those enjoyments themselves, and the days when they were within my power, but to times anterior, when as yet they did not exist; nay, when some who were chiefly concerned in them as parties had not even been born. No night, I might almost say, of my whole life, remains so profoundly, painfully, and pathetically imprinted on my remembrance as this very one, on which I tried prelusively, as it were, that same road in solitude, and lulled by the sweet carollings of the postilion, which, after an interval of ten years, and through a period of more than equal duration, it was destined that I should so often traverse in circumstances of happiness too radiant, that for me are burned out for ever. Coleridge told me of a similar case that had fallen within his knowledge, and the impassioned expression which the feel

ings belonging to it drew from a servant woman at Keswick: She had nursed some boy, either of his or of Mr. Southey's; the boy had lived apart from the rest of the family, secluded with his nurse in her cottage; she was doatingly fond of him; lived, in short, by him, as well as for him; and nearly ten years of her life had been exalted into one golden dream by his companionship. At length came the day which severed the connexion; and she, in the anguish of the separation, bewailing her future loneliness, and knowing too well that education and the world, if it left him some kind remembrances of her, never could restore him to her arms the same fond loving boy that felt no shame in surrendering his whole heart to caressing and being caressed, did not revert to any day or season of her ten years' happiness, but went back to the very day of his arrival, a particular Thursday, and to an hour when, as yet, she had not seen him, exclaiming "O that Thursday! O that it could come back! that Thursday when the chaise-wheels were ringing in the streets of Keswick; when yet I had not seen his bonny face; but when he was coming!"

Ay, reader, all this may sound foolishness to you, that perhaps never had a heartache, or that may have all your blessings to come. But now let me return to my narrative. After about twelve months' interval, and therefore again in November, but November of the year 1808, I repeated my visit to Wordsworth, and upon a longer scale. I found him removed from his cottage to a house of considerable size, about three-quarters of a mile distant, called Allan Bank. This house had been very recently erected, at an expense of about £1500, by a gentleman from Liverpool, a merchant, and also a lawyer in some department or other. It was not yet completely finished; and an odd accident was reported to me as having befallen it in its earliest stage. The walls had been finished, and this event was to be celebrated at the village inn with an ovation, previously to the triumph that would follow on the roof-raising. The workmen had all housed themselves at the Red Lion, and were beginning their carouse, when up rode a traveller, who brought them the unseasonable news, that, whilst riding along the vale, he had beheld the downfall of the whole building. Out the men

rushed, hoping that this might be a hoax; but too surely they found his report true, and their own festival premature. A little malice mingled unavoidably with the laughter of the Dalesmen; for it happened that the Liverpool gentleman had offered a sort of insult to the native artists, by bringing down both masons and carpenters from his own town; an unwise plan, for they were necessarily unacquainted with many points of local skill; and it was to some ignorance in their mode of laying the stones that the accident was due. The house had one or two capital defects-it was cold, damp, and, to all appearance, incurably smoky. Upon this latter defect, by the way, Wordsworth founded a claim, not for diminution of rent, but absolutely for entire immunity from any rent at all. It was truly comical to hear him argue the point with the Liverpool proprietor, Mr. C. He went on dilating on the hardship of living in such a house; of the injury, or suffering, at least, sustained by the eyes; until, at last, he had drawn a picture of himself as a very ill-used man; and I seriously expected to hear him sum up by demanding a round sum for damages. Mr. C. was a very good-natured man, calm, and gentlemanlike in his manners. He had also a considerable respect for Wordsworth, derived, it may be supposed, not from his writings, but from the authority (which many more besides him could not resist) of his conversation. However, he looked grave and perplexed. Nor do I know how the matter ended; but I mention it as an illustration of Wordsworth's keen spirit of business. Whilst foolish people supposed him a mere honeyed sentimentalist, speaking only in zephyrs and bucolics, he was in fact a somewhat hard pursuer of what he thought fair advantages.

In the February which followed, I left Allan Bank; but, upon Miss Wordsworth's happening to volunteer the task of furnishing for my use the cottage so recently occupied by her brother's family, I took it upon a seven years' lease. And thus it happened-this I mean was the mode of it (for, at any rate, I should have settled somewhere in the country)—that I became a resident in Grasmere.

CHAPTER VII

WESTMORELAND AND THE DALESMEN SOCIETY

OF THE LAKES

1

IN February, as I have said, of 1809, I quitted Allan Bank; and, from that time until the depth of summer, Miss Wordsworth was employed in the task she had volunteered, of renewing and furnishing the little cottage in which I was to succeed the illustrious tenant who had, in my mind, hallowed the rooms by a seven years' occupation, during, perhaps, the happiest period of his life—the early years of his marriage, and of his first acquaintance with parental affections. Cottage, immortal in my remembrance! as well it might be; for this cottage I retained through just seven-andtwenty years: this was the scene of struggle the most tempestuous and bitter within my own mind: this the scene of my despondency and unhappiness: this the scene of my happiness a happiness which justified the faith of man's earthly lot, as, upon the whole, a dowry from heaven. It was, in its exterior, not so much a picturesque cottage-for its outline and proportions, its windows and its chimneys, were not sufficiently marked and effective for the picturesque 2-as it was lovely: one gable end was, indeed,

1 From Tait's Magazine for January 1840.-M.

2 The idea of the picturesque is one which did not exist at all until the post-Christian ages; neither amongst the Grecians nor amongst the Romans; and therefore, as respects one reason, it was, that the art of landscape painting did not exist (except in a Chinese infancy, and as a mere trick of inventive ingenuity) amongst the finest artists of Greece. What is picturesque, as placed in relation to the beautiful

most gorgeously apparelled in ivy, and so far picturesque; but the principal side, or what might be called front, as it presented itself to the road, and was most illuminated by windows, was embossed-nay, it might be said, smothered— in roses of different species, amongst which the moss and the damask prevailed. These, together with as much jessamine and honeysuckle as could find room to flourish, were not only in themselves a most interesting garniture for a humble cottage wall, but they also performed the acceptable service of breaking the unpleasant glare that would else have wounded the eye from the whitewash; a glare which, having been renewed amongst the general preparations against my coming to inhabit the house, could not be suffi

and the sublime? It is (to define it by the very shortest form of words) the characteristic pushed into a sensible excess. The prevailing character of any natural object, no matter how little attractive it may be for beauty, is always interesting for itself, as the character and hieroglyphic symbol of the purposes pursued by Nature in the determination of its form, style of motion, texture of superficies, relation of parts, &c. Thus, for example, an expression of dulness and somnolent torpor does not ally itself with grace or elegance; but, in combination with strength and other qualities, it may compose a character of serviceable and patient endurance, as in the cart-horse, having unity in itself, and tending to one class of uses sufficient to mark it out by circumscription for a distinct and separate contemplation. Now, in combination with certain counteracting circumstances, as with the momentary energy of some great effort, much of this peculiar character might be lost, or defeated, or dissipated. On that account, the skilful observer will seek out circumstances that are in harmony with the principal tendencies and assist them; such, suppose, as a state of lazy relaxation from labour, and the fall of heavy drenching rain causing the head to droop, and the shaggy mane, together with the fetlocks, to weep. These, and other circumstances of attitude, &c., bring out the character of prevailing tendency of the animal in some excess; and, in such a case, we call the resulting effect to the eye-picturesque : or in fact, characteresque. In extending this speculation to objects of art and human purposes, there is something more required of subtle investigation. Meantime, it is evident that neither the sublime nor the beautiful depends upon any secondary interest of a purpose or of a character expressing that purpose. They (confining the case to visual objects) court the primary interest involved in that (form, colour, texture, attitude, motion) which forces admiration, which fascinates the eye, for itself, and without a question of any distinct purpose: and, instead of character-that is, discriminating and separating expression, tending to the special and the individual-they both agree in pursuing the Catholic, the Normal, the Ideal.

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