Wordsworth and his circle

Preface

This book does not aim at being a biography of Wordsworth, though it is strung on a biographical thread ; and, as the title indicates, it is in many places as much about Wordsworth's contemporaries as about himself.

As my method is deliberately desultory, I have tried, with whatever success, to be on my guard against repetition, the attendant shadow of desultoriness. The first chapter, being introductory, contains a kind of forecast, or summary in advance, of the chief contents of the chapters that follow.

It is impossible to be even initiated into Wordsworth without knowing, and knowing well, a great deal of his poetry. I have, therefore, not stinted myself in quotation and comment, though I have tried to avoid the reproduction of verses which might conceivably be regarded as trite or insignificant. In the Appendix will be found references for those quotations the whereabouts of which is not clearly shown in the text.

The prefixed list of authorities may serve the double purpose of showing the sources from which I have drawn, and guiding the reader who may wish to go more deeply into the subject.

D. W. R.

Winchester, 1907

PRINCIPAL AUTHORITIES

Wordsworth : Complete Works. Edited by William Knight, with Memoirs. The Poetical Works of Wordsworth. Edited by Thomas Hutchinson

(Oxford Edition.) 1895.

The Complete Poetical Works of Wordsworth. With an Introduction by

John Morley. 9th ed. 1903. In this edition the Poems are arranged

chronologically.

Wordsworth's Prose Works. Edited by Grosart. 3 vols. 1876. Prose Works of William Wordsworth. Edited by William Knight. 2 vols.

1896.

Wordsworth's Literary Criticism. Edited, with an Introduction, by Nowell

C. Smith. 1905.

Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes. 5th ed., 1835. With an Introduction, etc.,

by Ernest de Selincourt. 1906.

Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. Edited by William Knight. 2 vols. 2nd

ed. 1904.

Dorothy Wordsworth's Recollections of a Tour in Scotland. Edited by

J. C. Shairp. 1874.

Memoirs of W. Wordsworth. By Christopher Wordsworth, D.D. 2 vols. 1851.

Wordsworth. By F. W. H. Myers. (English Men of Letters.)

Wordsworth. By Elizabeth Wordsworth.

Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited, with a Biographical Introduction, by James Dykes Campbell.

Life of Coleridge. By J . D . Campbell .

Coleridge : Biographia Literaria. (Bohn's Libraries.)

Coleridge : Table Talk.

Cotelis : Early Recollections. {Reminiscences.) 1837 and 1847. '■' Mrs. Sandford : Thomas Poole afid his Friejids. 2 vols. ^ Memorials of Coleorton. Edited by Wilham Knight. 2 vols. 1887.

Southey's Works.

Southey : Life, Letters, and Select Correspondence. By his Son.

V Southey. By Edward Dowden. (English Men of Letters.)

V Charles Lamb : Complete Works, with Memoir. Edited by Alfred Ainger. ^' Charles Lamb. By Ainger. (English Men of Letters.)

v Life of Charles Lamb. By E. V. Lucas. \ De Ouincey : Collected Works. Edited by David Masson.

V De Ouincey. By David Masson. (Enghsh Men of Letters.) , Japp's (H. A. Page) Life of De Quincey.

Hazlitt: Complete Works. (Waller and Glover.) 12 vols. Specially

V Table Talk; Spirit of the Age; Winter slow.

viii WORDSWORTH AND HIS CIRCLE

Lockhart's Life of Scott.

Sir Walter Scott's Letters. 2 vols. 1894.

Sir Walter Scott's Journal. 1825-1832. 1890.

Works of Professor Wilson. Edited by Ferrier.

Memoir of Professor Wilson. By his Daughter, Mrs. Gordon.

Crabb Robinson's Diary, etc. Sadler. 3 vols.

Francis Jeffrey's Contributions to Edinburgh Review. 4 vols.

Blackwood'' s Magazine, passim.

The Quarterly Review, passim.

The Edinbtirgh Review, passim.

John Stuart Mill : Autobiography.

Matthew Arnold : Preface to Selections from Wordsworth.

Life of F. D. Maurice. By his Son.

F. W. Robertson : Lecture on Wordsworth, to Working Men. 1853.

George Brimley. Essays.

J. C. Shairp : Studies in Poetry and Philosophy.

Swinburne : Miscellanies. 1886.

Sir Leslie Stephen : Hours in a Library. 3rd Series.

R. W. Church : Introduction to Wordsworth Selections in Ward's English

Poets, and Dante a7id other Essays.

Professor Walter Raleigh : Words7vorth. 2nd impression. 1903. Carlyle : Reminiscences.

Emerson : English Traits.

Clayden's Life of Samuel Rogers. 2 vols. 1889. Harriet Martineau : Autobiography. 1877. Haydon's Correspondence and Table Talk.

Life of Haydon. By Tom Taylor.

Sir Henry Taylor. Autobiography, and Notes from Books. Life of Sir W. Rowan Hamilton. By Graves. Life of Aubrey de Vere. By Wilfrid Ward. Mrs. Fletcher's Autobiography. 1874.

Yarnall's Wordsworth and the Coleridges.

Wordsworthiafia. Selections from Transactions of Wordsworth Society. W. S. Landor. Life, by Forster.

Journals of Caroline Fox.

Stanley's Life of Arnold of Rugby.

Canon Rawnsley : Lake Cotmtry Sketches and Literary Associations of the

English Lakes.

Edward Quillinan : Poems.

Hartley Coleridge : Poems and Memoir. 1851. Leigh Hunt : Autobiography.

Byron's Works.

Keats' W^orks (including Letters).

Shelley's Works. Forman.

Pattison : The Brothers Wiffen. 18S0.

Life of Alaric Watts. 1 884.

Legouis : La Jeunesse de Wordsworth.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

Preface v

Principal Authorities vii

Chapter I Wordsworth In His Circle

IN one sense it seems a dubious use of metaphor to regard Wordsworth as the centre of any circle. For, if we think of a body of men as a circle, we must think of the centre as one of a group who shares its qualities ; one who gives and takes, who lives in intellectual community and not alone. Yet no fact about Wordsworth is more certain and more striking than his essential solitariness. To him, even more than to Milton, his own words belong : his soul was like a star and dwelt apart. The Puritanism of his age, the culture of his age, are much more perceptible in Milton, than are any sympathies of the eighteenth or nineteenth century in the work of Wordsworth. Milton, for all his mighty originality, was a classicist ; he was proud to work on traditional lines ; his form was as great as his matter, and is inseparable from it. But Wordsworth had the daring, defiant individuality of the true Romantic. He thought of himself, and he thought rightly, as a reformer, an innovator, in poetry ; and he neither had, nor believed himself to have, much essential kinship with any of his contemporaries. He always had enthusiastic admirers, and always friends whose cordial admiration fell short of enthusiasm ; but there was not one of them, who was wholly without perplexity and disappointment about the master, not one who could wholly abandon the attitude of apology.

While disciples and admirers were not without uncertainty and occasional dissent, Wordsworth himself habitually felt a serene self-complacency which enclosed him as a constant envelope, but which must not be confounded with any kind of vulgar egotism. Traces of such egotism there undoubtedly were in Wordsworth ; but they have really nothing to do with that consciousness of mission and certainty of ultimate success which gave to this poet the prophet's high self-regard and solitary outlook.

Wordsworth wrote to Lady Beaumont in 1807 that he was " easy-hearted " with respect to his poems. " Trouble not yourself," he wrote, " upon their present reception ; of what moment is that compared with what I trust in their destiny ? — to console the afflicted ; to add sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier ; to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think, and feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous ; this is their office." Such self-criticism is nearly as impersonal as the words which immediately precede it —

" It is an awful truth, that there neither is nor can be, any genuine enjoyment of poetry among nineteen out of twenty of those persons who live, or wish to live, in the broad light of the world — among those who either are, or are striving to make themselves, people of consideration in society. This is a truth, and an awful one, because to be incapable of a feeling of poetry, in my sense of the word, is to be without love of human nature and reverence for God."

One who thus thinks of poetry and of his own effort in its service, must feel and speak as if alone in a wilderness ; and perhaps no British man of letters was ever in this sense so unrelated, so original, as Wordsworth. His detachment is only made more obvious by the recognition of his debt to forerunners, and of his disciples' debt to him. In two very important respects, the way was prepared for Wordsworth, not in Britain only, but in Europe : men's affections were turning from purely human interests to interests in which landscape had a large share ; and from the attractions of elaborate civilization to those of extreme simplicity. No two men ever moved further apart than Rousseau and Wordsworth ; yet their common ground and the identity of some of their presuppositions are notorious. Nor, among his British contemporaries, is it only Wordsworth who reminds us of Rousseau. Goldsmith and Cowper, not less than the ballad-restorers or such a Romantic mediaevalist as Chatterton, felt, each in his own way, that disapproval of things as they were, that discontent with civilized man, which Rousseau indulged with such startling results. Goldsmith expressed them with a somewhat conventional pensiveness ; in Cowper they were made to subserve the Evangelicalism of the age ; but the burden, in both, was a praise of rusticity and simplicity, an appreciation of man as man, without any lendings or trappings, which are not far from Rousseau's central thought. And if Rousseau's thought became revolutionary, it must be remembered that Wordsworth's sympathies, in some of his strongest hours, were on the side of the Revolution. He hailed the great French upheaval as a resuscitation of man ; and the passion of his maturity, his hatred of Napoleon, was passion for the freedom which the tyrant had overthrown. So he read the events.

But none of this makes Wordsworth's originality less complete. The Nature to which he preached and led a return, had a very different complexion from the Nature of Rousseau's worship ; and in the rare atmosphere of its high places we may be sure that Goldsmith and Cowper would have found it hard to breathe. Even in his earliest work, in the Evetiing Walk and Descriptive Sketches (in the latter of which, indeed, Coleridge saw "the emergence of an original poetic genius above the horizon," but which are only remotely Wordsworthian), we find a treatment of landscape very different from Cowper's. Cowper's feeling for landscape leaves little to be desired in genuineness ; but his method of description has nothing of the intimacy of Wordsworth's. And when, in and after Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth became Wordsworthian, he thought and spoke of Nature, whether as revealed in man, or in that world of the open air in which man lives and moves, as no one, either in or out of Britain, had thought and spoken of it before. Some of his predecessors had observed Nature with affectionate care and truly and beautifully rendered her details ; many had personified her ; but it was left for Wordsworth to realize her as a living unity, and to love her as the saints love God.

Nor is Wordsworth's isolation less striking if we think of the history of his influence. Immediately and remotely, by repulsion as well as by attraction, his influence has been immense ; but it has never been of the kind which leads to imitation. Wordsworth founded no school. His words ran over the length and breadth of the land ; his thought has sunk deep into one generation after another ; but hardly any one has borrowed his accents or attempted to complete his message. Nor can it be said of him, as it can be said of, e.g. Byron, Scott, or Tennyson, that he was the spokesman of an age, that he ministered to prevalent taste, that he made articulate the thoughts and feelings which were striving for expression in younger as well as lesser men. What in this sense we call popularity could never be affirmed of Wordsworth. He sang of " things common " indeed ; but there are many ways of " touching" such things, and Wordsworth's way was not the world's.

To find Wordsworth's circle, then, we must think partly of his many contemporary literary and artistic friends and admirers, cordial always, but always critical ; partly of that opulent cluster of Romantic poets with their attendant and like-minded critics, among whom Wordsworth, in spite of his singularity, must be ranked. In the latter sense, the circle must be held to include Burns and Blake, Shelley and Keats, as much as Coleridge and Southey, De Quincey and Charles Lamb.

About the great literary outburst which marked the close of the eighteenth, and the first quarter of the nineteenth century, so much has been said that, probably, the less one now says the better. All that one may hope, or need attempt, to do, is to rehearse some generally recognized conclusions and point out some special aspects and distinctions. If we ignore these we shall miss Wordsworth's place in literary history.

The Romantic Revival, as it is the fashion to call the outburst, was a unity in diversity. It was a unity, as the springtime is a unity, inasmuch as it brought new life into the world, the world of verse and prose, of feeling and thought. It was a unity inasmuch as it depended upon novelty ; as it worked on men's minds by way of surprise, excitement, sense of change. It was a unity inasmuch as it came to be associated, often loosely and rhetorically, with the French Revolution, as if it were a kind of literary and artistic counterpart of that great social and political movement. But its diversity is more apparent than its unity. Even if we could bring ourselves to believe that one impulse, or a small number of kindred impulses, produced the Romantic Revival, we should have to acknowledge that the Revival included a great many very different things, of which the interconnection is by no means obvious. It has been called — not without good reason — the " Renascence of Wonder." It has been called, with equally good reason, the restoration of English poetry to Nature, or of Nature to English poetry. It was certainly the revival of various and beautiful lyrical measures ; it was a new birth of lyrical passion ; it was the revival of delight in love ; it was the recovery of power to recognize and render the beautiful. It was a reaction against a long monopoly in poetry of the satire of society. It included, as we have seen, a recovered sense of the beauty and significance of landscape ; and with this must be conjoined a recovered sense of the attractiveness of animals, and of their claim on human interest and affection. It was an assertion of the rights of individuality in genius against the obligation of literary tradition. It was the discovery of light in the " Dark Ages," in that mediaeval world which had seemed the mere ruin and negation of classical culture. Last, but not least, in the Romantic Revival poetry became essentially and truly " metaphysical." It asserted its kinship with theology and philosophy ; it assumed prophetic garments and mystical accents ; it became the interpreter of symbols, the revealer of realities beyond the phantasmagoria of the senses.

One feature was, on the whole, common to the many aspects of the movement, and the recognition of it will bring us back to Wordsworth. Romance is the cult of the extraordinary, the unusual ; its presupposition is that in the world of art a refuge is to be found from the tyranny of what is common, under which daily experience groans. Very different were the presuppositions of the poetry and fiction dominant in Britain for more than a hundred years before the Romantic Revival can be said to have begun. The poetry of Dryden and Pope assumed the all-sufficiency as poetic themes of contemporary society, manners, and politics. The so-called " comedy of manners," which culminated in Congreve, found its subject-matter and inspiration in the same quarters. The English novel renounced all connection with the preposterous romance of the seventeenth century, and nourished its mighty youth on the most homely, sometimes the most sordid, realities of British life. The poetry which intervened between Pope on the one hand, and Coleridge and Wordsworth on the other, was a poetry of transition, which foreshadowed the future as well as recalled the past. But in the prose romance of awe and supernatural terror which Horace Walpole handed on to Mrs. Radcliffe, and in the old-world opulence of Chatterton and Ossian and the ballad-restorers, literature turned its face resolutely from the temporary and the ordinary towards the extraordinary and the remote. And this conversion was of the very essence of the Romanticism which glowed like a bright star on the opening of the nineteenth century.

" But what," the reader may ask, " has it got to do with Wordsworth ? " Was not Wordsworth's battle for the homely, the ordinary ; was it not his boast, his reproach, and his glory, that he found " a tale in everything " ; that " the moving accident " was not his trade ; and that in humble, everyday life, its peasantry, its flowers, its speech, its " nameless unregarded acts," the best stuff of poetry was to be found ? The Romanticism of Coleridge, of Byron, of Scott, of Southey, of Keats, is evident ; but, if the cult of the extraordinary and remote is essential to Romanticism, is it consistent, is it reasonable, to call Wordsworth a Romantic ?

The answer is that Romanticism claims Wordsworth by virtue of his imagination. In the following pages we shall have to hear much about imagination. It is enough to say now that Wordsworth regarded that faculty very seriously ; that he conceived himself to possess it in large measure ; and that he thought of it as the poet's chief warrant. And while he gloried in choosing lowly themes for poetry, he utterly repudiated the judgment that his poetry itself was lowly. He believed that his imaginative faculty transformed the themes, and transformed them creatively, as we may believe that Divine Power transforms the raw material or primordial protoplasm of the physical universe. The result, according to Wordsworth, was that the common lost its commonness, and gained what Romanticism of the more ordinary type sought in the preternatural, the remote, the unusual.

When Wordsworth and Coleridge made the famous compact out of which Lyrical Ballads sprang in 1798, they agreed upon a division of labour in a joint enterprise. How they did it cannot be better told than in Coleridge's words : " It was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic ; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us ; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand."

" To excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural ; " that was the end which Wordsworth proposed to himself in his poetic operations. It was to be reached by the exercise of imagination, and, by virtue of imagination, he was a fellow-worker with the author of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Perhaps we best understand Wordsworth's literary relationships and his place in literary history when we realize his differences from one or two of his predecessors on the one hand, and from some of his famous contemporaries on the other.

Among the predecessors none are more eminent and none more characteristic of the eighteenth century than Pope and Gray. With both Wordsworth thought of himself as in antagonism ; against both, at least in certain respects, he led a revolt. Against Pope, indeed, the revolt had begun long before Wordsworth's day, when, in 1756, Joseph Warton published the first volume of his Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope. The reputation of Pope's successors, of Gray and Ossian and the ballad-editors, was itself a testimony to reaction against the Popian despotism. But Wordsworth was more than ten years old when Dr. Johnson published his Lives of the Poets, in which

Pope, though treated with searching critical discrimination, was held up as a genuine and great poet. " Let us look round upon the present time," cried the Doctor, " and back upon the past ; let us inquire to whom the voice of mankind has decreed the wreath of poetry ; let their productions be examined and their claims stated ; and the pretensions of Pope will be no more disputed. Had he given the world only his version [of Homer] the name of poet must have been allowed him." Wordsworth's view of Pope was very different. He admits that he had " melody " and " a polished style," but he considered his great reputation a false one. He hated personal satire, which plays such a large part in the poetry of Dryden and Pope ; and he found Pope wanting in the three essentials of poetry — passion, imagination, and truth to Nature. It was chiefly because of his lack of the last-named quality that Wordsworth was in antagonism to Pope. In an admirable sentence he says that Pope " having wandered from humanity [in his Pastorals] with boyish inexperience, the praise which these compositions obtained tempted him into a belief that Nature was not to be trusted, at least in pastoral poetry." Pope, like Dryden before him, wrote about Nature as a man born blind might write. And Wordsworth's mission was to show that Nature might be trusted.

" Nature never did betray the heart that loved her."

Wordsworth's revolt against Gray was part of his revolt against " poetic diction." He tried, in practice and in criticism, to break down distinctions between expression in prose and expression in verse ; and, rightly or wrongly, he held that Gray did all he could to raise and confirm such distinctions. In other words, he thought Gray an artificial poet, and as such, he, the Poet of Nature, felt obliged to treat him as a foe.

Towards the more Romantic of his predecessors, the author of the Ossian poems, and the ballad-writers, and even towards such true landscape lovers as Thomson and Cowper, Wordsworth was very critical. He frankly admits Thomson's inspiration ; but he says that he has a vicious style with false ornaments, and that he utters sentimental commonplaces. He mocks at Cowper for his apologetic admiration of *' that coarse object, a furze-bush." For Percy's Reliques, indeed, he has nothing but praise. But Ossian ! Gray, whose work it is not easy to regard as in any sense Romantic, Gray, the most fastidious of classicists, was delighted with Ossian. When the first instalment appeared, he wrote to Horace Walpole : " Is there any more to be had of equal beauty, or at all approaching to it ? " And on a further acquaintance with the poems, he describes himself as " struck, extasi^y with their infinite beauty."

Wordsworth, for his part, mercilessly tears the unhappy imposture to tatters ; he spurs on his somewhat sluggish rhetoric, and decides that the book "is essentially unnatural ... a forgery audacious as worthless."

With the rank and file of Germano-British Romanticism in prose fiction and in verse, Wordsworth had no sympathy. Reformer among reformers as he was, he took a pessimistic view of the efforts of those who were in some respects his fellow-workers. Like all the reformers, he wished literature to be exciting and stimulating rather than formal and dull ; but he held that the ruck of the Romanticists used " gross and violent stimulants" to attain their end. He aimed at passion and emotion, they at sentimentalism and sensationalism ; and the result was a degradation of literature. " The invaluable works of our elder writers," he wrote in 1800, "I had almost said the works of Shakespeare and Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse."

Such being Wordsworth's temper, it is a matter of interest to observe his relation to his great poetic contemporaries, and to the younger men who came after them. Coleridge was his dear and life-long friend ; and, in Lyrical Ballads, one of the landmarks of Romanticism, the Ancient Mariner appeared side by side with the Idiot Boy and the Tintern Abbey lines. Was not the Aficient Mariner an "idle and extravagant story in verse," or was it redeemed only by Wordsworth's contributions to it, the tale of the shot albatross and a line or two here and there, and by the moral about cruelty to animals } There is no evidence to show that critical questions greatly disturbed Wordsworth's admiration of and loyalty to his "marvellous" colleague and friend. But we do know that Wordsworth had his doubts about the rank of Coleridge's most distinctively I Romantic poetry. We know that he considered that Coleridge's poetic achievement fell short of his poetic gifts ; that the infelicity of his lot had shut him from that sympathy with others, which is granted only to long and tranquil experience, and without which the best poetry, which is a poetry of human nature, cannot be made. And we know, finally, that he regarded the preternatural, which counts for so much in Coleridge, as the pis aller of a poet who could not reach the natural.

If Wordsworth thought thus of Coleridge's most famous efforts in poetry, we must be prepared to find him somewhat cold to others of his contemporaries. We should hardly expect him to find spiritual kinship in Byron, whose satirical treatment of him was hardly relieved by even a passing expression of admiration. But what of him who was in R. L. Stevenson's phrase, " far and away the King of the Romantics," what of Walter Scott ? Deep was the respect, and genuine the love which the two men had for one another ; and much of their work, surely, was done in the same field. Scott was more of a narrative poet than Wordsworth ; he had the externalism to which the narrative poet is prone, and his love of pomp and circumstance ; and Wordsworth recognized this. In the introduction to The White Doe of Rylstone he points out that it was the inwardness of historical events that interested him ; and that whereas Scott made events march in the orthodox manner towards a catastrophe, he, for his part, was content with an external pageantry of mere failure, so long as it might be made the exponent of some hidden moral victory. But surely in their rendering of Nature, in the loving portraiture of mountain and sky and flower, the two poets were in fullest sympathy and co-operation. Yet Wordsworth does not seem to have felt the sympathy. His criticism of Scott is always depreciatory, and he does not seem to have even dreamed of placing him in a high rank. He recognized Southey's great cleverness and power of narrative in verse ; but denied him imagination and inspiration. Burns he loved and reverenced ; but could never forget his moral shortcomings, and was curiously insensible of his lyrical merit.

Keats and Shelley were a generation younger than Wordsworth ; yet they were as truly reformers and restorers of English poetry as he was. In spite of occasional scofiings, they regarded him as a doyen ; and the three were linked together against all artificiality and Philistinism in their art. Yet it does not appear that Wordsworth took any real interest in the work of his two great junior contemporaries.

As the world knows, Wordsworth's unsympathetic critics tried to fix him in a circle of their own drawing. " The Lake School," the " Lakists," such was the circle of Francis Jeffrey's devising: it was a triangle rather, and denoted Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, while it connoted " lakishness," that is to say, poetical incompetence and triviality, parading as affected simplicity, and pretentious philosophy. The animus which Jeffrey breathed into others is dead, and the criticism which it moved is obsolete ; but the Lake School will live for ever, not as a sect, but as a noble band of pioneers, or say rather as a cluster of satellites about a star, whose brightness, like that in the prophet's vision, shines "out of the North." Nowhere else in Britain, save in the wizard-held borderland, has any limited area of soil been so definitely and solemnly set apart for, and consecrated to, the Muses, as that region of mountain, lake, and gushing streams which is shared by the three counties of Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancaster. Grasmere Vale, with its sweet lake and engirdling hills ; Windermere, with its islands, reaching away to the south ; the shores of Derwentwater under the stately bulk of Skiddaw ; these are the spots where the ghostly presences are thickest. It was a great moment in British literary annals when Wordsworth, a wanderer on the face of the earth, resolved to return to the place of his birth, and live and die there.

" Many were the thoughts Encouraged and dismissed, till choice was made, Of a known Vale, whither my feet should turn, Nor rest till they had reached the very door Of the one cottage which methought I saw."