in all, to a little drawing-room, or whatever the reader chooses to call it. Wordsworth himself has described the fireplace of

this room as his

Half-kitchen and half-parlour fire.

It was not fully seven feet six inches high, and in other respects pretty nearly of the same dimensions as the rustic hall below. There was, however, in a small recess, a library of perhaps three hundred volumes, which seemed to consecrate the room as the poet's study and composing room, and such occasionally it was. But far oftener he both studied, as I found, and composed on the high road."*

Other poems of later years refer, much more fully than the above, to this cottage, and its orchard ground, where so many of Wordsworth's lyrics were composed.

The "orchard ground," which was for the most part in grass, sloped upwards; but a considerable portion of the natural rock was exposed; and on its face, some rough stone steps were cut by Wordsworth, helped by a near neighbour of his-John Fisher -so as more conveniently to reach the upper terrace, where the poet built for himself a small arbour. All this garden and orchard ground is not much altered since 1800. The short terrace walk is curved, with a sloping bank of grass above, shaded by apple trees, hazel, holly, laburnum, laurel, and mountain ash. Below the terrace is the well, which supplied the cottage in Wordsworth's time; and there large leaved primroses still grow, doubtless the successors of those planted by his own and his sister's hands. Above, and amongst the rocks, are the daffodils, which they also brought to their 'garden-ground ;" the Christmas roses, which they planted near the well, were removed to the eastern side of the garden, where they flourished luxuriantly in 1882; but have now, alas! disappeared. The box-wood planted by the poet grows close to the cottage. The arbour is now gone; but, in the place where it stood, a seat is erected. The hidden brook still sings its under-song, as it used to do, "its quiet soul on all bestowing,” and the green linnet may doubtless be seen now, as it used to be in 1803. The allusions to the garden ground at Dove Cottage, in the poems which follow, will be noted as they Occur.-ED.

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*See Recollections of the Lakes, etc., pp. 130-137, Works, vol. ii., edition of 1862.-ED.

"BLEAK SEASON WAS IT, TURBULENT
AND BLEAK”*

Composed (probably) in 1800.-Published 1851

BLEAK season was it, turbulent and bleak,
When hitherward we journeyed, side by side,
Through burst of sunshine and through flying showers,
Paced the long vales, how long they were, and yet
How fast that length of way was left behind,
Wensley's rich vale and Sedbergh's naked heights.
The frosty wind, as if to make amends

For its keen breath, was aiding to our steps,
And drove us onward like two ships at sea;

Or, like two birds, companions in mid-air,

Parted and reunited by the blast.

Stern was the face of nature; we rejoiced

In that stern countenance; for our souls thence drew
A feeling of their strength. The naked trees,
The icy brooks, as on we passed, appeared
To question us, "Whence come ye? To what end?”

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This poem refers to a winter journey on foot, which Wordsworth and his sister took from Sockburn to Grasmere, by Wensleydale and Askrigg; and, since he has left us an account of this journey, in a letter to Coleridge, written a few days after their arrival at Grasmere-a letter in which his characterisation of Nature is almost as happy as it is in his best poems—some extracts from it may here be appended.

"We left Sockburn last Tuesday morning. We crossed the Tees by moonlight in the Sockburn fields, and after ten good miles riding came in sight of the Swale. It is there a beautiful river, with its green banks and flat holms scattered over with trees. Four miles further brought us to Richmond, with its huge ivied castle, its friarage steeple, its castle tower resembling a huge steeple. . . . We were now in Wensleydale, and D. and I set off side by side to foot it as far as Kendal. We reached

*This is a fragment of The Recluse, 11. 152-167; but it was originally published in the Memoirs of Wordsworth by his nephew (1851).-ED.

On

It

Askrigg, twelve miles, before six in the evening, having been obliged to walk the last two miles over hard frozen roads. Next morning the earth was thinly covered with snow, enough to make the road soft and prevent its being slippery. leaving Askrigg we turned aside to see another waterfall. was a beautiful morning, with driving snow showers, which disappeared by fits, and unveiled the east, which was all one delicious pale orange colour. After walking through two small fields we came to a mill, which we passed, and in a moment a sweet little valley opened before us, with an area of grassy ground, and a stream dashing over various lamina of black rocks close under a bank covered with firs; the bank and stream on our left, another woody bank on our right, and the flat meadow in front, from which, as at Buttermere, the stream had retired, as it were, to hide itself under the shade. As we walked up this delightful valley we were tempted to look back perpetually on the stream, which reflected the orange lights of the morning among the gloomy rocks, with a brightness varying with the agitation of the current. The steeple of Askrigg was between us and the east, at the bottom of the valley; it was not a quarter of a mile distant. . . . The two banks seemed to join before us with a facing of rock common to them both. When we reached this bottom the valley opened out again; two rocky banks on each side, which, hung with ivy and moss, and fringed luxuriantly with brushwood, ran directly parallel to each other, and then approaching with a gentle curve at their point of union, presented a lofty waterfall, the termination of the valley. It was a keen frosty morning, showers of snow threatening us, but the sun bright and active. We had a task of twenty-one miles to perform in a short winter's day. On a nearer approach the waters seemed to fall down a tall arch or niche that had shaped itself by insensible moulderings in the wall of an old castle. We left this spot with reluctance, but highly exhilarated. It was bitter cold, the wind driving the snow behind us in the best style of a mountain storm. We soon reached an inn at a place called Hardrane, and descending from our vehicles, after warming ourselves by the cottage fire, we walked up the brook-side to take a view of a third waterfall. We had not walked above a few hundred yards between two winding rocky banks before we came full upon the waterfall, which seemed to throw itself in a narrow line from a lofty wall of rock, the water, which shot manifestly to some distance from the rock, seeming to be dispersed into a thin shower scarcely visible before it reached the bason.

We were disappointed in the cascade itself, though the introductory and accompanying banks were an exquisite mixture of grandeur and beauty. . . After cautiously sounding our way over stones of all colours and sizes, encased in the clearest water formed by the spray of the fall, we found the rock, which before had appeared like a wall, extending itself over our heads, like the ceiling of a huge cave, from the summit of which the waters shot directly over our heads into a bason, and among fragments wrinkled over with masses of ice as white as snow, or rather, as Dorothy says, like congealed froth. The water fell at least ten yards from us, and we stood directly behind it, the excavation not so deep in the rock as to impress any feeling of darkness, but lofty and magnificent; but in connection with the adjoining banks excluding as much of the sky as could well be spared from a scene so exquisitely beautiful. The spot where we stood was as dry as the chamber in which I am now sitting, and the incumbent rock, of which the groundwork was limestone, veined and dappled with colours which melted into each other with every possible variety of colour. On the summit

of the cave were three festoons, or rather wrinkles, in the rock, run up parallel like the folds of a curtain when it is drawn up. Each of these was hung with icicles of various length, and nearly in the middle of the festoon, in the deepest valley of the waves that ran parallel to each other, the stream shot from the rows of icicles in irregular fits of strength, and with a body of water that varied every moment. Sometimes the stream shot into the bason in one continued current; sometimes it was interrupted almost in the midst of its fall, and was blown towards part of the waterfall at no great distance from our feet like the heaviest thunder shower. In such a situation you have at every moment a feeling of the presence of the sky. Large fleecy clouds drove over our heads above the rush of the water, and the sky appeared of a blue more than usually brilliant. The rocks on each side, which, joining with the side of this cave, formed the vista of the brook, were chequered with three diminutive waterfalls, or rather courses of water. Each of these was a miniature of all that summer and winter can produce of delicate beauty. The rock in the centre of the falls, where the water was most abundant, a deep black, the adjoining parts yellow, white, purple, and dove colour, covered with waterplants of the most vivid green, and hung with streaming icicles, that in some places seem to conceal the verdure of the plants and the violet and yellow variegation of the rocks; and in some places render the colours more brilliant. I cannot express to

you the enchanting effect produced by this Arabian scene of colour as the wind blew aside the great waterfall behind which we stood, and alternately hid and revealed each of these fairy cataracts in irregular succession, or displayed them with various gradations of distinctness as the intervening spray was thickened or dispersed. What a scene too in summer! In the luxury of our imagination we could not help feeding upon the pleasure which this cave, in the heat of a July noon, would spread through a frame exquisitely sensible. That huge rock on the

right, the bank winding round on the left with all its living foliage, and the breeze stealing up the valley, and bedewing the cavern with the freshest imaginable spray. And then the murmur of the water, the quiet, the seclusion, and a long summer day."—Ed.

ELLEN IRWIN ;

OR, THE BRaes of KirtlE*

Composed 1800.-Published 1800

[It may be worth while to observe that as there are Scotch Poems on this subject in simple ballad strain, I thought it would be both presumptuous and superfluous to attempt treating it in the same way; and, accordingly, I chose a construction of stanza quite new in our language; in fact, the same as that of Bürger's Leonora, except that the first and third lines do not, in my stanzas, rhyme. At the outset I threw out a classical image to prepare the reader for the style in which I meant to treat the story, and so to preclude all comparison.—I. F.]

In the editions of 1815 and 1820 this was included among the "Poems founded on the Affections." In 1827 it was placed in the " Memorials of a Tour in Scotland, 1803."—ED.

FAIR Ellen Irwin, when she sate

Upon the braes of Kirtle,

Was lovely as a Grecian maid

Adorned with wreaths of myrtle;

Young Adam Bruce beside her lay,
And there did they beguile the day

* The Kirtle is a River in the Southern part of Scotland, on whose banks

the events here related took place.-W. W. 1800.

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