CHAPTER XLIV. DOMESTIC LIFE AND INCIDENTS-1841-1843. THERE was little to disturb the even tenor of Wordsworth's life at Rydal Mount during the year 1841, except the marriage of his daughter, referred to in a previous chapter. On the 19th January, he wrote to his friend John Peace, the city librarian at Bristol, thus : "Though I can make but little use of my eyes in writing or reading, I have lately been reading Cowper's Task aloud; and in so doing was tempted to look over the parallelisms, for which Mr. Southey, in his edition, was indebted to you. Knowing how comprehensive your acquaintance with poetry is, I was rather surprised that you did not notice the identity of the thought, and accompanying illustrations of it, in a passage of Shenstone's Ode upon Rural Elegance, compared with one in The Task,* where Cowper speaks of the inextinguishable love of the country as manifested by the inhabitants of cities in their culture of plants and flowers, where the want of air, cleanliness, and light is so unfavourable to their growth and beauty. The germ of the main thought is to be found in Horace : * See The Task, Book IV.— It is a flame that dies not even there, compared with Shenstone's Ode to the Duchess of Somerset Her impulse nothing may restrain. Nempe inter varias nutritur sylva columnas, Lib. i. epist. 10, v. 22. -Ever, my dear friend, faithfully, your obliged, WM. WORDSWORTH." Reference has been made, in the previous chapter, to Wordsworth's visit to the south of England, and to London, after his daughter's marriage. He said to John Peace that he had been "three months and as many weeks absent" from Rydal. Here turned to the north in August. Mrs. Fletcher gives us the following reminiscences of his conversation at the close of that month at Rydal. "Lancrigg, Easedale, August 26, 1841. Wordsworth made some striking remarks on Goethe in a walk on the terrace yesterday. He thinks that the German poet is greatly overrated, both in this country and his own. He said, 'He does not seem to me to be a great poet in either of the classes of poets. At the head of the first class I would place Homer and Shakspeare, whose universal minds are able to reach every variety of thought and feeling without bringing their own individuality before the reader. They infuse, they breathe life into every object they approach, but you never find themselves. At the head of the second class, those whom you can trace individually in all they write, I would place Spenser and Milton. In all that Spenser writes you can trace the gentle affectionate spirit of the man; in all that Milton writes you find the exalted sustained being that he was. Now in what Goethe writes, who aims to be of the first class, the universal, you find the man himself, the artificial man, where he should not be found; so that I consider him a very artificial writer, aiming to be universal, and yet constantly exposing his individuality, which his character was not of a VOL. III. 2 D kind to dignify. He had not sufficiently clear moral percep tions to make him anything but an artificial writer." Mrs. Fletcher's daughter Lady Richardson's Memoranda, dated two days later, are as follows: : "August 28th, 1841.-Mr. Wordsworth, Miss Fenwick, and Mr. Hill came to dine, and it rained on the whole day, but happily the poet talked on from two to eight without being weary, as we certainly were not. After dinner, when we came to the drawing-room, the conversation turned on the treatment of Wordsworth by the reviews of the day. I had never heard him open out on it before, and was much struck with the manner in which he did it; from his present elevation looking calmly back on the past, and at the same time feeling that an irreparable injury had been done to him, at the time when life and hope were young. As nearly as I can I shall record his words as they were spoken. He said :— 'At the time I resolved to dedicate myself to poetry, and separate myself from the ordinary lucrative professions, it would certainly have been a great object to me to have reaped the profits I should have done from my writings, but for the stupidity of Mr. Gifford and the impertinence of Mr. Jeffrey. It would have enabled me to purchase many books which I could not obtain, and I should have gone to Italy earlier, which I never could afford to do until I was sixty-five, when Moxon gave me a thousand pounds for my writings. This was the only kind of injury Mr. Jeffrey did me, for I immediately perceived that his mind was of that kind that his individual opinion on poetry was of no consequence to me whatever, that it was only by the influence his periodical exercised at the time, in preventing my poems being read and sold, that he could injure me; for, feeling that my writings were founded on what was true and spiritual in human nature, I knew the time would come when they must be known, and I never therefore felt his opinion of the slightest value, except in preventing the young of that generation from receiving impressions which might have been of use to them through life. I say this, I hope, not in a boasting spirit, but I am now daily surprised by receiving letters from various places at home and abroad expressive of gratitude to me, from persons I never saw or heard of. As this occurs now, I may fairly conclude that it might have been so when the poems appeared, but for the tyranny exercised over public opinion by the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews.” Another of Lady Richardson's Memoranda, of which only the date of the month is given, refers, I think, to the year 1842. "Tuesday, the 2d of May, Wordsworth and Miss F. came early to walk about, and dine. He was in a very happy, kindly mood. We took a walk on the terrace, and he went as usual to his favourite points. On our return he was struck with the berries on the holly-tree, and said, 'Why should not you and I go and pull some berries from the other side of the tree, which is not seen from the window? and then we can go and plant them in the rocky ground behind the house.' the berries, and set forth with our tool. I made the holes, and the poet put in the berries. He was as earnest and eager about it as if it had been a matter of importance; and as he put the seeds in, he every now and then muttered, in his low solemn tone, that beautiful verse from Burns's Vision— And wear thou this, she solemn said, And like a passing thought she fled In light away. We pulled He clambered to the highest rocks in the 'Tom Intak,'* and put in the berries in such situations as Nature sometimes does * "Intak" is a north-country word for " enclosure." with such true and beautiful effect. He said, I like to do this for posterity. Some people are selfish enough to say, What has posterity done for me? but the past does much for us.' In 1842 Wordsworth's Sonnets on the Punishment of Death first appeared in Sir Henry Taylor's article in the Quarterly Review. Writing to John Peace, February 23d, Wordsworth said: "Your Descant amused me, but I must protest against your system, which would discard punctuation to the extent you propose. It would, I think, destroy the harmony of blank verse when skilfully written. What would become of the pauses at the third syllable followed by an and, or any such word, without the rest, which a comma, when consistent with the sense, calls upon the reader to make, and which being made, he starts with the weak syllable that follows, as from the beginning of a verse? I am sure Milton would have supported me in this opinion. Thomson wrote his blank verse before his ear was formed as it was when he wrote the Castle of Indolence, and some of his short rhyme poems. It was, therefore, rather hard in you to select him as an instance of punctuation abused. I am glad that you concur in my view on the punishment of death. An outcry, as I expected, has been raised against me by weak-minded humanitarians. What do you think of one person having opened a battery of nineteen. fourteen-pounders upon me, i.e. nineteen sonnets, in which he gives himself credit for having blown me and my system to atoms? Another sonneteer has had a solitary shot at me from Ireland.-Ever faithfully yours, W. WORDSWORTH. In the end of May 1842, we find the poet in London, |