places-and there, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other members of their house holds often met. When Coleridge left Grasmere for Keswick, the Wordsworths usually accompanied him as far as this rock; and they often met him there on his way over from Keswick to Grasmere. Compare the Hon. Mr Justice Coleridge's Reminiscences. (Memoirs, Vol. II., p. 310.) An upright mural block of stone, Moist with pure water trickling down. ROCK OF NAMES! Light is the strain, but not unjust For they were graven on thy smooth breast And fail not Thou, loved Rock! to keep Thy charge when we are laid asleep. This rock is on the right hand of the road, a little way past Waterhead, at the southern end of Thirlmere. On it are cut the letters, W. W. M. H. D. W. S. T. C. J. W. S. H. which are the initials of William Wordsworth, Mary Hutchinson, Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Wordsworth, and Sarah Hutchinson. The Wordsworths settled at Grasmere at the close of the year 1799. As mentioned in a previous note (see p. 58), Captain John Wordsworth lived with his brother and sister during most of that winter, and during the whole of the spring, summer, and autumn of 1800, leaving it finally on September 29, 1800. These names must therefore have been cut during the summer of 1800. There is no record of the occurrence, and no allusion to the rock, in Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal of 1800. But that Journal, so far as I have examined it, begins on the 14th of May 1800. Almost every detail of the daily life and ways of the household at Dove Cottage is so minutely recorded in it, that I am convinced that this incident of the cutting of names in the Thirlmere Rock would have been mentioned, had it happened between the 14th of May and John Wordsworth's departure from Grasmere in September. Such references as this, for example, occur in the Journal, "Saturday, Aug. 2. William and Coleridge went to Keswick. John went with them to Wytheburn, and staid all day fishing." I therefore infer that it was in the spring or early summer of 1800 that the names were cut. I may add that the late Dean of Westminster-Dean Stanley-took much interest in this Rock of Names; and doubt having been cast on the accuracy of the place and the genuineness of the inscriptions, in a letter from the Bishop of Manchester, which he forwarded to me, he entered into the question with all the interest with which he was wont to track out details in the architecture or the history of a Church. There are few memorials connected with Wordsworth more worthy of preservation than this "upright mural block of stone." When one remembers that the initials on the rock were graven by the hands of William, Dorothy, and John Wordsworth, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the two Hutchinsons (Mary and Sarah), and that Wordsworth says of them, We worked until the initials took this Thirlmere Rock will be regarded as a far more interesting memento, of the group of poets that used to meet beside it, than the Stone in the grounds of Rydal Mount that was spared at Wordsworth's suit "from some rude beauty of its own." And there is simplicity as well as strength in the way in which the initials are cut. It is a sad reflection that the stone has been desecrated (and is, I fear, increasingly injured) by those who have had the audacity to scratch their own names or initials upon it. In 1877 I wrote, "The rock is as yet wonderfully free from such; and its preservation is probably due to the dark olivecoloured moss, with which the 'pure water trickling down' has covered the face of the 'mural block,' and thus secured it from observation, even on that highway;" but I find this summer (1882) that several other names have been ruthlessly added. "The Muse" takes farewell of the Waggoner as he is proceeding with the Sailor and his quaint model of the Vanguard along the road toward Keswick. It "scents the morning air," and Quits the slow-paced waggon's side, The "hawthorn dell" is the upper part of the Vale of St John. Of Raven-crag-black as a storm— Raven-crag is well known,-a rock on the western side of Thirlmere, where the Greta issues from the lake. But there is no rock in the district now called by the name of Ghimmer-crag, or the crag of the Ewe-lamb. I am inclined to think that Wordsworth referred to the "Fisher-crag" of the Ordnance Survey and the Guide Books. No other rock round Thirlmere can with any accuracy be called the "tall twin brother" of Raven-crag: certainly not Great How, nor any spur of High Seat or Bleaberry Fall. Fisher crag resembles Raven crag, as seen from Thirlmere Bridge, or from the high road above it; and it is somewhat remarkable that Green-in his Guide to the Lakes (a volume which the poet possessed)—makes use of the same expression as that which Wordsworth adopts regarding these two crags, Raven and Fisher. "The margin of the lake on the Dalehead side has its charms of wood and water; and Fischer Crag, twin brother to Raven Crag, is no bad object, when taken near the island called Buck's Holm" (A Description of Sixty Studies from Nature, by William Green of Ambleside, 1810, p. 57). I cannot find any topographical allusion to a Ghimmer-crag in contemporary local writers. Clarke, in his Survey of the Lakes, does not mention it. The Castle Rock, in the Vale of Legberthwaite, between High Fell and Great How, is the fairy castle of Sir Walter Scott's Bridal of Triermain. "Nathdale Fell" is the ridge between Naddle Vale (Nathdale Vale) and that of St John, now known as High Rigg. The old Hall of Threlkeld has long been in a state of ruinous dilapidation, the only habitable part of it having been for many years converted into a farmhouse. The remaining local allusions in The Waggoner are obvious enough: Castrigg is the shortened form of Castlerigg, the ridge between Naddle Valley and Keswick. In the "Reminiscences" of Wordsworth, which the Hon. Mr Justice Coleridge wrote for the Bishop of Lincoln, in 1850, there is the following reference to The Waggoner. (See Memoirs, Vol. II., p. 310.) The Waggoner seems a very favourite poem of his. He said his object in it had not been understood. It was a play of the fancy on a domestic incident, and lowly character. He wished by the opening descriptive lines to put his reader into the state of mind in which he wished it to be read. If he failed in doing that, he wished him to lay it down. He pointed out with the same view, the glowing lines on the state of exultation in which Ben and his companions are under the influence of liquor. Then he read the sickening langour of the morning walk, contrasted with the glorious uprising of Nature, and the songs of the birds. Here he has added about six most exquisite lines." The lines referred to are doubtless the eight, beginning Say more; for by that power a vein, which were added in the edition of 1836. See Appendix to this volume, Note I.-ED. FRENCH REVOLUTION, . AS IT APPEARED TO ENTHUSIASTS AT ITS COMMENCEMENT. [An extract from the long poem on my own poetical education. It was first published by Coleridge in his "Friend," which is the reason of its having had a place in every edition of my poems since.] OH! pleasant exercise of hope and joy! For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood Of custom, law, and statute, took at once Among the bowers of paradise itself) The budding rose above the rose full blown. To wield it; they, too, who, of gentle mood, Had watched all gentle motions, and to these, Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where ! These lines appeared first in The Friend, No. 11, October 26, 1809, p. 163. They afterwards found a place amongst the "Poems of the Imagination," in all the collective editions from 1815 onwards. They are part of the eleventh book of The Prelude, entitled "France--(concluded").-ED. |