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CHAPTER VI.

UNSETTLEMENT: WANDERINGS IN WALES AND CUMBER

LAND; ETC.

WORDSWORTH Went from London to the Isle of Wight for a month in the summer of 1793, with his friend, William Calvert. They saw the English fleet in the Solent, preparing for expected war. Every evening, as the sunset cannon was fired at Portsmouth, it roused in his mind visions of possible disaster, or of long-continued misery in store for the world.

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Leaving the Isle of Wight,—and (writing of it in 1842) he says it was "with melancholy forebodings" * that he did so,---he drove with Calvert through the New Forest to Salisbury. An accident occurring there, put a stop to their intended tour. Their carriage was wrecked in a ditch. Calvert went to the north on horseback, and Wordsworth walked, via Bristol, through South Wales, and thence onwards to the house of his other Welsh friend, Jones. Before leaving Salisbury, however, he spent three days among "the wilds of Sarum's Plain." Ranging over the trackless pastoral downs, or along the bare white roads, he strove to realise the state of matters in the Druid time. He saw in imagination the ancestral past, the primitive Britons in wolf-skin vests striding across the wold, and sacrificial altars flaming in the darkness. He traced the circle of Stonehenge, and seemed to see the long-bearded Teachers with white wands, pointing alternately to the sky, and to the mighty

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Stones, arranged by them to represent their knowledge of the heavens. His Salisbury wanderings, during these three days, gave rise to the poem which he first called The Female Vagrant, but afterwards Guilt and Sorrow, or Incidents on Sarum Plain.*

From Salisbury he proceeded on foot to Bath, thence to Bristol, next to the Wye, to Tintern Abbey, and on to Wales. This solitary visit to the Wye is referred to at the beginning of the Lines addressed to Tintern Abbey, in 1798. From Tintern he went up the river to Goodrich, and there, in the ruined courtyard of the old castle, he met the little girl, who persisted in reckoning her dead brothers as still in the family circle. † He went from Goodrich through South Wales, and thence to the house of his friend Jones, at Plas-yn-llan.

The very practical question of his own future, which had often been before him, had now to be faced, and, if possible, settled. Being twenty-three years of age, he could now have taken orders, if he chose. But he felt no vocation to do so, and his sense of duty would not permit him to become a clergyman merely to obtain a means of livelihood, or with a view to some future preferment.

His sister shared his anxieties, and wrote thus to Miss Pollard:

“FORNCETT, June 16, Sunday Morning, 1793.

I cannot foresee the day of my felicity, the day on which I am once more to find a home under the same roof as my brother. All is still obscure and dark.

You remember the enthusiasm with which we used to be fired, when in the back kitchen, the croft, or in any of our favourite haunts, we built our little Tower of Joy.

See the "Advertisement" to Guilt and Sorrow, 1842. + See We are Seven.

Let us never forget these days. I often hear from my dear brother William. I am very anxious about him just now, as he has not yet got an employment. He is looking out, and wishing for the opportunity of engaging himself as tutor to some young gentleman, an office for which he is peculiarly well qualified. . . . I cannot describe his attention to me. There was no pleasure that he would not have given up with joy for half an hour's conversation with me. It was in winter (at Christmas) that he was last at Forncett; and every day, as soon as we rose from dinner, we used to pace the gravel walk in the garden till six o'clock, when we received a summons (which was always welcome) to tea. Nothing but rain or snow prevented our taking this walk. Often have I gone out, when the keenest north wind has been whistling amongst the trees over our head, and have paced that walk in the garden, which will always be dear to me-from the remembrance of those very long conversations I have had upon it supported by my brother's arm. Ah! I never thought of the cold when he was with me. I am as heretical as yourself in my opinions concerning love and friendship. I am very sure that love will never bind me closer to any human being than friendship binds me to you my earliest friends, and to William my earliest and my dearest male friend.

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The most of the autumn of 1793 was spent with Jones. With him he renewed his wanderings on foot in North Wales, traversing much the same ground as Coleridge did with a friend in the following year on a pedestrian tour. At this time, Coleridge was at Cambridge, and the two men had not yet met.

Coleridge's own account of his first knowledge of Wordsworth's poems is given in the Biographia Literaria, chap. iv. "During the last year of my residence at Cambridge, 1794, I

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became acquainted with Mr Wordsworth's first publication,* entitled Descriptive Sketches, and seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon more evidently announced."

The earliest authentic notice of Coleridge's knowledge of Wordsworth occurs in the Cambridge Diary of Christopher Wordsworth, the poet's brother, afterwards master of Trinity, extracts from which are published by his grandson, in his Social Life at the English Universities in the eighteenth century. In that diary the following is recorded:-" Tuesday, Nov. 5, 1793.-Round about nine o'clock by Bilsbarrow and Le Grice, with a proposal to become member of a literary society: the members they mentioned as having already come into the plan, [S. T.] Coleridge, Jes., Setterthwiate, Rough, and themselves, Trin. Coll., and Franklin, Pembroke. . . . Was to have gone to Coleridge's to wine to consult on the plan. Got all into a box, and (having met with the Monthly Review of my Brother's Poems) entered into a good deal of literary and critical conversation on Dr Darwin, Miss Seward, Mrs Smith, Bowles, and my Brother. Coleridge spoke of the esteem in which my Brother was holden by a society at Exeter, of which Downman and Hole were members, as did Bilsbarrow (which he had before told me), of his repute with Dr Darwin, Miss Seward, &c., at Derby.

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Saturday, 9.— . . . No author ought, I think, without he enters the world with considerable advantages, to begin with publishing a very elaborate work, however, not a work upon which tastes may very considerably vary, e.g., my

* It may have been “ first,”—preceding The Evening Walk,—but we have no evidence. The first (quarto) edition of each poem, published in 1793, refers to the other as "by the same author." It is not unworthy of note that both these early quarto publications were by Johnson, the publisher and friend of Cowper, who brought out the first edition of The Task only nine years earlier, viz., in 1784.

Br[other]'s Poems. If he had had his reputation raised by some less important and more popular poems, it would have insured from petty critics a different reception to his Descriptive Sketches, and Evening Walk."-(p. 590.)

With Jones in Denbighshire he doubtless often discussed his future prospects. In the beginning of the following year he left Wales, and we find him first as far north as Armathwaite, near Keswick, living with the Speddings. In February he went to the Rawsons, at Mill House, Halifax. Mrs Rawson was the Miss Thelkeld, to whose care his sister Dorothy had been handed over after she left Penrith; and it was partly to meet his sister, and discuss their prospects, that he went to Halifax, where he spent four weeks. While at Mill House he gave Mr Rawson's nephew lessons in French.

In a letter to Mathews, February 17th, 1794, Wordsworth says: "My sister is under the same roof with me; indeed, it was to see her that I came into this country. I have been doing nothing, and still continue to do nothing. What is to become of me I know not." He adds that he has determined not to enter the Church; and, "as for the Law, I have neither strength of mind, purse, or constitution, to engage in that pursuit."*

In this state of suspense as to his future, the brother and sister started on one of those delightful walks,-so many of which they afterwards took together,—partly to talk over their future, partly to visit friends with whom they might further discuss it, partly to see if they could find a fit spot where they might settle down. Their mode of travelling was delightfully simple and unencumbered. They took coach, in the first instance, from Halifax to Kendal, there com

* See Memoirs, vol. i. p. 82. His three brothers had all made up their minds as to their future long before William could make up his. He was now twenty-three years of age.

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