Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 by Various

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What actions are absolutely moral is determined by application of the
same law,--those only which repose wholly in themselves, being to
themselves at once motive and reward. "Miserable is he," says the
"Bhagavad Gita," "whose motive to action lies, not in the action itself,
but in its reward." Duty purchased with covenant of special delights is
not duty, but is the most pointed possible denial of it. The just man
looks not beyond justice; the merciful reposes in acts of mercy; and
he who would be bribed to equity and goodness is not only bad, but
shameless. But of this no further words.

Rest is sacred, celestial, and the appreciation of it and longing for
it are mingled with the religious sentiment of all nations. I cannot
remember the time when there was not to me a certain ineffable
suggestion in the apostolic words, "There remaineth, therefore, a rest
for the people of God." But the repose of the godlike must, as that of
God himself, be _infinitely_ removed from mere sluggish inactivity;
since the conception of action is the conception of existence
itself,--that is, of Being in the act of self-manifestation. Celestial
rest is found in action so universal, so purely identical with the great
circulations of Nature, that, like the circulation of the blood and the
act of breathing, it is not a subtraction from vital resource, but is,
on the contrary, part of the very fact of life and all its felicities.
This does not exclude rhythmic or recreative rest; but the need of such
rest detracts nothing from pleasure or perfection. In heaven also, if
such figure of speech be allowable, may be that toil which shall render
grateful the cessation from toil, and give sweetness to sleep; but right
weariness has its own peculiar delight, no less than right exercise;
and as the glories of sunset equal those of dawn, so with equal, though
diverse pleasure, should noble and temperate labor take off its sandals
for evening repose, and put them on to go forth "beneath the opening
eyelids of the morn." Yet, allowing a place for this rhythm in the
detail and close inspection even of heavenly life, it still holds true
on the broad scale, that pure beauty and beatitude are found there only
where life and character sweep in orbits of that complete expression
which is at once divine labor and divine repose.

Observe, now, that this rest-motion, as being without waste or loss, is
a _manifested immortality_, since that which wastes not ends not; and
therefore it puts into every motion the very character and suggestion of
immortal life. Yea, one deed rightly done, and the doer is in heaven,
--is of the company of immortals. One deed so done that in it is _no_
mortality; and in that deed the meaning of man's history,--the meaning,
indeed, and the glory, of existence itself,--are declared. Easy,
therefore, it is to see how any action may be invested with universal
significance and the utmost conceivable charm. The smaller the realm and
the humbler the act into which this amplitude and universality of spirit
are carried, the more are they emphasized and set off; so that, without
opportunity of unusual occasion, or singular opulence of natural power,
a man's life may possess all that majesty which the imagination pictures
in archangels and in gods. Indeed, it is but simple statement of fact to
say, that he who rests _utterly_ in his action shall belittle not only
whatsoever history has recorded, but all which that poet of poets,
Mankind, has ever dreamed or fabled of grace and greatness. He shall
not peer about with curiosity to spy approbation, or with zeal to defy
censure; he shall not know if there be a spectator in the world; his
most public deed shall be done in a divine privacy, on which no eye
intrudes,--his most private in the boundless publicities of Nature; his
deed, when done, falls away from him, like autumn apples from their
boughs, no longer his, but the world's and destiny's; neither the
captive of yesterday nor the propitiator of to-morrow, he abides simply,
majestically, like a god, in being and doing. Meanwhile, blame and
praise whirl but as unrecognized cloudlets of gloom or glitter beneath
his feet, enveloping and often blinding those who utter them, but to him
never attaining.

It is not easy at present to suggest the real measure and significance
of such manhood, because this age has debased its imagination, by the
double trick, first, of confounding man with his body, and next, of
considering the body, not as a symbol of truth, but only as an agent in
the domain of matter,--comparing its size with the sum total of physical
space, and its muscular power with the sum total of physical forces. Yet

"What know we greater than the soul?"

A man is no outlying province, nor does any province lie beyond him.
East, West, North, South, and height and depth are contained in his
bosom, the poles of his being reaching more widely, his zenith and nadir
being more sublime and more profound. We are cheated by nearness and
intimacy. Let us look at man with a telescope, and we shall find no star
or constellation of sweep so grand, no nebulae or star-dust so provoking
and suggestive to fancy. In truth, there are no words to say how either
large or small, how significant or insignificant, men may be. Though
solar and stellar systems amaze by their grandeur of scale, yet is true
manhood the maximum of Nature; though microscopic and sub-microscopic
protophyta amaze by their inconceivable littleness, yet is mock manhood
Nature's minimum. The latter is the only negative quantity known to
Nature; the former the only revelation of her entire heart.

In concluding, need I say that only the pure can repose in his
action,--only he obtain deliverance by his deed, and after deliverance
from it? The egotism, the baseness, the partialities that are in our
performance are hooks and barbs by which it wounds and wearies us in the
passage, and clings to us being past.

Law governs all; no favor is shown; the event is as it must be; only he
who has no blinding partiality toward himself, who is whole and one with
the whole, he who is Nature and Law and divine Necessity, can be blest
with that blessedness which Nature is able to give only by her presence.
There is a labor and a rest that are the same, one fact, one felicity;
in this are power, beauty, immortality; by existence as a whole it is
always perfectly exemplified; to man, as the eye of existence, it is
also possible; but it is possible to him only as he is purely man,--only
as he abandons himself to the divine principles of his life: in other
words, this Sabbath remaineth in very deed to no other than the people
of God.

* * * * *

LIGHTS OF THE ENGLISH LAKE DISTRICT.

At the opening of the present century, the Lake District of Cumberland
and Westmoreland was groaned over by some residents as fast losing its
simplicity. The poet Gray had been the first to describe its natural
features in an express manner; and his account of the views above
Keswick and Grasmere was quoted, sixty years since, as evidence of
the spoiling process which had gone on since the introduction of
civilization from the South. Gray remarked on the absence of red roofs,
gentlemen's houses, and garden-walls, and on the uniform character of
the humble farmsteads and gray cottages under their sycamores in the
vales. Wordsworth heard and spoke a good deal of the innovations which
had modified the scene in the course of the thirty years which elapsed
between Gray's visits (in 1767-69) and his own settlement in the Lake
District; but he lived to say more, at the end of half a century, of the
wider and deeper changes which time had wrought in the aspect of the
country and the minds and manners of the people. According to his
testimony, and that of Southey, the barbarism was of a somewhat gross
character at the end of the last century; the magistrates were careless
of the condition of the society in which they bore authority; the clergy
were idle or worse,--"marrying and burying machines," as Southey told
Wilberforce; and the morality of the people, such as it was, was
ascribed by Wordsworth, in those his days of liberalism in politics, to
the state of republican equality in which they lived. Excellent, fussy
Mr. Wilberforce thought, when he came for some weeks into the District,
that the Devil had had quite time enough for sowing tares while the
clergy were asleep; so he set to work to sow a better seed; and we find
in his diary that he went into house after house "to talk religion to
the people." I do not know how he was received; but at this day the
people are puzzled at that kind of domestic intervention, so unsuitable
to their old-fashioned manners,--one old dame telling with wonder, some
little time since, that a young lady had called and sung a hymn to
her, but had given her nothing at the end for listening. The rough
independence of the popular manners even now offends persons of a
conventional habit of mind; and when poets and philosophers first came
from southern parts to live here, the democratic tone of feeling and
behavior was more striking than it is now or will ever be again.

Before the Lake poets began to give the public an interest in the
District, some glimpses of it were opened by the well-known literary
ladies of the last century who grouped themselves round their young
favorite, Elizabeth Smith. I do not know whether her name and fame have
reached America; but in my young days she was the English school-girls'
subject of admiration and emulation. She had marvellous powers of
acquisition, and she translated the Book of Job, and a good deal from
the German,--introducing Klopstock to us at a time when we hardly knew
the most conspicuous names in German literature. Elizabeth Smith was an
accomplished girl in all ways. There is a damp, musty-looking house,
with small windows and low ceilings, at Coniston, where she lived with
her parents and sister, for some years before her death. We know, from
Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton's and the Bowdlers' letters, how Elizabeth and
her sister lived in the beauty about them, rambling, sketching, and
rowing their guests on the lake. In one of her rambles, Elizabeth sat
too long under a heavy dew. She felt a sharp pain in her chest, which
never left her, and died in rapid decline. Towards the last she was
carried out daily from the close and narrow rooms at home, and laid in a
tent pitched in a field just across the road, whence she could overlook
the lake, and the range of mountains about its head. On that spot now
stands Tent Lodge, the residence of Tennyson and his bride after their
marriage. One of my neighbors, who first saw the Lake District in early
childhood, has a solemn remembrance of the first impression. The tolling
of the bell of Hawkeshead church was heard from afar; and it was tolling
for the funeral of Elizabeth Smith. Her portrait is before me now,--the
ingenuous, child-like face, with the large dark eyes which alone show
that it is not the portrait of a child. It was through her that a large
proportion of the last generation of readers first had any definite
associations with Coniston.

Wordsworth had, however, been in that church many a time, above twenty
years before, when at Hawkeshead school. He used to tell that his mother
had praised him for going into the church, one week-day, to see a woman
do penance in a white sheet. She considered it good for his morals. But
when he declared himself disappointed that nobody had given him a penny
for his attendance, as he had somehow expected, his mother told him he
was served right for going to church from such an inducement. He spoke
with gratitude of an usher at that school, who put him in the way
of learning the Latin, which had been a sore trouble at his native
Cockermouth, from unskilful teaching. Our interest in him at that
school, however, is from his having there first conceived the idea of
writing verse. His master set the boys, as a task, to write a poetical
theme,--"The Summer Vacation"; and Master William chose to add to it
"The Return to School." He was then fourteen; and he was to be double
that age before he returned to the District and took up his abode there.

He had meantime gone through his college course, as described in his
Memoirs, and undergone strange conditions of opinion and feeling in
Paris during the Revolution; had lived in Dorsetshire, with his faithful
sister; had there first seen Coleridge, and had been so impressed by the
mind and discourse of that wonderful young philosopher as to remove to
Somersetshire to be near him; had seen Klopstock in Germany, and lived
there for a time; and had passed through other changes of residence and
places, when we find him again among the Lakes in 1779, still with his
sister by his side, and their brother John, and Coleridge, who had never
been in the District before.

As they stood on the margin of Grasmere, the scene was more like what
Gray saw than what is seen at this day. The churchyard was bare of the
yews which now distinguish it,--for Sir George Beaumont had them planted
at a later time; and where the group of kindred and friends--the
Wordsworths and their relatives--now lie, the turf was level and
untouched. The iron rails and indefensible monuments, which Wordsworth
so reprobated half a century later, did not exist. The villas which stud
the slopes, the great inns which bring a great public, were uncreated;
and there was only the old Roman road where the Wishing-Gate is, or the
short cut by the quarries to arrive by from the South, instead of the
fine mail-road which now winds between the hills and the margin of
the lake. John Wordsworth guided his brother and Coleridge through
Grisedale, over a spur of Helvellyn, to see Ullswater; and Coleridge has
left a characteristic testimony of the effect of the scenery upon him.
It was "a day when light and darkness coexisted in contiguous masses,
and the earth and sky were but one. Nature lived for us in all her
wildest accidents." He tells how his eyes were dim with tears, and
how imagination and reality blended their objects and impressions.
Wordsworth's account of the same excursion is in as admirable contrast
with Coleridge's as their whole mode of life and expression was, from
first to last. With the carelessness of the popular mind in such cases,
the British public had already almost confounded the two men and their
works, as it soon after mixed up Southey with both; whereas they were
all as unlike each other as any three poets could well be.

Coleridge and Wordsworth were both contemplative, it is true, while
Southey was not: but the remarkable thing about Coleridge was the
exclusiveness of his contemplative tendencies, by which one set of
faculties ran riot in his mind and life, making havoc among his powers,
and a dismal wreck of his existence. The charm and marvel of his
discourse upset all judgments during his life, and for as long as his
voice remained in the ear of his enchanted hearers; but, apart from the
spell, it is clear to all sober and trained thinkers that Coleridge
wandered away from truth and reality in the midst of his vaticinations,
as the _clairvoyant_ does in the midst of his previsions, so as to
mislead and bewilder, while inspiring and intoxicating the hearer or
reader. He recorded, in regard to himself, that "history and particular
facts lost all interest" in his mind after his first launch into
metaphysics; and he remained through life incapable of discerning
reality from inborn images. Wordsworth took alarm at the first
experience of such a tendency in himself, and relates that he used to
catch at the trees and palings by the roadside to satisfy himself of
existences out of himself; but Coleridge encouraged this subjective
exclusiveness, to the destruction of the balance of his mind and the
_morale_ of his nature. He was himself a wild poem; and he discoursed
wild poems to us,--musical romances from Dreamland; but the luxury to
himself and us was bought by injury to others which was altogether
irreparable, and pardonable only on the ground that the balance of his
mind was destroyed by a fatal intellectual, in addition to physical
intemperance. In him we see an extreme case of a life of contemplation
uncontrolled by will and unchecked by action. His faculty of will
perished, and his prerogative of action died out. His contemplations
must necessarily be worth just so much the less to us as his mental
structure was deformed,--extravagantly developed in one direction, and
dwarfed in another.

The singularity in Wordsworth's case, on the other hand, is that his
contemplative tendencies not only coexisted with, but were implicated
with, the most precise and vivid apprehension of small realities. There
was no proportion in his mind; and vaticination and twaddle rolled
off his eloquent tongue as chance would have it. At one time he would
discourse like a seer, on the slightest instigation, by the hour
together; and next, he would hold forth with equal solemnity, on the
pettiest matter of domestic economy. I have known him take up some
casual notice of a "beck" (brook) in the neighborhood, and discourse
of brooks for two hours, till his hearers felt as if they were by the
rivers of waters in heaven; and next, he would talk on and on, till
stopped by some accident, on his doubt whether Mrs. Wordsworth gave a
penny apiece or a half-penny apiece for trapped mice to a little girl
who had undertaken to clear the house of them. It has been common to
regret that he held the office of Stamp-Distributor in the District; but
it was probably a great benefit to his mind as well as his fortunes. It
was something that it gave him security and ease as to the maintenance
of his family; but that is less important than its necessitating a
certain amount of absence from home, and intercourse with men on
business. He was no reader in mature life; and the concentration of his
mind on his own views, and his own genius, and the interests of his home
and neighborhood, caused some foibles, as it was; and it might have been
almost fatal, but for some office which allowed him to gratify his love
of out-door life at the same time that it led him into intercourse
with men in another capacity than as listeners to himself, or peasants
engrossed in their own small concerns.

Southey was not contemplative or speculative, and it could only have
been because he lived at the Lakes and was Coleridge's brother-in-law
that he was implicated with the two speculative poets at all. It has
been carelessly reported by Lake tourists that Southey was not beloved
among his neighbors, while Wordsworth was; and that therefore the latter
was the better man, in a social sense. It should be remembered that
Southey was a working man, and that the other two were not; and,
moreover, it should never be for a moment forgotten that Southey worked
double-tides to make up for Coleridge's idleness. While Coleridge was
dreaming and discoursing, Southey was toiling to maintain Coleridge's
wife and children. He had no time and no attention to spare for
wandering about and making himself at home with the neighbors. This
practice came naturally to Wordsworth; and a kind and valued neighbor he
was to all the peasants round. Many a time I have seen him in the road,
in Scotch bonnet and green spectacles, with a dozen children at his
heels and holding his cloak, while he cut ash-sticks for them from the
hedge, hearing all they had to say or talking to them. Southey, on the
other hand, took his constitutional walk at a fixed hour, often reading
as he went. Two families depended on him; and his duty of daily labor
was not only distinctive, but exclusive. He was always at work at home,
while Coleridge was doing nothing but talking, and Wordsworth was
abroad, without thinking whether he was at work or play. Seen from the
stand-point of conscience and of moral generosity, Southey's was the
noblest life of the three; and Coleridge's was, of course, nought.
I own, however, that, considering the tendency of the time to make
literature a trade, or at least a profession, I cannot help feeling
Wordsworth's to have been the most privileged life of them all. He had
not work enough to do; and his mode of life encouraged an excess of
egoism: but he bore all the necessary retribution of this in his latter
years; and the whole career leaves an impression of an airy freedom and
a natural course of contemplation, combined with social interest and
action, more healthy than the existence of either the delinquent or the
exemplary comrade with whom he was associated in the public view.

I have left my neighbors waiting long on the margin of Grasmere. That
was before I was born; but I could almost fancy I had seen them there.

I observed that Wordsworth's report of their trip was very unlike
Coleridge's. When his sister had left them, he wrote to her, describing
scenes by brief precise touches which draw the picture that Coleridge
blurs with grand phrases. Moreover, Wordsworth tells sister Dorothy that
John will give him forty pounds to buy a bit of land by the lake, where
they may build a cottage to live in henceforth. He says, also, that
there is a small house vacant near the spot.--They took that house;
and thus the Wordsworths became "Lakers." They entered that well-known
cottage at Grasmere on the shortest day (St. Thomas's) of 1799. Many
years afterwards, Dorothy wrote of the aspect of Grasmere on her arrival
that winter evening,--the pale orange lights on the lake, and the
reflection of the mountains and the island in the still waters. She
had wandered about the world in an unsettled way; and now she had cast
anchor for life,--not in that house, but within view of that valley.

All readers of Wordsworth, on either side the Atlantic, believe
that they know that cottage, (described in the fifth book of the
"Excursion,") with its little orchard, and the moss house, and the
tiny terrace behind, with its fine view of the lake and the basin of
mountains. There the brother and sister lived for some years in a very
humble way, making their feast of the beauty about them. Wordsworth was
fond of telling how they had meat only two or three times a week; and he
was eager to impress on new-comers--on me among others--the prudence of
warning visitors that they must make up their minds to the scantiest
fare. He was as emphatic about this, laying his finger on one's arm to
enforce it, as about catching mice or educating the people. It was vain
to say that one would rather not invite guests than fail to provide for
them; he insisted that the expense would be awful, and assumed that his
sister's and his own example settled the matter. I suppose they were
poor in those days; but it was not for long. A devoted sister Dorothy
was. Too late it appeared that she had sacrificed herself to aid and
indulge her brother. When her mind was gone, and she was dying by
inches, Mrs. Wordsworth offered me the serious warning that she gave
whenever occasion allowed, against overwalking. She told me that Dorothy
had, not occasionally only, but often, walked forty miles in a day to
give her brother her presence. To repair the ravages thus caused she
took opium; and the effect on her exhausted frame was to overthrow her
mind. This was when she was elderly. For a long course of years, she
was a rich household blessing to all connected with her. She shared her
brother's peculiarity of investing trifles with solemnity, or rather,
of treating all occasions alike (at least in writing) with pedantic
elaboration; but she had the true poet's, combined with the true woman's
nature; and the fortunate man had, in wife and sister, the two best
friends of his life.

The Wordsworths were the originals of the Lake _coterie,_ as we have
seen. Born at Cockermouth, and a pupil at the Hawkeshead school,
Wordsworth was looking homewards when he settled in the District. The
others came in consequence. Coleridge brought his family to Greta Hall,
near Keswick; and with them came Mrs. Lovell, one of the three Misses
Fricker, of whom Coleridge and Southey had married two. Southey was
invited to visit Greta Hall, the year after the Wordsworths settled at
Grasmere; and thus they became acquainted. They had just met before, in
the South; but they had yet to learn to know each other; and there was
sufficient unlikeness between them to render this a work of some time
and pains. It was not long before Southey, instead of Coleridge, was
the lessee of Greta Hall; and soon after Coleridge took his departure,
leaving his wife and children, and also the Lovells, a charge upon
Southey, who had no more fortune than Coleridge, except in the
inexhaustible wealth of a heart, a will, and a conscience. Wordsworth
married in 1802; and then the two poets passed through their share of
the experience of human life, a few miles apart, meeting occasionally on
some mountain ridge or hidden dale, and in one another's houses, drawn
closer by their common joys and sorrows, but never approximating in
the quality of their genius, or in the stand-points from which they
respectively looked out upon human affairs. They had children, loved
them, and each lost some of them; and they felt tenderly for each other
when each little grave was opened. Southey, the most amiable of men in
domestic life, gentle, generous, serene, and playful, grew absolutely
ferocious about politics, as his articles in the "Quarterly Review"
showed all the world. Wordsworth, who had some of the irritability and
pettishness, mildly described by himself as "gentle stirrings of the
mind," which occasionally render great men ludicrously like children,
and who was, moreover, highly conservative after his early democratic
fever had passed off, grew more and more liberal with advancing years.
I do not mean that he verged towards the Reformers,--but that he became
more enlarged, tolerant, and generally sympathetic in his political
views and temper. It thus happened that society at a distance took up
a wholly wrong impression of the two men,--supposing Southey to be an
ill-conditioned bigot, and Wordsworth a serene philosopher, far above
being disturbed by troubles in daily life, or paying any attention to
party-politics. He showed some of his ever-growing liberality, by the
way, in speaking of this matter of temper. In old age, he said that the
world certainly does get on in minor morals: that when he was young
"everybody had a temper"; whereas now no such thing is allowed;
amiability is the rule; and an imperfect temper is an offence and a
misfortune of a distinctive character.

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