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

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Among the letters which now and then arrived from strangers, in the
early days of Wordsworth's fame, was one which might have come from
Coleridge, if they had never met. It was full of admiration and
sympathy, expressed as such feelings would be by a man whose analytical
and speculative faculties predominated over all the rest. The writer
was, indeed, in those days, marvellously like Coleridge,--subtile in
analysis to excess, of gorgeous imagination, bewitching discourse, fine
scholarship, with a magnificent power of promising and utter incapacity
in performing, and with the same habit of intemperance in opium. By
his own account, his "disease was to meditate too much and observe too
little." I need hardly explain that this was De Quincey; and when I have
said that, I need hardly explain further that advancing time and closer
acquaintance made the likeness to Coleridge bear a smaller and smaller
proportion to the whole character of the man.

In return for his letter of admiration and sympathy, he received an
invitation to the Grasmere valley. More than once he set forth to avail
himself of it; but when within a few miles, the shyness under which in
those days he suffered overpowered his purpose, and he turned back.
After having achieved the meeting, however, he soon announced his
intention of settling in the valley; and he did so, putting his wife
and children eventually into the cottage which the Wordsworths had now
outgrown and left. There was little in him to interest or attach a
family of regular domestic habits, like the Wordsworths, given to active
employment, sensible thrift, and neighborly sympathy. It was universally
known that a great poem of Wordsworth's was reserved for posthumous
publication, and kept under lock and key meantime. De Quincey had so
remarkable a memory that he carried off by means of it the finest
passage of the poem,--or that which the author considered so; and
he published that passage in a magazine article, in which he gave
a detailed account of the Wordsworths' household, connections, and
friends, with an analysis of their characters and an exhibition of their
faults. This was in 1838, a dozen years before the poet's death. The
point of interest is,--How did the wronged family endure the wrong? They
were quiet about it,--that is, sensible and dignified; but Wordsworth
was more. A friend of his and mine was talking with him over the fire,
just when De Quincey's disclosures were making the most noise, and
mentioned the subject. Wordsworth begged to be spared hearing anything
about them, saying that the man had long passed away from the family
life and mind, and he did not wish to disturb himself about what could
not be remedied. My friend acquiesced, saying, "Well, I will tell you
only one thing that he says, and then we will talk of something else. He
says your wife is too good for you." The old man's dim eyes lighted up
instantly, and he started from his seat, and flung himself against
the mantel-piece, with his back to the fire, as he cried with loud
enthusiasm, "And that's _true! There_ he is right!"

It was by his written disclosures only that De Quincey could do much
mischief; for it was scarcely possible to be prejudiced by anything he
could say. The whole man was grotesque; and it must have been a singular
image that his neighbors in the valley preserved in their memory. A
frail-looking, diminutive man, with narrow chest and round shoulders and
features like those of a dying patient, walking with his hands behind
him, his hat on the back of his head, and his broad lower lip projected,
as if he had something on his tongue that wanted listening to,--such was
his aspect; and if one joined company with him, the strangeness grew
from moment to moment. His voice and its modulations were a perfect
treat. As for what he had to say, it was everything from odd comment on
a passing trifle, eloquent enunciation of some truth, or pregnant
remark on some lofty subject, down to petty gossip, so delivered as to
authorize a doubt whether it might not possibly be an awkward effort
at observing something outside of himself, or at getting a grasp of
something that he supposed actual. That he should have so supposed was
his weakness, and the retribution for the peculiar intemperance which
depraved his nature and alienated from their proper use powers which
should have made him one of the first philosophers of his age. His
singular organization was fatally deranged in its action before it could
show its best quality, and his is one of the cases in which we cannot be
wrong in attributing moral disease directly to physical disturbance; and
it would no doubt have been dropped out of notice, if he had been able
to abstain from comment on the characters and lives of other people.
Justice to them compels us to accept and use the exposures he offers us
of himself.

About the time of De Quincey's settlement at Grasmere, Wilson, the
future CHRISTOPHER NORTH, bought the Elleray estate, on the banks of
Windermere. He was then just of age,--supreme in all manly sports,
physically a model man, and intellectually, brimming with philosophy and
poetry. He came hither a rather spoiled child of fortune, perhaps; but
he was soon sobered by a loss of property which sent him to his studies
for the bar. Scott was an excellent friend to him at that time; and so
strong and prophetic was Wilson's admiration of his patron, that he
publicly gave him the name of "The Great Magician" before the first
"Waverley Novel" was published. Within ten years from his getting a
foothold on Windermere banks, he had raised periodical literature to a
height unknown before in our time, by his contributions to "Blackwood's
Magazine"; and he seemed to step naturally into the Moral Philosophy
Chair in Edinburgh in 1820. Christopher North has perhaps conveyed to
foreign, and untravelled English, readers as true a conception of our
Lake scenery and its influences in one way as Wordsworth in another.
The very spirit of the moorland, lake, brook, tarn, ghyll, and ridge
breathes from his prose poetry: and well it might. He wandered alone for
a week together beside the trout-streams and among the highest tarns. He
spent whole days in his boat, coasting the bays of the lake, or floating
in the centre, or lying reading in the shade of the trees on the
islands. He led with a glorious pride the famous regatta on Windermere,
when Canning was the guest of the Boltons at Storrs, and when Scott,
Wordsworth, and Southey were of the company; and he liked almost as well
steering the packet-boat from Waterhead to Bowness, till the steamer
drove out the old-fashioned conveyance. He sat at the stern,
immovable, with his hand on the rudder, looking beyond the company of
journeymen-carpenters, fish- and butter-women, and tourists, with a
gaze on the water-and-sky-line which never shifted. Sometimes a learned
professor or a brother sportsman was with him; but he spoke no word, and
kept his mouth peremptorily shut under his beard. It was a sight worth
taking the voyage for; and it was worth going a long round to see him
standing on the shore,--"reminding one of the first man, Adam," (as was
said of him,) in his best estate,--the tall, broad frame, large head,
marked features, and long hair; and the tread which shook the ground,
and the voice which roused the echoes afar and made one's heart-strings
vibrate within. These attributes made strangers turn to look at him on
the road, and fixed all eyes on him in the ball-room at Ambleside, when
any local object induced him to be a steward. Every old boatman and
young angler, every hoary shepherd and primitive housewife in the
uplands and dales, had an enthusiasm for him. He could enter into the
solemnity of speculation with Wordsworth while floating at sunset on the
lake; and not the less gamesomely could he collect a set of good fellows
under the lamp at his supper-table, and take off Wordsworth's or
Coleridge's monologues to the life. There was that between them which
must always have precluded a close sympathy; and their faults were just
what each could least allow for in another. Of Wilson's it is enough to
say that Scott's injunction to him to "leave off sack, purge, and live
cleanly," if he wished for the Moral Philosophy Chair, was precisely
what was needed. It was still needed some time after, when, though a
Professor of Moral Philosophy, he was seen, with poor Campbell, leaving
a tavern one morning, in Edinburgh, haggard and red-eyed, hoarse and
exhausted,--not only the feeble Campbell, but the mighty Wilson,--they
having sat together twenty-four hours, discussing poetry and wine with
all their united energies. This sort of thing was not to the taste of
Wordsworth or Southey, any more than their special complacencies were
venerable to the humor of Christopher North. Yet they could cordially
admire one another; and when sorrows came over them, in dreary
impartiality, they could feel reverently and deeply for each other. When
Southey lost his idolized boy, Herbert, and had to watch over his insane
wife, always his dearest friend, and all the dearer for her helpless
and patient suffering under an impenetrable gloom,--when Wordsworth was
bereaved of the daughter who made the brightness of his life in his old
age,--and when Wilson was shaken to the centre by the loss of his wife,
and mourned alone in the damp shades of Elleray, where he would allow
not a twig to be cut from the trees she loved,--the sorrow of each moved
them all. Elleray was a gloomy place then, and Wilson never surmounted
the melancholy which beset him there; and he wisely parted with it
some years before his death. The later depression in his case was in
proportion to the earlier exhilaration. His love of Nature and of genial
human intercourse had been too exuberant; and he became incapable of
enjoyment from either, in his last years. He never recovered from an
attack of pressure on the brain, and died paralyzed in the spring of
1854. He had before gone from among us with his joy; and then we heard
that he had dropped out of life with his griefs; and our beautiful
region, and the region of life, were so much the darker in a thousand
eyes.

While speaking of Elleray, we should pay a passing tribute of gratitude
to an older worthy of that neighborhood,--the well-known Bishop of
Llandaff, Richard Watson, who did more for the beauty of Windermere than
any other person. There is nothing to praise in the damp old mansion
at Calgarth, set down in low ground, and actually with its back to the
lake, and its front windows commanding no view; but the woods are the
glory of Bishop Watson. He was not a happy prelate, believing himself
undervalued and neglected, and fretting his heart over his want of
promotion; but be must have had many a blessed hour while planting
those woods for which many generations will be grateful to him. Let
the traveller remember him, when looking abroad from Miller Brow, near
Bowness. Below lies the whole length of Windermere, from the white
houses of Clappersgate, nestling under Loughrigg at the head, to the
Beacon at the foot. The whole range of both shores, with their bays
and coves and promontories, can be traced; and the green islands are
clustered in the centre; and the whole gradation of edifices is seen,
from Wray Castle, on its rising ground, to the tiny boat-houses, each
on its creek. All these features are enhanced in beauty by the Calgarth
woods, which cover the undulations of hill and margin beneath and
around, rising and falling, spreading and contracting, with green
meadows interposed, down to the white pebbly strand. To my eye, this
view is unsurpassed by any in the District.

Bishop Watson's two daughters were living in the neighborhood till two
years ago,--antique spinsters, presenting us with a most vivid specimen
of the literary female life of the last century. They were excellent
women, differing from the rest of society chiefly in their notion that
superior people should show their superiority in all the acts of their
lives,--that literary people should talk literature, and scientific
people science, and so on; and they felt affronted, as if set down among
common people, when an author talked about common things in a common
way. They did their best to treat their friends to wit and polite
letters; and they expected to be ministered to in the same fashion. This
was rather embarrassing to visitors to whom it had never occurred to
talk for any other purpose than to say what presented itself at the
moment; but it is a privilege to have known those faithful sisters, and
to have seen in them a good specimen of the literary society of the last
century.

There is another spot in that neighborhood which strangers look up to
with interest from the lake itself,--Dovenest, the abode of Mrs. Hemans
for the short time of her residence at the Lakes. She saw it for the
first time from the lake, as her published correspondence tells, and
fell in love with it; and as it was vacant at the time, she went into it
at once. Many of my readers will remember her description of the garden
and the view from it, the terrace, the circular grass-plot with its one
tall white rose-tree. "You cannot imagine," she wrote, in 1830, "how I
delight in that fair, solitary, neglected-looking tree." The tree is not
neglected now. Dovenest is inhabited by Mrs. Hemans's then young friend,
the Rev. R.P. Graves; and it has recovered from the wildness and
desolation of thirty years ago, while looking as secluded as ever among
the woods on the side of Wansfell.

All this time, illustrious strangers were coming, year by year, to visit
residents, or to live among the mountains for a few weeks. There was
Wilberforce, spending part of a summer at Rayrigg, on the lake shore.
One of his boys asked him, "Why should you not buy a house here? and
then we could come every year." The reply was characteristic:--that it
would be very delightful; but that the world is lying, in a manner,
under the curse of God; that we have something else to do than to enjoy
fine prospects; and that, though it may be allowable to taste the
pleasure now and then, we ought to wait till the other life to enjoy
ourselves. Such was the strait-lacing in which the good man was forever
trying to compress his genial, buoyant, and grateful nature.--Scott came
again and again; and Wordsworth and Southey met to do him honor. The
tourist must remember the Swan Inn,--the white house beyond Grasmere,
under the skirts of Helvellyn. There Scott went daily for a glass of
something good, while Wordsworth's guest, and treated with the homely
fare of the Grasmere cottage. One morning, his host, himself, and
Southey went up to the Swan, to start thence with ponies for the ascent
of Helvellyn. The innkeeper saw them coming, and accosted Scott with
"Eh, Sir! ye're come early for your draught to-day!"--a disclosure which
was not likely to embarrass his host at all. Wordsworth was probably the
least-discomposed member of the party.--Charles Lamb and his sister once
popped in unannounced on Coleridge at Keswick, and spent three weeks in
the neighborhood. We can all fancy the little man on the top of Skiddaw,
with his mind full as usual of quips and pranks, and struggling with the
emotions of mountain-land, so new and strange to a Cockney, such as he
truly described himself. His loving readers do not forget his statement
of the comparative charms of Skiddaw and Fleet Street; and on the spot
we quote his exclamations about the peak, and the keen air there, and
the look over into Scotland, and down upon a sea of mountains which made
him giddy. We are glad he came and enjoyed a day, which, as he said,
would stand out like a mountain in his life; but we feel that he could
never have followed his friends hither,--Coleridge and Wordsworth,--and
have made himself at home. The warmth of a city and the hum of human
voices all day long were necessary to his spirits. As to his passage at
arms with Southey,--everybody's sympathies are with Lamb; and he
only vexes us by his humility and gratitude at being pardoned by the
aggressor, whom he had in fact humiliated in all eyes but his own. It
was one of Southey's spurts of insolent bigotry; and Lamb's plea for
tolerance and fair play was so sound as to make it a poor affectation in
Southey to assume a pardoning air; but, if Lamb's kindly and sensitive
nature could not sustain him in so virtuous an opposition, it is well
that the two men did not meet on the top of Skiddaw.--Canning's visit to
Storrs, on Windermere, was a great event in its day; and Lockhart tells
us, in his "Life of Scott," what the regatta was like, when Wilson
played Admiral, and the group of local poets, and Scott, were in the
train of the statesman. Since that day, it has been a common thing for
illustrious persons to appear in our valleys. Statesmen, churchmen,
university-men, princes, peers, bishops, authors, artists, flock hither;
and during the latter years of Wordsworth's life, the average number
of strangers who called at Rydal Mount in the course of the season was
eight hundred.

During the growth of the District from its wildness to this thronged
state, a minor light of the region was kindling, flickering, failing,
gleaming, and at last going out,--anxiously watched and tended, but to
little purpose. The life of Hartley Coleridge has been published by his
family; and there can, therefore, be no scruple in speaking of him here.
The remembrance of him haunts us all,--almost as his ghost haunts his
kind landlady. Long after his death, she used to "hear him at night
laughing in his room," as he used to do when he lived there. A peculiar
laugh it was, which broke out when fancies crossed him, whether he was
alone or in company. Travellers used to look after him on the road, and
guides and drivers were always willing to tell about him; and still
his old friends almost expect to see Hartley at any turn,--the little
figure, with the round face, marked by the blackest eyebrows and
eyelashes, and by a smile and expression of great eccentricity. As we
passed, he would make a full stop in the road, face about, take off his
black-and-white straw hat, and bow down to the ground. The first glance
in return was always to see whether he was sober. The Hutchinsons must
remember him. He was one of the audience, when they held their concert
under the sycamores in Mr. Harrison's grounds at Ambleside; and he
thereupon wrote a sonnet,[A] doubtless well known in America. When I
wanted his leave to publish that sonnet, in an account of "Frolics with
the Hutchinsons," it was necessary to hunt him up, from public-house
to public-house, early in the morning. It is because these things are
universally known,--because he was seen staggering in the road, and
spoken of by drivers and lax artisans as an alehouse comrade, that I
speak of him here, in order that I may testify how he was beloved and
cherished by the best people in his neighborhood. I can hardly speak
of him myself as a personal acquaintance; for I could not venture on
inviting him to my house. I saw what it was to others to be subject to
day-long visits from him, when he would ask for wine, and talk from
morning to night,--and a woman, solitary and busy, could not undertake
that sort of hospitality; but I saw how forbearing his friends were, and
why,--and I could sympathize in their regrets when he died. I met him
in company occasionally, and never saw him sober; but I have heard from
several common friends of the charm of his conversation, and the beauty
of his gentle and affectionate nature. He was brought into the District
when four years old; and it does not appear that he ever had a chance
allowed him of growing into a sane man. Wordsworth used to say that
Hartley's life's failure arose mainly from his having grown up "wild
as the breeze,"--delivered over, without help or guardianship, to the
vagaries of an imagination which overwhelmed all the rest of him. There
was a strong constitutional likeness to his father, evident enough to
all; but no pains seem to have been taken on any hand to guard him from
the snare, or to invigorate his will, and aid him in self-discipline.
The great catastrophe, the ruinous blow, which rendered him hopeless, is
told in the Memoir; but there are particulars which help to account for
it. Hartley had spent his school-days under a master as eccentric as he
himself ever became. The Rev. John Dawes of Ambleside was one of the
oddities that may be found in the remote places of modern England. He
had no idea of restraint, for himself or his pupils; and when they
arrived, punctually or not, for morning school, they sometimes found the
door shut, and chalked with "Gone a-hunting," or "Gone a-fishing," or
gone away somewhere or other. Then Hartley would sit down under the
bridge, or in the shadow of the wood, or lie on the grass on the
hill-side, and tell tales to his schoolfellows for hours. His mind was
developed by the conversation of his father and his father's friends;
and he himself had a great friendship with Professor Wilson, who always
stood by him with a pitying love. He had this kind of discursive
education, but no discipline; and when he went to college, he was at the
mercy of any who courted his affection, intoxicated his imagination, and
then led him into vice. His Memoir shows how he lost his fellowship at
Oriel College, Oxford, at the end of his probationary year. He had been
warned by the authorities against his sin of intemperance; and he bent
his whole soul to get through that probationary year. For eleven months,
and many days of the twelfth, he lived soberly and studied well. Then
the old tempters agreed in London to go down to Oxford and get hold of
Hartley. They went down on the top of the coach, got access to his room,
made him drunk, and carried him with them to London; and he was not to
be found when he should have passed. The story of his death is but too
like this.

[Footnote A:

SONNET

TO TENNYSON, AFTER HEARING ABBY HUTCHINSON SING "THE MAY-QUEEN" AT
AMBLESIDE.

I would, my friend, indeed, thou hadst been
here
Last night, beneath the shadowy sycamore,
To hear the lines, to me well known before,
Embalmed in music so translucent clear.
Each word of thine came singly to the ear,
Yet all was blended in a flowing stream.
It had the rich repose of summer dream,
The light distinct of frosty atmosphere.
Still have I loved thy verse, yet never knew
How sweet it was, till woman's voice invested
The pencilled outline with the living hue,
And every note of feeling proved and tested.
What might old Pindar be, if once again
The harp and voice were trembling with his
strain!
]

His fellowship lost, he came, ruinously humbled, to live in this
District, at first under compulsion to take pupils, whom, of course, he
could not manage. On the death of his mother, an annuity was purchased
for him, and paid quarterly, to keep him out of debt, if possible. He
could not take care of money, and he was often hungry, and often begged
the loan of a sixpence; and when the publicans made him welcome to what
he pleased to have, in consideration of the company he brought together,
to hear his wonderful talk, his wit, and his dreams, he was helpless in
the snare. We must remember that he was a fine scholar, as well as a
dreamer and a humorist; and there was no order of intellect, from the
sage to the peasant, which could resist the charm of his discourse. He
had taken his degree with high distinction at Oxford; and yet the old
Westmoreland "statesman," who, offered whiskey and water, accepts the
one and says the other can be had anywhere, would sit long to hear what
Hartley had to tell of what he had seen or dreamed. At gentlemen's
tables, it was a chance how he might talk,--sublimely, sweetly, or with
a want of tact which made sad confusion. In the midst of the great
black-frost at the close of 1848, he was at a small dinner-party at
the house of a widow lady, about four miles from his lodgings. During
dinner, some scandal was talked about some friends of his to whom he
was warmly attached. He became excited on their behalf,--took Champagne
before he had eaten enough, and, before the ladies left the table, was
no longer master of himself. His host, a very young man, permitted some
practical joking: brandy was ordered, and given to the unconscious
Hartley; and by eleven o'clock he was clearly unfit to walk home alone.
His hostess sent her footman with him, to see him home. The man took him
through Ambleside, and then left him to find his way for the other two
miles. The cold was as severe as any ever known in this climate; and it
was six in the morning when his landlady heard some noise in the porch,
and found Hartley stumbling in. She put him to bed, put hot bricks to
his feet, and tried all the proper means; and in the middle of the day
he insisted on getting up and going out. He called at the house of a
friend, Dr. S----, near Ambleside. The kind physician scolded him for
coming out, sent for a carriage, took him home, and put him to bed. He
never rose again, but died on the 6th of January, 1849. The young host
and the old hostess have followed him, after deeply deploring that
unhappy day.

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