A REMINISCENCE 
 
 OF 
 
 WORDSWORTH DAY, 
 
 COCKERMOUTH, APRIL yth, 1896. 
 
 EDITED BY 
 THE REV. H. D. RAWNSLEY, M.A., 
 
 HON. CANON OF CARLISLE, 
 WITH 
 
 PREFATORY NOTES ON COCKERMOUTH, 
 
 BY THE REV. H. J. PALMER, M.A., 
 
 VICAR OF CHRIST CHURCH, COCKERMOUTH, 
 AND 
 
 AN ESSAY ON WORDSWORTH, 
 
 BY THE REV. J. LLEWELYN DA VIES, D.D. 
 
 Illustrated by Views of the Memorial Fountain, 
 
 The Birth Place and Terrace Walk of the Poet, 
 
 And the Grave of the Poet's Father. 
 
 COCKERMOUTH : 
 
 Brash Bros, "West Cumberland Times" Printing Works. 
 1896.
 
 HO T E . 
 
 T*fl E Title, " R Reminiscence of LUords- 
 cuorth Day," has been chosen because 
 it is hoped that as each year brings 
 daffodil time round again, the Birthday 
 of the Poet may be celebrated in Cocker- 
 mouth by a children's holiday. 
 
 flny profit arising from the sale of this 
 little book caill be devoted to a " Prize 
 Fund," for acuarding prizes for Recita- 
 tions of tUordsuiorth's Poetry, open to 
 the Scholars in the Coekermouth Day 
 Schools.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 PAGE. 
 
 5. CONCERNING THE TOWN IN WHICH THE POET WAS BORN. 
 
 14. THE DAY OF THE FOUNTAIN. 
 
 17. SPEECHES AT THE UNVEILING OF THE FOUNTAIN, BY 
 MR. STRAUGHTON, CANON RAWNSLEY, REV. H. J. PALMER, 
 AND MR. E. JACKSON. 
 
 25. SPEECH OF SIR WILFRID LAWSON AT THE PUBLIC MEETING. 
 
 29. LETTERS READ AT THE MEETING FROM DISTINGUISHED 
 ADMIRERS OF THE POET. 
 
 47. AN ADDRESS ON WORDSWORTH BY CANON RAWNSLEY. 
 
 63. SPEECHES BY MR. T. P. WHITTAKER, M.P., MR. W. L 
 ALEXANDER, AND DR. MITCHELL. 
 
 68. WORDSWORTH : A SKETCH OF His LIFE AND WORK, BY 
 DR. LLEWELYN DAVIES. 
 
 1051164
 
 THE SONNET PREFATORY. 
 
 AT THE UNVEILING OF THE MEMORIAL FOUNTAIN IN 
 
 THE PUBLIC PARK, TO THE MEMORY OF 
 WILLIAM AND DOROTHY WORDSWORTH, APRIL 7, 1896. 
 
 WELL met in glad commemorative throng. 
 Of this cool fountain- water as we drink 
 We bind our gratitude by crystal link 
 To thee, the fountain head of Cumbrian song ; 
 To thee, whose music still shall flow, as long 
 As men on man and human life may think, 
 Or hopes and fears into our bosom sink 
 From nature's overflowing, pure and strong. 
 
 But, Wordsworth, here, on this thy natal day, 
 
 Uplifted high o'er Derwent's double stream, 
 
 Our hearts remember that diviner flood, 
 
 The light that flowed through all thy childhood's 
 
 dream, 
 
 The inspiration of thy later way, 
 The unfailing spring of tender sisterhood. 
 
 H. D. RAWNSLEY.
 
 
 
 O 
 ffi 
 
 H 
 
 O
 
 CONCERNING THE TOWN IN WHICH 
 THE POET WAS BORN. 
 
 THE saying that " Poets are born not made " is 
 universally recognised as true. The place of a 
 Poet's birth may therefore rightly claim attention. 
 If " Heaven lies about us in our infancy," then 
 the environment of the infant mind may be taken into 
 account as likely to make impressions of the highest 
 value and to influence greatly the developing genius. 
 
 It was natural for the greatest Poet of Nature 
 to be born amidst the most beautiful of natural 
 surroundings. Wordsworth says " I was much favoured 
 in my birth-place," and the murmuring sound of the 
 Derwent which flows at the bottom of the garden of his 
 father's home, did 
 
 Make ceaseless music that composed my thoughts 
 To more than infant softness.
 
 The house in which Wordsworth was born on the 
 7th April, 1770, is pleasantly situated in the wide old- 
 fashioned Main Street of the ancient town of Cockermouth. 
 From the terrace at the bottom of the garden, along which 
 flows the clear and rapid Derwent, " fairest of all rivers," 
 may be obtained many refreshing and inspiring views. 
 Looking down the river to the west is an interesting old 
 bridge, over which, in old days, the coaches rolled on 
 their way to Carlisle and the North ; and raised up from 
 the river, below the bridge, is the Roman village of 
 Papcastle; nearly opposite, further off than the mill-race, 
 where he often " made one long bathing of a summer 
 day," are the famous Mickle Brows, in climbing which, 
 peeps are obtained of the Derwent valley, and of the 
 many many-shaped hills which stand round about ; 
 and looking up the river is the " Hay " with its 
 winding path, which 
 
 Was like an invitation into space 
 Boundless, or guide into eternity. 
 
 and, closer by, the grand old Norman Castle, rising at the 
 confluence of the rivers, where the Cocker flows into 
 the Derwent and gives the name of Cockermouth to the 
 town. The spirit of this " shattered monument of 
 feudal sway " haunted him years after he had left the 
 margin of the river, whose " smooth breast " received 
 the shadow of its towers, and he did not easily forget 
 the darkness of its dungeons which first made him 
 "acquainted with the grave." 
 
 Wordsworth was not allowed to live long on the 
 banks of the Derwent, for on the death of his mother 
 in 1778 his relatives at Penrith took charge of him; but his 
 father lived in Cockermouth till 1783, and was buried on
 
 December 3oth of that year in All Saints' churchyard, 
 where a simple stone slab, giving the dates of his birth and 
 death, perpetuates his memory. Wordsworth received 
 his first education at the old Grammar School in the 
 churchyard, before he was sent to school at Hawkshead ; 
 but Cockermouth, by its natural beauty, must lay claim 
 rather to have done something to stimulate his 
 mind as a Poet during these early years, than to have 
 had much to do with his scholastic accomplishments. 
 Dr. Shairp says, in his "Poetic Interpretation of 
 Nature," that " for the growing boy Nature is the 
 homely nurse that, long before school and schoolmaster 
 intermeddle with him, feeds his mind with materials, 
 pouring into him alike the outward framework of his 
 thought and the colours that flush over the chambers of 
 
 his imagery Nature is moving his spirit 
 
 in manifold and mysterious ways to elevate him with her 
 vastness and sublimity, to gladden him with her beauty, 
 to depress him with her bleakness, and restore him 
 with her calm." 
 
 Wordsworth never forgot the home of his childhood, 
 and often visited it in his later years. He is glad 
 to find, on one of these visits, that the privet hedge of 
 the terrace walk is still as full of roses as it had been 
 thirty years before. 
 
 In 1833 he wrote two sonnets referring to the place 
 of his birth : one, " In sight of the town of Cockermouth, 
 where the Author was born, and his fathers' remains are 
 laid," beginning 
 
 A point of life between my parents' dust, 
 And yours, my buried little ones, am I. 
 
 And the other, entitled " An Address from the Spirit of 
 Cockermouth Castle."
 
 8 
 
 In 1834 his eldest son, John Wordsworth, was 
 appointed vicar of Brigham, the ecclesiastical mother 
 parish of Cockermouth, and situated only about two miles 
 from the house of his birth, which naturally brought 
 the poet frequently into the neighbourhood of Cocker- 
 mouth. At Brigham is the " Nun's Well," a spot, which 
 with its scenery and associations, he minutely and 
 graphically describes in a sonnet entitled "The Nun's 
 Well at Brigham " 
 
 The cattle crowding round this beverage clear 
 
 To slake their thirst, with reckless hoofs have trod 
 
 '1 he encircling turf into a barren clod : 
 
 Through which the waters creep, then disappear, 
 
 Born to be lost in Derwent flowing near ; 
 
 Yet, o'er the brink, and round the limestone cell 
 
 Of the pure spring (they call it the " Nun's Well," 
 
 Name that first struck by chance my startled ear), 
 
 A tender spirit broods the pensive shade 
 
 Of ritual honours to this fountain paid 
 
 By hooded votaresses with saintly cheer ; 
 
 Albeit oft the virgin-mother mild 
 
 Looked down with pity upon eyes beguiled 
 
 Into the shedding of " too soft a tear." 
 
 The natural beauty surrounding the birth-place of 
 Wordsworth, as he viewed it and loved it, remains, and is 
 likely to remain as he left it 
 
 By him was seen 
 The self-same Vision which we now behold. 
 
 Skiddaw, his appearance varied by snow and cloud, 
 is always majestic, awful, beautiful. 
 
 He shrouds 
 
 His double front among Atlantic clouds, 
 And pours forth streams more sweet than Castaly. 
 
 The Derwent and the Cocker rushing from the North and 
 the South from Bassenthwaite and Crummock meet at
 
 the base of the old Castle-mound and run off together 
 as one fair stream to the West. To the South, Grassmoor 
 and Whiteside, at the end of the lovely Vale of Lorton, 
 appear at times as one immense mass of earth and seem 
 to rival Skiddaw in strength and durability. Whinfell in 
 one direction and the Hay in the other help to break the 
 abruptness of the greater heights beyond. The Solway is 
 only eight miles off, and across it may often be seen the 
 outline of the Scotch coast and the rising of the Scotch 
 hills along it. Indeed, as Dean Church says, "The 
 power of hills was on him ; the music of water was in 
 his ears ; light and darkness wove their spells for him " 
 even from the dawn of his earliest consciousness. 
 
 Harriet Martineau has described Cockermouth as 
 being one of the most pleasantly situated towns in 
 England. All around there are beautiful views to be 
 obtained, and in every direction delightful excursions can 
 be made. It is about twelve miles to Keswick along the 
 margin of Bassenthwaite Lake, and rather farther over 
 the steep and interesting Whinlatter Pass : eight miles to 
 Crummock through the Lorton Vale, and ten on to 
 Buttermere, and it is also about eight miles to Loweswater 
 Lake over the Mosser Fells. 
 
 In the town itself there are several places of interest. 
 The Castle takes us back to the beginning of its known 
 history. In the year 1069, when the County of 
 Cumberland formed part of Scotland, Malcolm King of 
 Scotland fought with the Saxons in the struggle against 
 William the Conqueror, who finally subdued both parties 
 and added the town of Cockermouth to England. By 
 William it was bestowed upon Randolph de Meschines, 
 one of his retainers. It afterwards came into the possession 
 of Waldeof, first Baron of Allerdale, who most probably
 
 10 
 
 built the Castle which now overlooks the town. After 
 the erection of the Castle the town would soon grow in 
 importance, the inhabitants of the surrounding country 
 being attracted by its protection, in the then insecure 
 state of life and property. 
 
 It is interesting to note that the gateway tower is 
 ornamented with the arms of the families of Umfreville, 
 Multon, Percy, and Neville names of renown who were 
 successively owners of the Castle. The Castle has been 
 the scene of much fighting, and it has not escaped the 
 vicissitudes of war. In the year 1315 King Robert Bruce 
 invaded and laid waste the whole district from 
 Cocker-mouth to St. Bees, and again in 1387 the Earl of 
 Fife, with an army of thirty thousand Scots, devastated the 
 whole neighbourhood for the space of three years, during 
 which period the Castle held out against the invaders. 
 In far different times in 1648 it was garrisoned by 
 Charles I., and was soon after laid siege to by the 
 Parliamentary forces under Oliver Cromwell, who raised 
 a fort against it about a quarter of a mile off above the 
 Fitz, and eventually succeeded in making a breach in 
 the south-west wall, and finally in effecting its complete 
 capture. 
 
 It is also of interest that Mary Queen of Scots 
 visited the town, and that the hovse in which she 
 stayed and the room in which she slept, still 
 exist. It is a quaint old Hall dating from the beginning 
 of the 1 5th century. It appears that Mary crossed 
 the Solway in a small ship, and landed at 
 Workington on the i6th May, 1568. She stayed all night 
 at Workington Hall, and the following day travelled to 
 Cockermouth. The owner of the Castle was then the 
 Duke of Northumberland, who happened to be absent,
 
 II 
 
 and his representative at the Castle refused admission to 
 the unfortunate lady. Thereupon one Henry Fletcher, 
 invited her to his Hall, and gave her shelter and 
 hospitality, and, seeing the state of her attire, he also 
 presented her with crimson velvet to make a new robe. 
 
 Cockermouth, which so long ago as 1295, sent two 
 members to Parliament, now gives its name to the 
 Division ot West Cumberland which returns Sir Wilfrid 
 Lawson. Ecclesiastically it is divided into two parishes, 
 All Saints' (pop. 2,125), anc ^ Christ Church (pop. (3661). 
 All Saints' Church, a beautiful structure with spire rising 
 to the height of 180 feet, is a great ornament to the 
 town, and was re-built, on the site of the old church which 
 Wordsworth attended as a boy, in 1854. The east window 
 was erected in memory of the Poet, a liberal subscription 
 being contributed by the late Prince Consort. Christ 
 Church, a plain stone building, with a heavy tower, was 
 erected in 1865, chiefly through the exertions of the 
 Rev H. B. L. Puxley, and is situated opposite the house 
 in which the Poet was born. 
 
 The Independents are an old body in the town, and 
 date from the year 1651, when several of the inhabitants, 
 under the guidance of the Rev. Thomas Larkham, who 
 had been vicar of Tavistock, signed a declaration of 
 faith and formed an Independent church. George Lark- 
 ham, son of Rev. Thomas Larkham, attended the famous 
 Savo} T Conference, and afterwards on returning to Cocker- 
 mouth was ordained in All Saints' Church by the Presbyters. 
 He officiated regularly afterwards in the church until 
 1 68 1, when at the Restoration he was ejected from the 
 living. The following entry of Cromwell's death occurs in 
 Mr Larkham's writings, and illustrates his religious 
 sentiments. " On this day died that eminent servant of
 
 God, and nursing father of the churches, Oliver Cromwell, 
 Lord Protector of Great Britain and Ireland." 
 
 It is also recorded that, while Mr Larkham was at 
 one time willing to suffer imprisonment in York Castle 
 for his Puritan principles, yet, when he was the regular 
 pastor of the church he fell foul of those members of his 
 flock who were affected by the teaching of George Fox, 
 and he actually excommunicated two women for their 
 obstinacy in this direction. Notwithstanding the 
 opposition of Mr Larkham and other Divines, George 
 Fox continued to preach and to draw crowds of followers 
 wherever he went. Pardshaw Cragg, just outside the 
 town, was the scene of much successful preaching. 
 Cockermouth is still, relatively speaking, a stronghold of 
 Quakerism, and the substantial Meeting House attended 
 by many of its most respected inhabitants bears witness 
 to the fact that whatever may be happening in the 
 villages around and in towns elsewhere, the teaching 
 of Fox is still respected in the place where many of his 
 first successes were attained. 
 
 The town of Cockermouth has undergone many 
 changes political, social, and commercial during its 
 long history, and since the day of the Poet it has not 
 been stationary. Many improvements have been carried 
 out, and it is now known as one of the healthiest towns 
 in England. Its natural beauty has not been spoiled by 
 the workings of coal and iron, as is the case in many of 
 the places round about it. If it has not greatly increased 
 in size and commercial importance, yet it has not been 
 spoilt by smoke and unsightly chimneys. Perhaps its 
 future prosperity will depend upon its continuing a 
 health resort, and a pleasant centre for visitors wishing 
 to see the westernmost part of the Lake Country.
 
 13 
 
 The inhabitants of Cockermouth are public-spirited 
 and progressive. At the time of the Jubilee a new road 
 and bridge, over the Cocker, were made into the town, 
 and the streets were planted with trees, and in 1895 a 
 beautiful park was opened, the site having been 
 generously given for the purpose by a lady inhabitant. 
 It is now tastefully laid out with trees and walks, and 
 commands extensive views of mountainous country in all 
 directions. As a resort for the weak and sickly it is an 
 inestimable benefit, and it is also a great advantage to the 
 poor who live without gardens in lower parts of the town. 
 In the Park, the Memorial Fountain to Wordsworth is 
 erected, in view of the house where he was born. The 
 inhabitants on the occasion of the unveiling showed much 
 enthusiasm, and it was evident that the Poet is held in 
 high honour by the people who now live in the town 
 which gave him birth. 
 
 Like Stratford-ou-Avon, Cockermouth is destined to 
 be known throughout all time all the world over 
 because it gave birth to one of immortal fame. 
 "Wordsworth is destined, if any poet is, to be immortal," 
 is the opinion of one who is not likely to have made a 
 mistake in his judgment. And the little town, called 
 after the mouth of the stream which swells the rapid 
 Derwent, is destined to share the renown of him who was 
 born on its banks. The music of his sweet song and the 
 ripple of its bright water will flow ou together for ever. 
 He has cast a halo of glory over the surroundings of his 
 native home which will never depart from it. The more 
 we study Wordsworth the more we shall love the 
 country which inspired his verse. " What he has loved, 
 others will love, and he will teach them how." 
 
 H. J. PALMER.
 
 14 
 
 THE DAY OF THE FOUNTAIN. 
 
 IT was the seventh of April, 1896, and 3 o'clock of a 
 dull and showery afternoon, that we stepped out of 
 the train at Cockermouth and saw on the brow of the 
 Public Park that slopes down toward the station, a large 
 gathering of spectators gazing on what seemed a muffled 
 figure that seemed to stand above a fountain basin of 
 granite. That muffled figure was to be unveiled 
 presently, and Cockermouth was to possess itself of a 
 simple fountain whose chief design was the bronze figure 
 of a young child which should pour forth its flashing cup 
 of crystal clear for the service of man and beast alike, 
 into the stone basin beneath. 
 
 All who might to-day stand beside the Fountain and 
 look over the grey town, would know that on April yth, 
 1896, the little bronze figure of the water-giver had been 
 unveiled to the honour of the two children who had 
 most added fame to Cockermouth, William Wordsworth 
 and his sister Dorothy. 
 
 To-day is the birthday of the Poet. To-day the 
 opening ceremony of the Fountain is to take place ; and 
 down into the town we go to the Town Hall ; we 
 find the street thronged with people and a long 
 procession of children, each bearing a posy of golden 
 daffodils, waiting, with the band at their head, to escort 
 the Member of their Division, the Urban District 
 Councillors, and those who have been instrumental in 
 erecting the Memorial Fountain, away to the Harris Park 
 for the opening ceremony. 
 
 Now the band strikes up, and away we march to 
 the unveiling. All is simplicity itself; just the kind of
 
 15 
 
 thing the Poet would have felt was fitting, for it is a 
 children's gala, we older people are here on sufferance. 
 But the children will be old one day, and to the last 
 year of their life they will remember this occasion. 
 
 The Park is reached ; the Councillors, the Member 
 of Parliament, the Speakers cluster round the Fountain 
 platform ; and if the mountain mist change to a drizzle, 
 and the drizzle become fine rain, no one thinks about 
 it ; for the little veiled figure above the granite basin has 
 excited the curiosity of the umbrella-dark crowd. Then 
 speeches are made, kindly and friendly and full of honour 
 for the name and life of the bard; certain strings are 
 pulled : a key turns on the water, and to the memory of 
 William Wordsworth, born 126 years ago in yonder 
 manor house below in the ancient town at the mouth of 
 the Cocker, the water is quaffed by the bystanders. It 
 was not a little interesting to note that amongst those 
 who poured libation or drank a health to his memory 
 were grandchildren and great grandchildren of the Poet, 
 who had come to the opening ceremony. 
 
 But there were other children of the Poet present, 
 the daffodils he made immortal, and the scholars, at a 
 given signal, came close up, and filled the granite basin 
 with their glory of innocent flower life, so that the last 
 thing we saw of the Fountain was the dark figure of 
 the little water-giver bending above a golden flower-bed 
 of Cumbrian daffies. 
 
 Thence, down into the town to the Town Hall, where 
 many speeches were made and letters of congratulation 
 and sympathy with the object of the gathering were read. 
 It was whispered that one of the great London dailies had
 
 i6 
 
 sent their own reporter to be present, and this added to 
 the dignity of the occasion ; and a man of the crowd, as 
 he left the gathering, was heard to say, " Eh what, but I 
 nivver kenned fwok aw the warld over set sic store by 
 oor Wadsworth noo ; but what ! Cockermuth mud be a 
 girt plaace hooiver to hev sic a girt man to be proud on." 
 
 And the crowd dispersed to wander back into the 
 streets of the old castled town beside the Derwent, feeling 
 that Cockermouth had something to boast of beyond its 
 Auction Mart and its Marble Statue and its Clock and its 
 Castle Brewery; and that somehow or other the spell of 
 " the mighty minds of old " was upon them ; and 
 Wordsworth's greatness had made them greater too. 
 
 The day was not ended yet. By kind invitation of 
 the residents in the Manor House, where Wordsworth 
 was born, many guests passed up the steps and into the 
 substantial house with its comfortable air outside, and its 
 cosy look of panelled rooms and old-fashioned fire-grates 
 within ; and from the window on the northern side gazed 
 into the quaint old walled garden, with its raised terrace, 
 where still the privet grows and the roses bloom, as in 
 the time when Dorothy and her brother peered into the 
 little nest, or gazed across the river to the grassy holmes 
 or up toward the Castle hold, or watched the fishes rise 
 or the sea-gulls flashing by, and felt the Derwent " flow 
 along their dreams." Then back across the old-fashioned 
 garden lawn, gay and fragrant with its hyacinths, the 
 guests strolled into the house and away with farewells 
 into the street bright with the golden sunset glow, and 
 up towards the Station and the field of the Fountain they 
 went, and many realised that a fountain of great 
 memories had been opened that day ; that the fadeless
 
 afterglow of the Poet's mind was upon their native town ; 
 They felt something of 
 
 "The light that never was, on sea or land. 
 The consecration, and the Poet's dream " ; 
 
 and that for the sake of William Wordsworth and his 
 sister Dorothy, this their birth-place was more dear. 
 
 SPEECHES AT UNVEILING OF THE 
 FOUNTAIN. 
 
 Mr Joseph Straughton (the chairman of the Cockermouth 
 Urban District Council) said : Ladies and gentlemen, 
 We are met together on more than an ordinary occasion, 
 to take part in the performance of more than an 
 ordinary ceremony. One hundred and twenty-six years 
 ago there was born in the ancient town of Cockermouth 
 a child who as a man was destined to stamp his name on 
 the pages of history, and, by his teaching and influence, 
 greatly to affect for good all future generations, for I 
 think it will be admitted by all that the teaching of his 
 song and the spirit they breathe has done much to 
 elevate, ennoble, and refine the life of the English 
 people. And it is but a fitting tribute we render that 
 to-day assembled we witness the unveiling of this 
 Fountain as a memorial of one who has rendered such 
 incalculable service to his fellows. But we would not 
 forget that, whilst we gladly and cheerfully seek to 
 perpetuate his memory by the erection of this granite 
 Fountain that his name and his memory are treasured 
 on more lasting and less perishable tablets, written on 
 the hearts and memories of those whose lives have been
 
 i8 
 
 sweetened and blessed by his song. (Applause.) We 
 must acknowledge that to the gentleman whom we have 
 invited, and who has cheerfully acceded to our request to 
 perform the ceremony of unveiling this Fountain, we are 
 almost nay, I think we may say altogether indebted 
 for this memorial of the Poet. (Applause.) I have now 
 the greatest pleasure in calling upon the Rev. Canon 
 Rawnsley to unveil this Fountain (Applause.) 
 
 Canon Rawnsley said : Mr Straughton and members 
 of the Urban Council and the Harris Park Committee, 
 ladies and gentlemen, I am conscious of the great 
 honour done me in asking me to unveil this little 
 Fountain in memory of the childhood of William 
 Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. I only wish the 
 task had fallen into worthier hands. Standing in this 
 pleasant Park upon their native hillside, and within 
 sight of the house where the children were born, we 
 remember that to-day, April yth, is the I26th anniversary 
 ot the Poet's birth. Household name as Wordsworth's is 
 in all English-speaking lands to-day, I dare to prophesy 
 that at the end of another 126 years the men of England, 
 of Cumberland, and Cockermouth will think more of their 
 great Poet than even they do now. But it is not only of 
 William Wordsworth we think today; we remember 
 aho that dear, dear sister Dorothy, to whom, under God, 
 we chiefly owe it that Wordsworth devoted his life to the 
 high calling of a Poet. The names of Dorothy and 
 William Wordsworth are inseparable : if there had been 
 no Dorothy Wordsworth, there would probably have been 
 no William Wordsworth. They are, in our act of 
 .gratitude to-day, indissolubly one This little Fountain, 
 as it appears to me, fitly symbolises the perpetual stream 
 of living thought for the healing of the nation that
 
 Wordsworth poured forth. It typifies the purity of 
 language, the clearness of truths, to which he gave 
 utterance. It sets forth that refreshment for mind and 
 spirit that all those who read Wordsworth with the 
 understanding, will find in his poems. But, gentlemen, 
 if we wish to be learners of him we must make him our 
 study. We must not only erect Fountains to his 
 memory, but we must read him, for 
 
 He is retired as noontide dew, 
 
 Or Fountain in a noonday grove, 
 And you must love him, ere to you 
 
 He shall seem worthy of your love. 
 
 I trust that the figure of the child proffering the cup of 
 water, above the Fountain's basin, may be in itself a 
 reminder of that ministering childhood and tender 
 sisterhood that was Dorothy's towards her brother. You 
 will see that round the base of the Fountain, above the 
 trough which has been specially designed for the 
 convenience of our four-footed friends, are inscribed the 
 words 
 
 Who feels contempt for any living thing 
 Hath faculties that he hath never used. 
 
 May these words remind us at once of the duty we owe 
 to the lower animals and of that loving reverence for all 
 things that have life which breathes from every page of 
 Wordsworth's writing his writing that bade us " never 
 to blend our pleasure or our pride, with sorrow of the 
 meanest thing that feels." I could wish that this simple 
 memorial Fountain might be more than this. You will 
 have noticed in the list of subscribers the names of 
 people of every varying creed and form of faith. The 
 praise of Wordsworth is in all the churches. One of the 
 last and most touching letters of sympathy received was
 
 20 
 
 from the great teacher of spiritual things, to our two last 
 generations, the Venerable Dr. James Martineau. Let 
 this Fountain say that in appreciation of the truths that 
 Wordsworth taught in nature and in human life, men may 
 more and more become brethren one of another. Nor is 
 this Fountain only a witness of friendship between men 
 of various religious opinion, and of common intellectual 
 regard. It is a monument of that abiding charity which 
 a common appreciation of the Poet may work among the 
 nations. The American Ambassador, than whom no 
 American citizen is held in higher regard among 
 thoughtful men on either sides of the Atlantic, and to 
 whom both nations owe a debt of gratitude for his 
 services in the past crisis, writing me last week, 
 spontaneously, and in the kindest way joined in this act 
 of homage to the memory of Wordsworth ; He tells me 
 that Wordsworth's gentle influence is steadily increasing 
 in America, and more and more becoming a recognised 
 moral and social force over there. May we not see, then, 
 in this act of international regard for the Poet we hold so 
 dear, one of those many ties of delight in common language 
 and common genius, that bind us here and over sea, in 
 common brotherhood. The forces that Wordsworth set 
 free to keep men's lives simple, thoughtiul, unselfish, 
 and pure, shall surely make for righteousness and peace 
 and community among the nations who can claim him as 
 their kinsman and the common Poet of their common 
 tongue, even unto the end. Mr Straughton, it is with 
 protound reverence for the lives of William and 
 Dorothy Wordsworth, and with great pleasure, that 
 now before this assemblage, honoured by the presence of 
 two at least of the grandchildren of the Poet, with 
 cordial thanks to Mr. Palmer, Mr. Prior, and the untiring 
 Park Committee, 1 unveil this Fountain, and in the name
 
 MEMORIAL FOUNTAIN.
 
 21 
 
 of the subscribers beg you, as chairman of the committee, 
 to accept this gift of homage to Cockermouth's greatest 
 son, a "simple water drinking bard," for the use and 
 pleasure of the people. (Applause,) 
 
 The Rev H. J. Palmer : I have great pleasure in 
 moving that we offer our best thanks to Canon 
 Rawnsley for all the trouble he has taken over this 
 movement, which he has brought to a successful issue 
 to-day. It is well that in this lovely lake country we 
 have still amongst us one who can so well appreciate the 
 genius of the great lake Poets. Canon Rawnsley has 
 drunk deeply not only of the spirit of the Poets, but of 
 the scenery in which they lived, and he has helped us 
 not a little by his own prose and poetic works to take an 
 interest in the neighbourhood in which we live and to 
 admire the great men who have belonged to it. (Hear, 
 hear.) We are reminded to-day that we are assembled 
 in Wordsworth's birth-place the greatest Poet of the 
 lake country, and to be reckoned with Tennyson and 
 Browning as making up the trio of the greatest Poets 
 of the century. Indeed, Matthew Arnold, in his famous 
 memorial verses on the Poet's grave in Grasmere 
 Churchyard, laments 
 
 The last poetic voice is dumb, 
 
 We stand to-day by Wordsworth's tomb. 
 
 And Tennyson, taking the laureateship from Wordsworth, 
 addressing the Queen, says : 
 
 Victoria, since your Royal Grace 
 To one of less desert allows 
 This laurel greener from the brows 
 
 Of Him who uttered nothing base. 
 
 As assembled in Wordsworth's birth-place it is well that 
 we should not forget the glory that will always belong
 
 22 
 
 to Cockermouth in consequence of this event. We stand 
 in sight of the very house in which he was born, of the 
 churchyard in which his father lies buried, and of the 
 church in which there is a memorial window put up in 
 former years and largely subscribed to by the late Prince 
 Consort, and we are also in time to view the school house 
 in which he received his earliest education, and which in 
 consequence of decay is about to be removed. We are 
 also surrounded by the hills he loved, which, thank God, 
 can never be removed, but stand fast for ever and 
 ever. We are reminded that the spot which receives 
 his beautiful memorial has been generously given to us 
 by a Cockermouth lady and that it will be preserved for 
 the people for ever as a public Park. (Hear, hear.) It 
 is said that " Poets are born, not made " ; therefore we 
 may conclude that a favourable birth-place has something 
 to do with poetic genius. (Applause.) 
 
 Mr. Edwin Jackson : I have much pleasure in 
 seconding the vote of thanks. We are quite aware that 
 Canon Rawnsley does not wish to be the recipient of a 
 too profuse expression of thanks especially if conveyed 
 in speeches of inordinate length. His has been a labour 
 of love, which is its own reward. But for all that the 
 occasion is fitting for us briefly to thank him f ^.r moving 
 in this matter, and for the happy suggestion that the 
 acquisition of this beautiful Park by the people of 
 Cockermouth through the generosity and munificence 
 of an honoured resident should be marked by the 
 erection of a public memorial to the greatest, the noblest, 
 and the best that our ancient town has produced, William 
 Wordsworth. And if we owe to Canon Rawnsley nothing 
 more than the suggestion we should have been his debtors, 
 but when we recollect that he promptly made his
 
 23 
 
 views known far and wide, and asked for the wherewithal 
 to carry out the work in which, I am glad to say, he 
 was singularly successful, the proof of it being before 
 us in this chaste and beautiful Fountain we must all 
 agree that it is necessary that we should put on record 
 our sense of appreciation in this way. Now, it has been 
 alleged that Cumberland, and more especially 
 Wordsworth's native town, have not yet fully realised 
 the greatness of his genius, and if we are to judge by the 
 outward and visible memorials that the county possesses, 
 there may be some reason for the allegation. But the 
 people of these northern parts are not quick at expressing 
 their emotions. They certainly have not been so 
 demonstrative as their neighbours of the midlands and 
 the south, but there does exist, notwithstanding in 
 their hearts a warm admiration for the great bard who 
 tuned his lyre and sang as perhaps no other Poet ever 
 sang of the true and beautiful in nature, animate and 
 inanimate, ever assigning to man the foremost and 
 noblest place, helping humanity to attain to a 
 higher standard of excellence and endowing even the 
 common objects of this delightful district with a new 
 charm. The whole of his teaching was to elevate and 
 ennoble, and yet his reputation was of slow growth, but 
 it has lasted, and will last for all time. (Applause.) A 
 long life was well nigh ended ere anything like national 
 recognition was accorded him. He has now been nearly 
 half a century dead, and the world's estimate of him is laid 
 betore us. His admirers have increased an hundred fold. 
 In many a far-off station in the wilds of the Great 
 North-West of Canada, in the solitary homestead of the 
 Queensland squatter, when thoughts of the Old Home 
 Country crowd upon the memory, Wordsworth's 
 descriptions of smiling English valleys, venerable
 
 2 4 
 
 churches and peaceful "God's acres" shaded by the 
 ' everlasting " yews " Produced too slowly ever to 
 Decay " are read and re-read with an interest and 
 appreciation that only those who are far removed can 
 feel. To the yearly increasing number ot his students 
 in England and America it is unnecessary to allude. 
 Wherever the mother tongue of the Anglo-Saxon race is 
 spoken his name and writings are known, and to know 
 them is to derive benefit harm is impossible. (Applause.) 
 That is the world's estimate to-day. It will be confirmed 
 and emphasised half a century hence. It is the best 
 memorial a great man can have. To it the painter, the 
 sculptor, the poet can add nothing And the best for us, 
 who reside in this spot, to do is to make ourselves 
 better acquainted with his works and simple upright 
 conscientious life to become familiar with the scenes 
 he loved, and under his guidance learn to under- 
 stand the natural beauties of the neighbourhood. To 
 it Wordsworth owes much. Born almost on the 
 " bright blue river " Derwent in that interesting 
 home which, by the kindness of Mr and Mrs Robinson 
 Mitchell, is open to our inspection to-day (applause) 
 his earliest recollections were of the " Grey old 
 castle," the quaint old garden, and across the river, 
 of the green holmes and hawthorn hedgerows of the 
 ancient kingdom of Strathclyde. Fit scenes tor the 
 opening eyes of the future Poet. This, Cockermothians 
 remember with pardonable pride and satisfaction, and 
 whilst the honour of being his birth-place has 
 immortalised the old town, he has himself acknowledged 
 to the full the debt ot inspiration he owes to her. 
 (Applause.)
 
 25 
 
 AT THE MEETING AFTERWARDS. 
 
 SIR WILFRID LAWSON said: Ladies and 
 gentlemen, I am very much obliged to the 
 committee who have charge of the arrangements to-day 
 for their kindness in asking me to preside on this 
 interesting occasion. I suppose one reason for my being 
 asked is to be found in the words which Canon Rawnsley 
 used just now in the Park. He said that Wordsworth 
 was a simple water-drinking bard (laughter) and I 
 suppose he and the committee thought that to speak of a 
 simple water-drinking bard was the province ot a 
 simple water-drinking member of Parliament. (Laughter 
 and applause.) Well, I think Cockermouth has done 
 well in inaugurating this Fountain, and I think Canon 
 Rawnsley has done well in having stirred us all up to 
 this work ; and I think that the people of Cumberland, as 
 well as the people of Cockermouth, will take an interest in 
 the proceedings of to-day, because I am inclined to believe 
 that Wordsworth did a great deal to make the Lake 
 District to make it popular, to make it known to the 
 English people and to induce them to come among the 
 lakes. (Applause.) Wordsworth acted towards the 
 Lake District of Cumberland and Westmorland much as 
 Sir Walter Scott did towards Scotland. Scotland before 
 Sir Walter Scott's time was looked upon as a barbarous 
 region. I dare say the English people thought it was 
 inhabited by cannibals who would eat them up if they 
 went there -(laughter) but Sir Walter Scott's beautiful 
 poems introduced us all to Scotland and made it the most 
 popular place in the world at the present day. I think 
 Cockermouth has done well by what you have done 
 to-day. You have appreciated the work of your great 
 Poet by commemorating him in the work of art we have
 
 26 
 
 just seen, and it will lead others, I think, when they 
 see it to study his works, and to feel as those of us do 
 who have read his works to feel the writings of one 
 whom we may call pre-eminently the great Poet of 
 nature. (Applause.) I suppose we are all interested 
 more or loss in poetry. It seems to me to be one of the 
 fine arts, if I may say so. Painting is very delightful. 
 It gives us the lineaments of those whom we love and 
 wish to remember, but a painting is fixed to one place ; 
 it cannot be carried about very much, and only a limited 
 number of people can see it. But a Poet writes a 
 beautiful line, and it is fixed in a man's head, and be he 
 rich or poor, high or low, he can carry it about in his 
 head to the very day of his death. As with painting so 
 with sculpture. It is fine, and it is still more difficult 
 for people to see, but they can remember and bear 
 with them the fine sentiments which any Poet has 
 expressed. In fact there is an old saying that a thing of 
 beauty is a joy for ever, and I should say that a fine line 
 of poetry such as many of those which Wordsworth 
 wrote is a joy for ever for a man to carry about with him 
 wherever he goes. (Applause.) Canon Rawnsley and I 
 are great admirers of poetry, and it is rather a curious 
 thing that when we write to one another we generally 
 write in verse, but the curious part of it is that we neither 
 of us can read the other one's writing. (Laughter.) 
 When I get a letter from the Canon I feel sure that he 
 has written something very fine, and when I write to him 
 he also is sure that it is very fine, and we are both 
 satisfied. (Laughter.) It is like the Scotchman's 
 definition of metaphysics, He said it is when one 
 man tries to explain to another man what he does not 
 understand himself. (Laughter.) Well, I am sure, as I 
 say, I think the Canon's writings to me are very good,
 
 27 
 
 because I know when he gets into print his writings are 
 very good, and I hope what he sends to me is equally 
 good and does not contain any bad language or anything 
 of that sort. What I write to him is another sort of 
 thing altogether. I daresay I shall be able to explain my 
 writings. There was a debate about a fortnight ago in 
 the House of Commons on pure beer, and the House 
 was very much excited. I have not seen them so excited 
 for a long time. Pure beer excites everybody, members 
 of Parliament as well as others. (Laughter.) A member 
 on the opposite side of the House to which I sit made a 
 speech, and said that when walking along the street he 
 saw an advertisement, which ran as follows : " It looks 
 like beer, smells like beer, and tastes like beer, but it is 
 not beer." And then he held up a large placard in full 
 view of the House with "Cockermouth mixture" written 
 upon it. (Laughter.) Well, now, a similar description 
 applies to my writings. It looks like poetry, it reads like 
 poetry, and it sounds like poetry, but it is not poetry. 
 (Much laughter.) It's like what margarine is to butter. 
 (Renewed laughter.) The Canon and I hope that all 
 those who are present to-day will imitate Wordsworth's 
 poetry and set him up as their model. As has been said 
 .you could not have a better model for purity and for 
 excellence than you can find in Wordsworth. I think 
 there is a good deal of poetry in Cumberland. I have 
 seen many good attempts very good in their way, short 
 and sweet. I remember a rather striking piece that 
 somebody found when he got to the top of Skiddaw. It 
 was 
 
 Though Skiddaw's top is bad to come at 
 Polly and me has reached the summit. 
 
 (Laughter.) That was a very nice short attempt. You 
 have the whole scene before you in two lines. (Laughter.) 
 
 :
 
 28 
 
 Then somebody at Cockermouth, some rising Poet, wrote 
 something even better, which I consider one of the finest 
 epic poems I ever read considering its brevity and force. 
 There was a football match between Cockermouth and 
 Cleator, and the whole battle was given in two lines. 
 
 Cleator came to Cockermouth, cock sure to win ; 
 Cleator went from Cockermouth sadly taken in. 
 
 (Laughter.) The man who wrote that ought to rise to 
 the highest in poetry. They could see Cleator coming 
 to Cockermouth with drums beating, banners flying, 
 determined to crush all opposition, and Cockermouth 
 rising magnificently to repulse the enemy, and winning a 
 glorious triumph. (Laughter and applause.) Well, this 
 is very beautiful, but, as I say, we won't model ourselves 
 exactly on those Poets. We will model ourselves 
 on Wordsworth as much as we can. (Applause.) I am 
 not going to expatiate much longer upon this matter, 
 because there are Canon Rawnsley and others, and 
 Canon Rawnsley is an expert and warm admirer of 
 Wordsworth, acquainted with him in all his details, and 
 will, I have no doubt, give you some of his very 
 best bits. Always, whatever happens, associate 
 Wordsworth with Cockermouth, where he was born in 
 this beautiful valley, I daresay he would share in a 
 sentiment which Moore wrote about another valley in 
 Ireland. 
 
 There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet 
 As that vale in whose bosom the wild waters meet ; 
 Oh ! the last rays of feeling and life shall depart, 
 Ere the bloom of that valley shall fade from my heart. 
 
 Wordsworth was born near where the waters of the 
 Cocker and Derwent meet in this beautiful vale which is 
 so dear to every Cumberland man, and if this valley is
 
 2 9 
 
 peopled by warm admirers of the Poet, by students of 
 him, by sympathisers with him, it will be better than it 
 is now, for the rising generation could not take a better 
 model than one of the sweetest, simplest, and purest 
 Poets that England ever produced. (Cheers. ) 
 
 LETTERS READ AT THE MEETING FROM 
 DISTINGUISHED ADMIRERS OF THE POET. 
 
 THE ABBEY, CARLISLE, 
 
 APRIL 4x11, 1896. 
 MY DEAR RAWNSLEY, 
 
 My conscience is always smiting me for not 
 being a better student of Wordsworth when I live a part 
 of the year in a home within a stone throw of Dove 
 Cottage. That which impresses me most is his quiet, 
 calm thoughtfulness as a contrast to our modern 
 temptation to hurry and fuss, which it is so very difficult 
 to resist. 
 
 Yours very sincerely, 
 
 H. BARROW IN FURNESS. 
 
 EMBASSY OF THE UNITED STATES, LONDON. 
 MY DEAR AND REVEREND SIR, 
 
 It would be most interesting to be present when 
 you dedicate the Memorial Fountain at Cockermouth, the 
 home and birth-place of William Wordsworth and his 
 sister Dorothy, on April 7th, his birthday. A gladsome 
 spring of bright pure water from their native hillside 
 seems peculiarly the natural cement of such associations 
 as these two beings bring to mind. In America our debt 
 to Wordsworth has long been acknowledged ; and happily
 
 30 
 
 for us his gentle influence is steadily increasing and is 
 more and more a recognised moral and social 
 force. . . ." 
 
 Believe me sincerely yours, 
 
 T. F. BAYARD. 
 
 (The Ambassador begged to be allowed to join in the tribute 
 to Wordsworth's memory and enclosed a cheque). 
 
 HOUSE OF COMMONS, 
 
 APRIL 28x11, 1896. 
 DEAR CANON RAWNSLEY, 
 
 Nothing can give more pleasure to those who 
 admire Wordsworth and who feel more and more how 
 much English poetry and English national life owe to 
 him, than to hear of the graceful and appropriate 
 memorial you are setting up at Cockermouth in honour 
 of him and his sister. 
 
 We have been too neglectful in the past of the 
 obvious and simple means of recalling to the inhabitants 
 of a pla.ce, many of whom have yet been faintly touched 
 by literary influences, the memory of the great ones 
 who have made their town or countryside immortal, 
 and have endeared the very names of spots, perhaps 
 obscure, to distant men and new generations. One 
 has often gone as a pilgrim to some place which the 
 dwelling there of a great man has consecrated, and been 
 disappointed to find nothing there to shew he was 
 remembered. You are removing this reproach from one 
 such place : and many will in future be glad to find 
 something to speak to them of the Poet and his sister 
 in the little town where they moved about as children 
 and received their first impressions of Nature. 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 J. BRYCE.
 
 TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. 
 DEAR CANON RAWNSLEY, 
 
 Your kind letter reaches me here too late to 
 allow of my answering it practically, but indeed in any 
 case I should have more than doubted my capacity to say 
 anything even tolerably worthy of the "Vates Sacer." 
 Amongst the best written tributes to him I always think 
 of Mat. Arnold's. " He took us, as we lay at birth," etc., 
 etc., and of Keble's inscriptions, the one in beautiful 
 Latin, the other in English, I. In his Oxford 
 Praelectiones. II. The quasi translation of it in the 
 church of Grasmere. I used often to show the passage 
 in the Praelectiones to my pupils at Harrow. These 
 few lines can hardly reach you till after your return from 
 your pious work, with which I very heartily sympathise. 
 
 Believe me to be most truly yours, 
 
 H. MONTAGU BUTLER. 
 
 14, NORHAM GARDENS, OXFORD. 
 
 EASTER DAY, 1 896. 
 MY DEAR FRIEND, 
 
 Would I could be with you on Tuesday, to join 
 in doing honour to the great Poet, whose memory 
 hallows and endears everything in the Lake Country. 
 There is nothing new to be said of Wordsworth. Only 
 as time goes on we feel more and more the greatness of 
 our debt to him. Every year England's increasing 
 wealth tends to make her more luxurious and artificial. 
 How much has he done both by writing and example to 
 recall us to simplicity ? Even if his poems fail to touch 
 men, yet the sight of that Grasmere cottage to which he 
 and his sister retired on ^80 a year, doing all the 
 housework and garden work themselves, while he wrote
 
 32 
 
 most of his greatest poems almost the greatest poems 
 in the language, is an argument stronger than all words 
 to recommend the noble freedom of simple ways of 
 living, and to make men ask themselves if after all 
 independence with high thoughts may not be better than 
 great wealth without them. 
 
 There must be many who visit Dove Cottage every 
 year from our great towns, to some at least of whom 
 such a question will not be put in vain. And yet again, 
 that love of country-life, inborn in Englishmen, how 
 terrible is it being sapped by the evergrowing strength 
 of ties that draw men to cities. And what a boon it is 
 for these worn, heated, anxious, everhardening spirits to 
 be drawn back again into Nature, there in its peace and 
 beauty to find their better selves again. And it is not 
 only by the power of depicting outward beauty that 
 Wordsworth draws us. He does not, as has been said, 
 paint Nature. Rather he makes us feel a heart and soul 
 in nature, calm, loving, elevated, inspiring, which finds 
 a counterpart in our own higher nature, and of which he 
 acts to us as the interpreter and go-between. 
 
 Long may we enjoy these higher influences of the 
 Lake Country. It is a wide and varied region of heights 
 and glens and winding solitudes, where we can still hear 
 only the cataract, or the raven, or the purling stream, or 
 the breeze rustling in the bracken. To this largeness of 
 Nature Wordsworth would himself, I think, have 
 welcomed all who come there to feel, to rest, to listen, to 
 learn, and to enjoy. 
 
 But if the lakes and streams are ever valued only 
 for their water supply and water-power ; if trains and 
 tramways carry noisy crowds to the top of Skiddaw and
 
 33 
 
 Scawfell, then, while the gain to such sightseers is 
 inappreciable (beyond the indulgence of a certain 
 curiosity and boisterous merriment), the loss to all the 
 higher thought and feeling of the country will be 
 incalculable. 
 
 This is not 
 
 "The joy in widest commonalty spread " 
 
 of which Wordsworth wrote. Some say that it is 
 selfish not to make everything, including "a thing of 
 beauty," accessible to all. They forget that one of the 
 chief elements of the " thing of beauty " is the repose 
 and restfulness of the landscape, with nothing foreign or 
 out of tune to jar with it. Once let in noise and clamour 
 and foolish speaking, and you had better be at home at 
 your desk and ledger making up invoices or balancing 
 accounts. 
 
 Yours ever sincerely, 
 
 A. G. BUTLER. 
 
 BALIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD. 
 MY DEAR RAWNSLEY, 
 
 I hope your Wordsworth , celebration will be 
 successful. What I shall claim for Wordsworth is not 
 that he is in the front rank of Poets, but that he has 
 distinctly added a new note to poetry. He has extended 
 the range of what is felt as beautiful by showing 
 new relations between nature and the spiritual life of 
 man. 
 
 1 am ever yours very truly, 
 
 E. CAIRD. 
 
 (The Master of Baliol was thinking of the world's greatest 
 Poets, not of English poetry only, when he spoke of 
 Wordsworth as not being in the front rank.)
 
 34 
 
 THE QUEEN'S HOTEL, MANCHESTER. 
 DEAR CANON RAWNSLEY, 
 
 I hope I shall not be too late for the daffodils, 
 but it would have been impossible for me to have 
 adopted your kind suggestion and come down to you 
 earlier. There is always something to be seen on 
 nature's stage if not daffodils. This brings me naturally 
 to Wordsworth. I think if he had written nothing but 
 the two sonnets, one beginning 
 
 The world is too much with us late and soon 
 
 Getting and spending we lay waste our powers ; 
 and 
 
 Most sweet is it with our uplifted eyes, 
 
 Wordsworth would have delivered his message to all 
 time. Most especially does our tims need such 
 teaching, when in our search for the means of life we 
 are destroying all that makes life worth living. No I it 
 is not the search for the means of life, it is the thirst for 
 gold and gain ; ruthless, selfish, destructive, destroying 
 trust between men, and sympathy with nature. 
 
 Wordsworth is the "still small voice" recalling us 
 to our saner selves, leading us back from the turmoil of 
 the world, from its " serious folly " to the elemental 
 spirit of nature, from the human drama (the noise of 
 which drowns all other voices) to the drama of the 
 clouds of our mountains, the woods and the waters, the 
 flowers and the grass. 
 
 There may be many who appreciated Wordsworth's 
 message, but how few there are who are able to follow it 
 in spirit and in truth. Condemned to live mostly in 
 crowded towns or in narrow-minded villages ; condemned 
 to see the green fields, the woods, the blue hills, if at all, 
 mostly in crowds never having a chance of wandering
 
 35 
 
 " lonely as a cloud " except perchance when full of 
 anxiety, and in a state of mind which quite excludes the 
 companionship of "Thought and love." This is largely 
 done in the perversity of our social system and of order, 
 due no doubt to that aforesaid greed, and "getting and 
 spending." Would that we were as a people more 
 united as to what constituted the true life. " The cares 
 of this life and the deceitfulness of riches " or of 
 poverty seems to weave a fine web over and around 
 us which deaden our sensibilities and make us less alive 
 to the harmonies of wild nature. 
 
 But "it is good for us to be here" to turn from 
 our artificial life to natural life to natural scenes to 
 natural beauty to simple souls ; and to these we can 
 have no more sympathetic and loving a guide than 
 William Wordsworth. His poetry is like the fresh 
 springs from the mountain sides of his well-loved Lake 
 Country, and there is a poetic appropriateness in 
 dedicating a Fountain to his memory. 
 
 With kind regards, very truly yours, 
 
 WALTER CRANE. 
 
 MORLEY'S HOTEL, LONDON, 
 
 MARCH 2&TH, 1896. 
 MY DEAR RAWNSLEY, 
 
 I have now been in London for a fortnight, and 
 am just leaving it for the continent in the pursuit of new 
 material ; and goodness knows when I sha'l get back to 
 Penicuick ! I wish I could have helped you with the 
 Wordsworth Fountain. 
 
 Always yours, 
 
 S. R. CROCKETT.
 
 36 
 
 KlRKBY LONSDALE, 
 
 APRIL 7TH, 1896. 
 MY DEAR CANON RAWNSLEY, 
 
 It was with much regret that I found myself 
 unable to accept my friend Palmer's kind invitation to be 
 present at the ceremony in which you have so rightful a 
 place. To my old interest in Wordsworth a new 
 interest in Cockermouth has of late years been added, 
 and I rejoice in a movement which by increasing the 
 pride of Cumberland in its great native Poet, may be the 
 means of leading the young people to give more thought 
 to Wordsworth, and to study with quickened reverence 
 both his poems and his life. I can imagine no study 
 that could inspire them more nobly, or prepare them 
 better for high enjoyment and for the manly discharge of 
 duty. 
 
 Believe me. sincerely yours, 
 
 J. LLEWELYN DAVIES. 
 
 BUONA VISTA, KILLINEY, Co. DUBLIN. 
 DEAR CANON RAWNSLEY, 
 
 I rejoice to hear of the Memorial Fountain to be 
 unveiled on Wordsworth's birthday, and in sight of his 
 birthplace. I wish it were possible for me to be 
 present, and by my presence to signify, silently, the 
 debt I owe to Wordsworth. When I was a boy I happily 
 became possessor of a copy of his poems, and I felt 
 something of their radiant calm, together with something 
 of the passion that lies hidden in that calm. During all 
 the years since then they have been to me a source of 
 strength and joy. 
 
 I am, dear Canon Rawnsley, very truly yours, 
 
 EDWARD DOWDEN.
 
 37 
 
 HAWARDEN. 
 DEAR AND REVEREND SIR, 
 
 I rejoice in any and every manifestation of 
 honour to Wordsworth. I visited his house when a boy, 
 and when a young man had the honour of entertaining 
 him more than once in the Albany (London). I revered 
 his genius, and delighted in his kindness, and in the 
 grave and stately but not austere dignity of his manners. 
 Apart from all personal impressions and from all the 
 prerogatives of genius as such, we owe him a debt of 
 gratitude for having done so much for our literature in 
 the capital points of purity and elevation. 
 
 Yours faithfully, 
 
 W. E. GLADSTONE. 
 
 DEAR RAWNSLEY, 
 
 Wordsworth's " message to our time " was, I 
 think, many-sided and far reaching, but mainly a protest 
 against worldliness and conventionality of life, a 
 constantly expressed admiration for all that is simple 
 and true, for " plain living aud high thinking." It is a 
 message that every day increases in importance as life 
 becomes more complex, fuller of strain, of ambition, and 
 luxury. The Poet who wrote the lines 
 
 There is 
 
 One great society alone 
 The noble living, and the noble dead. 
 
 was one whose chief joys and sorrows were connected 
 with simple folk, and to whom nature brought ever-new 
 sources of interest and delight. 
 
 Wordsworth's sympathy, his power of entering into 
 the common things of nature, are the secret of his
 
 38 
 
 influence, and as he showed the exquisite fitness of the 
 external world to excite and satisfy the mind of man, he 
 led man on to new possessions of beauty and thought. 
 
 Wordsworth's wholesome contempt for an existence 
 of mere money-making, of "getting and spending," his 
 contempt for much of the folly and frivolity of our 
 modern days gave wings to the words of that fine 
 sonnet 
 
 The world is too much with us ; late and soon, 
 
 Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers ; 
 
 Little we see in Nature that is ours ; 
 We give our hearts away, a sordid boon ! 
 The sea that bares her bosom to the moon ; 
 
 The winds that will be howling at all hours, 
 
 And are upgathered now like sleeping flowers, 
 For this, for everything-, we are out of tune ; 
 It moves us not Great God ! I'd rather be 
 
 A Pagan surkled in a creed outworn, 
 So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
 
 Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 
 Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, 
 
 Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. 
 
 The simple natural life of man, so intimately bound 
 up with the earth upon which we live, and the air which 
 we breathe, is being spoilt by a craving for false things, 
 by the following of false gods, by brainless fashions, and 
 artificial excitements, and by a literature pandering to all 
 of these things. Such evils are leading us far from 
 the strengthening and healing power that lies in 
 Wordsworth's philosophy of life ; I am not sure that we 
 are not less sensitive to its influence than we were forty
 
 39 
 
 or fifty years ago, when Matthew Arnold wrote those 
 lines by Rotha's stream : 
 
 He found us when the age had bound 
 
 Our souls in its benumbing round ; 
 
 He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears ; 
 
 He laid us as we lay at birth 
 
 On the cool flowery lap of earth, 
 
 Smiles broke from us and we had ease ; 
 
 The hills were round us, and the breeze 
 
 Went o'er the sunlit fields again ; 
 
 Our foreheads felt the wind and rain. 
 
 Our youth return'd ; for there was shed 
 
 On spirits that had long been dead, 
 
 Spirits dried up and closely furl'd, 
 
 The freshness of the early world. 
 
 Who shall say that our needs are not greater to-day than 
 they were when these lines were written ? I venture to 
 think thus until we return to a greater purity and far 
 greater simplicity of living to a more vivid conception 
 of Wordsworth's ideal of life we shall riot have put our 
 feet on the first step of the ladder that would lead us to 
 the diviner air and into the higher life. 
 
 Believe me, dear Rawnsley, yours faithfully, 
 
 HARRY GOODWIN. 
 
 HOUSE OF COMMONS, 
 
 27TH MARCH, 1896. 
 DEAR CANON RAWNSLEY, 
 
 I regret that it will be impossible for me to be at 
 Cockermouth on Easter Tuesday. I should have liked 
 to avail myself of the opportunity of paying my homage 
 to the great Poet whose works have stood so well the 
 fatal test of time, and to whom personally I owe, in 
 common with so many others, a hearty debt of gratitude. 
 Yours very truly, 
 
 W. C. GULLY.
 
 40 
 
 38, WESTBOURNE TERRACE, W., LONDON, 
 
 i8xH APRIL, 1896. 
 DEAR CANON RAWNSLEY, 
 
 I was glad to see how well you and your friends 
 performed the interesting ceremony in commemoration 
 of the great Poet of Cumberland. I could not find any 
 proper frame of mind to join, and my intrusion on your 
 gathering would have been a work of supererogation. 
 Yours very truly, 
 
 FREDERICK HARRISON. 
 
 190, MARYLEBONE ROAD, N.W. 
 DEAR CANON RAWNSLEY, 
 
 Have no time to write except heartiest 
 congratulations to Cockermouth on its Park and 
 Memorial Fountain. Oh ! that more people would 
 give open spaces, with perennial sources of joy and 
 good. Wordsworth has led us all to realise great 
 teachings in nature and quiet has he not ? 
 Yours very truly, 
 
 OCTAVIA HILL. 
 
 35, GORDON SQUARE, LONDON, W.C. 
 
 I need not say how heartily I go with you in 
 this act of homage to the memory of our great Poet ; 
 and I crave permission to join in it, though after date, 
 by throwing in my mite, which may perhaps still get 
 absorbed by some little interstice of unprovided cost. I 
 never could write to order I only make a mess of it 
 till it spontaneously comes, and I cannot help it. In this 
 case, my love of Wordsworth is rather a cherished
 
 memory than a present affection, for I am not in the 
 brotherhood of Poets, but have too long lived in other 
 regions of thought to have any right to bring an offering 
 to their temple of honour. 
 
 Ever sincerely yours, 
 
 JAMES MARTINEAU. 
 
 UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LIVERPOOL. 
 DEAR RAWNSLEY, 
 
 I wish I were near enough to share your festival 
 to-morrow, and the inauguration of the Wordsworth 
 Memorial. It is well that Cockermouth should at last be 
 furnished with a visible reminder of the great Poet, 
 whose infancy and childhood will become her immemorial 
 pride. With scantier and less authentic relics, 
 Stratford-on-Avon is a place of resort for hundreds and 
 thousands. Standing and looking on the Wordsworth^' 
 House, I have often marvelled that Cockermouth 
 possessing such a birthplace should make no sign. 1 
 have walked the Norfolk avenue and garden, where in 
 the Cambridge days William and Dorothy re-met, to 
 exchange sweet intimacies of brotherhood and sisterhood. 
 In Dove Cottage I have communed with the past and felt 
 the consecrations ot the creepered porch, the terraced 
 lawn, the rustic seat, the tiny orchard plot, every inch of 
 which is holy ground to those who know what England 
 owes to the inspirations that found birth and utterance 
 in that enchanted spot how, for us all and for 
 generations yet unborn, the simple affections that 
 make homes beautiful were illumined with a radiance 
 and a poetry they can never lose, how life's secret was 
 found in admiration, hope, and love, how in the trumpet 
 of the cataract and the sailing of the cloud, the
 
 42 
 
 blitheness of the lark and the blooming of daffodils, new 
 intimations of immortality were brought to light, how 
 once for all the bonds of poetry and the thought of duty 
 were ennobled and enlarged for all men of English 
 speech. And knowing these things, I have wondered 
 often how small store or value Cockermouth seemed to 
 set upon the house so comely in its domestic staid 
 simplicity in which the Poet and his sister both were 
 born. Last Christmas I felt a glow of pleasure as I went 
 over the new Park. The wide horizons reminded me in 
 some sort of the Druid Circle at your own Keswick, 
 encompassed by its hills ; and I rejoiced to hear that 
 Wordsworth was at last to have commemoration there 
 looking upon his childhood's home ; and that hereafter 
 boys and girls of Cockermouth would not grow up, nor 
 visitors come and go, unaware of the place and house 
 that gave him birth, or forgetful that in that garden and 
 its terrace by the brimming Derwent Bank, William and 
 Dorothy played and grew and learned affection, and 
 passed in happy mirth 
 
 Sweet childish days, that were as long 
 
 As twenty days are now. 
 
 Had I been anywhere within reach, I must have joined 
 your festa. Wishing you joy of it. 
 
 Yours most truly, 
 
 G. H. KENDALL. 
 
 THE FISH, BUTTERMERE, 
 
 6iH APRIL, 1896. 
 DEAR CANON RAWNSLEY, 
 
 I much regret that I cannot be with you 
 to-morrow when the Wordsworth Fountain will be 
 opened. I must return to Birmingham and work. This 
 pious memorial in the erection of which you have taken
 
 43 
 
 so much interest will help to keep alive in some a 
 feeling of regard for the great Poet of quietude, who, in 
 the rush and stress of our modern life, has been so much 
 of help for our nation. Wordsworth should indeed be 
 " living at this hour " in the Lake Country, a love for 
 which he was largely instrumental in creating, or we 
 shall lose a very precious heritage for the refreshment 
 and rest of weary England. What I saw last week was 
 about to be done by your Keswick local authorities to 
 their beautiful lake approach, and what I hear is 
 proposed in the way ot a coach road over the Styhead 
 Pass, with its entire destruction of the one supreme 
 solitude of the lakes, makes me feel that the spirit of 
 Wordsworth ought to be preached up in all parts of 
 the land if the English Lake District is at all to 
 maintain its popularity as a health resort for busy city 
 men. I heard yesterday that Wasdale Head and 
 Borrowdale are full of people this Easter who have been 
 driven away from Snowdonia by Sir Edward Watkin 
 and his railway, and if the solitary wilderness of Wasdale 
 is to be broken in upon by a road on which the brake 
 aad char-a-banc rattle, then its present visitors will in 
 their turn go to Scotland and the Continent. Let the 
 few oases of wild scenery that remain be left undisturbed 
 or all the county will suffer. As Wordsworth has 
 pointed out "The staple of the Lake Country is its 
 beauty and its character of retirement." Let then the 
 beauty be undisfigured and the retirement unviolated, if 
 not, those who, Uzzah-like, touch the ark in the hope to 
 help it may find, all too late, that they have not only not 
 achieved their end, but have irretrievably injured 
 themselves. Success to Wordsworth. 
 
 I am, dear Canon, yours sincerely, 
 
 SHOWELL ROGERS.
 
 44 
 
 LANDSDOWNE, EDGEBASTON. 
 DEAR CANON RAWNSLEY, 
 
 I commend Wordsworth not only to our time 
 but to all time simply because he was one of the two or 
 three great Poets who ever wrote in English speech. 
 When I confine myself to the English tongue it is not 
 that I admit any inferiority to or comparison with the 
 Poets of other tongues, but because it narrows the 
 matter down, and makes it simpler, and makes the 
 assertion more modest ; there may be great Poets in 
 unknown tongues with whom I am unacquainted. . 
 I hold Wordsworth to be one of the greatest Poets that 
 ever wrote, because he possessed every qualification 
 of the greatest Poet. These qualifications are : First, 
 " Form," -as perhaps the most important gift to a 
 Poet. There is in Wordsworth more, I think, than in all 
 Poets, excepting perhaps Shakespeare, that surprise of 
 subtle charm, like the sudden flash of sunshine under a 
 dark cloud or the perfection of the tints of dawn. Read 
 these lines out of the ' Waggoner" : 
 
 Along the smooth unpathwayed plain, 
 By sheep track or through cottage lane, 
 Where no disturbance comes to intrude 
 Upon the pensive solitude. 
 
 And so on. The first "Ode to Lycoris" is further 
 evidence of " Form " the most perfect reproduction 
 in English words of a perfect strain on a violin. 
 Secondly, Wordsworth gives us Human Interest, or 
 Humour, for the terms are synonymous ; it is a great 
 mistake to call Wordsworth the Poet of nature. He is 
 not such ; he is the Poet of man. He only uses nature, 
 as man does, as the stage on which man acts. 
 Page after page is full ot it. ... Thirdly, 
 Wordsworth was a Poet, and nothing else. His whole
 
 45 
 
 life was a poem, every hour and moment of his day was 
 a poem. This is how, in all trivial things, in all 
 common daily incidents, he tound the poetic aspect and 
 caught the poetic note. ... Lastly, of Wordsworth 
 as a teacher and a seer. To learn of such an one, men 
 must listen to him. ... I have never read a page 
 of it (" The Excursion "), but I have felt something of a 
 divine strength and purity. ... A possible motto 
 for Wordsworth might be taken from the first pages of 
 " The Excursion" 
 
 A skillful distribution of sweet sounds 
 
 Feeding the soul. 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 J. H. SHORTHOUSE. 
 
 FARRINGFORD, FRESHWATER, ISLE OF WIGHT. 
 DEAR RAWNSLEY, 
 
 My father would have felt that a Fountain is a 
 most appropriate monument to Wordsworth ; the purity 
 and nobility of whose teaching he highly revered. 
 Some of Wordsworth's shorter poems and some of 
 the sonnets, and certain passages and lines, he would 
 quote as among the finest in our language. 
 
 Yours very truly, 
 
 TENNYSON. 
 
 DEAR CANON RAWNSLEY, 
 
 I am glad to hear of your ceremony on Tuesday, 
 and that Cockermouth is honouring the great Poet and 
 his sister. Rich as English literature is, and great as 
 the Poets using the English language have been, it may 
 be doubted if any have lifted the human heart on so 
 strong a wing as Wordsworth. I am happy to join in 
 honouring him. 
 
 Yours very truly, 
 
 G. F. WATTS,
 
 46 
 
 The Bishop of Wakefield sent the following 
 sonnet : 
 
 TO WORDSWORTH. 
 
 O singer, who with heav'n-taught eye and ear 
 And heart all-loving, could'st new beauty shed 
 On all things beautiful, and singing, wed 
 
 High thoughts with sun-crown'd hil! and glimmering mere, 
 
 Making the dear scene by thy spell more dear, 
 And teaching dull hearts in the world outspread 
 To trace new gleamings of the love o'erhead, 
 
 And see all things transfigur'd far and near. 
 
 Reconstructor of the God-blest land! 
 
 Voicing each hill and dell and stream and wood 
 With sweetest love for those who understand, 
 
 We'll guard thy well-lov'd haunts from spoiler rude. 
 
 And bless thee who has taught us to decry 
 
 The spirit pulsing in all earth and sky. 
 
 w. w. w. 
 
 MARCH 3OTH, 1896. 
 
 EATON, 
 
 APRIL 4TH, 1896. 
 DEAR CANON RAWNSLEY, 
 
 I am glad to hear that a memorial of the 
 immortal Poet of the Lakes is being dedicated at the 
 place of his birth a proceeding which must command 
 the sympathy of the whole English speaking and reading 
 race. Would it not be possible to secure the home of 
 his birth as a national monument ? 
 
 Believe me to be very truly yours, 
 
 WESTMINSTER.
 
 47 
 
 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 AN ADDRESS BY CANON RAWNSLEY. 
 
 WE are met together to-day upon the ia6th 
 anniversary of Wordsworth's birth, to try to 
 wipe out some of the reproach which his son alluded to 
 years ago, who when asked to subscribe towards a 
 lecture room to be called the Wordsworth Institute, said he 
 was glad to hear that they were doing anything in 
 Cockermouth to perpetuate his father's name, for in his 
 father's time, the Laureate could never learn that a single 
 volume of his poems was either read or on sale in the 
 town that gave him birth. 
 
 He would have been gratified to-day to see that, 
 though 46 years have passed since the turf began to 
 grow green by Rotha's wave upon his father's Grasmere 
 tomb, the spirit of the greatest son that has been born to 
 Cockermouth, the greatest name in Cumberland to-day, 
 and one of the greatest of our English Poets, is so quick 
 and alive and in the hearts of men, as the letters I have 
 just read seem to testify. 
 
 These words seem large praise, but after all, who 
 are the truly great, who are the men that we inevitably 
 seek to honour and feel as we do it " a grandeur in the 
 beating of the heart ?" Surely they are those who give 
 great and enduring thoughts to the world ; who enkindle 
 our imagination, call forth our tenderest emotions, give 
 us eyes and ears, feed our spirits with pure hope and 
 lofty resolve, enrich our nation not only with glorious 
 language, but with new views of human life, reveal man
 
 48 
 
 unto himself, and make his surroundings, his environment, 
 
 so breathe of that 
 
 " Wisdom and spirit of the universe, 
 That soul that is the eternity of thought," 
 
 that fools though wayfaring men feel it and know it. 
 
 All this Wordsworth did. He not only unfolded a 
 new philosophy, but he made men desire it. He not 
 only gave us new wine from the heart of God, 
 the inspirer, but he gave men a taste for the new thing, 
 which they found real, precious, and an abiding 
 possession. No one, except perhaps Keats, was ever so 
 scoffed at when his first poems were given to the world. 
 But none of our Poets havebeen privileged to see more 
 clearly than Wordsworth saw, such a complete change 
 of attitude towards his poetry as was affected in the 
 first quarter of this century. 
 
 For this Wordsworth, not only put man and nature 
 on talking terms, but filled this common earth of ours 
 with angel presences to haunt and help mankind. It is 
 because of Wordsworth that " the earth and common face 
 of nature speak to us rememberable things." It is 
 because of Wordsworth that his disciples all the world 
 over to-day 
 
 ' Are lovers of the meadows and the woods 
 And mountains, and of all that we behold 
 Of this green earth : of all the mighty world 
 Of eye and ear, both what they half create 
 And what perceive." 
 
 It is because of Wordsworth that men to-day, as he 
 
 in his day, 
 
 " Are well pleased to recognise 
 In nature and the language of the sense, 
 The author of their purest thoughts, 
 The guide, the guardian of their heart, and soul 
 Of all their moral being."
 
 49 
 
 He made it possible for the poorest of the poor to be 
 rich beyond words in power of communing with Nature. 
 
 To him the 
 
 "Earth and sky and every common thing 
 Were apparelled in celestial delight." 
 
 and he made others share this joy. 
 
 The Spirit ot God in nature, " by day and starlight," 
 from the earliest dawn of childhood, intertwined for him 
 " The passions that build up our human soul 
 Not with the mean and vulgar works of man, 
 But with high objects, with enduring things 
 With life and nature purifying thus 
 The elements of feeling and of thought.'' 
 
 And it was Wordsworth's mission to proclaim to men, 
 that this same spirit in nature, if only they would 
 reverently "look towards the Uncreated, with an eye of 
 love " in all His manifestations, would infallibly purify 
 their lives, and keep their feelings and their thoughts on 
 noble heights ot service and of love. 
 
 " Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows 
 Like harmony in music," 
 
 And Wordsworth was the Orpheus who discovered the 
 harmony that exists between man and all the background 
 of his human life. He made the great reconciliation 
 between man and the earth he walks on and the heaven 
 to which his eyes are cast ; and so though he heard 
 oft-times " the still sad music of humanity," at least he 
 heard with it those great master chords of the sympathetic 
 life of a common creation waiting for the adoption, that 
 soothed and cheered, and set men marching bravelier to 
 the tune. 
 
 Wordsworth, sensitive from a child, and practised 
 as is a blind man's touch to all the outward manifestations
 
 5 
 
 of Nature, saw how and where and why they haunted 
 the soul. ' We live," said he, " by admiration, hope 
 and love," and to these vital feelings of delight, earth, 
 sky, the pomp of woods, the sound of waterfalls, dews, 
 vapours, and the melody of birds, and all the beauty of a 
 common dawn might minister. He found they did 
 minister. We recall how he says in the Prelude 
 
 " From Nature and her overflowing soul, 
 
 I had received so much, that all my thoughts 
 
 Were steeped in feeling ; 1 was only then 
 
 Contented, when with bliss ineffable 
 
 I felt the sentiment of Being spread 
 
 O'er all that moves and all that seemeth still ; " 
 
 And we remember also how in the same poem he says : 
 
 " ye mountains and ye lakes 
 And sounding cataracts, ye mist and winds 
 That dwell among the hills where I was born ; 
 'If in my youth, I have been pure in heart, 
 If, mingling with the world, I am content 
 With my own modest pleasures, and have lived 
 With God and Nature communing, removed 
 From little enmities and low desires, 
 The gift is yours ; " 
 
 And whatever of power to be pure, and of that bliss 
 
 ineffable that comes of noble feeling, and clear perception, 
 
 that man and nature have a common life, and silent 
 
 sympathy and heart communion, Wordsworth 
 
 xperienced, he is teaching us to-day. 
 
 Wordsworth's genius lay in discovering that in 
 Nature's ever varying forms and phases, there was a 
 something that had a message to the hearts of men, and 
 that in the commonest everyday life ot man there was a 
 something that would respond to the call ; and that 
 something was absolute truth, absolute reality.
 
 He saw that the great passions that upbuild the soul, 
 the great primal impulses of human affection, the great 
 master powers of the mind to suffer or be glad, need no 
 grander field for the unfolding of the drama of life and 
 character, than is found in the life of the working men, 
 the simple shepherds of our hills. 
 
 He saw too that it is even possible to fill familiar 
 circumstances and surroundings with the novelties of a 
 great surprise, if only these familiar things were made, by 
 the wand of the imagination, to minister to the deeps of 
 our human nature and feeling, and if only character were 
 seen to be the result. 
 
 He was the Poet of common life ; and he accepted 
 it as his mission to open the eyes and widen the thoughts 
 of his countrymen, and to teach them to discover in the 
 humblest and most unexpected form, a presence 
 that was kindred to what they had long recognised as 
 the highest and the noblest '' He insisted," as Dean 
 Church puts it, " that the whole range of the beautiful, 
 the pathetic, the tragic, the heroic, was to be found in 
 common lowly life." 
 
 Wordsworth's chief characteristic is the noble 
 intermingling of deep feeling with profound thought ; 
 but his gift to his time was that he opened the 
 fountain whence this thought and feeling flow ; he 
 bade men realise that not a single ray of morning 
 light upon a distant hill, or cloud that lies cradled 
 in the setting sun, not a bird or creature that flashes 
 past, not a sound of the " winds that will be wandering 
 at all hours," but may so touch the heart and set man 
 thinking " on man and nature and on human life," that
 
 52 
 
 even the labourer going forth into the fields may find 
 them filled with glad companionship, and have angels 
 at his side to bring him home at eventide. 
 
 The immanence of the Divine spirit in Nature was 
 revealed to him. 
 
 It was Wordsworth who felt 
 
 " The presence that disturbed him with the joy 
 Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime 
 Of something far more deeply interfused, 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns 
 And the round ocean and the living air, 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man ; 
 A mation and a spirit that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought 
 And rolls thro' all things." 
 
 And it was Wordsworth who has made us feel this 
 also. 
 
 It was Wordsworth who applied the phenomena of 
 Nature to the problem of life ; and made the clouds and 
 earth and winds and the sun and stars subservient to the 
 moulding of us men. 
 
 This teaching of Wordsworth's was new to his 
 century ; we, who follow after, have drunk of his spirit 
 from many sources -we found it in Carlyle, in 
 Ruskin, and again in Tennyson, in Browning, in Arnold, 
 in Thackeray, in George Eliot, in Mrs Ward, in Emerson, 
 in Lowell, in Longfellow, in Whittier, in Thoreau and 
 we are apt to forget that it is to Wordsworth we must 
 turn as to a fountain head to find 
 
 " The first beginning of this song." 
 
 Matthew Arnold, than whom none in our generation 
 have deeplier entered into, or more lovingly appreciated
 
 w 
 
 H
 
 53 
 
 the spirit of Wordsworth, wrote thus, in April of 1850, 
 on hearing of the death of the Poet : 
 
 " He, too, upon a wintry clime 
 Had fallen on this iron time 
 Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears 
 He found us when the age had bound, 
 Our souls in its benumbing round, 
 He spoke, and loosed our hearts in tears. 
 He laid us as we lay at birth 
 On the cool flowery lap of earth, 
 Smiles broke from us and we had ease, 
 The hills were round us, and the breeze 
 Went o'er the sunlit fields again, 
 Our foreheads felt the wind and rain, 
 Our youth returned for there was shed 
 On spirits that had long been dead, 
 Spirits dried up and closely furled 
 The freshness of the early world." 
 
 And Matthew Arnold was right. The Poet who stands 
 out pre-eminent as having worthily and by immutable 
 laws of poetic beauty and poetic truth, nobly applied 
 ideas to life and expressed for our spiritual understanding 
 noble truths " On man and nature and on human life," 
 did this for us, that he softened us with feeling, as he 
 soothed and tamed us. 
 
 " Others will teach us how to dare 
 
 And against fear our heart to steel ; 
 Others will strengthen us to bear, 
 
 But who, ah ! who will make us feel ? " 
 
 But he not only makes us feel ; he gives us of his 
 own great calm at the same time, and makes us know 
 that it is good to have been born. 
 
 " Enough if something from our hands have power 
 To live and move and serve the present hour, 
 And as towards the silent tomb we go 
 We feel that we are greater than we know."
 
 54 
 
 It is this dignity he has added to the life of the 
 "poor inhabitant below," if the poor inhabitant does 
 his duty well, for which we have to thank Wordsworth. 
 
 But what strikes one most about this Poet, is the 
 serious earnestness which distinguishes him. He, as 
 Matthew Arnold, in quite another way, always seems to 
 have felt, that the burden of the prophet was upon him, 
 " Woe is me if I speak not all the words that I have 
 heard." He was as the poets and prophets of old, divinely 
 sent, and he felt the greatness of the service God had 
 entrusted him with. "Every great poet," he once said, 
 " is a teacher. I wish to be considered as a teacher or 
 nothing." At his most impassioned times, he never seems 
 to lose sight of his mission. And what a mission it was ! 
 this is his own account of the aims and object of his 
 poetry : 
 
 " To console the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight by 
 making the happy happier ; to teach the young and the gracious 
 of every age to see, to think, and to feel, and therefore to become 
 more actively and seriously virtuous." 
 
 And that he fulfilled and is fulfilling that mission, no 
 one can doubt who has found the joy and cheerfulness 
 that comes of nice observation and a cultivated meditative 
 mind. He had his limitations, who has not ? His field 
 of work, like the valley fields he knew, shut in by 
 mountain-walls and Heaven, was unworked before he 
 touched it, and he worked it thoroughly, what it would 
 yield he made it yield. All said and done Wordsworth's 
 hero was a sturdy fell-side yeoman of strong feeling and 
 quiet uncomplaining mind, fighting a good fight amid all 
 the storms of life and "the business of the elements," 
 building up noble character, as he wrestled with his 
 fortune to the end, loving deeply his own fireside
 
 55 
 
 and as deeply all things that have life about his path. 
 It was this very ideal of English home-life in humble 
 estate, which loved the hills and fields " with an affection 
 strong as life itself," that makes Wordsworth rank high 
 among the teachers of patriotism, all the world over. 
 
 The reason why some of us are such fighters to-day 
 for the beauties of the hills and valleys that he loved, 
 why we spend ourselves and are spent in endeavours to 
 keep the natural features of our quiet country, 
 unimproved, unvulgarized and unmarred, is because 
 Wordsworth has taught us to find some of our springs 
 for public action in that same unfailing fountain he has 
 opened to rich and poor alike, love for " this Demi 
 Eden other Paradise," wherein men still may walk and 
 talk with God. 
 
 And as we gather here to-day we remember that the 
 occasion is sacred to the memory not only of William 
 Wordsworth who was born in 1770, but to that 
 little Christmas child, his sister Dorothy, who was born 
 in the following year. Without Dorothy we might have 
 had in William, a social reformer, an ardent politician, 
 an impassioned writer, but not a meditative philosopher, 
 not the Poet of the life " we live by admiration, hope, 
 and love." It was Dorothy, the " dear, dear sister," who 
 weaned her brother William, as the late Bishop of Lincoln 
 has told us, from contemporary politics, and won him 
 to beauty and truth. 
 
 At a time when it seemed Wordsworth, sorely out 
 of heart, depressed and bewildered by the French 
 Revolution, was about to seek refuge from the storm in 
 political economics or scientific research, that tender- 
 hearted loyal sister became a very guiding star to his
 
 56 
 
 nigh storm-wrecked ship ; and brought him to the haven 
 where God would have him to be. Wordsworth himself 
 has told us this in plainest verse. He wrote : 
 
 " Then it was, 
 Thanks to the bounteous Giver of all good, 
 
 1 hat this beloved sister 
 
 Maintained for me a saving intercourse 
 With my true self : 
 
 She in the midst of all preserved me still 
 A poet : made me seek beneath that name 
 And that alone, my office upon earth.'' 
 
 Have we not then right to bind the memory of 
 Dorothy with the honour we do unto her brother, the 
 bard, in lasting bonds of gratitude and praise ? 
 
 For what a sister was this Dorothy ! A child of 
 marvellous sensitiveness ; so that it is recorded that when 
 she gazed upon the shining Solway sea from the heights 
 above Whitehaven, she burst into tears. So tender of 
 heart that when she and her brothers in the terrace- 
 garden chased the butterfly 
 
 " She, God love her, feared to brush 
 The dust from off his wings." 
 
 It was this Dorothy of whom her brother wrote : 
 
 " She gave me eyes, she gave me ears 
 And humble cares and delicate fears, 
 A heart the fountain of sweet tears 
 And love and thought and joy." 
 
 She it was who grew up to be rather as one who is 
 wooed by a suitor, while he was happy as a lover when 
 in her sight. Most touching are the letters she writes, 
 in which she describes to her friends the ideal ot gentle 
 knightly manhood that she finds in her brother ; and he
 
 57 
 
 speaking of her, says, that to be with her again after some 
 absence at Cambridge is 
 
 " a joy above all joys, a morn 
 Risen upon mid-noon," 
 
 and seemed 
 
 " Now, after separation desolate 
 A gift then first bestowed." 
 
 We cannot follow the lovers' life of devotion, 
 that from first to last, seems to have been between these 
 two. The constant companion of his wanderings, the 
 sharer with him of his early poverty and all the later 
 triumphs of his song, Dorothy appears to have been a 
 ministering angel, always ready " to soothe, to comfort, 
 and command." 
 
 With an eye and ear inevitably trained for all the 
 delicate manifestations of nature, often prompting the 
 motive of his subject, suggesting by some description, in 
 her own note-book, of the scenes they passed through, 
 food for his fancy and song, she was to all intents the 
 Poet's second self, his first and last best critic, counsellor, 
 and friend. 
 
 The picture of that unselfish woman with weather- 
 tanned face, and dark flashing eye, of whom Coleridge 
 wrote : 
 
 " in every motion her most innocent soul outbeams so brightly, 
 that who saw her must say 'Guilt was a thing impossible to her.'" 
 
 constantly rises to my mind, when I think of an ideal 
 sister, and of the pictures of ideal womanhood, that by 
 reason of her companionship, Wordsworth was able to 
 pourtray. And one is thankful that 
 
 " This being breathing thoughtful breath, 
 This traveller between life and death " 
 
 has won through her brother's verse immortality.
 
 58 
 
 We to-day who remember the brother, must pay our 
 homage to the little Cockermouth maiden, who in 
 pleasant days of long ago ran in these meadows, 
 wandered up the street, peered at the sparrow's nest 
 in the privet and rose hedges of the manor house 
 garden she ever kept in mind, and climbed with him 
 about the Castle towers. 
 
 WORDSWORTH & COCKERMOUTH. 
 
 A SHORT SKETCH BY CANON RAWNSLEY. 
 
 IN this year of grace 1896, when we have been troubled 
 here, in England, by differences on an American 
 question, it is interesting to note that it was a difference that 
 arose on the American question, between Sir James Lowther 
 and his law agent and steward, a certain John Robinson, 
 in the year 1766, that was the prime cause of the fact that 
 Wordsworth, the poet, was born here. For John Robinson 
 resigned his stewardship, and young John Wordsworth, 
 then only 24 years of age, "a man of great force of character 
 and real human capacity," was appointed in his place to be 
 " law agent and steward of the manor of Ennerdale." To 
 that post, which he occupied for the next 18 years, the 
 young man came from the Penrith neighbourhood, 
 bringing with him as his girl wife a certain Ann Cookson, a 
 mercer's daughter, who could boast, through her descent 
 on her mother's side from the Crackanthorpes, of 
 Newbiggin Hall, an ancestry that flowed from as far back 
 as the time of Edward III. She was thus well suited to 
 marry the son of the land agent of Sockbridge, near 
 Penistone, who traced his descent through a long
 
 59 
 
 unbroken line of sturdy Yorkshire yeomen away in 
 the Penistone neighbourhood, as far as to the time of the 
 Norman Conqueror. They took up their abode in the 
 substantial house now occupied by Mr. Robinson 
 Mitchell, then lately buiided by one Sheriff Luckock. It 
 bears date 1745-46, and is to-day unmarred and 
 unmodernised, remaining much as it was when John 
 Wordsworth became its tenant. We know little of this 
 young John Wordsworth, but he must have been a man 
 " tender and deep in his excess of love," for when, after 
 twelve years of happy married life here in the old manor 
 house beside the Derwent, his wife died from consumption, 
 caught, as we are told, by being put into a damp bed in 
 the " best room" when on a visit to friends in London, 
 he never seemed to recover his spirits, and he himself 
 died six years after her, in the year 1783, on the 3oth 
 December, and lies buried at the east end of the All Saints' 
 Church. He lost his way on the fells when returning 
 from some business engagement at Broughton-in-Furness, 
 and was obliged to stay out all night ; the chill from 
 exposure, brought on inflammation of the lungs, and his 
 strength, sapped by deep domestic sorrow, could not 
 bear up against it. The orphans whom he left, Richard, 
 William, Dorothy, John, and Christopher, four of whom 
 were remarkable in after life, were then removed to the 
 care of their uncle Cookson at Penrith, and Cockermouth 
 knew them no more. We have been allowed, from 
 William Wordsworth's autobiographical notes and his 
 poems, to glean something of those early days. The 
 poet tells us : 
 
 Early died 
 
 My honoured mother, she who was the heart 
 And hinge of all our learnings and our loves 
 Nor would I praise her, but in perfect love !
 
 6o 
 
 We can in fancy see her in earnest converse with Mr. 
 Ellbanks, the teacher of the school by the churchyard, 
 talking about William's " moody and stiff temper " ; we 
 can hear her say " that the only one of the children 
 about whom she has fears is William ; and he will be 
 remarkable for good or evil." We may note her 
 pinning on the child's breast the Easter nosegay, for the 
 young lad is to go up to the church, to say his catechism. 
 Daffodils I expect the flowers were : years after, in the 
 ecclesiastical sonnets Wordsworth, speaking of this act of 
 his mother's, writes ; 
 
 Sweet flowers at whose inaudible command 
 Her countenance phantom-like doth reappear. 
 
 Or we can see the father, book in hand, hearing the lad 
 recite the long passages of Shakespeare, and Milton, and 
 Spencer which were insensibly to mould his ear to music, 
 fire his imagination, and make a poet of him. 
 
 But when I think of Wordsworth in those 
 childish days I do not go off to the ancient school 
 by the church to hear him stumble through Latin 
 verbs. He was not as happy there as he was at 
 Mrs. Birkett's, the dame's school at Penrith ; there 
 was no Mary Hutchinson to keep him company ; 
 and he learned, he tells us, when he went to Hawkshead 
 at the age of ten, more Latin in a fortnight than he had 
 learned the two previous years at Cockermouth. No, 
 rather when I want to see the little William Wordsworth 
 at his happiest, I go with him into the old Manor House 
 Terrace garden by the Derwent's side, and see him with 
 his sister, that sister " Emmeline," as he called her, 
 chasing the butterfly, or hand in hand peering through 
 the rose and privet hedge at the sparrow's nest, " wishing 
 yet fearing to be near it."
 
 6i 
 
 Or, follow him with his nurse, he a child of only 
 five years of age, bathing and basking alternate, 
 all the hot August day in the shallows of the 
 mill pool, and leaping naked as an Indian through the tall 
 garden ragwort on the sands, and clapping his hands to 
 see the rainbow spring from middle air. Or I go with him 
 by the river, " winding among its grassy holmes," whose 
 voice flowed along his earliest dreams that Derwent he 
 never could forget away to the Castle-hold of the barons 
 of old time, Waldeof, Umfraville, Multon, Lucies, and 
 Nevilles, and watch him peering with look of awe into 
 the dark cellar and dungeons, watch him chase the 
 butterfly through the grim courts or climb after the tufts 
 of golden wallflower upon its broken battlements. 
 
 But happiest of all was he when with his story book 
 he lay full stretched, as he describes in the <( Prelude," 
 upon the sun- warmed stones and sandy banks "beside the 
 bright blue river," and there feasted his little heart 
 on fairy tale and filled his soul with scenes from 
 wonderland. 
 
 Wordsworth was never unmindful of the home 
 of his birth. He left Cockermouth for schooldays 
 at Hawkshead when he was a boy of nine, and 
 though in the holidays, for the next five years, he 
 paid an occasional visit to the place, his chief 
 vacation associations were with Penrith. The Poet's 
 connection with this town ceased at his father's death in 
 1784, when he was a lad of fourteen; but he never 
 forgot it. From nature and her overflowing soul here in 
 his childhood days he had received so much that all his 
 thoughts were steeped in a feeling of grateful remembrance 
 of it. He visited the home of his childhood occasionally 
 to refresh his heart with a cup of remembrance, and we
 
 62 
 
 find a note of a certain visit in Dorothy's letter to Mrs. 
 Marshall. Writing in September, 1807, she says : "W. 
 and M. have just returned. They were at Cockermouth, 
 our native place you know, and the Terrace Walk that 
 you have heard me speak of many a time with the 
 privet hedge, is still full of roses as it was thirty years 
 ago. Yes, I remember it for more than thirty years." 
 
 In 1836 he interests himself in a scheme for building a 
 new church. He writes to his friend Poole, of Nether 
 Stowey, for assistance to this object. He tells him that 
 Cockermouth is in a state of much spiritual destitution, 
 near 6,000 souls and only 300 sittings for the poor. 
 Wordsworth cared for the poor. " I have been 
 the means," he says, " of setting on foot the project of 
 erecting a new church there, and the inhabitants look to 
 me for much more assistance than I can possibly afford 
 them, through any influence that I possess." 
 
 As a Keswick man, I gather with pride further on 
 in that letter, that it was the fact of the new church of St. 
 John's having been built there that spurred him on ; and 
 that he hopes Cockermouth will do as Keswick has done, 
 and thus excite other towns to follow so good an 
 example. 
 
 It is interesting to note that the Cockermouthians of 
 that day were not of one mind in the matter, or the 
 Poet had been misled as to native church feeling ; for 
 the inhabitants having a windfall of ^2,000 given them 
 by the Lord of Egremont that year, to spend as they 
 pleased, preferred a new market place to a new church, 
 and the old Poet writes : " This was wanted, so we 
 cannot complain."
 
 63 
 
 So far as I know this was the last public 
 work he attempted to do for the place that gave him 
 birth. But at least we cannot regret that his last effort 
 was in a cause near to his heart, the cause of the religious 
 interests and life of his fellow Cumbrians, the cause of 
 reverence, worship, and godly fear, of " pure religion 
 breathing household laws," the cause of the worship and 
 praise of Almighty God, here in his native place. 
 
 The seed he sowed, though it lay dormant, did not fall 
 on barren ground ; and in a real sense the present All Saints' 
 Parish Church may stand as a monument to the immortal 
 Poet, who then as ever, championed " in perilous times 
 the cause of the poor and simple," and did what he might 
 for church life and piety, in his day, here in 
 Cockermouth. 
 
 NOTE. Since writing the above short sketch, I have had 
 access to a MS. letter of Wordsworth's, which 
 shows that the Church-building project fell 
 through, as far as he was concerned, by reason of 
 what he considered the unfair treatment of an 
 offer of help, made by the then Lord Lonsdale to 
 the town, in connection with the church 
 accommodation needed. 
 
 MR. T. P. WHITTAKER M.P., after the reading 
 of the letters, said : Ladies and gentlemen, In 
 my judgment Wordsworth is a curious and 
 interesting illustration of the fact that a true Poet must 
 be a friend of humanity and an exponent of the right 
 qualities and possibilities of his fcllowmen as human 
 beings and citizens. (Applause.) A mere versemaker 
 and framer of sonorous phrases may influence the 
 passions and throw a glamour over base and selfish
 
 64 
 
 deeds. But a true Poet must touch the heart and 
 conscience, and beget the response of our deepest 
 emotions by giving melodious expression to a far-reaching 
 perception of that which is true, beautiful, ennobling, and 
 sublime in nature and in man. (Applause.) True 
 poetry must tend to elevate, purify, refine, and as'it does 
 so it must evoke sympathy with that which is highest, best 
 and noblest in humanity. (Hear, hear.) It must voice 
 those aspirations and efforts which make for freedom and 
 progress the uplifting and brotherhood of the human 
 race. Wordsworth was a Poet of the real and the 
 common place. He wrote but little of kings, courtiers, 
 and warriors. (Hear, hear.) For his heroes he went 
 but seldom to the mists of antiquity. He was not an 
 exponent of impossible beings doing impossible deeds 
 under impossible conditions. He set forth the incidents 
 of every day life, with all the simple joys, and sorrows, 
 and pathos. He expressed the feelings of our common 
 nature in language pure and beautiful, which tends to 
 bring home to us the important fact that beneath the 
 great differences of social status, worldly position, 
 and intellectual culture, and the log of prejudice, 
 ignorance,and envy, which rise from them, the great 
 heart of humanity is sound and true, and can in the long 
 run be most deeply and effectually moved by appeals 
 to brotherhood, justice, and love ; that beauty, dignity, 
 purity, and honour are not confined to any section of 
 society, but are continually, touchingly, exemplified in 
 the ranks of the humblest and the lowliest. (Applause.) 
 In a word he illustrated and indirectly enforced the 
 teaching of Burns that 
 
 Rank is but the guinea stamp, 
 
 The man's the gold for a' that and a' that. 
 
 (Applause.) Consequently, though Wordsworth was
 
 65 
 
 frightened out of the opinions of his youth by the horrors 
 of the French revolution, of which he saw so much with 
 his own eyes, he was really a Poet of humanity. The 
 lessons which he taught in his pathetic stories of the joys 
 and sorrows, the struggles and the heroisms of the poor 
 and lowly, disclosed his insight into, and his appreciation 
 of that something in humanity which always responds to 
 the touchstone ot right and truth and justice. How much 
 true insight there was in many of Wordsworth's poems is 
 illustrated in that portion of his lines on " The old 
 Cumberland beggar," in which he alludes to the kindness 
 of the poor to the poor, and to the happiness and joy of 
 doing some good to others, and tells us how the very 
 poorest often yearn to exercise that power of generosity 
 which some wealthier folk possess but do not 
 adequately use. (Applause.) He tells us that 
 
 Man is dear to man ; the poorest poor 
 
 Long for some moments in a weary life 
 
 When they can know and feel that they have been. 
 
 Themselves, the authors and givers out 
 
 Of some small blessings ; have been kind to such 
 
 As needed kindness ; for this single cause 
 
 That we have, all of us, one human heart. 
 
 Yes, in pure English and beautiful verse Wordsworth 
 aptly voiced some of the best phrases and deepest 
 feelings of our common humanity. He taught us that 
 the noblest traits and highest aspirations are not confined 
 to any class. The lesson is one which needs continually 
 to be taught. It is well therefore that you should cherish 
 your Poet's memory. In cherishing his memory don't 
 forget his teaching. In honouring him you honour 
 yourselves, and you will honour him and yourselves most
 
 66 
 
 by living and acting, being and doing the ennobling 
 truths and principles which so many of his poems 
 illustrated and inculcated, (Applause.) 
 
 MR. W. L. ALEXANDER, J.P., chairman of the 
 Cockermouth School Board, said : Ladies and gentlemen, 
 My friend Canon Hoskins, who was to propose a vote of 
 thanks to the speakers, has told me that he would be 
 unable to attend, and therefore it has fallen to my lot to 
 take his place. Before doing so I wish to say that I 
 think we have had a most delightful afternoon, 
 notwithstanding the drizzle of rain, which will not have 
 hurt anybody. I think, the daffodil bearers made a very 
 pleasant picture, especially when they decorated the 
 Fountain with their flowers. Who knows but that there 
 are some budding Poets amongst them. (Laughter and 
 applause.) We must all feel deeply grateful for the 
 interesting addresses with which our kind friends have 
 favoured us. We shall all be better men and women for 
 listening to the quotations of verse and sketches of 
 character so vividly portrayed and placed before us. A 
 lively interest has been awakened amongst us sure to 
 lead to the circulation and perusal of the best works of 
 our Poet, and thus a powerful influence for good is set up 
 in our midst to the advantage not only of the inhabitants 
 of his native place, the good old town of Cockermouth, 
 but in more distant parts, from this happy celebration of 
 the 1 26th anniversary of his birth. Wordsworth's 
 pecuniary means in early life were of limited character, 
 and money was never better disposed of than when his 
 friend, Mr. Raisley Calvert, bequeathed him the legacy of 
 ^900 for the special purpose of affording him ample time 
 and leisure for the development of his natural powers. 
 Some of his first productions v/ere poor, trivial, and
 
 6 7 
 
 of small repute, consequently did not meet the general 
 approval. He was on friendly terms with Coleridge, and 
 the noted "Lyrical Ballads," published in 1798, the 
 united work of the two Poets, was unsuccessful a 
 failure ; the volumes did not sell. Wordsworth had no 
 expensive tastes, was straightforward, and a man of 
 singleness of aim. He appreciated his own powers, did 
 not allow his energies to flag, nor his spirit to be 
 disheartened by the neglect of the public. His 
 perseverance was ultimately rewarded by his attaining 
 in 1843 the honourable position of Laureate. He was a 
 good man, possessing philosophic meditation, simplicity 
 of manner, highly susceptible to the beauties of scenery, 
 the mountain, lake, and landscape. Hence that deep 
 subtle communion with nature which pervades his 
 poetry, constituting its true claim to originality 
 
 One impulse from a vernal wood 
 
 May teach you more of man, 
 Of moral evil and of good, 
 
 Than all the sages can. 
 
 His writings breathe the widest spirit of charity. The 
 Poet of humanity, he spoke to the heart, sympathised 
 with suffering, reverenced our universal nature, 
 acknowledged the common brotherhood of man 
 
 He lived serenely, and so fed 
 With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, 
 Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, 
 Nor greetings where no kindness is 
 Could e'er prevail against him. 
 
 I have much pleasure in proposing that the best thanks 
 of this meeting be given to the Rev. Canon Rawnsley and 
 our other friends for their most instructive and pleasing 
 addresses. (Applause.)
 
 68 
 
 DR. MITCHELL, in seconding the vote of thanks, 
 said he had long been a reader and lover of Wordsworth, 
 and he had more hope of his influence to-day in his 
 native place and the surrounding district than ever 
 before. 
 
 WORDSWORTH: A SKETCH OF HIS 
 LIFE AND WORK. 
 
 (EXTRACTS FROM A LECTURE BY THE REV. J. LLEWELYN 
 DAVIES, D.D.) 
 
 IT is difficult to us to believe that a Poet of the 
 very first rank should ever have been treated 
 with critical disrespect, and that any one should 
 have been stupid enough to speak of the twaddle of 
 the Lake-poets and the watery effusions of Wordworth. 
 Such criticism is obsolete now, and Wordsworth is all 
 but universally honoured. But he does not belong to the 
 class of popular poets. He is a poet for those who 
 attend and consider, and who like to find beauties in the 
 second and third reading which did not strike them in the 
 first. Those who read without much attention, and 
 never care to read more than once, will find Longfellow, 
 for example, more to their taste than Wordsworth. 
 Some will understand the comparison at once by 
 thinking of music. Wordsworth is not indeed a poet for 
 the select and advanced only, there is nothing in him to 
 surprise and repel the many,- he is not the Wagner of 
 poetry : but neither is he the creator of melodies which 
 achieve at once universal popularity ; he is the 
 Beethoven, perhaps, of the sister art. The more he is
 
 6 9 
 
 known and read, the better it is for our world ; it is a 
 gain for our taste, for our morality, for our religion, that 
 more and more of us should enter into Wordsworth's 
 thought and sentiment and should be taken by the 
 beauty and the grandeur of his verse. Holding this 
 conviction, I feel that I am well employed in commending 
 this poet to your better knowledge and warmer admiration. 
 
 There is. properly speaking, but one Lake-poet ; and 
 Wordsworth is he. Coleridge and Southey came from 
 South-west England, and all their best poetry was written 
 before they ever saw the Lake Country ; but Wordsworth 
 was a genuine son of this region, born and 'bred in it ; 
 from it he went forth into the world, and to it he soon 
 returned ; here he lived for 50 years, and here he was 
 buried ; he loved the scenery, and he loved the 
 population, of the Lake District with an inner jealous 
 devotion. He received his poetical inspiration from its 
 waters and hills and skies ; it was one of his ambitions 
 so to praise the land and the people that his readers 
 might be constrained to share his admiration of both. 
 He was by no means exclusive ; he was catholic enough 
 in his sympathies and appreciations : but the Lake 
 Country was home to him, and he gloried in it and 
 desired to glorify it. 
 
 William Wordsworth sprang from this County of 
 Cumberland. "I was born," he said, " at Cockermouth 
 in Cumberland on April yth, 1770, the second son of 
 John Wordsworth, attorney-at-law as lawyers of this 
 class were then called and law-agent to Sir James 
 Lowther, afterwards Earl of Lonsdale. My mother was 
 Anne, only daughter of William Cookson, mercer, of 
 Penrith, and of Dorothy, born Crackanthorp, of the 
 ancient family of that name, who from the times of
 
 7 o 
 
 Edward III. had lived in Newbiggin Hall, Westmorland. 
 My grandfather was the first of the name of Wordsworth 
 who came into Westmorland, where he purchased the 
 small estate of Sockbridge. He was descended from a 
 family who had been settled at Peniston, in Yorkshire, 
 near the sources of the Don, probably before the Norman 
 Conquest. . . . The time of my infancy and 
 early boyhood was passed partly at Cockermouth 
 and partly with my mother's parents at Penrith, 
 where my mother, in the year 1778, died of a 
 decline, brought on by a cold, in consequence of being 
 put, at a friend's house in London, in what used to be 
 called a ' best bedroom.' My father never recovered his 
 usual cheerfulness of mind after this loss, and died when 
 I was in my i4th year, a schoolboy, just returned from 
 Hawkshead, whither I had been sent with my elder 
 brother Richard, in my gth year." At Hawkshead 
 Grammar School, between Windermere and Coniston, 
 Wordsworth had a long and very happy school-time, and 
 his faculty of versifying revealed itself there. A piece 
 which he wrote when he was 14 or 15, which stands at the 
 beginning of his Collected Works, was as he says 
 " much admired." He went up to St. John's College, 
 Cambridge, in October, 1787, in his i8th year, and took 
 his B. A. degree, without Academical honours, in January, 
 1791. 
 
 We have an account, by Wordsworth himself, of the 
 influences which in youth and early manhood helped to 
 form his mind and character, in a poem, entitled " The 
 Prelude ; or, Growth of a Poet's Mind." He thus 
 explains the title : " When the author retired to his 
 native mountains with the hope of being enabled to 
 construct a literary work that might live, it was
 
 reasonable thing that he should take a review of his own 
 mind, and examine how far Nature and Education had 
 qualified him for such an employment. As subsidiary to 
 this preparation, he undertook to record in verse the 
 origin and progress of his own powers, as far as he was 
 acquainted with them." The great work which 
 Wordsworth had in view was to be " a Philosophical 
 Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society, and 
 to be entitled the ' Recluse' ; as having for its principal 
 subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in 
 retirement." The Recluse was to have been in three 
 parts ; the second part, called the Excursion, was 
 completed, and a small portion of the first part : the 
 Prelude was the Introduction to the Recluse. It was 
 addressed to Coleridge, and was commenced in 1799 and 
 finished in 1805. Coleridge came up to Cambridge 
 just as Wordsworth left it. The elder poet, who loved 
 and admired Coleridge with a constant enthusiasm, 
 reflects with a sigh what a companion he would have 
 had in him if they had been at College together. 
 
 Not alone, 
 
 Ah ! surely not in singleness* of heart 
 Should 1 have seen the light of evening fade 
 From smooth Cam's silent waters : had we met 
 Even at that early time, needs must I trust 
 In the belief that my maturer age, 
 My calmer habits, and more steady voice, 
 Would with an influence benign have soothed, 
 Or chased away, the airy wretchedness 
 That battened on thy youth. But thou hast trod 
 A march of glory, which doth put to shame 
 These vain regrets : health suffers in thee, else 
 Such grief for thee would be the weakest thought 
 That ever harboured in the breast of man. 
 
 * By " singleness " he means solitariness
 
 72 
 
 During his Cambridge time Wordsworth did not 
 devote himself to Academical studies with any ardour. 
 He gives this account of his indifference to those 
 studies : 
 
 " For I, bred up 'mid Nature's luxuries, 
 Was a spoiled child, and, rambling like the wind 
 As I had done in daily intercourse 
 With those crystalline rivers, solemn heights, 
 And mountains, ranging like a fowl of the air, 
 I was ill tutored for captivity ; 
 To quit my pleasure, and, from mouth to mouth, 
 Take up a station calmly in the perch 
 Of sedentary peace. Those lovely forms 
 Had also left less space within my mind, 
 Which, wrought upon instinctively, had found 
 A greatness in those objects of her love, 
 A winning power, beyond all other powers. 
 Not that I slighted books, that were to lack 
 All sense, but other passions in me ruled, 
 Passions more fervent, making me less prompt 
 To indoor study than was wise or well, 
 Or suited to those years." 
 
 He complains however with some bitterness of the 
 Cambridge life of those days ; of the eagerness for 
 distinctions of no solid value, of 
 
 " Idleness halting with his weary clog, 
 And simple pleasure foraging for death," 
 
 and the general absence of nobleness of aspiration. 
 
 In his third long vacation Wordsworth and a 
 friend went on a walking tour through France 
 into Switzerland. It is thought that, very probably, 
 this now familiar excursion was then made by under- 
 graduates for the first time. It was the summer 
 of 1790. The month in which the two friends started 
 was that of one of the greatest scenic performances
 
 73 
 
 which have taken place on this earth. On the i4th 
 July all France was gathered by representation on 
 the Champs de Mars in Paris, and there France "With 
 that oath which smote air, earth, and sea, Stamped 
 her strong foot, and said she would be free," whilst 
 cannon after cannon, taking up the voice of the 
 central gathering, carried the shout to every furthest 
 extremity of the land. The travellers passed through a 
 France intoxicated with joy, and Wordsworth describes 
 how 
 
 " All hearts were open, every tongue was loud, 
 With amity and glee ; we bore a name 
 Honoured in France, the name of Englishmen, 
 And hospitably did they give us hail, 
 As their forerunners in a glorious course ; 
 And round and round the board we danced again." 
 
 Returning from abroad, he spent his last Term 
 at College, and left Cambridge in the January following, 
 at the beginning of 1791. The greater part of that year 
 he spent in London, apparently waiting to determine 
 what he should undertake as the work of his life ; and in 
 November he went to France, intending to stay some 
 time at Orleans and to learn French. The Revolution 
 was advancing on its course. Wordsworth stopped in 
 Paris for a short time 
 
 " In both her clamorous Halls, 
 The National Synod and the Jacobins, 
 I saw the Revolutionary Power 
 Toss like a ship at anchor, rocked by storms. 
 
 Then he went on to Orleans, and settling there obtained 
 admission into the society of the place. Through personal 
 contact both with enemies of the Revolution, who were 
 chiefly officers of the troops quartered there, and with 
 enthusiastic adherents of it, he was drawn into a deeper
 
 74 
 
 sympathy with the movement than he had yet felt ; and 
 he records a curious impulse that he had when he 
 returned to Paris in October, 1879, to throw himself into 
 the political whirlpool, and Englishman as he was, not 
 eloquent even in English and speaking French 
 imperfectly to aim at exercising a personal influence 
 upon the distracted factions of Paris, which might help to 
 save France. Fortunately for his own safety and his 
 future poetical career, the relatives who were supplying 
 him with the moderate allowance on which he was living 
 sent him word that they would maintain him no longer in 
 France, and he was thus compelled to return to England. 
 
 At this time the great Continental Powers, supported 
 by England, were seeking to restore the exiled Royalists 
 and Nobility, and to force back upon France its old and 
 discredited institutions, by means of an armed invasion ; 
 and, like Coleridge and Southey at the same moment, 
 Wordsworth was possessed by an indignation which he 
 could scarcely control at the policy of England in making 
 common cause with the invaders of France. He had just 
 the feelings which Coleridge described in his magnificent 
 Ode, of desire for his own country's discomfiture, and of 
 grief that he should be compelled to desire it. When, in 
 its magnificent uprising for the repulse of the invaders, 
 the arm of France "made mockery of the warriors' ramp," 
 its triumphs gave to both the poets a joy upon which in 
 their later and cooler days neither of them looked back 
 with any regret. I dwell with emphasis upon the 
 enthusiasm which was excited independently in all the 
 three Lake-Poets by the French Revolution. This 
 enthusiasm, besides being the most interesting feature of 
 their mental lives, must have had much to do with the 
 raising of their poetic faculty to its highest power. It took
 
 75 
 
 them at the time when enthusiasm was most precious 
 and most powerful, and it allied itself with all that was 
 generous and romantic and inventive in their natures. 
 Wordsworth says : 
 
 " Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 
 But to be young was very heaven !" 
 
 " Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth, 
 The beauty wore of promise, that which sets 
 The budding rose above the rose full-blown. 
 What temper at the prospect did not wake 
 To happiness unthought of ? The inert 
 Were roused, and lively natures rapt away !" 
 
 " Earth was then, 
 
 To me, what an inheritance, new fallen, 
 Seems, when the first time visited, to one 
 Who thither comes to find in it his home. 
 He walks about, and looks upon the spot 
 With cordial transport, moulds it and remoulds, 
 And is half-pleased with things that are amiss, 
 Twill be such joy to see them disappear." 
 
 The bloodshed and violence of the days of the Terror were 
 a profound grief to these enthusiasts, but as Coleridge 
 puts it they regarded them as dark clouds which 
 surrounded the rising sun 
 
 " And as the desert hath green spots, the sea 
 Small islands scattered amid stormy waves; 
 So that disastrous period did not want 
 Bright sprinklings of all human excellence 
 To which the silver wands of saints in heaven 
 Might point with rapturous joy." 
 
 And when Robespierre had fallen and a quieter time set 
 in, it was as if the clouds had been dispersed. Wordsworth 
 describes when and how he heard of the death of 
 Robespierre. He was making a journey " over the
 
 7 6 
 
 smooth sands of Levens ample estuary " " beneath a 
 genial sun " ; and he met " a variegated crowd," wander- 
 ing through the shallow stream of inland waters. 
 
 " The foremost of the band, 
 As he approached, no salutation given 
 In the familiar language of the day, 
 Cried, ' Robespierre is dead ! ' 
 
 ' Come now, ye golden times,' 
 Said I, forth-pouring on those open sands 
 A hymn of triumph : ' As the morning comes 
 From out the bosom of the night, come ye ! ' " 
 
 It was in July, 1794, that Robespierre was put to 
 death. For two or three years after his return from 
 France at the end of 1792, Wordsworth wandered 
 somewhat loosely from place to place. In June, 1793, 
 his sister, writing to a friend, says of him " He is now 
 going upon a tour in the West of England with a 
 gentleman who was formerly a schoolfellow, a man of 
 fortune, who is to bear all the expenses of the journey, 
 and only requests the favour of William's company. He 
 is perfectly at liberty to quit this companion as soon as 
 anything more advantageous offers." This was a 
 young man named Calvert, who attached himself to 
 Wordsworth in much the same way as another, Lloyd, 
 attached himself to Coleridge. In 1793 and 1794 the two 
 friends lived mostly together. But then Calvert sickened 
 and died. Wordsworth nursed him in his illness, and 
 it was found that Calvert had left Wordsworth ^900. 
 " The act was done entirely from a confidence on his 
 part that 1 had powers and attainments which might be 
 of use to mankind." The gift was very opportune. 
 Wordsworth's sister Dorothy was ready to come and live 
 with him. She was a remarkable person, and 
 Wordsworth felt himself to be under the deepest
 
 77 
 
 obligations to her. Brother and sister could not have 
 been more devoted to each other. Wordsworth tells us 
 that the mental trials through which the Revolution 
 caused him to pass depressed and bewildered him : he 
 took to questioning everything. 
 
 " till, demanding formal proof, 
 And seeking it in everything, I lost 
 All feeling of conviction, and, in fine, 
 Sick, wearied out with contrarieties, 
 Yielded up moral questions in despair." 
 
 He turned to the study of abstract science 
 
 " Then it was 
 
 Thanks to the bounteous Giver of all good ! 
 That the beloved sister in whose sight 
 Those days were passed, now speaking in a voice 
 Of sudden admonition, . 
 
 Maintained for me a saving intercourse 
 
 With my true self ; for, though bedimmed and changed 
 
 Much, as it seemed, I was no further changed 
 
 Than as a clouded and a waning moon : 
 
 She whispered still that brightness would return ; 
 
 She, in the midst of all, preserved me still 
 
 A Poet, made me seek beneath that name, 
 
 And that alone, my office upon earth." 
 
 So it is to Dorothy Wordsworth, it would seem, that the 
 world owes the treasure of her brother's poetry. With 
 her Wordsworth retired to a cottage at Racedown, near 
 Crewkerne, in Dorsetshire, in the autumn of 1795 ; and 
 from that date he took up the profession of a Poet, and 
 began to work steadily at making poetry. It was in 
 June, 1797, that Coleridge paid the brother and sister the 
 memorable visit which began an intercourse to which 
 both the poets owed so much. The earliest piece of 
 Wordsworth's which has any real interest for his
 
 78 
 
 admirers was written in 1797, whether before or after 
 Coleridge's visit does not appear : it is the short poem 
 entitled " The reverie of poor Susan." But it was 
 after the walk on which Coleridge's Ancient Mariner 
 was planned and commenced, and to make up the 
 volume, called Lyrical Ballads, in which the Ancient 
 Mariner first appeared, that Wordsworth began to write 
 the poems by which he is known. This volume was the 
 joint production of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and the 
 intention of the authors was to illustrate the particular 
 views of poetical composition which were at the time 
 commending themselves to them. They were in a mood 
 ot defiance towards the formal and rhetorical style of 
 verse which had Pope for its great authority, and which 
 aimed at divorcing poetry from common lite. Many 
 lovers of Wordsworth are willing to admit that he 
 went rather far in defiant simplicity in some of his 
 pieces, especially in that early volume of the Lyrical 
 Ballads. But such simplicity is far from being 
 characteristic of his poetry in general, which has on the 
 contrary a peculiar dignity of its own. 
 
 The well-known poem, " We are Seven," which 
 was in the Lyrical Ballads, goes to the furthest point of 
 simplicity, and this and some others, such as " Goody 
 Blake " and the " Idiot Boy," were laughed at by many 
 when the volume appeared ; but wiser readers felt 
 and all feel now that it is redeemed from triviality 
 by the solemnity of thought and pathos of feeling 
 which envelope its child's language. 
 
 The volume closed with a poem, which had no title 
 to be called a Lyrical Ballad, and which no one would 
 think of charging with exaggerated simplicity, " Lines 
 composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on
 
 79 
 
 revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour. July 
 1 3th, 1798." All who love Wordsworth love these lines ot 
 blank verse as being particularly full of his mind and 
 spirit. There is not as much of poetical beauty as we find 
 in many of his later poems, even in some of the 
 narrative passages which I have read from the Prelude ; 
 and beauty, loveliness, is perhaps what is most precious 
 in poetry : but there is a fulness of thought and 
 suggestion, an appeal to what is deepest in the feelings 
 of all sensitive human beings, and a revelation of 
 Influence which we dimly apprehend, which have caused 
 these lines to sink into the memory of countless readers. 
 
 That belief in a Divine Spirit pervading the creation 
 and conversing in many subtle ways with human spirits, 
 which is Wordsworth's special creed, is implied in all 
 the best poetry, and without it verse becomes common- 
 place, uninspired, unprofitable ; but it puts a strain on 
 the minds of readers in general, and is not unlikely to 
 cause them some discomfort and self-questioning. Few 
 of us are quickly and at all times responsive to that 
 creed. But it is the true faith for those who believe 
 in a living Divine Creator. 
 
 In the year 1798, when he was 28 years of age, 
 Wordsworth had arrived at a certain maturity of his 
 powers, of his poetical principles, and of his general 
 opinions. Within the next nine years or say, the ten 
 years including 1798 almost all that is of high value 
 in his collected works was written. And the same 
 years were the period of settlement in his personal life. 
 
 Towards the end of 1798 Wordsworth and his sister 
 paid a visit of four months to Germany. They lett 
 England with Coleridge, to whose suggestion the journey
 
 8o 
 
 was probably due, but they parted company wisely, as 
 the chief object of both the poets was to learn German 
 and the Wordsworths settled at the " romantic Imperial 
 town of Goslar, on the edge of the Hartz Forest." "The 
 four months spent at Goslar," writes one of his critics, 
 "were the very bloom of Wordsworth's poetic career. 
 Through none of his poems has the peculiar loveliness of 
 English scenery and English girlhood shone more 
 delicately than through those which came to him as he 
 paced the frozen gardens of that desolate city." (Myers, 
 p. 34.) Soon after their return to England the two settled 
 in a cottage at Grasmere. Miss Wordsworth, in a letter 
 dated September loth, 1800, thus describes their new 
 home. " We are daily more delighted with Grasmere 
 and its neighbourhood. . . We have a boat upon the 
 lake, and a small orchard and smaller garden, which, as 
 it is the work of our own hands, we regard with pride 
 and partiality. Our cottage is quite large enough for us, 
 though very small ; and we have made it neat and 
 comfortable within doors ; and it looks very nice on the 
 outside ; for though the roses and honeysuckles which 
 we have planted against it are only of this year's growth, 
 yet it is covered all over with green leaves and scarlet 
 flowers ; for we have trained scarlet beans upon threads, 
 which are not only exceedingly beautiful, but very useful, 
 as their produce is immense. We have made a lodging 
 room of the parlour below stairs, which has a stone floor, 
 therefore we have covered it all over with matting. We 
 sit in a room above stairs, and we have one lodging room 
 with two single beds, a sort of lumber room, and a small 
 low unceiled room, which I have papered with 
 newspapers, and in which we have put a small bed. Our 
 servant is an old woman of sixty years of age, whom we
 
 8i 
 
 took partly out of charity. She was very ignorant, very 
 foolish, and very difficult to teach. But the goodness of 
 her disposition, and the great convenience we should find 
 if my perseverance was successful, induced me go on." 
 In 1802 Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson, of 
 Penrith, a congenial and devoted wife ; his sister 
 continuing to live with them. Sons and daughters were 
 born, in 1803, 4, 6, 8 ; and it was not till the spring of 1808 
 that they all removed to another house at Grasmere, called 
 Allan Bank. In the spring of 1813 they occupied the 
 house, Rydal Mount, where Wordsworth lived till his death 
 in 1850. In 1813 he had the rather lucrative office of 
 Distributor of Stamps for the County conferred upon him, 
 the work of it being chiefly performed we are glad to 
 learn by a clerk. Wordsworth's habit as a maker of 
 poetry was to compose as he walked, humming the lines 
 to himself or "booing" as his neighbours called it, and often 
 dictating them out of doors to wife or sister. In person, 
 he had a somewhat rustic exterior ; his sister says that 
 he would be thought " plain " at first sight. In 1803 
 Southey writes to a friend, " Hazlitt, a man of real genius, 
 has made a very fine picture of Coleridge for Sir George 
 Beaumont, which is said to be in Titian's manner ; he has 
 also painted Wordsworth, but so dismally, though 
 Wordsworth's face is his idea of physiognomical 
 perfection, that one of his friends on seeing it exclaimed, 
 ' At the gallows deeply affected by his deserved fate 
 yet determined to die like a man.' " Carlyle, in a 
 description written after meeting him in London at the 
 age of 70, says "A fine wholesome rusticity, fresh as 
 his mountain breezes, sat well on the stalwart veteran, 
 and on all he said and did. . . . He was large- 
 boned, lean, but still firm-knit ; tall and strong-looking
 
 82 
 
 when he stood ; a right good old steel-gray figure, with a 
 fine rustic simplicity and dignity about him, and a 
 veracious strength looking through him." 
 
 Of the poems of Wordsworth's prime there are four, 
 written in Germany in 1799, relating to one "Lucy," 
 who must have been a real person, though nothing 
 seems to be known of her. They all have a simple 
 loveliness which can never pall, and this short one is the 
 simplest and loveliest : 
 
 " She dwelt among the untrodden ways 
 
 Beside the springs of Dove, 
 A maid whom there were none to praise, 
 And very few to love : 
 
 A violet by a mossy stone, 
 
 Half hidden from the eye ! 
 Fair as a star, when only one 
 
 Is shining in the sky. 
 
 She lived unknown, and few could know 
 
 When Lucy ceased to be ; 
 But she is in her grave, and, oh, 
 
 The difference to me ! " 
 
 Wordsworth was a great writer of sonnets, and his 
 sonnets are amongst the most delightful and most moving 
 of his compositions. A sonnet, originally a " little sound," 
 the name being applied to any short poem, may be 
 recognised by its consisting of 14 lines, which always 
 rhyme, though the rhymes may be arranged variously. 
 It is said that " the peculiar pleasure which the ear 
 derives from the sonnet as a metrical form consists 
 in the number and arrangement of the lines being 
 prescribed,and distinctly recognisable as being prescribed." 
 And it is held that in a good sonnet some single wave of 
 emotion or thought should be expressed. To give complete 
 and telling expression to some one idea or feeling within
 
 83 
 
 the compass of the 14 lines is the art of the sonnet ; and 
 the need of saying what the author has to say under 
 these fixed conditions of space and rhyme often leads 
 him to place and polish his words with a care that 
 produces fine effects. Wordsworth gives the following 
 account of his first adoption of the sonnet-form : 
 " In the cottage, Town-end, Grasmere, one afternoon 
 in 1 80 1, my sister read to me the sonnets of Milton. I 
 had long been well acquainted with them, but I was 
 particularly struck on that occasion by the dignified 
 simplicity and majestic harmony that runs through most 
 of them, in character so totally different from the 
 Italian, and still more so from Shakespeare's fine 
 sonnets. I took fire, if I may be allowed to say so, and 
 produced these sonnets the same afternoon, the 
 first I ever wrote except an irregular one at school." 
 Wordsworth's finest sonnets take rank with Milton's, 
 and in several of them Milton's name is enshrined. One 
 of the earliest is that in which the Lake-poet pays so 
 striking a tribute to London. It was composed on 
 Westminster Bridge, in 1802, and describes the view 
 from it as seen at early dawn : 
 
 Earth has not anything to shew more fair : 
 
 Dull would he be of soul who could pass by 
 
 A sight so touching in its majesty : 
 
 This City now doth, like a garment, wear 
 
 The beauty of the morning ; silent, bare, 
 
 Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie 
 
 Open unto the fields, and to the sky ; 
 
 All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. 
 
 Never did sun more beautifully steep 
 
 In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill ; 
 
 Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep ! 
 
 The river glideth at his own sweet will : 
 
 Dear God ! the veiy houses seem asleep ; 
 
 And all that mighty heart is lying still !
 
 8 4 
 
 There is a sort of sister to this sonnet, in one composed a 
 few days after, on the sea-beach near Calais, and recording 
 the stillness of evening : 
 
 " It is a beauteous evening, calm and free, 
 The holy time is quiet as a Nun 
 Breathless with adoration ; the broad sun 
 Is sinking down in its tranquility ; 
 The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the sea : 
 Listen ! the mighty being is awake, 
 And doth with his eternal motions make 
 A sound like thunder everlastingly. 
 Dear Child ! dear Girl ! that walkest with me here, 
 If thou appear untouched by solemn thought, 
 Thy nature is not therefore less Divine : 
 Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year ; 
 And worshipp'st at the Temple's inner shrine, 
 God being with thee when we know it not." 
 
 Amongst the better known of Wordsworth's pieces are 
 two poems which resemble one another in the almost 
 austere loftiness which characterises them, I mean 
 the Ode to Duty, and The Character of the Happy 
 Warrior. Even better known that these is the poem which 
 begins "She was a phantom of delight," illustrating with 
 special felicity the typically Wordsworthian poetry. 
 This poetry, we may say, is a tree whose graceful foliage, 
 lifted high towards heaven, plays with the air and the 
 sunshine ; which has a solid stem of rational meaning ; 
 and which strikes its roots into the elemental affections 
 and obligations in which is the secret and the strength of 
 wholesome human life. The little poem, "To a Sky- 
 lark," a "gem of purest ray serene," though not written
 
 85 
 
 till 1826, might well have belonged to Wordsworth's 
 most inspired time : 
 
 Ethereal minstrel ! pilgrims of the sky ! 
 Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound ? 
 Or, while the wings aspire, are heart and eye 
 Both with thy nest upon the dewy ground ? 
 Thy nest which thou canst drop into at will, 
 Those quivering wings composed, that music still ! 
 
 Leave to the Nightingale her shady \vood ; 
 A privacy of glorious light is thine ; 
 Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood 
 Of harmony, with instinct more divine : 
 Type of the wise, who soar, but never roam, 
 True to the kindred points of heaven and home ! 
 
 I have kept for final mention what would be generally 
 recognised as Wordsworth's masterpiece the Ode 
 entitled " Intimations of Immortality from Recollections 
 of Early Childhood," written between 1803 and 1806. 
 In his own introduction to the poem he says, "When 
 I was impelled to write this poem on the Immortality of 
 the soul, I took hold of the notion of pre-existence as 
 hsving sufficient foundation in humanity for authorizing 
 me to make for my purpose the best use of it I could as a 
 poet." In this use of the notion of pre-existence there is 
 something that answers to Coleridge's use of a 
 supernatural machinery in constructing his masterpiece, 
 " The Ancient Mariner." Wordsworth, we may say, 
 dwelling upon the susceptibilities of early childhood, 
 accounts for them by the hypothesis of some pre-existent 
 nature : they are as if memories of a previous heavenly 
 existence were haunting the first years of this earthly 
 life. The beauty of the poem is in its setting forth those 
 spiritual susceptibilities of childhood. The most modern 
 philosophy would account for them, perhaps, by the
 
 86 
 
 principle of heredity ; would admit them to be traces of 
 previous existence, but the previous existence would be 
 that of parents and ancestors Wordsworth's " Heaven 
 lies about us in our infancy !" expresses our Christian 
 faith. We hold that the spirit of the child is related to, 
 and visited by, the Divine Spirit ; and that that 
 intercourse lies in the region of mystery and evades the 
 handling of ordinary observation and analysis. According 
 to Wordsworth's poetical faith, it is especially through 
 externa) Nature that the Creative Spirit touches the 
 nature of the child and the childlike man. 
 
 There is a singularly fine passage of Henry Vaughan, 
 the contemporary of Milton, in which we may recognize 
 the leading idea of the Intimations of Immortality : 
 
 Happy those early days when I 
 Shined in my angel-infancy ! 
 Before I understood this place 
 Appointed for my second race 
 Or taught my soul to fancy ought 
 But a white celestial thought ; 
 When yet I had not walked above 
 A mile or two from my first love, 
 And, looking back, at that short space 
 Could see a glimpse of his bright face ; 
 When on some gilded cloud or flower 
 My gazing soul could dwell an hour, 
 And in those weaker glories spy 
 Some shadows of eternity; 
 Before I taught my tongue to wound 
 My conscience with a sinful sound, 
 Or had the black art to dispense 
 A several sin to every sense, 
 But felt through all this fleshly dress 
 Bright shoots of everlastingness.
 
 87 
 In close harmony with this picture Wordsworth says 
 
 There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, 
 The earth, and every common sight, 
 
 To me did seem 
 Apparelled in celestial light, 
 The glory and the freshness of a dream. 
 
 There was something to regret in the loss of this 
 susceptibility of childhood, but Wordsworth has his 
 consolation : 
 
 What though the radiance that was once so bright 
 
 Be now for ever taken from my sight, 
 
 Though nothing can bring back the hour 
 
 Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower ; 
 
 We will grieve not, rather find 
 
 Strength in what remains behind ; 
 
 In the primal sympathy 
 
 Which, having been, must ever be ; 
 
 In the soothing thoughts that spring 
 
 Out of human suffering ; 
 
 In the faith that looks through death, 
 
 In years that bring the philosophic mind. 
 
 In the life of Wordsworth, prolonged to so advanced 
 an age, there is nothing to lament, nothing to pity. His 
 circumstances were such as he desired, and, accepting his 
 lot with thankfulness, he was happy in it. He always 
 received admiring appreciation from those for whose 
 judgment he cared much ; and before his end came he 
 had won a high reputation throughout the English- 
 speaking world. For the last seven years of his life he 
 was Poet-Laureate the public Poet of England. 'We 
 may describe the boons which he has conferred upon 
 our race in the words in which, in 1807, he expressed his 
 own confident hope : " Of what moment is the present
 
 88 
 
 reception of my poems compared with what I trust is 
 their destiny ? to console the afflicted ; to add sunshine 
 to daylight, by making the happy happier ; to teach the 
 young, and the gracious of every age, to see, to think, and 
 to feel, and, therefore, to become more actively and 
 securely virtuous ; this is their office, which I trust they 
 will faithfully perform, long after we (that is, all that is 
 mortal of us) are mouldered in our graves."
 
 WORDSWORTH'S FATHER'S GRAVE.
 
 THE LOCAL INDUSTRY, 
 
 JUSTICE would not be done to Cockermouth if a 
 few words were not written about its leading 
 industry, the fame of which is not small in places where, 
 otherwise, it might almost, alas, be said that both town 
 and poet were but little regarded. Through the products 
 of the DERWENT MILLS, the work of MESSRS.' HARRIS AND 
 SONS, LIMITED, Cockermouth is famous in the world of 
 fashion, and, what is of infinitely greater value, in the 
 world of Art as well. So artistic is the work that 
 a stand of Art Linens Embroidered in their Flax Threads 
 very recently obtained a Gold Medal in Manchester, and 
 so thoroughly meritorious are the " Derwent " shot 
 dress linens that this material figures in the trousseau 
 of Princess Maud of Wales, while the Princess of Wales 
 also ordered some for herself, thus obtaining a 
 thoroughly native article, but one as thoroughly 
 serviceable and artistic as it is English. For over sixty 
 years the manufacture of Flax Threads and Fabrics has 
 been carried on in the Derwent Mills and the Show- 
 rooms at the Mills are open to visitors, just as are those 
 in Old Bond Street, London, King Street, Manchester, 
 Corporation Street, Birmingham, and also in Paris. 
 Here in Cockermouth the examination of specimens of 
 Art Needlework for every kind of household decoration 
 is a delightful method of passing an hour, and every 
 variety of artistic form and delicate colour attract the eye 
 and appeal to the mind. One almost envies the deft 
 workers whose daily task is to produce the embroideries 
 displayed in the Show Rooms, and worked under the 
 happiest imaginable conditions of light and air and 
 healthy surroundings.
 
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