fliiiliMSA ?-; RECOLLECTIONS OF THE LAKES LAKE POETS COLERIDGE, WOEDSWORTH. AND SOUTHEY THOMAS DE QUINCEY EDINBUEGH ADAM AND CHAKLES BLACK MDCCCLXII. [^The right of Translation is reserved.] PRINTED BT NElLt AND COMPANT, BDnTBlTROH. TO THE EEIDEE. THE following brief extract from the life of De Quincey, in the " English Cyclopaedia/' edited by Charles Knight, may be appropriately placed here in connection with this volume :- — "It was in the year 1807 that De Quincey first made the acquaintance of Coieridge, Wordsworth, and Southey; and on quitting college in 1808 he took up his abode at the Lakes, and became one of the intellectual brotherhood there constituted by these men. Wilson was a resident at the Lakes about the same time. The difference between De Quincey and the Lakists was — that his element was exclusively Prose. Like Coleridge, but with pe- culiarities sufficient to distinguish him from that thinker, he philosophised, and analysed, and specu- lated in sympathy with the new literary movement of which the Lake party was a manifestation. He resided ten or eleven years at the Lakes ; and during these ten or eleven years we are to suppose him VI increasing his knowledge of Greek, of German, and of Universal History and Literature. " In point of time De Quincey preceded Carlyle as a literary medium between Germany and this country; and some of his earliest literary efforts were translations from Lessing, Eichter, and other German authors. " These literary efforts, begun while he was still a student at the Lakes, were continued with growing abundance after he left them in 1819." CONTENTS. PAGK Early Memorials or G-RASMEEi5, ... 1 Samuel Taylor CoLERinGs. . . . .38 Born 1772 ; died 1834. William Wordsworth, 123 Born 7th April 1770 ; died 23d April 1850. Buried in the green Churchyard of Grasmere, between a yew-tree of his own planting and an aged thorn-tree. Robert Sotjthet, . . . . . .211 Born 12th August 1774; died 21st March 1843. Buried in the quiet Churchyard of CrossthwaitH, near Kexwick. RECOLLECTIONS OF THE LAKES. EARLY MEMOKIALS OF GEASMEEK, Soon after my return to Oxford in 1807-8, I received a letter from Miss Wordsworth, asking for any subscriptions I might succeed in obtaining, amongst my college friends, in aid of the funds then raising on behalf of an orphan family, who had become such by an affecting tragedy that had occurred within a few weeks from my visit to Grasmere. Miss "Wordsworth's simple but fervid memoir not being within my reach at this moment, I must trust to my own recollections and my own impressions to retrace the story ; which, after all, is not much of a story to excite or to im- press, unless for those who can find a sufficient interest in the trials and calamities of hard-working peasants, and can reverence the fortitude which, being lodged in so frail a tenement as the person of a little girl, not much, if any- thing, above nine years old, could face an occasion of sud- den mysterious abandonment, and could tower up, during one night, into the perfect energies of womanhood, under the mere pressure of difficulty, and under the sense of new- bom responsibilities awfully bequeathed to her, and in the most lonely, perhaps, of English habitations. The little vaUey of Easedale, which, and the neighbour- hood of which, were the scenes of these interesting events, A — n. 2 RlilCOLLECTIONS OP TlIK LAKES. is, ou its own account, one of the most impressive soli- tudes amongst the mountains of the Lake district ; and I must pause to describe it. Easedale is impressive as a solitude ; for the depth of the seclusion is brought out and forced more pointedly upon the feelings by the thin scat- tering of houses over its sides, and over the surface of what may be called its floor. These are not above six at the most ; and one, the remotest of the whole, was untenanted for all the thirty years of my acquaintance with the place. Secondly, it is impressive from the excessive loveliness which adorns its little area. This is broken up into small fields and miniature meadows, separated, not — as too often happens, with sad injury to the beauty of the Lake coun- try — by stone walls, but sometimes by little hedgerows, sometimes by little sparkling, pebbly " becks," lustrous to the very bottom, and not too broad for a child's flying leap ; and sometimes by wild self-sown woodlands of birch, alder, holly, mountain ash, and hazel, that meander through the valley, intervening the different estates with natural sylvan marches, and giving cheerfulness in winter by the bright scarlet of their berries. It is the character of all the northern Eughsh valleys, as I have already remarked — and it is a character first noticed by Wordsworth — that they assume, in their bottom areas, the level, floor-like shape, making everywhere a direct angle with the surroundiiig hills, and definitely marking out the margm of their out- lines ; whereas the Welsh valleys have too often the glaring imperfection of the basin shape, which allows no sense of any flat area or valley surface : the hills are already commenc- ing at the very centre of what is called the level area. The little valley of Easedale is, in this respect, as highly finished as in every other ; and in the Westmoreland spring, which may be considered May and the earlier half of June, whilst EAULY MEMOF.TALS OF GEASMEitB. 3 the gi-ass in the meadows is yet short from the habit of keeping the sheep on it until a much later period than elsewhere (viz., until the mountains are so far cleared of snow and the probability of storms, as to make it safe to send them out on their summer migration), it fol- lows naturally that the little fields in Easedale have the most lawny appearance, and, from the humidity of the Westmoreland * climate, the most verdant that it is possible to imagine. But there is a third advantage possessed by this Easedale, above other rival valleys, in the sublimity of its mountain barriers. In one of its many rocky recesses is seen a " force " (such is the local name for a cataract), white with foam, descending at all seasons with considerable strength, and, after the melting of snows, with an Alpine violence. Follow the leading of this " force " for three quarters of a mile, and you come to a little mountain lake, locally termed a " tarn," t the very finest and most gloomily sublime of its class. From this tarn it was, I doubt not, though applying it to another, that Wordsworth drew the circumstances of his general * It is pretty generally known, perhaps, that Westmoreland and Devonshire are the two rainiest counties in England. At Kirkby Lonsdale, lying just on the outer margin of the Lake district, one- fifth more rain is computed to fall than in the adjacent counties on the same western side of England. But it is also notorious, that the western side of the island universally is more rainy than the east. Collins called it the showery west. ■f A tarn is a lake, generally (perhaps always) a small one : and always, as I think (but this 1 have heard disputed), lying above the level of the inhabited valleys and the large lakes; and subject to this farther restriction, first noticed by Wordsworth, that it has no main feeder. Now, this latter accident of the tiling at once explains and authenticates my account of the word, viz., that it is the Danish \vqrd taaren {a trichling of tears), a deposit of waters from the weeping ai rain down the smooth faces (jf the rock?. 4 RKCOLLKOTIONS OF TUK LAKhS. description. And far beyond this " enormous barrier/' that thus imprisons the very winds, tower upwards ^)ia aspiring heads (usually enveloped in cloud and mist) uf Glaramara, Bow Fell, and the other ftUs of Langdale Head and Borrowdale. Easedale, in its relation to Gras- mere, is a chamber within a chamber, or rather a closet within a chamber — a chapel within a cathedral — a little private oratory within a chapel. The sole approach, as I have mentioned, is from Grasmere ; and some one outlet there must inevitably be in every vale that can be inter- esting to a human occupant, since without water it would not be habitable ; and running water must force an egress for itself, and, consequently, an ingress for the reader and myself : but, properly speaking, there is no other. For, when you explore the remoter end of the vale, at which you suspect some communication with the world outside, you find before you a most formidable amount of climbing, the extent of which can hardly be measured where there is no solitary object of human workmanship or vestige of animal life, not a sheep-track, not a shepherd's hovel, but rock and heath, heath and rock, tossed about in monoto- nous confusion. And, after the ascent is mastered, you descend into a second vale — long, narrow, sterile- — known by the name of " Far Easedale : " from which point, if you could drive a tunnel under the everlasting hills, perhaps six or seven miles might bring you to the nearest habita- tion of man, in Borrowdale ; but, going over the mountains, the road cannot be less than twelve or fourteen, and, in point of fatiguye, at the least twenty. This long valley, which is really terrific at noonday, from its utter loneliness and desolation, completes the defences of little sylvan Ease- dale. There is one door into it from the Grasmere side : but that door is obscure j and on every other quarter there EARLY MEMORIALS OF GRASMERE. 5 IE ao door at all ; not any, the roughest, access, but such as would demand a day's walking. Such is the solitude — so deep and so rich in miniature boiiuty — of Easedale ; and in this solitude it was that George and Sarah Green, two poor and hard-working pea- sai.ts, dwelt, with a numerous family of small children. Poor as they were, they had won the general respect of the neighbourhood, from the uncomplaining firmness with which they bore the hardships of their lot, and from the decent attire in which the good mother of the family contrived to send out her children to the Grasmere parish-school. It is a custom, and a very ancient one, in Westmoreland — the same custom (resting on the same causes) I have wit- nessed also in southern Scotland — that any sale by auction of household furniture (and seldom a month passes without something of the sort) forms an excuse for the good women, throughout the whole circumference of perhaps four or five valleys, to assemble at the place of sale, with the nominal purpose of buying something they may happen to want. A sale, except it were of the sort exclusively interesting to farming men, is a kind of general intimation to the country, from the owner of the property, that he will, on that afternoon, be " at home " to all comers, and hopes to see as large an attendance as possible. Accordingly, it was the almost invariable custom — and often, ^too, when the parties were far too poor for such an effort of hospitality — to make ample provision, not of eatables, but of liquor, for aU who came. Even a gentleman, who should happen to present himself on such a festal occasion, by way of seeing the " humours " of the scene, was certain of meeting the most cordial welcome. The good woman of the house more particularly testified her sense of the honour done to her, and was stre to seek out some cherished and solitary G ' KEOOLLEOTIONS OF THE LAKES, article of china — a wreck from a century back — in order that he, being a porcelain man among so many delf men and women, might have a porcelain cup to drink from. The main secret of attraction at these sales — many of vhich I have attended — was the social rendezvous thus effected between parties so remote from each other (either by real distance, or by virtual distance, resulting from the separation effected by mountains 3000 feet high), that, in fact, without some such common object, they would not be likely to hear of each other for months, or actually to meet for years. This principal charm of the " gathering," sea- soned, doubtless, to many by the certain anticipation that the whole budget of rural gossip woidd then and there be opened, was not assuredly diminished to the men by the anticipation of excellent ale (usually brewed six or seven weeks before, m preparation for the event), and possibly of still more excellent pow-sowdy (a combination of ale, spirits, and spices) ; nor to the women by some prospect, not so inevitably fulfilled, but pretty certain in a liberal house, of communicating their news over excellent tea. Even tlie auctioneer was always a character in the drama : he was always a rustic old humorist, and a jovial drunkard, pri- vileged in certain good-humoured liberties and jokes with all bidders, gentle or simple, and furnished with an ancient inheritance of ^ests appropriate to the articles offered for sale — jests that had, doubtless, done their ofl&ce from Eliza- beth's golden days ; but no more, on that account, failing of their expected effect, with either man or woman of this nineteenth century, than the sun fails to gladden the heart, because it is that same old superannuated sun that has gladdened it for thousands of years. One thing, however, in mere justice to the Dalesmen of Westmoreland and Cumberland, I am bound in this place EARLY MEMORIALS OF GRASMERE. / to record : Often as I have been at these sales, and years before even a scattering of gentry began to attend, yet so true to the natural standard of politeness was the decorum uniformly maintained, that even the old buffoon of an auctioneer never forgot himself so far as to found upon any article of furniture a jest fitted to call up a painful blush in any woman's face. He might, perhaps, go so far as to awaken a little rosy confusion upon some young bride's countenance, when pressing a cradle upon her attention ; but never did I hear him utter, nor would he have been tolerated in uttering, a scurrilous or disgusting jest, such as might easily have been suggested by something offered at a household sale. Such jests as these I heard, for the first time, at a sale in Grasmere in 1814 ; and, T am ashamed to say it, from some " gentlemen" of a great city. And it grieved me to see the efi'ect, as it expressed itself upon the manly faces of the grave Dalesmen — a sense of insult offered to their women, who met in confiding reliance upon the forbearance of the men, and upon their regard for the dignity of the female sex, this feeling strugghng with the habitual respect they are inclined to show towards what they suppose gentle blood and superior education. Taken generally, however, these were the most picturesque and tbstal meetings which the manners of the country produced. There you saw all ages and both sexes assembled ; there you saw old men whose heads would have been studies for Guido ; there you saw the most colossal and stately figures amongst the young men that England has to show ; there the most beautiful young women. There it was that the social benevolence, the innocent mirth, and the neighbourly kindness of the people, most delightfully expanded, and expressed themselves with the least reserve. To puch a scene it was, to a sale of domestic furnituro O RB^'OLLECTIONS OF THE LAKES. at the house of some proprietor in Langdale, that George and Sarah Green set forward in the forenoon of a day fated to be their last on earth. The sale was to take place in Langdalehead ; to which, from their own cottage in Ease- dale, it was possible in daylight, and supposing no mist upon the hills, to find out a short cut of not more than five or six miles. By this route they went ; and, notwithstand- ing the snow lay on the ground, they reached their destinar tion in safety. The attendance at the sale must have been diminished by the rigorous state of the weather ; but still the scene was a gay one as usual. Sarah Green, though a good and worthy woman in her maturer years, had been imprudent, and — as the merciful judgment of the country is apt to express it — " unfortunate" in her youth. She had an elder daughter, who was illegitimate ; and I believe the father of this girl was dead. The girl herself was grown up ; and the peculiar solicitude of poor Sarah's ma- ternal heart was at this time called forth on her behalf : she wished to see her placed in a very respectable house, where the mistress was distinguished for her notable quali- ties, and for success in forming good servants. This object, as important to Sarah Green in the narrow range of her cares, as, in a more exalted family, it might be to obtain a ship for a lieutenant that had passed as master and com- mander, or to get him " posted" — occupied her almost throughout the sale. A doubtful answer had been given to her application ; and Sarah was going about the crowd, - and weaving her person in and out, in order to lay hold of this or that intercessor who might have, or might seem to have, some weight with the principal person concerned. This I think it interesting to notice, as the last occupa- tion which is known to have stirred the pulses of her heart An illegitimate child is everywhere, even in the indulgent EAULY MEMORIALS OF GEASMERE. 9 society of Westmoreland Dalesmen, under some cloud of discountenance ; * so that Sarah Green might consider her duty to be the stronger towards this child of her " misfor- tune." And she probably had another reason for her anxiety — as some words dropped by her on this evening led people to presume — in her conscientious desire to introduce her daughter into a situation less perilous than that which had compassed her own youthful steps with snares. If so, it is painful to know that the virtuous wish, whose " Vital warmth Gave the last human motion to her heart," should not have been fulfilled. She was a woman of ardent and affectionate spirit, of which Miss Wordsworth gave me some circumstantial and affecting instances. This ardour it was, and her impassioned manner, that drew attention to what she did ; for, otherwise, she was too poor a person to be important in the estimation of strangers, and, of all pos- sible situations, to be important at a sale, where the public attention was naturally fixed upon the chief purchasers, and the attention of the purchasers fixed upon the chief competitors. Hence it happened that, after she ceased to challenge notice by the emphasis of her solicitations for her daughter, she ceased to be noticed at all ; and nothing was recollected of her subsequent behaviour until the time arrived for general separation. This time was considerably after sunset ; and the final recollections of the crowd with * But still nothing at all in England by comparison with its gloomy excess in Scotland. In the present generation, the rancorous bigotry of this feeling has been considerably mitigated. But, if the reader wishes to view it in its ancient strength, I advise him to look into the " Life of Alexander Alexander" (2 vols. 1830). He was a poor out- cftst, whose latter days were sheltered from ruin by the munificenwi of the late Mr. Blackwood, senior, 10 RECOLLECTIONS OF THE LAKES. respect to George and Sarah Green were, that, upon their intention being understood to retrace their morning path, and to attempt the perilous task of dropping down into Easedale from the mountains above Langdalehead, a sound of remonstrance arose from many quarters. However, at such a moment, when everybody was in the hurry of de- parture, and to such persons (persons, I mean, so mature in years and in local knowledge), the opposition could not be very obstitote; party after party rode off; the meeting u^dted away, or, as the northern phrase is, scaled ;* and at length nobody was left of any weight that could pretend to influence the decision of elderly people. They quitted the scene, professing to obey some advice or other upon the choice of roads ; but, at as early a point as they could do so unobserved, began to ascend the hills, everywhere open from the rude carriage-way. After this they were seen no more. They had disappeared into the cloud of death. Voices were heard, some hours afterwards, from the mountains — voices, as some thought, of alarm ; others said. No, that it was only the voices of jovial people, car- ried by the wind into uncertain regions. The result was, that no attention was paid to the lounds. That night, in little peaceful Easedale, six children sat by a peat-fire, expecting the return of their parents, upon whom they depended for their daily bread. Let a day pass, and they were starving. Every sound was heard * Scaled :— Scale is a verb botli active and neuter. I use it here as a neuter verb, in the sense (a Cumberland sense) of separating to all the points of the compass. But by Shakspere it is used in an active or transitive sense. Speaking of some secret news, he says, " We'll scale it a little more" — i. e., spread it in all directions, and disentangle its complexities. felAlJLY AIEMOHlALS OF GEASMEBE. 11 with anxiety; for all this was reported many hundred times to IMiss Wordsworth, and to those who, like myself, were never wearied of hearing the details. Every sound, every echo amongst the hills, was listened to for five hours, from seven to twelve. At length the eldest girl of the family — about nine years old — told her Little brothers and sisters to go to bed. They had been trained to obedience ; and all of them, at the voice of their eldest sister, went off fearfully to their beds. What could be thei?' fears, it is difficult to say ; they had no knowledge to instruct them in the dangers of the hills ; but the eldest sister always averred that they had as deep a solicitude as she herself had about their parents. Doubtless she had communicated her fears to them. Some time in the course of the even- ing — but it was late, and after midnight — the moon arose, and shed a torrent of light upon the Langdale fells, which had already, long hours before, witnessed in , darkness the death of their parents. That night, and the following morning, came a further and a heavier fall of snow ; in consequence of which the poor children were completely imprisoned, and cut off from aU possibility of commuhicating with their next neigh- bours. The brook was too much for them to leap ; and the little, crazy wooden bridge could not be crossed, or even approached with safety, from the drifting of the snow having made it impossible to ascertain the exact situation of some treacherous hole in its timbers, which, if trod upon, would have let a small child drop through into the rapid waters. Their parents did not return. For some hours of the morning, the children clung to the hope that the extreme severity of the night had tempted them to Bleep in Langdale ; but this hope forsook them as the day^ wore away. Their father, George Green, had served as a 12 KECOLLECTIONS OF THE LAKES. Boldier, and was an active man, of ready resources, wbu would not, under any circumstances, have failed to force a road back to his family, had he been still living ; and this reflection, or rather semi-conscious feeling, which the awfulness of their situation forced upon the minds of all but the mere infants, awakened them to the whole extent of their calamity. Wonderful it is to see the effect of sudden misery, sudden giief, or sudden fear, in sharpening (where they do not utterly upset) the intellectual percep- tions. Instances must have fallen in the way of most of us. And I have noticed frequently that even sudden and intense bodily pain forms part of the machinery employed by nature for quickening the development of the mind. The perceptions of infants are not, in fact, excited by gra- duated steps and continuously, but per saltum, and by un- equal starts. At least, within the whole range of my own experience, I have remarked, that, after any very severe fit of those peculiar pains to which the delicate digestive organs of most infants are liable, there always became apparent on the following day a very considerable increase of vital energy and of quickened attention to the objects around them. The poor desolate children of Blentarn Ghyll,* hourly becoming more pathetically convinced that they were orphans, gave many evidences of this awaking power * Wordsworth's conjecture as to the origin of the name is probably the true one. There is, at a little elevation above the place, a small concave tract of ground, shaped like the bed of a tarn. Some causes having diverted the supplies of water, at some remote period, from the little reservoir, the tarn has probably disappeared ; but the bed, and other indications of a tarn (particularly a little ghyll, or steep rocky cleft for discharging the water), having remained as memorials that it once existed, the country people have called it the Blind Tarn — the tarn which wants its eye — in wanting the luminous sparkle o\ the waters of right belonging to it. EARLY MEMORIALS OF OKASMEKJE. 13 aa lodged, by a providential arrangement, in situations of trial that most require it. They huddled together, in the evening, round their hearth-fire of peats, and held their little family councils upon what was to be done towards any chance — if chance remained — of yet giving aid to their parents ; for a slender hope had sprung up that some hovel or sheep-fold might have furnished them a screen (or, in Westmoreland phrase, a bield) against the weather quarter of the storm, in which hovel they might even now be lying snowed up ; and, secondly, as regarded themselves, in what way they were to make known their situation, in case the snow should continue or should increase ; for starvation stared them in the face, if they should be confined for many days to their house. Meantime, the eldest sister, little Agnes, though sadly alarmed, and feeling the sensation of eeriness as twilight came on, and she looked out from the cottage-door to the dreadful feUs on which, too probably, her parents were lying corpses (and possibly not many hundred yards from their own threshold), yet exerted herself to take aU the measures which their own prospects made prudent. And she told Miss "Wordsworth, that, in the midst of the op- pression on her little spirit, from vague ghostly terrors, she did not fail, however, to draw some comfort from the consideration, that the very same causes which produced their danger in one direction, sheltered them from danger of another kind — such dangers as she knew, from books that she had read, would have threatened a little desolate flock of children in other parts of England ; for she con- sidered thankfully, that, if the]/ could not get out into Grasmere, on the other hand, bad men, and wild seafaring foreigners, who sometimes passed along the high road even in that vale, could not get to them ; and that, as to 14 KEGOLLECTIONS OF THE LAKES. their neighbours, so far from having anything to fear in that quarter, their greatest apprehension was, lest they might not be able to acquaint them with their situation ; but that, if this could be accomplished, the very sternest amongst them were kind-hearted people, that would contend with each other for the privilege of assisting them. Some- what cheered with these thoughts, and having caused all her brothers and sisters— ;except the two little things, not ■ yet of a fit age — to kneel down and say the prayers which they had been taught, this admirable little maiden turned herself to every household task that could have proved useful to them in a long captivity. First of all, upon some recollection that the clock was nearly going down, she wound it up. Next, she took all the milk which remained from what her mother had provided for the children's consump- tion during her absence, and for the breakfast of the following morning — this luckily was still in sufficient plenty for two days' consumption (skimmed or " blue " milk being only one halfpenny a quart, and the quart a most redundant one, in Grasmere) — this she took and scalded, so as to save it from turning sour. That done, she next examined the meal chest ; made the common oatmeal porridge of the country (the " burgoo " of the Royal Navy) ; but put aU of the children, except the two youngest, on short allowance ; and, by way of reconciling them in some measure to this stinted meal, she found out a little hoard of flour, part of which she baked for them upon the hearth into little cakes ; and this unusual delicacy persuaded them to think that they had been celebrating a feast. Next, before night coming on should make it too trying to her own feelings, or before fresh snow coming on might make it impossible, she issued out of doors. There her first task was, with the assistance of two younger brothers, to carry in from the EAKLY MEMORIALS OF GEASMEEK 15 [xiat-staclc a6 many peats as might serve them for a week's consumption. That done, in the second place she examined the potatoes, buried in "brackens" (that is, withered fern) : these were not many, and she thought it better to leave them where they were, excepting as many as would make a single meal, under a fear that the heat of their cottage would spoil them, if removed. Having thus made all the provision in her power for supporting their own lives, she turned her attention to tho cow. Her she milked; but, unfortunately, the milk she gave, either from being badly fed, or from some other cause, was too trifling to be of much consideration towards the wants of a large family. Here, however, her chief anxiety was to get down the hay for the cow's food from a loft above the outhouse : and in this she succeeded but imper- fectly, from want of strength and size to cope with the difficulties of the case ; besides, that the increasing darkness by this time, together with the gloom of the place, made it a matter of great self-conquest for her to work at all ; but, as respected one night at any rate, she placed the cow in a situation of luxurious warmth and comfort. Then retreat- ing into the warm house, and " barring " the door, she sat down to undress the two youngest of the children ; them she laid carefully and cosily in their little nests up-stairs, and sang them to sleep. The rest she kept up to bear her company until the clock should tell them it was midnight ; up to which time she had still a lingering hope that some welcome shout from the hills above, which they were all to strain their ears to catch, might yet assure them that they were not wholly orphans, even though one parent should have perished. No shout, it may be supposed, was ever heard ; nor could a shout, in any case, have been heard, for the night was one of tumultuous wind. And though, 16 KEOOLLECTIONS Of THE LAKES. amidst its ravines, sometimes they fancied a sound of voices, still, in the dead lulls that now and then succcc-ded, they heard nothing to confirm their hopes. As last services to what she might now have called lier own little family, Agnes took precautions against the drifting of the snow tvithin the door and within the imperfect window, which had caused them some discomfort on the preceding day; and finally, she adopted the most systematic and elaborate plans for preventing the possibility of their fire being extinguished, which, in the event of their being thrown upon the ulti- mate resource of their potatoes, would be absolutely indis- pensable to their existence ; and in any case a main element of their comfort. The night slipped away, and morning came, bringing with it no better hopes of any kind. Change there had been none, but for the worse. The snow had greatly increased in quantity ; and the drifts seemed far more for- midable, A second day passed like the first ; little Agnes still keeping her young flock quiet, and tolerably comfort- able ; and still calling on all the elders in succession to say their prayers, morning and night. A third day came ; and whether on that or on the fourth, I do not now recollect, but on one or other there came a welcome gleam of hope. The arrangement of the snow-drifts had shifted during the night ; and, though the wooden bridge was still impracticable, a low wall had been exposed, over which, by a circuit which evaded the brook, it seemed possible that a road might be found into Grasmere. In some walls it was necessary to force gaps ; but this was effected without much difficulty, even by children ; for the Westmoreland field walls are " open," that is, uncemented with mortar ; and the push of a stick will generally detach 5o much from the upper part of any old crazy fence as to KAKLY MEMORIALS OF GKASMERE. 17 lower it sufficiently for female or even for childisli steps to pass. The little boys accompanied their sister until she came to the other side of the hill, which, lying more sheltered from the weather, offered a path onwards comparatively easy. Here they parted ; and little Agnes pursued her solitary mission to the nearest house she could find accessible in Grasmere. No house could have proved a wrong one in such a case. Miss "Wordsworth and I often heard the description renewed, of the horror which, in an instant, displaced the smile of hospitable greeting, when little weeping Agnes told her sad tale. No tongue can express the fervid sym- pathy which travelled through the vale, like fire in an American forest, when it was learned that neither George nor Sarah Green had been seen by their children since the day of the Langdale sale. Within half an hour, or little more, from the remotest parts of the valley — some of them distant nearly two miles from the point of rendezvous — all the men of Grasmere had assembled at the little cluster of cottages called " Kirktown," from its adjacency to the venerable parish Church of St. Oswald. There were at the time I settled in Grasmere — viz., in the spring of 1809, and, therefore, I suppose, in 1807-8, fifteen months previously — about sixty-three households in the vale ; and the total number of souls was about 265 to 270 ; so that the number of 'fighting men would be about sixty or sixty-six, according to the common way of computing the proportion ; and the majority were athletic and powerfully built. Sixty, at least, after a short consultation as to the plan of opera- tions, and for arranging the kind of signals by which they were to commutiicate from great distances, and in the peri- lous events of mists or snow-storms, set ofi" with the speed of Alpine hunters to the hills. The dangers of the under- tiicing were considerable, undwr the uneasy and agitated a2 18 RECOLLECTIONS OF THE LAKES. st-'Ue of the weather ; and all the women of the vale ■vrera in the greatest anxiety, until night brought them back, in a body, unsuccessful. Three days at the least, and I rather think five, the search was ineffectual : which arose partly from the great extent of the ground to be examined, and partly from the natural mistake made of ranging almost exclusively during the earlier days on that part of the hills over which the path of Easedale might be presumed to have been selected under any reasonable latitude of circuitousness. But the fact is, when the fatal accident (for such it haa often proved) of a permanent mist surprises a man on the hills, if he turns and loses his direction, he is a lost man ; and without doing this so as to lose the power of sorienter all at once, it is yet well known how difficult it is to avoid losing it insensibly and by degrees. Baffling snow-showers are the worst kinds of mists. And the poor Greens had, under that kind of confusion, wandered many a mUe out of their proper track ; so that to search for them upon any line indicated by the ordinary probabilities, would perhaps offer the slenderest chance for finding them. The zeal of the people, meantime, was not in the least abated, but rather quickened, by the wearisome disappoint- ments ; every hour of daylight was turned to accoimt ; no man of the valley ever came home to meals ; and the reply of a young shoemaker, on the fourth night's return, speaks sufficiently for the unabated spiiit of the vale. Miss Words- worth asked wdiat he would do on the next morning. " GrO up again, of course," was his answer. But what if to- morrow also should turn out like all the rest. " Why, go up in stronger force on the day after." Yet this man was sacrificing his own daily earnings without a chance of re- compense. At length, sagacious dogs were taken up ; and alxHic noonday, a shout from an aerial height, amono-st thick EARLY MEMORIALS OF GRASMERE, 19 volumes of cloudy vapour, propagated through repeating bands of men from a distance of many miles, conveyed as by telegraph into Grasmere the news that the bodies were found. George Green was lying at the bottom of a precipice, from which he had fallen. Sarah Green was found on the summit of the precipice ; and, by laying together all the indications of what had passed, and reading into coherency the sad hieroglyphics of their last agonies, it was conjec- tured that the husband had desired his wife to pause for a few minutes, wrapping her, meantime, in his own greatcoat, whilst he should go forward and reconnoitre the ground, in order to catch a sight of some object (rocky peak, or tarn, or peat-field) which might ascertain their real situa- tion. Either the snow above, already lying in drifts, or the blinding snow-storms driving into his eyes, must have misled him as to the nature of the circumjacent ground ; for the precipice over which he had fallen was but a few yards from the spot in which he had quitted his wife. The depth of the descent and the fury of the wind (almost always violent on these cloudy altitudes) would prevent any distinct communication between the dying husband below and his despairing wife above, but it was believed by the shepherds, best acquainted with the ground and the range of sound, as regarded the capacities of the human ear under the probable circumstances of the storm, that Sarah might have caught, at intervals, the groans of her unhappy partner, supposing that his death were at all a lingering one. Others, on the contrary, supposed her to have gathered this catastrophe rather from the want of any sounds, and from his continued absence, than from any one distinct or positive expression of it ; both because the smooth and unruffled surface of the snow where he lay seemed to argue that he had died without a struggle, per- 20 RECOLLECTIONS OP THE LAKES. haps without a groan ; and because that tremendous sounu of " hurtling" in the upper chambers of the air, which often accompanies a snow-storm, when combined with heavy gales of wind, would utterly suppress and stifle (as they conceived) any sound so feeble as those from a dying man. In any case, and by whatever sad language of sounds or signs, positive or negative, she might have learned or guessed her loss, it was generally agreed that the wild shrieks heard towards midnight in Langdalehead* announced the agoniz- ing moment which brought to her now widowed heart the conviction of utter desolation and of final abandonment to her own solitary and fast-fleeting energies. It seemed pro- bable that the sudden disappearance of her husband from her pursuing eyes would teach her to understand his fate ; and that the consequent indefinite apprehension of instant death lying aU around the point on which she sat, had kept her stationary to the very attitude in which her husband left her, until her failing powers, and the increasing bitter- ness of the cold, to one no longer in motion, would soon make those changes of place impossible, which too awfully had made themselves known as dangerous. The footsteps * I once heard, also, in talking with a Langdale family upon this tragic tale, that the sounds had penetrated into the valley of Little Langdale ; which is possible enough. For, although this interesting recess of the entire Langdale basin (which bears somewhat of the eame relation to Great Langdale that Easedale bears to Grasmere) does, in fact. He beyond Langdalehead by the entire breadth of that dale, yet, from the singular accident of having its area raised far above the level of the adjacent vales, one most solitary section of Little Langdale (in which Hes a tiny lake, and on the banks of that lake dwells one solitary family) being exactly at right angles both to Langdalehead and to the other complementary section of the Lesser Langdale, is brought into a position and an elevation virti"- ally much nearer to objects (especially to audible objects) on the Eflseiiale Fells. EAKLY MEMOKIALS OF GRASMEEE. 21 in some places, -wherever drifting had not obliterated them, yet traceable as to the outline, though partially filled up with later falls of snow, satisfactorily showed that, however much they might have rambled, after crossing and doubling upon their own tracks, and many a mile astray from their right path, so they must have kept together to the very plateau or shelf of rock at which (i.e., on which, and helow which) their wanderings had terminated ; for there were evidently no steps from this plateau in the retro- grade order. By the time they had reached this final stage of their erroneous course, all possibility of escape must have been long over for both alike ; because their exhaustion must have been excessive before they could have reached a point so remote and high ; and, unfortunately, the direct result of aU this exhaustion had been to throw them farther ofi" their home, or from " any dwelling-place of man," than they were at starting. Here, therefore, at this rocky pinnacle, hope was extinct for the wedded couple, but not perhaps for the husband. It was the impression of the vale, that, perhaps, within half-an-hour before reaching this fatal point, George Green might, had his conscience or his heart allowed him in so base a desertion, have saved himself singly, with- out any very great difiiculty. It is to be hoped, however — and, for my part, I think too well of human nature to hesitate in believing — that not many, even amongst the meaner-minded and the least generous of men, could have reconciled themselves to the abandonment of a poor fainting female companion in such circumstances. Still, though not more than a most imperative duty, it was such a duty as most of his associates believed to have cost him (perhaps consciously) his life. It is an impressive truth — that some- diues in the very lowest forms of duty, less than which 22 RECOLLECTIONS OV THE LAKiia. would rank a man as a villain, there is, novertlieless, the subliraest ascent of self-sacrifice. To do less, would class you as an object of eternal scorn : to do so much, presumes the grandeur of heroism. For his wife not only must have disabled him greatly by clinging to his arm for support ■ but it was known, from her peculiar character and manner, that she would be likely to rob him of his coolness and presence of mind, by too painfully fixing his thoughts, where her own would be busiest, upon their helpless little family. '^ Stung with the thoughts of home" — to borrow the fine expression of Thomson, in describing a similar case — alternately thinking of the blessedness of that warm fire- side at Blentarn Ghyll, which was not again to spread its genial glow through her freezing limbs, and of those darling little faces which, in this world, she was to see no more ; unintentionally, and without being aware even of that result, she would rob the brave man (for such he was) of his forti- tude, and the strong man of his animal resources. And yet (such, in the very opposite direction, was equally the impression universally through Grasmere), had Sarah Green foreseen, could her aflfectionate heart have guessed, even the tenth part of that love and neighbourly respect for herself which soon afterwards expressed themselves in showers of bounty to her children ; could she have looked behind the curtain of destiny sufiiciently to learn that the very desola- tion of these poor children, which wrung her maternal heart, and doubtless constituted to her the sting of death, would prove the signal and the pledge of such anxious guardian- ship as not many rich men's children receive, and that this overflowing offering to her own memory would not be a hasty or decaying tribute of the first sorrowing sensibilities, but would pursue her children steadily until their hopeful settlement in life, — anything a}.