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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- I tudes amongst the mountains of the Lake district ; and must pause to describe it. Easedale is impressive as a and solitude ; for the depth of the seclusion is brought out 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 into it one door from the Grasmere side : but that door is obscure j and on every other quarter there — EARLY MEMORIALS OF GRASMERE.

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