The Age of Napoleon by Durant Will & Durant Ariel

Author:Durant, Will & Durant, Ariel [Durant, Ariel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2011-06-03T20:00:00+00:00

XII. WORDSWORTH: CLIMAX, 1804–14

After some minor wanderings, the Wordsworth ménage moved (1808) from Dove Cottage to a larger house at nearby Allan Bank. There the poet blossomed out as a landscape gardener, surrounding the house with plants and flowers that frolicked in the Grasmere rains. In 1813 the family moved finally to a modest estate at Rydal Mount in Ambleside, a mile south of Grasmere. They were now prosperous, with several servants and some titled friends. In this year Lord Lonsdale arranged Wordsworth’s appointment as distributor of stamps for Westmorland County; this post, retained till 1842, brought the poet an additional two hundred pounds per year. Freed from economic worry, he spent more time in his garden, making it the paradise of rhododendra and other flowering plants which it still is. From his window on the second floor he had an inspiring view of Rydal Water (i.e., Lake) two miles away.

Meanwhile (1805) he completed The Prelude, begun in 1798; “every day,” Dorothy noted, he “brings us in a large treat” of it from his morning walk.88 She and Sara Hutchinson were kept busy taking dictation; Wordsworth had learned to think in blank verse. He subtitled the leisurely epic “The Growth of a Poet’s Mind”; it was intended as a mental autobiography, and as a prelude to The Excursion, which would expound in detail the philosophy reached in that growth. He gave the record an added intimacy by repeatedly addressing his memories to Coleridge. He apologized for the surface egotism of the poem; it was, he confessed, “a thing unprecedented that a man should talk so much about himself.”89 Perhaps for that reason he kept it unpublished during his life.

It is quite tolerable if taken in small doses. Most pleasant are the scenes of his childhood (Books I and II), his solitary woodland rambles, when it seemed to him that in the chatter of the animals, the rustling of the trees, even in the resonance of rocks and hills, he heard the voice of a hidden and multiform god. So, as he sat

Alone upon some jutting eminence,

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