THE Wordsworths moved into Rydal Mount on May day, 1813, without ever having been inside before. The previous owners, a family called North from Liverpool, had left the house empty for several weeks, but refused to let the Wordsworths go inside until they had removed their wine from the cellar. The Wordsworths already knew, just from the outside, that they would be happy there. It’s still a fine, handsome house today, up a steep lane from the roadside, with tremendous south-facing views across to Rydal Water and the northern edges of Lake Windermere. It was high and dry and nicely secluded, compared with the damp and exposed Parsonage in Grasmere, and was very much a house of style and taste—far smarter than anything they’d ever had before—with over four acres of gardens and a splendid drawing-room.
They never owned Rydal Mount, nor any other house they ever lived in, though they owned property they didn’t inhabit. Their landlady, called Lady Fleming, was their nearest neighbour; she lived at Rydal Hall with her mother, Diana, also a Lady Fleming. The elder Lady Fleming was very fond of William and his poetry and encouraged him and his family to call. ‘Lady D. has bought a little present for Willy,’ wrote Wordsworth, ‘what it is she has not told us, but he is very anxious to call there, expecting gratification from her little Dogs, her Peacocks or perhaps from the sight of her perenially blooming and brilliant cheeks!’ They were never as friendly with the younger Lady Fleming and when Lady Diana died in 1816, relations were occasionally strained.
Rydal was only two miles away from Grasmere, along the road to Ambleside, but it was in many ways part of a different world. Grasmere was very much a working village (though one or two merchants from Lancashire were already buying up plots and building their holiday homes), but Ambleside had always had definite pretensions, with a sprinkling of old county families, ladies and gentlemen of quality who led an active social life. At Rydal Mount, the Wordsworths were now well within calling distance for the Ambleside gentry.
‘The place is a paradise,’ wrote Dorothy, ‘but my inner thoughts will go back to Grasmere. I was the last person who left the House yesterday morning. It seemed as quiet as the grave … the house only reminded me of desolation, gloom and emptiness and cheerless silence—but why do I now turn to these thoughts? The morning is bright and I am more cheerful today.’
They all settled down to furnish and equip the new house, knowing that, with the weather improving, they would soon have lots of visitors, coming to see their fine house as much as the fine new occupants. Even William went to the sales with the whole family to buy tables and chairs and ornaments, returning home with goods by the cart-load. These Lakeland country sales, to this day, are great social occasions, with the whole neighbourhood congregating in the house whose goods are for sale, bringing their children and sandwiches and making a day of it. ‘We stayed the sale out to the very last and the beds were sold by candle light,’ wrote Dorothy. ‘All walked home in the bright moonshine, I with a water decanter and glass in my hand and William and Mary with a large looking glass, oval with a gilt mirror, to be hung in the best lodging room, very cheap, £1 13s.’ Dorothy was writing this letter to Sarah and she described how all the time William had wished Sarah had been there, knowing how much she enjoyed a good sale: ‘William bitterly regretted you were not here to talk over the humours of the Sales.’
Almost all their furniture was second-hand. But, though at first they thought they would buy cheap Scottish-made carpets, they then decided that only the best would do for the Wordsworths of Rydal Mount and bought the finest new carpets.
Now I must tell you of our grandure [wrote Dorothy]. We are going to have a Turkey!!! carpet—in the dining room and a Brussels in William’s study. You stare, and the simplicity of the dear Town End cottage comes before your eyes and you are tempted to say ‘are they changed, are they setting up for fine folks? for making parties, giving dinners, etc? No, no, you do not make such a guess, but you want an explanation and I must give it to you. The Turkey carpet (it is a large room) will cost 22 guineas and a Scotch carpet would cost 9 or ten. The Turkey will last four Scotch therefore will be the cheapest, and will never be shabby, and from this consideration we were all of one mind that the dining room carpet should be a Turkey one.
Mary and I were rather ashamed of the thought of a Brussels (for William’s room) and inclined to the Scotch as looking less ambitious and less like setting up ourselves upon the model of our neighbours—the Ambleside gentry, who all intend calling upon us, though happily most of them considered it would be inconvenient at present, and I assure you we take their apologies very quietly and say as few civil things in return as possible. Our Master was all for the Brussels and to him we yielded. A humour took him to make his Room smart and we did not oppose him.
William was equally anxious to smarten up their life style, personally hanging up some water-colours that had been painted by his landed friend, Sir George Beaumont, and working out plans for landscaping the large gardens. But then he wasn’t just the new occupant of a desirable residence. He had a new position in society, one of some responsibility and standing, one which needed some dignity and the keeping-up of appearance. Just as he moved into Rydal Mount, he got himself a job, the first one in his whole life.
During the whole of the previous year William had been very worried about his financial situation. He had three children to educate, a large household to support and very little money coming in. The Lowther debts had been paid long before, and Montagu at last paid his in 1813; most of these monies had been carefully invested by Richard, who still looked after the family’s financial affairs, but William’s total investment income was relatively slight, possibly not much more than £200 a year. He had long since realized that he could never count on his poems bringing him in much money. He reckoned in 1812 that his total returns so far from his poetry—and by now almost twenty years had elapsed since his first book was published—came to only seven score pounds. Not even Wordsworth, who always travelled on the outside of coaches, rarely ate meat, often wore second-hand clothes, never took strong drink and never wasted candles, could exist on an average income from his writing of £7 a year. If he was going to be a best-selling poet, like Scott, it would have happened by now. A future as a poet who could support his family appeared impossible.
He wrote to Lord Lonsdale in early 1812, asking him if he had any situations available for which he could recommend him. It was an ever-so-humble, bending-over-backwards-to-please sort of letter, and it is hard to tell if any of the sentiments expressed were in the slightest way cynical—if perhaps he was half revolted by having to beg—or whether he was totally unaware of any humiliation.
In the letter he said that literature had been the pursuit of his life, but for many reasons it had turned out unprofitable: his writings didn’t suit the taste of the times and he was unwilling to associate with the more fashionable literary men of the day. He felt emboldened to beg a favour because of his family connection with Lord Lonsdale. ‘My father and grandfather did conscientously, I believe, discharge such trusts as were reposed to them through that connection. But my situation is a peculiar one and I have been chiefly encouraged by a knowledge of your Lordship’s attachment to Literature and by particular marks of kindness with which you have distinguished me.’
One might have thought that William would have wanted to keep out of the grips of the Lowther family, of all people, having suffered so much from them in the past, but presumably it appeared to him to offer his only hope. He was indeed a genuine admirer of the new Earl of Lonsdale, who was a civilized man, and their families had had long connections. It was the custom of the times for the landed gentry, especially the truly wealthy and landed such as the Lowthers, to spread around their largesse, though there were not many like Sir George Beaumont, who had a real interest in all the creative arts. Young artists, of all sorts, depended on such patronage. You might get a government pension, if you were old enough or had distinguished yourself in some way which usually meant having made friends with some important politicians or lords. But the best solution of all was to find a patron.
Twenty years before William had hated the very idea of the Lowthers and all their inherited wealth. He wanted the aristocracy destroyed. Now he neither hated them nor even felt disapproving of their money. It seemed to him the natural and ideal scheme of things, that there should be vast landowners; as long as they treated their subjects with wisdom and kindness, he approved of their power. Lord Lonsdale was touched, and said he would look out for an opening, but there was nothing at the moment.
By October 1812, William was becoming rather desperate and wrote to Daniel Stuart, his London friend, editor of the Courier, saying that his ‘powerful neighbour Lord Lonsdale’ had promised to help, but that some time might elapse before anything might happen.
Now you know I live chiefly in a retired corner of the world and therefore there is no chance that I should hear of anything suitable likely to be vacant. Will you then be so kind as point out to me anything which is likely to answer my purpose that may come to your knowledge. Of course this is between ourselves. I have no objection, I must add, to quit this part of the country, provided the salary be adequate, and the duty what I am equal to, without being under the necessity of withdrawing myself wholly from Literature.
It’s interesting to note that William was still prepared, at this late stage, to leave the Lakes.
Lord Lonsdale eventually approached the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, hoping to get William a pension, but though the Prime Minister was favourable, so William was told, the pension fund was limited. Instead, Lord Lonsdale personally offered William a pension of £100 a year from his own pocket, till such time as a situation presented itself. This put William in a difficult position, since he did not want to accept such blatant charity, despite his blatant begging (in another letter to Lonsdale he’d mentioned the tragic deaths of his two children in half a year, and how the remaining three were all down with measles), but, at the same time, he needed the money. Sir George Beaumont, asked for his advice, urged William to accept, otherwise the good Lord might be upset, but William decided to wait a while.
In early 1813, there was at last a job in the offing, and Lord Lonsdale offered William £100 in advance—which William readily took—till the appointment was confirmed. In March 1813, the new job became official, and William was unveiled as the new Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland.
It was a government job, and so, technically, William had become a civil servant, occupying one of the many provincial positions which a local feudal lord usually managed to control, putting forward the nomination in the right quarters when the position became vacant. It was by no means a sinecure, involving much more work than William expected, and less money than he’d been led to believe. He’d hoped to earn himself £400 a year, not realizing that the retiring Distributor had to be paid a pension of £100 from William’s earnings and that he also needed to take on a clerk, John Carter (who doubled as gardener), to help with the paper work. But it was a secure income of about £200 a year. In the first year or so, while he was settling in to the post, it was taking up two-thirds of his time, so Dorothy said.
In those days, all legal documents, wills, insurance policies, pamphlets and books required government stamps, which could be bought from sub-distributors, usually local tradesmen or shopkeepers. The Distributor appointed his sub-distributors, handed out the stamps and collected the money, and so the job involved a lot of travelling round his area, a lot of paperwork, and a certain amount of worry—the ladies, in particular, worried when William was away from home and they were in charge of the stamps. Some skill was also needed to choose the right sub-distributors. One, in Kirkby Lonsdale, went bankrupt, owing £300 in stamp money. William, fearing that he would personally be held responsible for the debt, rushed across to Kirkby Lonsdale, took legal proceedings and was able to sell off the poor man’s belongings and effects, managing in the end to recoup the losses.
It sounds rather a demeaning job for a poet, to become in effect a local collector of government taxes, but William was only the latest in a long line of English poets who’d become servants of the government. Chaucer had been clerk of works to Edward III; Spenser was secretary to Lord Grey in Ireland; Milton was Latin secretary to the Council of State under Oliver Cromwell. There are worse ways to earn a living.
Naturally, the whole Wordsworth family was very pleased. They could move in and furnish their fine new house, getting the Turkey carpet instead of the Scotch, without too many worries. The financial security would give William an easier mind and, when he’d organized the new job, some clear time to devote himself properly to his poetry. The London wits, however, didn’t quite see it in the same light. They considered William had sold himself to the government and had become a Lowther lackey—a social crime for which some of them never forgave him.
In the same year that Wordsworth became Distributor of Stamps, Robert Southey became Poet Laureate—a much more distinguished position, though one that didn’t pay much money (only £90 a year, plus a butt of sack). Then, as now, there were those who ridiculed the Laureate, pointing to the great poets who had never been so ennobled; but, on the whole, it was looked upon as a high honour, despite the fact that Walter Scott, the best-selling poet of the day, had just turned it down. Scott didn’t feel up to writing the required odes on royal occasions, which often brought abuse down on the writer’s head, and, anyway, he already held two public appointments. Instead, he put in a good word for Southey, as being a very deserving poet, with no other means of income and no government job, one who would dignify the profession of poet. It was a safe and popular choice. Southey consented on condition that he would write odes only when the spirit moved him, and not when the occasion demanded, which has remained the system to this day. Southey looked upon the Laureateship as something of a literary duty. For the previous hundred years—at least since Dryden, in the late seventeenth century—the position had been held by some very undistinguished poets. The Laureate who had just died was Henry James Pye, and you don’t find him in many anthologies.
It was, in a way, an honour for the Lake Poets, as Southey was linked in popular minds with Wordsworth while, in critical minds, he had been spared most of the viciousness. At the same time, the honour was regarded as a stigma in some quarters. ‘Mr Southey and even Mr Wordsworth have both accepted offices under the Government,’ wrote Leigh Hunt, ‘of such a nature as absolutely ties up their independence.’ Wordsworth later refused another government job, again put in his way by Lord Lonsdale: that of a Customs Collector at Whitehaven. If he had accepted it he would have had to move, which by now he didn’t want to do, being settled at Rydal Mount. As Sarah Hutchinson ruefully remarked, the London newspapers were not so ready to publish his refusal of this public post as they had been to publish his acceptance of the Stamp Office appointment.
One of William’s little duties as a local Stamp official was to look up his superior, the Comptroller of Stamps, when he was in London. This particular official was a very self-important gentleman called Mr Kingston, who was looking forward to his first meeting with his well-known subordinate. In fact, he could hardly wait. He was a post-dinner guest at a dinner party, held in 1817, at which Wordsworth was a guest of the painter Benjamin Haydon, who had arranged the dinner so that young Keats and others could meet Mr Wordsworth for the first time. It was a very jolly, very distinguished literary gathering and the guests included Charles Lamb. Everyone was extremely embarrassed when the awful Kingston duly arrived—except Lamb, who, being rather tipsy, made fun of him to his face.
Lamb had already been teasing Wordsworth, calling him a ‘rascally Lake Poet’, which William had taken in good part, laughing as Lamb had gone on to abuse Voltaire and Newton (not present, but there in spirit). When Kingston arrived, Lamb turned on him, calling for a candle to examine his phrenology, and pronouncing him a ‘silly fellow’ for calling Milton a great poet.
Keats afterwards felt rather sorry for William having to put up with such a man, and refused Kingston’s invitation to his house. However, on the morning of Kingston’s dinner, Keats chanced to call on William and found him dressed up in knee-breeches and silk stockings, all ready to go off and dine with his superior. Keats’s romantic image of Wordsworth as a radical spirit diminished from that moment on.
A week later, William invited Keats for dinner, where he met Mary. He also thought he met Dorothy, according to his own accounts, but it was Sarah he met, as Dorothy had stayed at home at Rydal with the children. Keats had for long admired William’s poems, and his private letters contain many quotations from ‘Tintern Abbey’, the ‘Immortality’ ode and others, but at dinner, he found William at his pontifical worst, laying down his own rules on poetry, and running down almost everyone and everything else. The scales dropped from Keats’s eyes, as far as Wordsworth the man was concerned: ‘For the sake of a few fine imaginative or domestic passages are we to be bullied into a certain Philosophy engendered in the whims of an Egotist.… I am afraid Wordsworth went rather huffed out of town—I am sorry for it. He cannot expect his fireside Divan to be infallible, he cannot expect but that every man of worth is as proud as himself.’
William didn’t feel at all huffed out of town, and he had many new and distinguished admirers to huff him up, not down. Benjamin Haydon, for example, a painter of great note and reputation in his day, who knew and had painted most of the eminent writers and statesmen, was a close friend of his. Another new friend to visit was Henry Crabb Robinson, the gentleman who had helped with the so-called reconciliation between William and Coleridge. He was a wealthy bachelor, a lawyer by profession, who had met most of the great writers of Europe, including Goethe and Schiller. He later spent many holidays with the Wordsworths and became perhaps William’s closest non-Lakeland, non-family friend.
But it was a shame that William had disappointed the new young writers such as Keats. Today, we tend to classify this new young generation of poets along with Wordsworth—like Keats, Shelley and Byron—as the Romantics. You can see all their handsome images today, headed ‘The Romantic Poets’, grouped together in one room at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The new generation had been genuinely inspired by Wordsworth and Coleridge; they had thrilled to Lyrical Ballads and realized that the old order had gone, that a new spirit was in the air. It was a spirit that was simultaneously rushing through continental Europe, as poets, writers, artists and musicians generally were overthrowing the eighteenth-century classical framework and developing a more romantic, spiritual, lyrical inspiration, based on feeling rather than on form. The Romantic movement changed the culture of the civilized world, and in the English-speaking countries, Wordsworth is looked upon as its poetic leader.
At the time, however, the new poets didn’t quite see Wordsworth in this light. They were becoming increasingly biased against him, upset by reports and gossipings of his growing reactionary attitudes, and, in the flesh, his rather pompous, didactic manner hadn’t helped. He thought he was helping them, giving young people the benefit of his collected wisdom; but that wasn’t how they saw it. William, alas, once a rebel, once a violent and opinionated young radical writer and activist, seems almost to have forgotten that he was ever young himself.
Remember how our hero, as a young blood at Cambridge in 1790, had ignored the system, refused to take honours and generally rebelled against most of the disciplines? In 1816, writing to his friend Thomas Clarkson, we find him heavily advising a young man at all costs to conform at Cambridge, and not to refuse to sit for an honour. The letter is full of weighty calls to duty and responsibility, with not a hint of tolerance or understanding, nor any reference, even as a warning, to how he himself had acted while in the same situation.
Remember that Bishop of Llandaff, the one against whom William had written his fierce, radical pamphlet in 1794? Not long after they had moved into Rydal Mount in 1813, William actually went to dine with him at his home on the shores of Lake Windermere. The bishop was one of the gentry who lived within calling distance of Ambleside, still an absentee Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, amongst other things, who had arranged for others to do his duties for over thirty years.
Remember William’s own peccadilloes as a young man in France? These didn’t stop him getting on his high horse whenever anyone else started what he thought was an inappropriate relationship, however respectably it might end. In 1814, his elder brother Richard, then aged forty-six, married a girl of twenty-two. ‘He has done a foolish thing in marrying one so young; not to speak of the disgrace of forming such a connection with a servant, and that, one of his own,’ wrote William to their other brother Christopher, the cleric.
William had never been particularly close to Richard, who had sometimes annoyed them by his slowness in answering their endless letters and queries about their finances, and had rather hurt them by only once coming to visit them in the Lakes, despite endless invitations and despite having his own property near Penrith. But, as he was their brother, they felt personally slighted by his unseemly marriage.
Dorothy proved more forgiving. A year later, when she’d at last met the girl, she was pleased to find she wasn’t such a disgrace as they feared. ‘You will be glad to hear that I like my Brother R’s wife very well—the circumstances of her education, her rank in Society, her youth, etc, being got over. She is a very respectable woman and kind and attentive to her husband. She is not vulgar, though she has nothing of the natural gentlewoman about her. Her face is very comely and her countenance excellent.’
When young Thomas De Quincey, their devoted young friend and neighbour, committed what they considered an even more shameful act, they couldn’t quite bring themselves to forgive him, though their row with him had a more basic cause than merely an unsuitable liaison.
Firstly, there appears to have been disagreement over changes De Quincey started making at Dove Cottage, such as cutting down some hedges to give more light to the apple-trees, which upset Dorothy. He was excellent with the children, and loved them all, but the Wordsworths began to be rather critical when he didn’t always do what he said he would do. ‘John now goes to Mr de Quincey for a nominal hour every day to learn Latin,’ wrote Dorothy in 1813, when John, their eldest, was ten. ‘This said nominal hour now generally is included in the space of twenty minutes; either the scholar learns with such uncommon rapidity that more time is unnecessary, or the Master tires.’
De Quincey, when in London, often took on the job of seeing some work by Wordsworth through the press, which was a thankless task, as William was always making corrections. One book went on for months, mainly because of William’s changes, but they all blamed De Quincey each time things went wrong at the printers and he got little thanks in the end for all his pains.
Dorothy had begun to take quite a delight in passing on gossip about him, once relaying to a friend that his housekeeper was thinking of leaving him: ‘What a prize she would be to your brother as a housekeeper. She is tired of Mr De Q’s meanness and greediness.’ Dorothy had been the one who’d absolutely adored De Quincey, whereas William, though liking him, had been more restrained and had kept his distance. When ill feeling arose, William tended to ignore it, not stooping to malicious remarks. ‘Mr De Quincey has taken a fit of solitude,’ he wrote in 1816, giving nothing away. ‘I have scarcely seen him since Mr Wilson left us.’
What had happened in 1816 was that De Quincey had taken up with a servant girl, Margaret Simpson, the daughter of a small farmer at Nab Cottage, just half a mile from Rydal Mount.
She had a child by him, much to the disgust of the Wordsworth household. He married her the following year, and she made him a perfectly respectable and loving wife, but the ladies of the Wordsworth household refused to call on the pair. Crabb Robinson visited both households in late 1816 and found that De Quincey had broken with the Wordsworths, which he thought was rather sad, though he tried not to take sides, managing to remain friendly with both of them.
There was also the matter of opium. They’d had enough of that with Coleridge, and when they discovered that De Quincey was becoming addicted, they now began to discourage his visits, not wishing to be involved.
The specific cause of the break in 1816 was De Quincey’s relationship with the servant girl, but perhaps the real reason for it was that the friendship had been built on a dangerous premise in the first place. De Quincey had arrived into their lives as an admirer, a slavish follower of Wordsworth, and they expected him to remain so, devoting himself completely to the Wordsworth cause but expecting very little in return. Coleridge had always been an equal, whatever else he became, but De Quincey had been consigned from the very beginning to play a secondary role—though, alas for him, he didn’t realize this for many years.
De Quincey’s Recollections of the Lake Poets, written many years later, shows how often, even in the early days, he had been hurt by little things. He was out walking with William and Southey one day when Southey asked William a question about Charles Lloyd, their friend and neighbour, who was ill. De Quincey didn’t quite catch William’s reply and asked him to repeat it. ‘To my surprise, he replied that in fact what he had said was a matter of some delicacy and not quite proper to be communicated except to near friends of the family. This to me—ye gods!—to me, who knew by many a hundred conversations how disagreeable Wordsworth was to both Charles Lloyd and his wife. The arrogance of Wordsworth was well illustrated in this case of the Lloyds.’
De Quincey was a great book-man and in the early days was perfectly willing to let William or anyone else borrow his books. At one time, he reckoned that between them, Coleridge and William had borrowed five hundred of his books and had taken them to Allan Bank. But he soon grew to resent William borrowing his books. Unlike Southey, De Quincey said, William didn’t know how to care for books; his own wretched collection, no more than two or three hundred, were ‘ill bound and in tatters’ and he hardly ever read them, unless the weather was really bad and he was stuck indoors. One day, De Quincey let him borrow a book by Edmund Burke: a virgin copy, unopened and straight from the publisher.
Wordsworth took down the volume and … unfortunately it was uncut; fortunately, and by a special Providence as to him, it seemed, tea was proceeding at the time. Dry toast required butter; butter required knives and knives then lay on the table; but sad it was for the virgin purity of Mr Burke’s as yet unsunned pages that every knife bore upon its blade testimonies of the service it had rendered. Did that stop Mr Wordsworth? Not at all. He tore his way into the heart of the volume with this knife that left its greasy honours behind it upon every page; and are they not there to this day?
Most of De Quincey’s stories are very amusing, though probably not necessarily always quite accurate, and his physical descriptions of William, especially (as we have seen) his legs, have a vividness and immediacy which the more reverential and probably more truthful accounts sadly lack.
De Quincey always numbered William amongst the luckiest people he had ever met—lucky in his love of simple pleasures, lucky in his health, lucky in his windfalls, like the Calvert money and Lord Lonsdale’s help with the Stamp job, and perhaps most fortunate of all, lucky in the women of his household—especially Dorothy. He never lowered his estimation of William as a poet, considering that of the three Lake Poets, William was the original, the true genius, even if he preferred the others as people. Nonetheless, he had to admit that, as a person, William was still interesting. Southey might be pleasanter to meet, but he was rather boring. William, despite what De Quincey considered his arrogant ways, was worth meeting, though in the end he confessed that he, personally, had had enough of him. He couldn’t put up with the strain of keeping in with him, having to hold himself in check, always feeling himself to be in the wrong. ‘Having observed this human arrogance, I took care never to lay myself under the possibility of an insult. Systematically I avoided saying anything, however suddenly tempted into any expression of my feelings, upon the natural appearance whether in the sky or upon the earth. Thus I evaded one cause of quarrel. Wordsworth was not aware of the irritation and disgust which he had founded in the minds of his friends.’
De Quincey doesn’t mention his own conduct, either his drugs or his love life, as being a possible cause of the parting. But he was certainly not alone amongst the younger generation in finding the middle-aged Wordsworth difficult to put up with. John Wilson, the other young student admirer who’d arrived in the Lakes especially to be near Wordsworth, left the area at about the same time. He went to Edinburgh, where he became a contributor to Blackwood’s Magazine and wrote several critical articles about Wordsworth. No row is known to have occurred between them, but Wilson’s relationship with William was much the same as De Quincey’s, with William accepting the adoration, but giving little in return.
In later years, William’s friendship with De Quincey was somewhat renewed. De Quincey didn’t finally leave the Lakes till about 1830—by which time he’d taken another local house, keeping Dove Cottage for his books—and he also moved eventually to Edinburgh. But the friendship was never again of the same intensity, after what the Wordsworths considered had been his most ungentlemanly behaviour.
It does look, despite Dorothy’s half-joking remarks, as if the Wordsworths of Rydal Mount had begun to consider themselves as rather fine folks.
This heavy moralizing ode, published in the 1807 collection, was an indication of the new stern Wordsworth, warning of weaknesses in himself and in his friends. It was written like a hymn and proved very popular with later Victorians.
STERN Daughter of the Voice of God!
O Duty! If that name thou love
Who art a light to guide, a rod
To check the erring, and reprove;
Thou, who are victory and law
When empty terrors overawe;
From vain temptations dost set free;
And calm’st the weary strife of frail humanity!
Serene will be our days and bright,
And happy will our nature be,
When love is an unerring light,
And joy its own security.
And they a blissful course may hold
Even now, who, not unwisely bold,
Live in the spirit of this creed;
Yet seek thy firm support, according to their need.
To humbler functions, awful Power!
I call thee: I myself commend
Unto thy guidance from this hour;
Oh, let my weakness have an end!
Give unto me, made lowly wise,
The spirit of self-sacrifice;
The confidence of reason give;
And in the light of truth thy Bondman let me live!