AS we have seen, Dorothy left Rydal in the autumn of 1828 to spend the winter with John, acting as his housekeeper and helping him out generally in his first position as curate at Whitwick Church in Leicestershire. It appeared to be just a routine trip. Dorothy had been a universal aunt for several years now. She’d just finished almost a year in charge of Rydal Mount, while William, Mary and Dora had been away. She saw it as a pleasure, comforting her nephew in a strange new area, but there was something a bit plaintive in her letters written on arrival, describing John in his loneliness, suffering the dullness of long, empty evenings, stuck in a strange village, full of ‘poverty and all the bad habits attendant upon petty manufacturies in a crowded village … barren of society’. She planned to stay six months. After all, what else had she to do. ‘I am more useful than I could be anywhere else.’
She faithfully reported John’s progress and how he was drawing larger congregations than the church had had before: ‘I cannot say that he yet preaches with boldness and full effect, but really he reads the prayers, to my ear, very pleasingly, having a fine voice and a serious manner of delivery.’
She didn’t complain that she herself was lonely, though she was rather wistful in a letter to Crabb Robinson, who had mentioned a trip to Rome. William had already seen every sight and city in Europe which he’d wanted to see, except for Rome. It had been a topic in family letters for years.
‘Alas for Rome. I never expect to set foot upon that sacred ground,’ wrote Dorothy. ‘Nor do I ever visit it even in a day dream. Indeed, when my Brother talks of Rome it always rather damps my hopes of even crossing the Channel again. So many circumstances must occur to make so large a scheme practical, and years slip away. On Xmas Day, I, the youngest of the three elders of the house, shall have completed my 56th year.…’
In April 1829, by which time John had heard that a living of his own had been secured for him in Cumberland by Lord Lonsdale, Dorothy suffered a serious illness. For forty hours, it looked as though she would die. She’d apparently been for a long walk on a cold day and had been struck down by ‘internal inflammation’, suffered ‘excruciating torture’ and, even when the pain began to abate, was unable to speak for some time. It is now thought the illness was an attack of cholicystitis, with gall-stones. Willy happened to be there at the time, staying with his brother on the way to Bremen in Germany, and both nephews devotedly nursed her, till their mother came rushing down from Rydal.
‘What a shock that was to our poor hearts,’ wrote William, after Dorothy at last began to regain her strength. ‘Were she to depart, the Phases of my Moon would be robbed of light to a degree that I have not the courage to think of.’ Back at Rydal, she recovered enough to walk round the house, but over the next four years came a series of relapses, confining her to bed, though her mind was still active and her thoughts were harmonious. She was fit enough in the autumn of 1834 to start her Journals again, and on 4 October there’s an interesting insertion, showing she’d never forgotten what happened between William and Mary, on that day thirty-two years ago: ‘The wedding day, and if Dora recollected it she did not tell me and we let it pass unnoticed. I have again had the resolution not to go out, beautiful as the weather was, yet so beautiful at home I could not but be pleased with walking from room to room and feeling and seeing the lovely sunshine.’
In the spring of 1835, William and Mary felt sufficiently confident of Dorothy’s condition to go to London. One of their main objects was to try to secure some sort of government job for Willy. Since he had come back from Germany, the only employment they had been able to find for him was as his father’s sub-distributor of stamps in Carlisle. William, through Lord Lowther, sought the help of Sir Robert Peel, the Prime Minister, who was an admirer of Wordsworth’s poetry; but this came to nothing, as Peel’s government was about to fall.
When William returned to Rydal, full of gloom at the Whigs coming to power, he found the house almost like a hospital. Everyone was struck down, or about to be struck down, with influenza. Dora, Dorothy and Sarah Hutchinson were all seriously ill, and so was the cook. Naturally, they feared most for Dorothy, who had been an invalid for the last five years, and were convinced that she was about to die, a release at last from her physical misery. But it was Sarah who died. Quickly, quietly and unexpectedly, just as they were sure she was recovering, Sarah passed away on 23 June 1835. ‘She had no acute suffering whatever,’ William wrote to Southey, ‘and within a very short time of her departure … she opened her eyes in strength and with a strong and sweet voice, said “I am quite, I am perfectly comfortable.”’
Sarah Hutchinson was sixty years old and had made her home with the Wordsworths for thirty years, sharing their pleasures and their pains. She’d been a vital part of those exciting early years in Grasmere. Her name was in all their hearts, carved in their memories and carved in stone on that rock where they’d all placed their names, a rock which William still stopped and stared at when he passed, often taking a knife with him to keep the letters fresh. She’d shared the excitement of Coleridge, helping him in his creative urges, perhaps even sharing his romantic urges. Was she ever in love with him, as he was with her? We will never know.
But she had also loved John, the brother who died at sea, and, according to Coleridge, it was he who had been expected to marry her. She was equally loved by Southey and his whole household; she was a friend in time of need, called in to nurse the sick, transcribe for the literary, or just cheer up the family. Perhaps they missed her laughter as much as anything. She was the one who enjoyed best the fun of the country sales, or could jest William out of his mental gloom or pain in his side. Coleridge perhaps left the best one-word description of her. She had a quality, he once said, which he called ‘entertainingness’.
Dorothy recovered from her bout of ’flu, but that was about all. As her physical strength returned, so her mental power went. The family put it down to the shock of Sarah’s death, allied with the amounts of opium which had been prescribed to relieve her pain, and hoped that, with careful nursing, her mind would return, but it never did.
Dorothy had always been a highly emotional lady, and it would seem from many of her early letters and journal entries that at times she had not been completely stable. De Quincey, and others, always commented on her wild, staring eyes. Her struggles to control her emotions, alternately subduing them or letting them burn with fire, made strangers become distressed, even frightened. ‘At times,’ said De Quincey, ‘the self counteraction and self baffling of her feelings caused her even to stammer.’
From now until the end of her life, she lived in her own twilight world, eventually confined to a wheel-chair, taken out round the garden on days of sunshine, though she often protested, determined to sit roasting by the fire, even on the hottest days. William and Mary proved absolutely devoted nurses, despite Dorothy’s frequent outbursts of anger, shouts and screams. They did it with no sense of embarrassment, still looking on her as a normal member of the household, never for a moment considering hiding her away from public or private gaze, far less putting her in a home. Strangely enough, her few lucid spells were usually poetical. Whenever a line of poetry was quoted, she could carry on the passage, reciting whole sections by William and by other poets. She had given William ears and eyes as a boy. Now, he gave her love.
Sarah’s was the first death to occur in the family household since the two children had died all those years previously, but William’s own contemporaries, both personal friends and poets, had already begun to fall. The first old friend to go was Sir George Beaumont in 1827, aged seventy-four. ‘Nearly twenty five years have I known him intimately,’ wrote William, ‘and neither myself nor my family ever received a cold or unkind look from him.’ He had been comfortably, rather than enormously, wealthy, and his presents to William had been truly generous, such as the little estate near Skiddaw, which was meant to provide a home for William near Coleridge. He had done several paintings of William’s poems, such as ‘The Thorn’, which is still in the Wordsworth family today. The foundation of the National Gallery in 1823, for which he worked, is perhaps his best-known single achievement. He left sixteen of the best paintings from his collection to the nation, including works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Poussin, Canaletto, Reynolds and Claude. In his will, he left Wordsworth a legacy of £100 a year for life.
William’s last meeting with Sir Walter Scott was in 1831, when he and Dora visited him at Abbotsford. Scott was then about to make his final trip abroad, to Italy, in the hope of improving his health, but he was already in a frail state, hardly able to write in Dora’s album. Dora took this album on most journeys with her father, collecting something from almost all his famous friends. Scott managed a few stanzas, though in signing the verses he omitted the S from his own name. ‘I should not have done anything of this kind, but for your father’s sake,’ he told Dora. ‘They are probably the last verses I shall ever write.’
William was terribly upset by Scott’s appearance. ‘How sadly changed did I find the man I had seen so healthy, gay and hopeful a few years before when he said at the inn in Patterdale, in my presence, his daughter Anne also being there, with my own wife and daughter and Mr Quillinan, “I mean to live till I am eighty, and shall write as long as I live.” ’
It had been a typical Walter Scott statement, full of cheerfulness and gaiety, but one that William knew he himself could never make. Even at the time, it struck him as tempting fate. ‘I was startled, and almost shocked at that bold saying which could scarcely be uttered by such a man, sanguine as he was, without a momentary forgetfulness of the instability of life.’ Scott died the next year, 1832, aged sixty-one, worn out by his herculean literary labours to clear his debts.
Coleridge died in 1834. Although they had taken that surprise foreign tour, with Dora, in 1828, they had not become real friends again and William never saw him during the last four years of his life. After all his wanderings and drug addiction, he’d remained for the last eighteen years of his life in reasonable stability and happiness with James Gillman, his physician, in Highgate. He’d even managed to get his play put on in the West End, and it ran for twenty nights.
Charles Lamb, another life-long literary friend, died a few months later. The next year, 1835, the Ettrick Shepherd, James Hogg, died, and though Wordsworth hadn’t been a particular friend of his, or an admirer of his poetry, the event inspired him to write a poem in memory of all his literary friends who had so recently died. It all took place in a sudden upsurge of inspiration, the sort he hadn’t had for many years, and it produced what is generally considered as the best of his late poems.
A niece who was staying with them at Rydal Mount happened to bring in a copy of the Newcastle Journal, which contained the news of Hogg’s death. William left the room, but returned in half an hour, asking his niece to write down some lines which he had just composed—lines now known as ‘Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg’. It was similar to ‘Tintern Abbey’, written some thirty-seven years previously, in that it was produced without Wordsworth’s usual alterations and corrections. In commemorating the dead poets, such as Coleridge, Scott, Lamb, Crabbe and Hogg, it was almost as if he felt his own death was imminent.
William became active poetically again in the 1830s, after a fairly barren decade, but he produced little of note—at least, little of what the scholars consider notable. He was also busy revising and re-editing various collections of his poems, as well as putting the final, final touches to The Prelude, which he at last completed in 1839, then put away, probably in the iron chest which he used for the stamp money, with instructions that it should not be opened until after his death.
Mary, and all his family and close friends, hoped that he might get back to ‘The Recluse’, his master work, of which The Prelude was to be the first part; but he never did, contenting himself with sonnets and little verses, produced as the mood took him, and written on a multitude of likely and unlikely subjects. ‘Has Wordsworth written no sonnet on the Income Tax,’ asked a friend in 1842.
Off and on, over the previous twenty years, William had often remarked that he thought the muse had gone, but there’s no sign that he really believed it. He worked as hard as ever, whenever he felt a poem taking shape, and was as proud of the result.
Mrs Wudsworth would say ‘ring the bell’ but he wouldn’t stir [a former servant at Rydal Mount later recalled]. ‘Goa and see what he’s doing,’ she’d say, and we wad goa up to study door and hear him mumbling and bumming through it. ‘Dinner’s ready, sir,’ I’d ca’ out. He’d goa mumbling on like a deaf man, ya see. And sometimes Mrs Wudsworth ’ud say, ‘Goa and brek a bottle, or let a dish fall just outside door in passage.’ Eh dear, that maistly would bring him out, wad that. For ye kna that he was a verra careful man, and he couldn’t do with brekking t’china.
William was by now well into his late sixties, and not many great poets have been creative at that late stage. The Great Decade, as far as Wordsworth’s poetry is concerned, is usually said to have been 1796–1806, but little-known works, written in later years, are constantly being reanalysed and revalued. After the James Hogg effusion in 1835, however, there is very little that people trouble to read today.
The 1830s were altogether a fairly depressing time for William. Apart from Dorothy’s decline, and then the deaths of his friends and contemporaries, there was the state of the nation in general. He was upset by the movement for reform, which culminated in the 1832 Reform Bill, when the Whigs had at last achieved office, and prophesied that nothing but doom would result from the enlargement of the franchise. ‘I was so depressed with the aspect of public affairs,’ he wrote to his brother Christopher in 1832, ‘that were it not for our dear sister’s illness, I should think of nothing else. They are to be envied, I think who from age or infirmity, are likely to be removed from the afflictions which God is preparing for this sinful nation.’ He also prophesied economic ruin, political chaos and social disintegration. On all sides, he saw threats to the Church of England, which he stoutly defended from all attacks—either from the Dissenters or from the Roman Catholic Church. He was against Catholic Emancipation and felt the monarchy would be in danger should it ever happen: ‘These two islands are likely to reap the fruit of their own folly and madness in becoming, for the present generation, the two most unquiet and miserable spots upon the earth.’
He grieved for what he considered the depressed state of poetry and of the English language—‘the disgusting frequency with which the word artistical, imported with other impertinencies from the Germans, is employed by writers of the present day’—and for the poverty of the publishing business. He even managed to chastise the scientists of the day, condemning them for their airs and graces, and for being more concerned for titles than for caring for humanity. This could have been a dig at his old friend Sir Humphry Davy, who was now a man of high fashion.
It was a time of general social unrest, and William himself did have many personal reasons for gloom and despondency, but, throughout the 1830s, an air of melancholy seems to have pervaded even his happiest moments. One day in 1836, walking up Easedale, his favourite walk near Grasmere, on a perfect autumn day, he came with some friends upon a beautiful tumbling stream.
I have often thought what a solemn thing it would be [he said, turning to his friends] if we could have brought to our mind, at once, all the scenes of distress and misery, which any spot, however beautiful and calm before us, has been witness to since the beginning. That water break, with the glassy, quiet pool beneath it, that looks so lovely, and presents no images to the mind but of peace—there, I remember, the only son of his father, a poor man, who lived yonder, was drowned. He missed him, came to search, and saw his body dead in the pool.
In 1837, William undertook a trip to Italy with Crabb Robinson. They managed to pay a quick visit to Caroline on their way through Paris (this was the last time father and daughter ever met). The tour as a whole ended earlier than they’d planned. William found that he and Crabb Robinson, for all their years of friendship and intimacy, had different habits. William loved to be up and on his way at the crack of dawn, while Robinson was still asleep. William went to his bedroom when the sun went down, unable to read by candlelight, while Robinson was just getting ready for the town, to visit the reading rooms and parties. ‘One night I heard him in bed composing verses,’ wrote Robinson, ‘and on the following day I offered to be his amanuensis; but I was not patient enough, I fear, and he did not employ me a second time.’
William missed having any of his regular female companions with him, and vowed never to travel without one again. He was very homesick, writing home quite pathetic letters to Mary, promising never to be irritable or cross with any of them again and saying how much he loved them all.
In 1838, William learned some news which, on the face of it, should have made him extremely happy, but which drove him to the depths of misery and worry. Dora wanted to get married.
John, his eldest child, was already married, to everyone’s satisfaction and relief. Not long after he had moved to his living at Moresby, near Whitehaven, John had married Isabella Curwen, in October 1830. She was the daughter of Mr Curwen, of Workington Hall and of Belle Isle in Windermere. The Curwens were a noted Cumbrian family, well known by William since his school-days at Hawkshead. (He mentions Mr Curwen twice in his Guide to the Lakes, both times favourably, complimenting him on his plantations, little knowing that his son would one day marry into the family.)
The person Dora wanted to marry didn’t have quite such a solid or favourable background. She was in love, so she told her father, with Edward Quillinan.
Dora had been just seventeen when she first met Quillinan, and he was then a family man of thirty, married with two children, a man of the world, an army officer who had served in various parts of Europe during the Napoleonic Wars. As we have seen, he had become very much a family friend of William’s and Dorothy’s, part of their generation rather than of the youthful Dora’s. They had visited him as a family, when they stayed with him in London, but gradually, when he came to Rydal on visits, it was Dora he most wanted to see. By 1825, she was confiding to a girl friend that she liked ‘the heavy dragoon, better than any other man’.
In their family letters to Quillinan, Dorothy and William always passed on Dora’s best wishes. Even when she was sending him ‘a thousand loves’, William seems to have been completely unaware of their courtship, looking upon Quillinan as one of his own dearest personal friends. Quillinan once sent them some of his poems, which Dora read to her father. William was much impressed by them, writing to tell Quillinan that, if he could correct a few faults, it was in his power ‘to attain a permanent place amongst the poets of England’. It was a terrible shock when Dora finally told her father that she and Quillinan wanted to become engaged. William’s immediate reaction was to refuse his permission.
It is easy to say that William was being possessive, that he selfishly didn’t want to lose his only daughter. She had certainly been his favourite travelling companion for the last ten years. She was so good for him—cheekier, as she said herself, than any of his other household ladies. There was a joke amongst their friends that some men were henpecked, but that Wordsworth was chicken-pecked.
Although she now travelled a lot, thanks to her father, she had spent a very sheltered girlhood. Her best friends were over in the Southey household, where there were no boys of her age. John, her elder brother, doesn’t appear to have brought any of his own male friends to the house—none, at least, that she took a fancy to. Mr Quillinan, then, although her father’s friend, must have appeared a very dashing figure, charming and amusing, experienced and worldly, but at the same time a cultivated figure, a poet like her father—or a would-be poet.
William was patently horrified when he was told what had been going on under his nose, but he denied that he was reacting selfishly. Nor was Quillinan’s age ever mentioned in all the arguments that ensued, nor even that he was a Roman Catholic. It was his lack of prospects which worried William. He had no income, apart from his army pension, and no fixed abode. He wandered around, between London and Portugal, where his family had lived, or in rented cottages in Rydal. He already had two young girls to support. How could he take on a new wife, especially one who had always been delicate, one who needed the best attention and care?
Family friends eventually persuaded William to agree to the engagement, but it was on the understanding that Quillinan would now be looking for a secure job and steady home. Having for years been so enthusiastic in his letters about Quillinan, so solicitous and friendly, William now changed completely. He almost refused to discuss the topic of the marriage; in fact, he virtually refused to admit Quillinan’s existence.
Quillinan, naturally, became impatient, unwilling to postpone the marriage indefinitely, which appeared to be William’s hope. Dora told her father one day that Quillinan had written to her, suggesting that they should take a chance on marriage, not waiting for financial security. ‘I must direct your attention,’ wrote Wordsworth in reply, the heavy-handed father, ‘to the fact that you must have overlooked the state in which Dora has long been, or you could not have called upon her Parents to give their Daughter up to a “rough chance”.’
Quillinan took great exception to William’s letter, and for several months the two men were not on speaking or corresponding terms. Eventually, after pressure from family friends, the marriage was at last arranged—a good two years after Dora had hoped it would take place. William had finally agreed on negative grounds: he would not oppose the marriage, but he was still not for it. He said he loved Dora too much and cared too much for her future happiness to bless such a marriage. ‘But I must submit and do submit, and God Almighty bless you my dear child, and him who is the object of your long and long-tried preference and choice.’
The marriage took place in Bath in 1841, at the home of a family friend who had taken Dora’s side in the long and bitter family row. John, her brother, came down from his west Cumberland vicarage to marry her, and her younger brother Willy gave her away. William and Mary came down for the wedding and William intended to go to the church, but at the last moment he did what Dorothy had done at his own wedding thirty-nine years previously. He couldn’t face it. He talked to Dora alone before the ceremony and then told Quillinan that ‘this interview with my child has already so upset me that I think I can hardly bear it’.
It is difficult not to feel some sympathy for everyone concerned. William’s anguish for his delicate daughter was more than just fatherly emotion. Quillinan could not, on the face of it, give her the sort of stability she needed.
Dora, for her part, was now nearly thirty-seven. So far, she had given absolute devotion to her father, but she wanted to marry the man she loved, a man whom she’d known for twenty years, all her adult life. He was a dear family friend, someone they’d all loved and whose company they’d always all enjoyed. She wasn’t running away with a stranger. She couldn’t understand why her father had turned against him. William put a brave face on it. He invited them to have their honeymoon up at Rydal Mount, while he and Mary continued on a little tour of the West Country.
Over at Greta Hall, the 1830s brought some similarly sad events, plus a few very happy ones. A great bond of friendship had grown up between the members of the next generation at Greta Hall and Rydal, with Dora being the best friend of Sara Coleridge and Edith Southey. When Sara got married in 1829, to her first cousin Henry Nelson Coleridge, the bridesmaids included the three Southey girls (the youngest, Isabel, had died in 1826) and Dora, and the ceremony was performed by John Wordsworth.
But as the older children grew up, married and moved away, Greta Hall became a much quieter house, though still a hive of literary industry, with Southey as busy as ever. In 1835, Peel asked him to accept a baronetcy—an honour Wordsworth was never offered—but Southey declined. He didn’t think he had the wealth to support such an honour. ‘I could afford to die,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘but not to be disabled.’ By this, he meant he had good insurance policies, and some property which could be sold, but that he was still completely dependent on turning out books every year to support his family. In place of the baronetcy. Peel increased his small government pension, which he’d had since 1807, to £300 a year.
The first domestic tragedy at Greta Hall occurred in 1834. A visitor chanced to arrive at the house at the moment it happened and later a friend described what he’d witnessed.
On passing the drawing room he noticed several ladies apparently in a cheerful mood. On giving his name, after waiting five minutes, Southey came to him, the very image of distraction, took his hand and led him into his study. For a long time he remained silent—at length he told him he believed he must dismiss him; in time he disclosed to him that within the last five minutes, Mrs Southey had, without previous indication or symptom, gone raving mad, and to that hopeless degree that within an hour, he must take her to an asylum.
Edith Southey had been in a fairly depressed state since the death of her daughter Isabel, but appeared to have recovered, though she had never been a particularly lively lady—prone to fears about money, susceptible to religious mania. Southey did send her for a few months to a Retreat for Lunatics at York, then brought her home; but she never recovered her sanity.
Within a matter of months of each other, Rydal Mount and Greta Hall had been stricken with mental illness, each with what appeared to be incurable cases. But whereas Dorothy Wordsworth at least managed to gain some physical strength—enough to walk round the house on occasions—Edith Southey quickly deteriorated. She died two years later, in 1837.
In 1839, Southey surprised almost everyone by marrying Caroline Bowles, one of those literary ladies with whom he’d corresponded and whom he’d helped. She was twelve years younger than Southey and most of his children were greatly upset by the union. The family was split down the middle, with the Wordsworths taking the side of Kate, Southey’s last unmarried daughter, who for a while took refuge at Rydal Mount. Southey’s brother, and another daughter, approved of the marriage and tried to support the new Mrs Southey. Southey had pleaded with Caroline to marry him, feeling old and lonely and very miserable, but she quickly realized that she had become more of a nurse than a wife. His own mental and physical powers began to fade very quickly.
Within a year, Southey’s mind had gone. When William came to visit him in July 1840, he found him still trying to read. ‘Past taking pleasure in the presence of any of his old friends, he did not recognize me till he was told. Then his eyes flashed for a moment with their former brightness, but he sank into the state in which I had found him, patting with both hands his books affectionately, like a child.’
Southey died in March 1843, aged sixty-eight, and internal family hostilities broke out once again, with Kate Southey’s dislike of her stepmother splitting their relations and friends. The Wordsworths, still taking Kate’s side, were not invited to the funeral by Mrs Southey, but William went all the same, unasked, and later wrote the words for one of the memorials.
So ended the literary life of Greta Hall, for forty-three years one of the power-houses in the history of English literature. Together, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey had managed to move the centre of English poetry up to the Lake District and keep it there for well-nigh fifty years. Southey’s poems and books gave pleasure to thousands, but sadly, out of the forty-five books he published, very few are read today. Perhaps his best-known work, apart from his Life of Nelson, is his children’s story, ‘The Three Bears’. (In his original version it’s an old lady who eats their porridge.) He wrote prose with enormous fluency and great style, and, arguably, had more of either than Wordsworth, but in his poetry he lacked that vital ingredient: content. Whatever the faults in Wordsworth, and there are many, he did offer the world a philosophy, moral substance and deep feeling.
Within ten days of Southey’s death, Wordsworth was asked to be Poet Laureate, but at first he refused. He felt too old to write any commemorative verse. Southey, during his thirty years as Laureate, had not been officially obliged to write commemorative verse, but he usually had done so, all the same, though, when he had failed to think of anything suitable for Queen Victoria’s coronation, he had been greatly upset.
William had not gone unhonoured in the preceding years. In 1838, he received his first honorary degree, from the new University of Durham, which had pleased him. He even made a joke about it, telling Crabb Robinson in a letter that now he had a DCL, ‘you will not scruple when a difficult point of law occurs to consult me’.
The following year, the University of Oxford gave him a similar honour, and he received a tremendous ovation from all the undergraduates. He was told it had only been exceeded by the welcome for the Duke of Wellington. His own college at Cambridge, St John’s, gave him a lot of pleasure by commissioning his portrait by Pickergsill, to be hung in the college.
In 1842, William had given up his Distributorship of Stamps, having at last, after lengthy and devious negotiations, arranged that his son Willy could take it over. His numerous collections of poems were now selling much better than they’d ever sold before, bringing him in an income, by the late 1830s, of £500 a year; but, even so, the loss of his annual £400 Stamp income was quite a substantial one. Poor Willy had failed to get any job all these years, but now, at least, he had an income and a position for life. However, William’s loss had been made good a few months later when, thanks to Peel, he was made a pensioner on the Civil List, with a sum of £300 a year.
William was therefore rather obliged to Peel, and when Peel wrote personally to him, asking him again to take on the Laureateship, he felt forced to reconsider his decision. ‘I will undertake,’ wrote Peel, ‘that you will have nothing required from you. As the Queen can select for this honourable appointment no one whose claims for respect and honour, on account of eminence as a poet, can be placed in comparison with yours, I trust you will no longer hesitate to accept.’
In April 1843, Wordsworth therefore graciously agreed to be Poet Laureate. As his nephew Christopher observed, his grey hairs had long since deserved to be wreathed with laurels. ‘By his earlier poetical effusions, he had earned the bays before he wore them. He wrote laureate odes before he was the laureate. Those lyrical poems are more valuable because they were not official but the spontaneous effusions of inspiration.’
The muse fell silent after the acceptance of the Laureateship, but, at seventy-three, William was still fit and healthy and physically remarkably active. There were more triumphs, and troubles, to come.
Wordsworth’s ‘Extempore Effusion Upon the Death of James Hogg’ was written in a sudden burst of sad inspiration in 1835, almost thirty years after his supposedly greatest writing years were over. He was mourning the recent deaths of Coleridge, Lamb and others, wondering who would be next.
THE mighty Minstrel breathes no longer,
’Mid mouldering ruins low he lies;
And death upon the braes of Yarrow,
Has closed the Shepherd-poet’s eyes:
Nor has the rolling year twice measured,
From sign to sign, its steadfast course,
Since every mortal power of Coleridge
Was frozen at its marvellous source:
The rapt One, of the godlike forehead,
The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth:
And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle,
Has vanished from his lonely hearth.
Like clouds that rake the mountain-summits,
Or waves that own no curbing hand,
How fast has brother followed brother,
From sunshine to the sunless land!
Yet I, whose lids from infant slumber
Were earlier raised, remain to hear
A timid voice, that asks in whispers,
‘Who next will drop and disappear?’