Memoirs of William WordsworthPhillips, George S. (George Searle)
General
Memoirs of William Wordsworth
Phillips, George S. (George Searle)
Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography; Wordsworth, William, 1770-1850
In 1795, Wordsworth, accompanied by his sister, left Cumberland, for
Racedown Lodge, near Cremkerne, in Dorsetshire. The country was
delightful, and the house pleasantly situated, with a garden attached to
it. They passed their time in reading, gardening, writing, and in
translating Ariosto, and other Italian poets. We also find the poet
making imitations of Juvenal’s Satires, copies of which he sent to his
friend Wrangham, with a view to joint publication. They were never
printed, however; and Wordsworth, in 1805, when he was urged by the same
friend to allow them to appear, repudiated them altogether, and
regretted that he had spent so much time in their composition, declaring
that he had come to a “fixed resolution to steer clear,” now and for
ever, of all personal satire. During this same year of ’95, he finished
his poem on “Guilt and Sorrow,” and began his tragedy of “The
Borderers,” which was completed before the close of the following year.
It is a cumbrous affair, and will not act; but it contains some fine
passages. It was first published in 1842, and was offered to Mr. Harris,
the manager of the Covent Garden Theatre, through Mr. Knight, the actor,
and was, as Wordsworth confesses, “_judiciously_ returned, as not
calculated for the stage.”
In the year 1797, Coleridge came to Racedown. Miss Wordsworth describes
him in one of her letters as “a wonderful man;” his conversation teeming
with “soul, mind, and spirit,”--three things very nearly related to each
other, one would think. He is benevolent, too, good-tempered, and
cheerful, like her dear brother William, and “interests himself much
about every little trifle.” At first she thought him very plain--that is
for about “three minutes” for he is “pale, thin, has a wide mouth, thick
lips, and not very good teeth; longish, loose growing, half-curling,
rough black hair.” But he no sooner began to talk than she forgot his
want of comeliness, his bad teeth, and wide mouth, and was entranced by
the magic of his eloquence. “His eye,” she adds, “is large and full,
not very dark, but grey; such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul
the dullest expression; but it speaks every emotion of his animated
mind; it has more of the ‘poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling,’ than I
ever witnessed. He has fine dark eye-brows, and an overhanging
forehead.”
Such was the apparition of Coleridge, in Wordsworth’s house at Racedown.
The poet himself was delighted with his visitor, and they were soon in
deep conversation about literature, and their own several adventures,
and proposed argosies on that great and shoreless deep.--Wordsworth read
a new poem, which he had just written, called the “Ruined Cottage,”--and
Coleridge praised it highly. Then they sat down to tea, and presently
the latter “repeated two acts and a half of his tragedy, ‘Osoris.’”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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