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At the end of December, his health growing steadily worse, he conceived the project of a voyage to Madeira, and quitted Keswick with the intention, after paying a short visit to the Wordsworths, of betaking himself to London to make preparations. His stay at Grasmere, however, was longer than he had counted on.
Moreover, Wordsworth tells sister Dorothy that John will give him forty pounds to buy a bit of land by the lake, where they may build a cottage to live in henceforth. He says, also, that there is a small house vacant near the spot. They took that house; and thus the Wordsworths became "Lakers."
After having achieved the meeting, however, he soon announced his intention of settling in the valley; and he did so, putting his wife and children eventually into the cottage which the Wordsworths had now outgrown and left. There was little in him to interest or attach a family of regular domestic habits, like the Wordsworths, given to active employment, sensible thrift, and neighborly sympathy.
The Wordsworths were the originals of the Lake coterie, as we have seen. Born at Cockermouth, and a pupil at the Hawkeshead school, Wordsworth was looking homewards when he settled in the District. The others came in consequence. Coleridge brought his family to Greta Hall, near Keswick; and with them came Mrs. Lovell, one of the three Misses Fricker, of whom Coleridge and Southey had married two.
After some hesitation, Coleridge consented, and that winter he set off for a visit to Germany with the Wordsworths. It was on their return from this visit that Wordsworth again changed his home and went to live at Dove Cottage, near Grasmere, in the Lake District, which as a boy he had known and loved. And here, among the hills, he made his home for the rest of his life.
If the supernatural becomes natural and the natural becomes supernatural, the world regains its splendour and charm. Lines may be drawn from their predecessors to Coleridge and the Wordsworths, but the work they did was distinctly original, and renewed proof was given of the folly of despair even when fertility seems to be exhausted.
If the law of demand and supply is as applicable to mental products as it is to the imports of commerce, then we may readily understand that the realm of the ideal, which was ruled by the Wordsworths, Carlyles and Longfellows, should be supplanted by a realm in which the master minds should be political economists, or explorers, or railway kings, or financial magnates, or empire-builders of some description.
The two poets only received thirty guineas for their work, and the publisher lost his money. The taste of the country was not yet ripe for Wordsworth's poetic experiment. Immediately after the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, the two Wordsworths and Coleridge started from Yarmouth for Hamburg.
But there is a prevalent recklessness, grossness, and mingled extravagance and discomfort in the family management, which, I am told, was far worse when the Wordsworths came than it is now.
Truly this year, from April, 1797, to April, 1798, was the annus mirabilis of his life. Never again was he so happy, never again did he do such good work, as when he harboured in this cottage, and slipped through the back gate to walk in the garden or read in the library of his good friend, Thomas Poole, or trudged down the road to the woods of Alfoxton to talk with the Wordsworths.
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