The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge. Adam Sisman
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for practical reasons. Calvert may have given Wordsworth some money for his journey; he then mounted his horse and rode off into the north, leaving Wordsworth to proceed, as Dorothy put it, supported by his ‘firm friends, a pair of stout legs’. This unexpected parting turned out to be serendipitous, because the impressions Wordsworth received during the rest of the tour proved inspirational. On foot, and alone with his thoughts, he was more responsive to the landscape, and more open to encounters along the way.
His path took him along chalk tracks across the vast plateau of Salisbury Plain, the wind whistling through unending dreary fields of corn, crows eddying in the sky. It was a desolate place, with few trees or hedges to break the monotony; barely inhabited then, but pockmarked with prehistoric remains. As he walked, Wordsworth meditated on the savage past, and on the ‘calamities, principally consequent on war, to which, more than other classes of men, the poor are subject’. He imagined a vagrant ex-soldier, caught in the open as a storm began to sweep the Plain, seeking shelter from the driving rain and howling wind among the monoliths of Stonehenge. It is tempting to speculate that Wordsworth did the same, especially as contemporary records describe ‘a storm of extraordinary intensity [that] lashed southern England with hailstones as big as six inches round’.26 But perhaps the temptation should be resisted, because in a letter written many years afterwards, Wordsworth recalled how ‘overcome with heat and fatigue I took my siesta among the Pillars of Stonehenge’, and complained jokingly that he ‘was not visited by the Muse in my Slumbers’.27
If the muse left him alone on this occasion, she cannot have been far off, because another vision came to Wordsworth on the Plain, where relics of the distant past – standing stones, barrows, ancient tracks, stone circles, mounds and hill forts – are more evident than anywhere else in Britain. In The Prelude he tells us that
While through those vestiges of ancient times
I ranged, and by the solitude o’ercome,
I had a reverie and saw the past,
Saw multitudes of men, and here and there
A single Briton in his wolf-skin vest
With shield and stone-ax, stride across the wold;
The voice of spears was heard, the rattling spear
Shaken by arms of mighty bone, in strength
Long mouldered, of barbaric majesty.28
Wordsworth goes on to describe a nightmare of darkness descending (perhaps a lowering storm?), a sacrificial altar lit by dismal flames, and the groans of those waiting to die; followed by a more peaceful vision of bearded Druids pointing with white wands to the starry sky.
From Salisbury Plain Wordsworth made his way via Bath towards the Welsh border, crossing the Severn Estuary somewhere near Bristol and then ascending the Wye Valley. Today, the lower Wye is still lovely enough to stir the heart, especially when sunlight penetrates the woods that line the valley’s steep sides, glinting on the fast-flowing river below. Brooding cliffs tower against the sky. Ruined castles perch high above the gorge. Celebrated for its picturesque qualities,* this was one of the first places in Britain to attract tourists, and pleasure boats plied up and down the river. Its appeal was marred by importunate beggars who haunted the ruins of Tintern Abbey, and a number of ironworks belching smoke into the air, but neither seems to have bothered Wordsworth. Poetic inspirations came to him one after another: the lovely valley itself, Tintern Abbey, a girl he met at Goodrich Castle who became the heroine of ‘We are Seven’, a tinker he met at Builth who served as a model for ‘Peter Bell’. Above all, the river itself:
… Oh! How oft –
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir unprofitable and the fever of the world
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart –
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
Wordsworth continued north, reaching his friend Robert Jones’s cottage in north Wales towards the end of August. Here he seems to have paused, in anticipation of an onward journey to Halifax to rendezvous with Dorothy, whom he had not seen for almost three years. ‘Oh my dear, dear sister,’ he had written to her earlier that summer, ‘with what transport shall I again meet you, with what rapture shall I again wear out the day in your sight. I assure you so eager is my desire to see you that all obstacles vanish. I see you in a moment running or rather flying to my arms.’29
William and Dorothy had spent most of their lives apart. After the death of their mother in 1778, Dorothy, then only six years old, had been separated from her siblings and sent to live with her mother’s cousin, Elizabeth Threlkeld, more than a hundred miles off in Halifax, while her four brothers – Richard, William, and her two younger brothers, John and Christopher – remained with their father in Cockermouth. She did not return for her father’s funeral in 1784, and was reunited with her brothers only in the summer of 1787, after a gap of nine years. ‘You know not how happy I am in their company,’ she wrote at the time to her bosom friend, Jane Pollard. ‘They are just the kind of boys I could wish them, they are so affectionate and kind to me as makes me love them more and more every day.’ William, then seventeen and nearly two years Dorothy’s senior, was due to go up to Cambridge in the autumn. ‘William and Christopher are very clever boys at least so they appear in the partial eyes of a Sister.’30
The reunion between Dorothy and her brothers in 1787 was all too brief. After a few weeks the young family was once again dispersed: William to Cambridge,* her eldest brother Richard to London where he would train as a lawyer, her two younger brothers back to school in Hawkshead. Dorothy remained unhappily with her grandparents in Penrith until William returned from university the following summer. Later that year Dorothy’s uncle, the Reverend William Cookson, married and took up a living in East Anglia. It was decided that Dorothy, by now sixteen, should accompany her uncle and aunt to the Norfolk village of Forncett St Peter, and live with them there. She would remain at the Forncett rectory for five years, helping her aunt with her burgeoning family and running a little school. It was a lonely life for Dorothy, isolated from the friends she had grown up alongside in Yorkshire. The Cooksons did not share her pursuits and pleasures, though they treated her kindly and affectionately. But Forncett was conveniently close to Cambridge,† and William was able to visit her there in the holidays.
There was a special sympathy between these two. Sensitive, passionate and uninhibited, Dorothy acted as a lightning rod for her more reserved brother, showing him flashes of feeling. ‘I have thought of you perpetually,’ he wrote to her while on his walking tour in the Alps, ‘and never have my eyes burst upon a scene of particular loveliness but I have almost instantly wished that you could for a moment be transported to the place where I stood to enjoy it.’31 Wordsworth spent the Christmas vacation before his finals at Forncett; every morning brother and sister would walk in the garden for two hours, pacing backwards and forwards on the gravel arm in arm, even when the keenest north wind was whistling among the trees, and every evening they would walk another two hours or so, engaged in ‘long, long conversations’.
‘I never thought of the cold when he was with me,’ wrote Dorothy to Jane Pollard, to whom she confessed that though she was fond of all her brothers, William was her favourite. In comparison to their youngest brother Christopher (now also at Cambridge), while each was ‘steady and sincere in his attachments’, William was more ardent, with