DOVE COTTAGE, GRASMERE Dove Cottage was the home of Wordsworth for seven years and bears traces of his care. Many of the flowering shrubs were planted by his own hand. The stones laid down in the garden are steps up its steep incline to a terrace higher than the cottage, over which he had a view of Grasmere Lake, and of Silver How beyond. When Wordsworth left Dove Cottage, De Quincey resided in it for many years. EDITOR'S PREFACE THE purpose of this volume, as the title indicates, is to trace the relations of poets with the aspects of “their ain countrie," or with the scenes where they built their homes, or pitched their transient camps. "A wanderer is man from his birth," Mr. Matthew Arnold writes, and the habits of many poets have been nomadic. There is little of his native Devonshire in Coleridge; Sussex has no conspicuous part in the making of Shelley; the Muse of Byron is influenced rather by the Mediterranean than by Dee and Don. But other poets are home-keeping, like Wordsworth and Scott; their favourite scenes are those among which they were born and spent their years of boyhood and their later lives. Tennyson, too, had a strong attachment to his native "Brook"-in which, if The Miller's Daughter be autobiographic, he was a very idle angler-and to the level wastes of the Lincolnshire fen country. There are poets who "generalise" landscape; they give us “a practicable wood," a pasteboard cottage, a stream which V 164962 PR 109 L3 1907a MAIN punctually "purls," and the rest of the décor of the eighteenth century. Drayton, on the other hand, seems to have had minute knowledge of every bourne and beck, as well as of every river, in England. Some poets, anxious, in Wordsworth's phrase, “to write with their eyes on the object," take notes of landscape, as painters make rapid pencil sketches. To take such notes on aspects of the atmosphere, of the hills, woods, and even the most retiring species of the vegetable kingdom, was the practice of Wordsworth and of his sister Dorothy. The ingredients thus collected might or might not come handy in the composi tion of a poem. Thus Dorothy Wordsworth would chronicle the circumstance that "the moon was immensely large, the sky scattered over with clouds. These soon closed in, contracting the dimensions of the moon without concealing her." This note of phenomena very familiar was made in Somerset. Coleridge read it, and did it into blank verse, in a pocket-book : Behind the thin Grey cloud that covered but not hid the sky, The round full moon looked small. The piece of local colour was now ready for instant use, in case Coleridge was writing a poem in blank Wordsworth also exploited Dorothy's note, in verse. |