Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803

Excerpt

PREFACE.

Those who have long known the poetry of Wordsworth will be no strangers to the existence of this Journal of his sister, which is now for the first time published entire.  They will have by heart those few wonderful sentences from it which here and there stand at the head of the Poet’s ‘Memorials of a Tour in Scotland in 1803.’  Especially they will remember that ‘Extract from the Journal of my Companion’ which preludes the ‘Address to Kilchurn Castle upon Loch Awe,’ and they may sometimes have asked themselves whether the prose of the sister is not as truly poetic and as memorable as her brother’s verse.  If they have read the Memoirs of the Poet published by his nephew the Bishop of Lincoln, they will have found there fuller extracts from the Journal, which quite maintain the impression made by the first brief sentences.  All true Wordsworthians then will welcome, I believe, the present publication.  They will find in it not only new and illustrative light on those Scottish poems which they have so long known, but a faithful commentary on the character of the poet, his mode of life, and the manner of his poetry.  Those who from close study of Wordsworth’s poetry know both the poet and his sister, and what they were to each other, will need nothing more than the Journal itself.  If it were likely to fall only into their hands, it might be left without one word of comment or illustration.  But as it may reach some who have never read Wordsworth, and others who having read do not relish him, for the information of these something more must be said.  The Journal now published does not borrow all its worth from its bearing on the great poet.  It has merit and value of its own, which may commend it to some who have no heart for Wordsworth’s poetry.  For the writer of it was in herself no common woman, and might have secured for herself an independent reputation, had she not chosen rather that other part, to forget and merge herself entirely in the work and reputation of her brother.

Dorothy Wordsworth was the only sister of the poet, a year and a half younger, having been born on Christmas Day 1771.  The five children who composed the family, four sons and one daughter, lost their mother in 1778, when William was eight, and Dorothy six years old.  The father died five years afterwards, at the close of 1783, and the family home at Cockermouth was broken up and the children scattered.  Before his father’s death, William, in his ninth year, had gone with his elder brother to school at Hawkshead, by the lake of Esthwaite, and after the father died Dorothy was brought up by a cousin on her mother’s side, Miss Threlkeld, afterwards Mrs. Rawson, who lived in Halifax.  During the eight years which Wordsworth spent at school, or, at any rate, from the time of his father’s death, he and his sister seem seldom, if ever, to have met.

The first college vacation in the summer of 1788 brought him back to his old school in the vale of Esthwaite, and either this or the next of his undergraduate summers restored him to the society of his sister at Penrith.  This meeting is thus described in the ‘Prelude:’—

‘In summer, making quest for works of art,
Or scenes renowned for beauty, I explored
That streamlet whose blue current works its way
Between romantic Dovedale’s spiry rocks;
Pried into Yorkshire dales, or hidden tracts
Of my own native region, and was blest
Between these sundry wanderings with a joy
Above all joys, that seemed another morn
Risen on mid-noon; blest with the presence, Friend! 
Of that sole sister, her who hath been long
Dear to thee also, thy true friend and mine,
Now, after separation desolate
Restored to me—such absence that she seemed
A gift then first bestowed.’

They then together wandered by the banks of Emont, among the woods of Lowther, and ‘climbing the Border Beacon looked wistfully towards the dim regions of Scotland.’  Then and there too Wordsworth first met that young kinswoman who was his wife to be.

During the following summers the Poet was busy with walking tours in Switzerland and North Italy, his residence in France, his absorption in the French Revolution, which kept him some years longer apart from his sister.  During those years Miss Wordsworth lived much with her uncle Dr....