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Famous writers and the Lake District

Literary visitors have been countless. The Scottish poet James Hogg, 'The Ettrick Shepherd', stayed in 1814 and, after dining with Wordsworth, De Quincey, Charles Lloyd and John Wilson, watched a display of brilliant meteors from the terrace. Hogg ventured the pleasantry that it was 'a triumphal airch raised in honor of the meeting of the poets', offending Wordsworth, who resented being lumped together with such minor authors. Hogg took his revenge by gently parodying Wordsworth in 'The Flying Tailor' and other pieces.

Keats called on his June 1818 walking tour, but Wordsworth was out canvassing for the Lowther (Tory) interest in the approaching election: Rest Bank Ambleside St John's in the Vale He was not at home [wrote Keats] nor was any member of his family I was much disappointed. I wrote a note for him and stuck it up over what I knew must be Miss Wordsworth's portrait and set forth again & we visited two Waterfalls in the neighborhood. Other visitors included William Wilberforce and his family, who stayed nearby from August to October 1818; Scott and J G Lockhart, who came with John Wilson in 1825 and (a less welcome guest) William Godwin, elderly anarchist philosopher, who visited in 1816. In youth, Wordsworth had been greatly impressed by his plans for an egalitarian society; now, a keen Tory, he lectured Godwin so fiercely that his guest left in a huff. Tennyson and James Spedding came in May 1835. At some time on the same holiday Tennyson climbed Loughrigg Fell opposite and looked across at Rydal Mount. 'Never was a poet more comfortably housed,' he reflected, perhaps with a touch of envy.

In 1849 there was a curious encounter when the twelve year old Algernon Charles Swinburne, an elfin figure with a mass of red gold hair, was brought by his parents to meet the aged Wordsworth, who read him Gray's 'Elegy' 'a poem which Swinburne ever after thoroughly disliked', according to a biographer. When Wordsworth said goodbye, adding 'I do not think, Algernon, that you will forget me,' the future author of Poems and Ballads burst into tears. In Wordsworth's old age Rydal Mount was a place of pilgrimage for American visitors. Emerson came in August 1833:

[Wordsworth's] daughters, called in their father, a plain looking elderly man in goggles & he sat down & talked with great simplicity. There may be in America some vulgarity of manners [said the poet] but that's nothing important; it comes out of the pioneer state of things; but ... I fear they are too much given to making of money & secondly to politics. In 1846 Harriet Martineau brought the American feminist Margaret Fuller. Hawthorne, who waited until 1855, had to be content with a tour of the late poet's garden.

A footnote on Rydal Mount is supplied by Mrs Humphry Ward, who with her daughter rented the house in September 1911. The daughter slept in the 'corner room, over the small sitting room'; late one night, as she recalled, she suddenly awoke: My first impression was of bright moonlight, but then I became strongly conscious of the moonlight striking on something, and I saw perfectly clearly the figure of an old man sitting in the armchair by the window. I said to myself 'That's Wordsworth!' He was sitting with either hand resting on the arm of the chair, leaning back, his head rather bent and he seemed to be looking down, straight in front of him with a rapt expression ... As I looked I cannot say, when I looked again, for I have no recollection of ceasing to look, or looking away the figure disappeared, and I became aware of the empty chair. I lay back again, and thought for a moment in a pleased and contented way 'That was Wordsworth.' And almost immediately I must have fallen asleep again.

Mrs Ward adds, 'We did not know it till afterwards that the seer of the vision was sleeping in Dorothy Wordsworth's room', where Wordsworth must often have sat with his sister in her last years of illness. Wordsworth gave great care to the garden, which is still beautiful. He himself made the terraces which run w from the house, and describes one of them in 'The Massy Ways, carried across these heights' (1826) On the mountain's side A poet's hand first shaped it; and the steps Of that same bard repeated to and fro At morn, at noon, and under moonlight skies Through the vicissitudes of many a year Forbade the weeds to creep o'er its grey line.

According to Dora Wordsworth, the impulsive Hartley Coleridge used to compose sonnets here, running up and down the terrace whilst thinking. Several poems mention the view from the garden. 'I watch, and long have watched, with calm regret' (1819) describes Wordsworth's feelings on watching a 'slowly sinking star' vanish behind the 'rocky parapet' of Loughrigg Fell opposite; a sonnet of 1819 addresses 'a projecting point of Loughrigg, nearly in front of Rydal Mount' across the lake:

Aerial Rock whose solitary brow From this low threshold daily meets my sight When I step forth to hail the morning light; Or quit the stars with a lingering farewell and imagines decorating it with an 'imperial Castle' in gratitude for the pleasure it has given. The lawn 'the sloping one approaching the kitchengarden' is described in a somewhat moralising poem of 1839:

This lawn, a carpet all alive With shadows flung from leaves to strive In dance, amid a press Of sunshine, an apt emblem yields Of world lings For a pleasant walk to Grasmere (which we shall later deal with from the other end) go uphill from Rydal Mount and take the signed bridleway w along the hillside, or reach it from the gate at the top w corner of the Rydal Mount garden.

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