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

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

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 Poets 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 brothers 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 Wordsworths poetry know both the poet and his sister, and what they were to each other, will need nothing more than the Journal itself. If p. xit 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 Wordsworths 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 fathers 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 mothers 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 fathers 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 p. xirestored him to the society of his sister at Penrith. This meeting is thus described in the Prelude: ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 28880
Author: Wordsworth, Dorothy
Release Date: May 19, 2009
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Editor: Shairp, John Campbell, 1819-1885