Last Of The Rydal Dorothys

( Originally Published 1902 )

FEBRUARY 25, 1890.

THE sadness of the Bratha and the Rotha, how it grows upon one ! Time was when the merriest-hearted met for dance and song in that Low Brathay Hall where Christopher North wooed and won the beauty of Westmoreland.

I never pass the grey old bridge at Clappers-gate without a thought of those happy lovers leaving " the sound of the flute, violin, bas-soon," and passing out to gaze beneath a summer moon on Bratha's reach of laughing, rippling silver.

But as I gaze, a solemn sound wails upward from the river bed. Those canal diggers, who have, for a poor ten pound's worth of possible hay-grass, robbed the river near the Brathay Church of all charm, all music, all glory of broken light for ever, have heaven be thanked for it ! kept their foolishly short-sighted and ungenerous hands off the Bratha near the old Hall. And there still, as of old to the ears of Charles Lloyd and De Quincey, " the sound of pealing anthems, . . . the sound of choral chanting distant, solemn, saintly," steals upward ever from the river's rocky channel. There in the dawn, " when all things are locked in sleep, and only some uneasy murmur or cock-crow in the faint distance gives a hint of resurrection for earth and her generations," we can still hear, as De Quincey used to hear in that same chanting of the little mountain river, " a requiem over departed happiness, and a protestation against the thought that so many excellent creatures, but a little lower than the angels, whom we have seen only to love in this life so many of the good, the brave, the beautiful, the wise can have appeared for no higher purpose or prospect than simply to point a moral, to cause a little joy and many tears, a few perishing moons of happiness and years of vain regret."

What is it that so fills the Bratha and the Rotha's voice with melancholy ? It is simply this, that there are great ghosts upon the river banks from its hill-birth to its rest within the lake.

The rivers have outrun a race of men and women whose like we scarce can hope to see again.

" Their form remains, their function never dies ;
While they, the brave, the mighty, and the wise "

have vanished.

The Bratha, that soothed Charles Lloyd and his tender-hearted son the Langdale pastor, that saddened De Quincey, that gladdened Christopher North, that was the playmate of Hartley Coleridge in the days when he came to old Mr. Longmire's house in Clappersgate, to be near the Lloyd's—" those four noble lads that were his schoolfellows, and their admirable mother," as he tells us. The river Bratha, that was afterwards Hartley's friend when wise and good Mr. Harden of Brathay Hall showed him true kindness, and Mr. Branker of Croft Lodge gave him hospitality that was sometimes more well meant than wise. The river, by which so often Joseph Harden walked and talked with Owen Lloyd ; the Bratha, that so delighted Mrs. Gaskell in Mill Brow days; that river that heard in later times the sweet voice of Alice Fletcher, and knew her smile.

The river Rotha, that stirred the heart of Dorothy Wordsworth, and inspired her brother the Laureate ; that glistened in the dreams of S. T. Coleridge, and may have haunted De Quincey's sleep ; that sighed along the lawn whereby lay Dora Quillinan stricken unto death ; that made Arnold in his study at Rugby a man o'er again, when he thought the holiday was near, and the groves of Loughrigg's Cithaeron were waiting to receive him ; the river Rotha, that at the stepping-stones sung on in the ears of the poet's son William, and spoke peace to William Edward Forster, the man of peace, when he came for short rest beside its banks. The river, that ever recalled to her home the good and beautiful Mrs. Fletcher of Lancrigg ; that cast its spell upon her Arctic son-in-law Sir John that cheered her gifted daughter, Mrs. Davy. The river by whose banks Mrs. Hemans strayed, and Miss Fenwick found such delight, and of which Harriet Martineau mused. The river that in later times made a headmaster, Edward Thring, forget his care in holiday-song and scramble, for no man ever loved the Rotha's pools more passionately than Edward Thring. The river that rejoiced the young heart of Arthur Clough, and that other Arthur of golden memory. That haunted the singingtime of Matthew Arnold, the singer of both. What can these streams be to us to-day but streams of tears for the great dead gone, and brooks by which the harp in silence must be hung ?

Today the alders droop their tassels in rosiest fairness about the Rotha's bank ; the willows stand almost as white as budding almond-flower ; the wrens flit, as they flitted half a century ago before Faber's delighted eyes, hither and thither along the mossy walls ; the water-ousel glances from stone to stone, flashes like a silver star, and disappears, then curtseys quaintly and bobs his white throat and breast from sun to shadow on the boulder's edge ; that other ousel, " the mellow ousel," flutes from tree to tree, but all is out of tune. River and bird and sunshine and blue air lack harmony with our spirits ; and the wanderer by the Bratha or the Rotha today might say with Wordsworth :

Your sound my heart of peace bereaves,
It robs my heart of rest.
Thou thrush, that singest loud and loud and free,
Into yon row of willows flit,
Upon that alder sit,
Or sing another song, or choose another tree."

And wherefore, but because today, Tuesday, February 25, 1890, from yonder white house in the trees to yonder churchyard on its rocky knoll, affectionate hands are to carry to her long rest the last of the Dorothys of Rydal Mount, and the book of Wordsworthian memories is well-nigh closed for ever in this vale.

It is not only of Mrs. Harrison we think to-day ; it is of that " seraphic-faced " one to whose musical voice long years ago the people of Ambleside listened on Sunday morn, the lover of the Bratha and the Rotha, the singer of the marvellous charm of Loughrigg's height, he of whom Wordsworth once said to Aubrey de Vere that he could see more things in a mountain ramble than his own accustomed eyes perceived.

Frederick Faber, the young poet, is bound up in my mind indissolubly with the presence of that gracious lady who, with the weight of eighty-eight years upon her head, goes down to the grave today.

Faber was one of the Harrison household. Fifty-two years ago, or more, the young clergy-man came to act as tutor to Mrs. Harrison's boys. How he loved the children of his charge may be gathered from his volume of lyrics and sonnets. What he was to Matthew, the elder, as he roved by meadow and lawn on Loughrigg, on Rothay's white-lipped strand," or by Thirlmere's side, may therein be read. As he loved the children, so did the beautiful mother of those children honour him. I have watched the workings of that serene and lovely old face as Mrs. Harrison spoke of Faber what his converse and communion with her household in young days meant ; and quite lately have been permitted to see, in a friend's album, a sonnet written in Faber's clear, methodical hand, dated August 25, 1838, which speaks volumes for the tender ties that bound the family of Green Bank to the young poet tutor.

To RICHARD HARRISON, GREEN BANK.

" Dear little one ! and can thy mother find
In those soft lineaments, that move so free
To smiles or tears, as holiest infancy
About thy heart its glorious web doth wind,
A faithful likeness of my sterner mind?
Ah ! then there must be tunes unknown to me,
When my lost boyhood, like a wandering air,
Comes for a while to pass upon my face,
Giving me back the dear familiar grace
O'er which my mother poured her last fond prayer !
But sin and age will rob me of this power,
Though now my heart, like an uneasy lake,
Some broken images at times may take
From forms which fade more sadly every hour ! "

The sonnet, as printed in Faber's poems, is entitled, " To a Little Boy." That little boy fascinated Faber : he watched him in all his movements, as the sonnet Richard's Tree " testifies ; and when he was leaving Green Bank in 1840, he wrote upon the fly-leaf of a volume of poems the following words : " A Christmas gift to my little facsimile, R. H., lest we should never meet again," and thereunder these two verses :

" If it so be my corpse should rock
Beneath a foreign wave,
Or feed, as poets' should, sweet weeds,
Above a foreign grave,

In lot of life, in orphanhood,
In talents cramped and marred,
Soft child ! be thou, though like in face,
Unlike this weak-willed bard."

F. W. F.

Green Bank, 1840.

The sonnet " On My Pupil's Portrait " is but another record of the joy he felt " in the light spirits and the humours wild " of those Harrison boys at Green Bank.

It was no wonder that the poet of Loughrigg and the Bratha found warm friends in that Harrison household. Not only was he passionately fond of his pupils, but he cared for one at least of their recreative amusements. Readers of Father Faber's poems will remember how devotedly he loved music, and the Green Bank home was a nest of nightingales. Matthew grew up with a fine baritone voice. Words-worth's voice is remembered still. John, about whose delicate childish life so much of the gentleness of home circled, was passionately fond of music ; and the fine tenor voice and cultivated singing of that son with the beautiful face, Richard, will not be forgotten by those who heard him.

Faber encouraged the singing ; and not one of the least noteworthy reminiscences of Amble-side in the tourist season was the exquisite music of the little choir that the Harrison family and Faber and his " cathedrals," or collegians, led in the old church on the hill.

" You know," said an old inhabitant to me once, " we loved Faber, and do still, for all his Romish ways. Why, before he came, Amble-side was very dark. He started evening service in the old church, and monthly communion ; and he it was who first got the folks to sing at the services : for you see Parson Dames was going downhill in them days, quite an old man, and he left a deal to Faber, and Faber loved the people, and the people loved him. Eh, dear ! but it was a pity he went over ! And we told him so. But he used to say : ' It will be all right at the last' ; and we quite expected he was coming back to us. Oh dear ! oh dear ! and he never came."

To-day, as one walks by the river-side, one looks across to Rothay Cottage and thinks of the music and the mind of one who was pre-eminently the poet of the two rivers, who, though he loved "the elder river," and was "solaced and calmed by Brathay's flooded noise," yet dwelt on the banks of " the younger river," the Rotha, and tells us that

" Many a night the joyousness and mirth
Of its dear flow had been his vesper song."

To the last Faber cared for this vale, even as his memory is cared for still by the dwellers in it ; and he found at Green Bank the young fresh child-life that called forth so much of his tenderness and his song.

Green Bank! Yes so in Faber's days the home of Mrs. Harrison was called ; and like enough when she and her husband, Benson of the Lund, came hither from Ulverston in 1827, the comparative absence of the present stately trees upon the lawn gave force to that name.

She cared for those trees that her own hand planted. She had something of her poet cousin's fondness for leaving the trees in quiet possession of the ground they grew in. I remember how her face flushed with pleasure when she gave me permission to ask her agent to tell the hedgerow-cutter not to disturb a beautiful young birch tree in one of the fields below her house. May that birch be spared for many a year, even as wise care has spared one or two other noticeable trees in Ambleside. May it flourish in mid valley, a monument of Mrs. Harrison.

It is a long while to look back to 1827, when she who had been married four years came to the Green Bank, overlooking Ambleside, and settled down on the How, or high place, up which the old Norse shepherds had gone when they scaled the sheep-heights, the ' Faar-felt '—the Fairfield—of today.

She came back into a valley that knew her well. Her cousin Dora was close by at Rydal Mount. Sara Coleridge, whose acquaintance she had made as a child, was still at "dear Greta Hall," a happy lover now for five years past.

The Lloyds had left old Brathay. The Hardens were at Brathay Hall. Wilson of Elleray had removed to Edinburgh, and only paid flying visits to the Lake country. The Arnolds and beautiful Mrs. Fletcher had not yet come into the neighbourhood. De Quincey was under his cloud, away in London, busy upon articles for magazines, of which the most memorable in 1827 was the strange one, " Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts " ; but Mrs. De Quincey, with her four bonnie bairns, was at Town End. Owen Lloyd, love-able " lile Owey," was in lodgings at Mrs. Nicholson's ; and Hartley Coleridge, Owen Lloyd's friend, and joint-partner with " our Owen " in the hearts of the people, was in and out of the Ambleside houses. He had just escaped from the troubles, nay, the agonies, of being tutor against his will in Mr. Suart's school at Fisherbeck ; probably he had not Yet removed to Mrs. Fleming's at Grasmere.

But Mrs. Harrison would have a largish circle of friends. Beyond the Raise were the Southeys ; and whenever Mrs. Stanger Mary Calvert that was came from London, she would call to see her old friend of the Bellevue and Rydal Mount days. Clever Miss Watson, too, was at Calgarth, the Barbers were at Grasmere, the Flemings at Rayrigg.

Whenever Christopher North did come to Elleray, he would be quite certain to come over to Ambleside to have a " crack an' wi' girtest cock-breeder theeraboot, yan Jonathan Birkett they cawed him " ; and quite as certainly would he call in at Green Bank, to see the Dorothy of Rydal Mount days. For Wilson loved to look upon a fair face, and a fair face was that face of Dorothy Wordsworth, that a few years before, seen momently in the little stationer's shop at Ulverston, had so enchanted the widower of Water Park as to haunt his memory till he made her his bride.

" You know," said one who can still remember the day when Mrs. Harrison came to Green Bank, " she was what we call about here a very comely body, ' lish' and tall, with the sweetest mouth that ever smiled, and the straightest nose as ever was set upon face. I have seen her off and on for the past sixty-three years, and her face seemed to me to grow more likeable with every year. Other folks' faces worsen with age, hers improved with it."

It was given to me to see that comely face, with its clear girlish complexion, its benevolent smile, its dark and noticeable grey eyes, its silver setting of white hair, only when all the sorrows of life and the stress of years had passed over it ; and yet so beautiful in its serenity did it appear, that I have walked miles to gaze upon it. And I used to come away from the interview with words in my ears, written on a different subject " Sits like a throned lady sending out a gracious look all over her domain."

No wonder, thought I, as she sat in state within her ample arm-chair, the snow-white handkerchief on the table close by, her hand upon her ebon walking-stick, her white cap exquisitely set on to set off her features, her red shawl carefully arranged over her black velvet gown, a perfect picture of what beautiful old age should be, that Faber the poet worshipped, that Hartley Coleridge teased her as a child by running round the table to catch her and look at her face, and that still tradition in Ambleside tells of the pretty sight of the two Dorothys clattering along, in clogs and cloaks, through the snow to school at Miss Fletcher's of Bellevue, a veritable pair of Iittle Red Riding Hoods. And small marvel that the fair orphan child should have been welcomed by her father's cousin to be inmate of Rydal Mount.

You know," Mrs. Harrison would say with a twinkle in her eye, " they called me at first plain Dorothy in those days. There were three Dorothys at Rydal Mount altogether, Miss Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, and myself, plain Dorothy, and sometimes instead of plain Dorothy I was called ' Middle Dolly.'"

It must have been with no small pleasure that, somewhere about 1813, the year after Catherine and Thomas, the boy " whom every eye that looked on loved," had been so sadly and swiftly removed from the poet's household, the Rydal party was thus increased by the fresh young girl of thirteen summers, whose father, Richard Wordsworth, an attorney at White-haven, had died.

She was the oldest of the Rydal children, older than Dora by nearly four years ; but she always spoke as if they looked upon themselves as much of an age, and I suspect that lessons were more in Dora's way than her own. There at Rydal Mount for six years she lived, and as she thus spent the six years of life that are the most impressionable, she naturally became Rydalian, and reverential for Rydal Mount.

One of course used to speak of those six years, but one gathered rather from what she said that there was a solemnity about Words-worth, and an awe in her mind, that kept her, the little cousin once removed, at a distance from the poet. And she would speak of the pre-Rydalian days, and her far-off memories of the fine folk at Whitehaven going out to dinner at 3 P.M. in their sedan-chairs and returning in their sedans from their card-parties and punch at ten, with something of relief.

But it was plain that if to her the poet's soul was as a star, and dwelt apart," and she did not read all Wordsworth's poems, she honoured him as a man, and loved him for his tender kindness and constant thoughtfulness and affection ; and there are still living in Ambleside those who remember how, on a time when Mrs. Harrison's life was hanging in the balance, the poet would walk about in the Scale How gardens, by the hour together, waiting for the latest bulletin, and how, day after day, he would take his peaked cap and cloak and go through all weathers to hear " what progress to recovery Dorothy was making."

And now that same Dorothy, Dorothy the third of Rydal Mount, having outlived her generation, has passed beyond all questionings of times that were lang sync. She who, a few weeks ago, was so full of life and apparent energy as to press a friend to come next summer to pay her a visit at Water Park, has quietly fallen on sleep.

"An old age serene and bright,
And lovely as a Lapland night,
Has led her to the grave."

In yonder churchyard six little white crosses, upon pedestals of grey limestone, tell how her husband and her children have preceded her to the land whence none return. And a grave is open to receive the mother of a family whereof but one remains to mourn.

I had no heart to attend those last sad obsequies, but with a friend walked up to Loughrigg's bossy height, today lustrous as burnished gold beneath the sun. Talk of " the first mild day of March, each minute lovelier than before "; the day was a May day, as far as light, and warmth, and blessing of soft air could go.

Windermere stretched a flawless mirror beneath an azure sky. But for the white half-moon above Wansfell, there was no speck in all the heaven. The shadows lay deep purple in the hills ; the woodlands swept deep purple up the Fairfield hollow. Bratha shone from pool to pool like silver ; and from the Old Man of Coniston, right round by Bowfell to Seat Sandal, from Seat Sandal to the coned ridges of the High Street range, was one unbroken pomp and glory of triumphant spring.

The thrush sang through the hazel tassels ; the tits chattered from the budding birch ; the mountain sheep lay in shadow of the juniper; and the red mice ran through the gold rust of the bracken.

There on a mossèd boulder we sat, my friend and I, and suddenly the great vase of air above the grey little town throbbed, and the muffled peal told us that the sad cortège had left Scale How, to bear the remains of the last Dorothy of Rydal Mount to their final resting-place.

One, two, three, four, five, six. In solemn single strokes and slow the Ambleside bells tolled out. There was a plaintive tone in that C-major chime that was almost human, and when one put words to it, one found the bells saying in clear English accent, " Good-bye, old friend, good-bye."

A shepherd passed, dressed in sable weeds from head to foot. " Gaain' to th' funeral," he said ; " eh my ! but what, she'll be missed by many a poor person, will Mrs. Harrison now. I darsay theer's a scoor o' more hes leuked to her weekly for these years past."

One remembered how gracious in her benevolence the last of the Dorothys had been, not only to Ambleside but to Ulverston also. And one had heard it said : " Oh, you know, when anything was wanted, we turned to Green Bank. We were quite sure that if it was a good cause, it would appeal to her." She gave to schools, to church, to Mechanics' Institute, to the Volunteers, and to all who really were in want, but she let not her left hand know what her right hand did. But not in the heart of shepherd, mechanic, or volunteer will her memory be so dear as in the heart of the village school-child. For as long as the old rush-bearing custom, which old Mr. North put on its present footing is continued, as long as Owen Lloyd's rush-bearing hymn is sung, it will be remembered that once a-year, for more than two generations, the scholars assembled on the slopes of the Green Bank meadow for tea and sports upon the Monday, and bore their " burdens" as the flowery insignia are locally called, from the Ambleside church to the garden grounds of " kindly Mrs. Harrison."

But the bell tolled on—" Good-bye, old friend, good-bye." And darkly seen between the houses in the valley, the long procession moved from Scale How to the church. Then the bell ceased. It seemed as if a hymn was faintly wafted upward, and presently from the church the congregation poured into the sunniest of churchyards and we knew that ashes to ashes, dust to dust had been said, the prayer prayed, the last blessing given.

We rose to descend into the vale to see in quiet the spot where, with the regret of all the neighbourhood, was laid one who, for sixty-three years, had been a generous genial presence in the people's midst.

Still the sun shone and the lake lay in perfect calm, and the birds sang as though it had been May. There was something suitable even in the day's sun and gladness to this home-going of the third Dorothy of Rydal Mount for one remembered how Mrs. Fletcher had written of the poet Wordsworth's funeral, under date April 27, 1850:

" We saw him laid within the quiet grave.
'Twas a day
Of most rare brightness, and the little birds
Sang no sad requiem o'er the hallowed spot.
All nature glowed instinct with tender love."

For the friend of Dora, her almost elder sister, gentle, serene, beautiful Mrs. Harrison of Scale How, the birds also sang, and nature glowed upon her funeral morn.