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“Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods,

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty word

Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,

And what perceive; well pleased to recognise

In nature and the language of the sense,

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.”

-William Wordsworth, ‘Lines, composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour.  July 13, 1798.’

St. Anthony of Egypt, famed amongst the saints as ‘the dweller in the wilderness,’ who sought to imitate Christ amongst His Creation, was accustomed to seek the guidance of the Spirit in the natural world, rather than in the sacred text.  When asked how it was, that he, so holy a man, did without a Bible, Anthony replied, “My book is the nature of created things, and it is present when I want to read the words of God.”

Such divine and simple love of Nature lived again in William Wordsworth.  He was born at Cockermouth, fortuitously within view of the Lakeland fells, and it was amongst the majestic scenery of the Lakes of Westmorland and Cumbria that Wordsworth passed most of his life.  Amongst the wild and solemn beauty of the mountain peaks, rising and falling amidst the placidity of the stretching waters, every lonely crevice of Nature was filled with some woody dell, or pleasant, green nook; here did Wordsworth find that sacred and higher communion, and that divinity with which his poetry is so well and fully infused*.  To the Lakeland landscape the higher influences of Wordsworth may be traced, and to its landscape is also owed the birth of a new era, in which the ancient was revived, and the new well fed, amidst the sublimity of Wordsworth, and the romanticism of his contemporary, Walter Scott.

For this was the commencement of the Romantic age in art and literature, and Wordsworth, along with Scott in the North, and such men as Keats and Shelley, were its forerunners.  To their voices were subsequently added the naturalism of John Clare, the patriotism and Christian idealism of Lord Tennyson, and the medievalism of the Pre-Raphaelites, as typified by John Ruskin and William Morris.  They were the antagonists of the Industrial Revolution; but it was not the mechanization of labour that was their sole complaint. 

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the world seemed overturned. The atheist Republicanism of the Revolution swept across the ancient nation of France, and the bold conquest of Napoleon, sprung from the internal upheaval of Gaul, was encompassing the continent.  Systems of government, corrupt and long outworn, void feudalism, were to be swept away, in the light of a new world order.  In England, a way of life that had endured for over a thousand years was negated by another Revolution, that of the technological sort.  Labour of the hands was replaced by the mechanised toil of the machine; easily, and on a mass scale, could new wealth be produced, for the enjoyment of the Empire.  But at what cost?  At the expense of the ravaged land, which had yet to endure the pillaging of its resources, and the grime of the expanding towns and railways. And too, at the expense of the poor; for think not, modern reader, that new wealth translated to better living for every class of society.  From the humble cottage to the city slum, the poor were transported, and, where once they had been the dependents of the land, and nature’s timely season, they were now the slaves of the machine.   The climax of centuries of reform and enlightenment seemed to be made manifest in a bold and unhealthy individualism, coupled with a newfound greed and materialism. 

 Where could this new wealth lead?  The middle classes were enriched, and a new order of aristocracy, that of the comfortable mill owner, and the nouveau bourgeoisie, took hold.  The countryside, as it was cleared of its former lowly inhabitants, became the province of the wealthy, and great houses were erected two by two.  With one, singular voice, the protest of the Romantics was made,

“When Adam delved, and Eve span

Who was then the gentleman?”

 If feudal society had proved corrupt, and in need of reformation, as the Church itself had some centuries before, it was now clear, in the dawning of the modern age, that the ancient virtues of the medievalists had been lost along the path of ‘enlightenment.’  Feudal society had at least ensured, to each caste and individual, a place and a duty within their own sphere and community, and the classes were, indeed, interdependent.  Medieval society itself was unified not only by a strict idealism, but also by firm Christian and spiritual union, in which all orders of men were ultimately bound by a common purpose: the service of God.  Ruskin argued in favour of the salvation of the idealism and spiritualism of the medieval world; Wordsworth sought the deliverance of Nature, from the grip of human greed and carelessness.

 It may be argued that Wordsworth, along with Scott, was the first to fully infuse poetry with the idea of the Sublime; for Wordsworth, like the ancient St. Francis, saw the hand of the Creator in Nature, and might read of Him there as in the sacred text.  It was this higher spiritual quality that drew Wordsworth to his beloved lakes, and which spiritualism pervades all his writings, as embodied in these most noted lines,

“And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.”

            It was the irreverence shown the land, and the carelessness for its sacred nature, against which Wordsworth quietly, yet fervently, revolted, especially as embodied by the expansion of the railway into every solemn corner of beauty.  A Kendal and Windermere railway was proposed, for the primary reason of bringing tourism to the Lake District, and Wordsworth replied with the following sonnet and note, inserted in the Morning Post of 1844,

“Is then no nook of English ground secure

From rash assult?  Schemes of retirement sown

In youth, and ’mid the busy world kept pure

As when their earliest flowers of hope were blown,

Must perish; -how can they this blight endure?

And must he too the ruthless change bemoan

Who scorns a false utilitarian lure

’Mid his paternal fields at random thrown?

Baffle the threat, bright Scene, from Orrest-head

Given to the pausing traveller’s rapturous glance:

Plead for thy peace, thou beautiful romance

Of nature; and, if human hearts be dead,

Speak, passing winds; ye torrents, with your strong

And constant voice, protest against the wrong.”

“RYDAL MOUNT,

             October 12th, 1844.

The degree and kind of attachment which many of the yeomanry feel to their small inheritances can scarcely be overrated.  Near the house of one of them stands a magnificent tree, which a neighbour of the owner advised him to fell for profit’s sake.  ‘Fell it,’ exclaimed the yeoman, ‘I had rather fall on my knees and worship it.’  It happens, I believe, that the intended railway would pass through this little property, and I hope that an apology for the answer will not be thought necessary by the one who enters into the strength of the feeling.                                                                                                     

W.W.”

Too well Wordsworth saw the inevitability of modernisation, in both the technological and social sense, in which the dominion of man over nature would be as secure as its natural dominion over him had been in ages past.  When, in 1847, the Kendal and Windermere Railway at last spread its steam and steel across the district, Wordsworth replied with these verses,

“Proud were ye, Mountains, when in times of old,

Your patriot sons, to stem invasive war,

Intrenched your brows; ye gloried in each scar:

Now, for your shame, a Power, the Thirst of Gold,

That rules o’er Britain like a baneful star,

Wills that your peace, your beauty, shall be sold,

And clear way made for her triumphal car

Through the beloved retreats your arms enfold!

Heard YE that whistle?  As her long-linked Train

Swept onwards, did the vision cross your view?

Yes, ye were startled; -and, in balance true,

Weighing the mischief with the promised gain,

Mountains, and Vales, and Floods, I call on you

To share the passion of a just disdain.”

Three years later, in 1850, Wordsworth died; within his lifetime, this man had seen his nation, its landscape so well beloved for its wild beauty, marked in every depth with the romance of ancient lore, and the peace of Heaven, become the victim of tyrannical utilitarianism, and the workhorse of the industrial age.  Speaking of the railway, some years before his death, he wrote prophetically,

“…Nor have I opposed this undertaking on account of the inhabitants of the district merely, but, as hath been intimated, for the sake of every one, however humble his condition, who coming hither shall bring with him an eye to perceive, and a heart to feel and worthily enjoy.  And as for holiday pastimes, if a scene is to be chosen suitable to them for persons thronging from a distance, it may be found elsewhere at much less cost of every kind.  But in fact, we have too much hurrying about in these islands; much for idle pleasure, and more from over activity in the pursuit of wealth, without regard to the good or happiness of others.”

Wordsworth is buried, along with his wife, daughter, and sister, in the little churchyard of St. Oswald, at Grasmere, a parish in the Lakeland district of Ambleside.  If he should have an epitaph, let it be in the words of his own creed,

“…I look abroad upon Nature, I think of the best part of our species, I lean upon my Friends and I meditate upon the Gospel of St. John, and my creed rises up of itself, with the ease of an exhalation, yet a fabric of adamant—Our being’s heart and home is with Infinitude, and all which we behold is full of Blessing.  I bent before God’s gracious throne and asked for Peace on supplicant knee, and Peace was given, nor Peace alone, but Faith sublimed to Ecstasy…‘In the Light of Truth Thy bondsman let me live.’”

* As H. S. Holland writes in his introduction to the Lyra Apostolica, “ That which was a truism inside the Church, Wordsworth verified by his own experience.  Nature was the symbolic utterance of the unseen God.”