SOURCE: Woof, Pamela. “Dorothy Wordsworth and the Pleasures of Recognition: An Approach to the Travel Journals.” The Wordsworth Circle 22, no. 3 (summer 1991): 150-160.

[In the following excerpt, Woof praises Wordsworth's journals for their “humanness” and unique expressions of pleasure.]

Journals we shall have in number sufficient to fill a Lady's bookshelf,—for all, except my Brother, write a Journal.

(MY, II, 625)

So Dorothy Wordsworth to Catherine Clarkson at the beginning of the Continental Tour on July 23, 1820. A shelf-full of Journals! And Wordsworth, though he refrained from a Journal, produced more poems than for the Scottish Recollections of 1803. Further Journals were written in 1822 for the second Scottish Tour. And there were letters; these have an immediacy not quite allowed to the Journals. Here, for instance, is Mary Wordsworth's personal fear when left alone “under a great waterfall amongst the hills … If any one should come near me and I was unable to speak to them [because she couldn't speak German] and if W should be bewildered in the black wood above!” (Letters of Mary Wordsworth, ed. Mary E. Burton [1958] p. 63). This, of course, is omitted from the Journal, as is Dorothy's impatience with Italians, clear from a letter from Milan to Catherine Clarkson: “One of Buonaparte's works was the finishing of this Cathedral, and I wish he had never done anything worse. The Italians always call him Napoleone, and he seems to be a great favourite here, and the people, being what they are, and having no dignified government of their own to be attached to, it is no wonder” (MY, II, 638). The grudging approval of Napoleon's attempt to get Milan's cathedral finished is repeated in the Journal, but not the comment on the Italian people.

It was, indeed, as Dorothy said in 1823, when she was pondering with Samuel Rogers the possibility of publishing a revised 1803 Recollections—in order to defray the expenses of another Continental Tour and write yet another Journal—“‘Far better’ I say, ‘make another Tour and write the journal on a different plan!’” (LY, I, 271)—it was, as she pointed out, a “writing and publishing (especially tour-writing and tour-publishing) age,” and she feared her own work might be “wholly overlooked” (LY, I, 181). In the event, there were no published Recollections, no second Continental Tour, no Journal “on a different plan.” Dorothy's existing Tours simply begin their narrative on leaving home and end on returning. She has no eleven-page Preface as, say, John Stoddart has in his Remarks on Scotland of 1801, no discussion of the philosophy of travel as Sterne had slipped into his Sentimental Journey. In 1825, she said that the Object of her Continental Tour had not been “a Book, but to leave to my Niece a neatly penned Memorial of those few interesting months of our lives” (LY, I, 271) and that it “well answered the purpose intended, of reviving recollections” (LY, I, 337). Mary began her “imperfect notices … at D's request—& with a certain notion on my part, that they might be useful, when she wrote her Journal—but soon finding my notes superfluous, in that point of view, I should not have had resolution to go on—but at Wms desire—& from the feeling that my daughter & perhaps her brothers might one day find pleasure—especially if they are ever so fortunate as to track our steps—in recognising those objects their Mother had seen. At any rate this thought has been a powerful & a heart chearing stimulant to me—often when I have been fagged & would rather …” (DC MS 91). Here, Mary breaks off, and in the fair copy she is not “fagged” (a local word Dorothy had used about Potter's wife panting up a hill, Grasmere Journals, 69), but she would rather have “sought repose.”

I shall try now to move amongst the Journals and poems, touching on aspects of Dorothy's writing. This from the Alfoxden Journal, 1798: “The shapes of the mist, slowly moving along, exquisitely beautiful; passing over the sheep they almost seemed to have more of life than those quiet creatures” (March 1, 1798, Journals, ed. Moorman, 9). This from the Recollections, 1803: “We walked up to the house and stood some minutes watching the swallows that flew about restlessly, and flung their shadows upon the sunbright walls of the old building; the shadows glanced and twinkled, interchanged and crossed each other, expanded and shrunk up, appeared and disappeared every instant; as I observed to Wm and Coleridge, seeming more like living things than the birds themselves” (Journals, I, 195-6). Dorothy, Wordsworth and Coleridge were passing Rose Castle on their way to Carlisle and Scotland. The same fancy is in both passages. Dorothy sees a life in mist and in shadows; in the Recollections she recalls speaking about this: “as I observed to Wm and Coleridge,” and undoubtedly she had done the same at Alfoxden—the same companions were with her then. They had a community of observation: famously, Alfoxden's sole remaining leaf that danced; the red marks left upon palings by locks of sheep's wool, the dim moon sailing suddenly out of cloud; we are all aware of such noticings that moved probably from conversation into the writing of two, or even all three. And Coleridge, in his 1803 Notebook, has observations so like Dorothy's in the Recollections that behind both must be conversation. He too remarks “the Swallows & their Shadows on the Castle-House walls” (Notebooks, I, 1427) and later, he and Dorothy must have talked about the movements of people on the road to the waterfall at Cora Linn: Dorothy has “lasses in gay dresses running like cattle among the broom” (Journals, I, 222); while Coleridge's “Men & women in their Sunday finery straggle like Cattle, each in his own path” (Notebooks, I, 1449). They both say of the inside of a moss-hut near the Fall that it was “like a Haystack scooped out” (Notebooks, I, 1449; Journals, I, 224). Coleridge is writing on the spot, sketching from Nature: “As I write this, I turn my head, & close by me I see a Birch … the Shadows of its Leaves playing on its silver Bark, an image that delighted my Boyhood, when I had no waterfalls to see.” Dorothy appears not to have been occupied with her Notebook, and we see her briefly from the outside as Coleridge records both her reaction and that of the guide, a “little Girl sent to dog & guide us, yawning with stretching Limbs a droll dissonance with Dorothy's Raptures.” Apart from being “much affected” and “struck with astonishment,” Dorothy has not written “Raptures” here; her finished account is not immediately from nature; it is Recollections, and it has space for elaboration and distinctions.

Coleridge can dispatch an evening in a few words: “We had a merry meal in the Hovel black & varnished & glistering with peat smoak, the Fowls roosting in the Chimney amid the cloud of smoke” (Notebooks, I, 1471). Dorothy had reached the Hovel sick with cold after being in an open boat in the rain for three and a half miles down Loch Katrine (Coleridge had walked). So she records the stages of becoming comfortable, the clothes drying, the coffee Coleridge had put to boil, the whiskey they asked for, the man of the house cold and wet, but keeping back from the fire, the woman's separate bringing of sugar, butter, barley bread and milk:

We caroused our cups of coffee, laughing like children at the strange atmosphere in which we were: the smoke came in gusts, and spread along the walls and above our heads in the chimney, where the hens were roosting like light clouds in the sky; we laughed and laughed again, in spite of the smarting of our eyes, yet had a quieter pleasure in observing the beauty of the beams and rafters gleaming between the clouds of smoke. They had been crusted over and varnished by many winters, till, where the firelight fell upon them, they were as glossy as black rocks on a sunny day cased in ice.

(Journals, I, 276-7)

The black and varnished rafters, the hens roosting and the clouds are common to both accounts, but Dorothy has space to distinguish between laughter and “quieter pleasure,” and in “glossy as black rocks on a sunny day cased in ice” she mingles all their sensibilities: Wordsworth's “black rock wet with constant springs” that “glistered” in the declining sun (Prelude, 1805, VIII, 566-8), and Coleridge's yoking of sun and ice in “Kubla Khan.”

Next morning, Sunday, August 28, 1803, they crossed the lake, again, “wet to the skin,” walked through rain to Loch Lomond, waited hours in the Ferry house, everyone being gone to a preaching, save an old grandmother, a baby, and two young girls, one

As light and beauteous as a squirrel,
As beauteous and as wild,

writes Dorothy, taking Wordsworth's words from Peter Bell about a sweet Highland girl. This allusion too comes out of discussion: Coleridge had written to his wife: “beautiful as a Vision / & put both me & Dorothy in mind of the Highland Girl in William's Peter Bell” (Letters, ed. Griggs, II, 978). Dorothy's prose is alive with detail: the gabbling of Erse, the hesitant English, more drying of clothes, the cotton sprigged gown and blue lindsey petticoat for her to put on, the poultry cooking, the porridge boiling, the baby crying, the grandmother rocking the cradle the more violently as it cried and singing doleful Erse songs, the rain, the wet floor, the sound of the waterfall. And the “neighbourly connexion” of people from around two lakes going to a preaching she found “exceedingly pleasing to my imagination” (Journals, I, 282). Coleridge merely contrasts the comfortless Hovel with the native Elegance of the girls, of one particularly, a “divine Creature” (Notebooks, I, 1471). Wordsworth produces his version after returning to Grasmere, probably while Dorothy was converting her rough notes into Recollections. His imagination was not stirred by the social, the preaching so pleasing to Dorothy's, but yet his bare unparticularised response could well have been triggered by her inclusive handling of the scene. It had happened before: he had lifted his leech gatherer out of detail, out of fact, into a mythic world. He would do the same with the daffodils of that windy day on Ullswater. Likewise, for the Highland Girl. The Ferryman's hut becomes an abode “Like something in a dream”; the girl is a solitary stranger with hints of leadings from above.

Thanks to Heaven! that of its grace
Hath led me to this lonely place.

Like the later Solitary Reaper, she communicates the better in that her language is not understood; she has,

… thoughts that lie beyond the reach
Of thy few words of English speech

She has a pastoral queenliness:

What hand but would a garland cull
For thee who are so beautiful?

She is Perdita:

Thou art to me but as a wave
Of the wild sea

And we recall Florizel's

          when you do dance, I wish you
A wave o' th' sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that, move still, still so

And Wordsworth's own

She seemed as happy as a wave
That dances on the sea

(“The Two April Mornings,” 51-2)

But Wordsworth is not Florizel, not, as he momentarily wished, “a Shepherd, thou a Shepherdess.” He ends, the not-so-young poet he is, leaving, but taking with him the lasting image that he has created:

Joy have I had, and going hence
I bear away my recompense.

As ever, it is good to have both: Dorothy's lively untidy hut, her two girls laughing and raking out the mother's dresses, with Dorothy persistently attempting conversation (one recollects her pleasure in meeting an Italian barometer-seller in 1820 who spoke English—she can get his story); and, Wordsworth's reduction of detail, even to finding language an irrelevance in order to create an inner vision.

There must have been a lot of talking as Dorothy wrote up the Recollections in the autumn of 1803 and in 1804. At the end of her account of the “half-articulate Gaelic hooting” of the little boy in grey plaid in mist on a hillside calling home the cattle, she adds, “It was a text, as Wm has since observed to me, containing in itself the whole history of the Highlander's life—his melancholy, his simplicity, his poverty, his superstition, and above all, that visionariness which results from a communion with the unworldliness of nature” (Journals, I, 286). A boy in a landscape—for Wordsworth, a text to be read for meaning; like the heap of unhewn stones in “Michael” that must be noticed as well as seen, or fields that like a book preserved memory. Coleridge, by contrast, is concerned only to remember: “Never, never let me forget that small Herd boy, in his Tartan Plaid, dim-seen on the hilly field, & long heard ere seen, a melancholy Voice, calling to his Cattle! (Notebooks, I, 1471). Shortly after this Coleridge went his way, alone.

It was with Wordsworth that Dorothy shared so many interests. One was a delight in secluded places. The retreats and Bowers of the Grasmere Journals, the Grasmere Columbine sheltered and shaded, seeking retirement, Wensley Dale in summer, 1802, with its trees in leaf “& forming groves, & screens, & then little openings upon recesses & concealed retreats,” even these are related to the “narrow deep valley,” the “perfect solitude without house or hut suddenly seen near Ballachulish in 1803, when shower and rainy clouds passed away (Journals, I, 330). And much later, how inevitably was Dorothy moved in 1820, when, walking on towards Chamonix ahead of Wordsworth and Mary, she “looked suddenly down from the edge of the step into a long, level verdant, and narrow Dell, sprinkled with brown wood cottages,” and it was the same “aboriginal vale,” “the green recess” of Prelude, VI (Journals, II, 280). Wordsworth could check his memory of thirty years, and Dorothy could live the feelings she had long known from his verse and talk. This significant recess came unexpectedly; but Dorothy could go in deliberate pursuit. In 1822, Joanna Hutchinson still sleeping, half past eight of a Sunday morning near Inverary, she records in her Notebook “how the Robins warble—one has just left the Sea-rock where I sit—White cottage gable end & smoke between two Groves. One promontory below, a deep small Bay half concealed. I must on thither” (Second Tour, 167). The urgency of “I must on thither” disappears in the written up account, where a “white cottage peeping from a cluster of trees” merely “tempts me onward” (Second Tour, 130).

But this pleasure could be brought about by mist as well as geography, and Dorothy was alert to “vapours settling or shifting.” She could watch a sea of vapour from an eminence “till the sun had mastery of all beneath us, after a silent process of change and interchange—of concealing and revealing” (Journals, II, 96). This, at Lenzberg, between the Jura and the Alps, in 1820, but it had been the same in 1801 on Helvellyn with “Mists above & below & close to us …” (Grasmere Journals, October 25, 1801). Or on the road to Keswick, “the mountains for every varying, now hid in the Clouds & now with their tops visible while perhaps they were half concealed below” (Grasmere Journals, November 9, 1801). Mist was positive. Sun could be destructive: “It was no longer a visionary scene: the sun shone into every crevice of the hills, and the mountain tops were clear” (Journals, I, 366). And again: “we had seen the place to great advantage at our first approach, owing to the mists upon the mountains, which had made them exceedingly high, while the strange figures on the Cobbler appeared and disappeared, like living things; but as the day cleared we were disappointed …” (Journals, I, 288). Yet real disappointment was rare, for though mist partly concealed things, Dorothy was not extravagant in imagination: “we always fill up what we are left to guess at with something as beautiful as what we see” (Journals, I, 364). As, but not more beautiful. “I wished for nothing that was not there,” she writes, of meadow-land beside the Tweed where, in the words of Wordsworth's sonnet, “Degenerate Douglas” had levelled “with the dust a noble horde, / A brotherhood of ancient trees.” Yet even Wordsworth, writing within the tradition of melancholy about felled trees, acknowledges that nature itself has no sorrow.

For shelter'd places, bosoms, nooks and bays
And the pure mountains and the gentle Tweed,
And the green silent pastures yet remain.

Dorothy learned later about the fallen woods but she does not allow any regret to alter her recollected pleasure; her attitude is Nature's: “I wished for nothing that was not there” (Journals, I, 389). She is not unlike that looker in Wallace Stevens' Snow Man who saw nothing that was not there, but she is quite unlike that same viewer who saw also the “nothing that was.” None of it is nothing to Dorothy Wordsworth. And Edinburgh was not nothing, not even when a “cloud of black smoke overhung the city”—Dorothy's expression here recalling the dawn houses of London “not overhung by their cloud of smoke,” and rivalling nature's purity (Grasmere Journals, 123). Edinburgh was at a disadvantage; it had black smoke and rain and mist as Dorothy and Wordsworth sat on Arthur's Seat. Yet—and with Wordsworth's very recently written passage on the climbing of Snowdon surely in mind—Dorothy writes that,

… instead of the roaring of torrents, we listened to the noises of the city … The Castle rock looked exceedingly large through the misty air … an obscurity which added much to the grandeur of the sound. … It was impossible to think of anything that was little or mean, the goings-on of trade, the strife of men, or every-day city business; the impression was one, and it was visionary, like the conceptions of our childhood of Bagdad or Balsora when we have been reading the Arabian Nights' Entertainment

(Journals, I, 385)

Naturally, Dorothy was prepared to find the experience impressive: they had climbed up for it, and, as she told Jane Marshall in 1807, “there is no sensation more elevating to the heart and the imagination than what we take in … from some superior eminence” (MY, I, 163). She took in, here, above Edinburgh, a visionary impression, but one that still belonged to the familiar, to “conceptions of our childhood of Bagdad or Balsora when we have been reading the Arabian Nights' Entertainment.” This is comfortable. The visionariness does not go beyond the warm childhood recollection. Instead of “the roaring of torrents, we listened to the noises of the city.” No Snowdon mediation rises to usurp the real, to brood on power or civilisation. Despite Dorothy's claim that it was impossible to think of “trade, the strife of men, every-day city business,” these are exactly what she does think of. Even when she cannot see, she cannot forget what is.

What is, anchors the “raptures,” as Coleridge might call them. At home, domestic life inevitably provoked the writing about baking the bread and the apple pie-making, the gathering of peas, all the particularity of the Grasmere Journals. Away, although Dorothy was excited, she was alert for what she recognised. Reaching Calais in 1820, she recalled Calais in 1802: “I looked about for what I remembered, and looked for new things, and in both quests was gratified” (Journals, II, 9). She was generally so gratified. “On going into a new country I seem to myself to waken up” (Journals, I, 247), she wrote, approaching the Highlands. Roads were bright and, for Dorothy, not at all disheartened by poor weather, they were “brightened by rain”; distant prospects were an excitement (Journals, I, 250). At the same time, Scotland, though literally new, generated a kind of remembering; there was even some literal revisiting, a second walking along the same path in the Trossachs, for example. There was much that, either for its likeness or its difference, brought the Lake District to mind, called up Wordsworth's poetry, reminded Dorothy of familiar books—Cervantes' Don Quixote, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Smollett's Waters of Leven, read in 1802, and, in any case, probably long known from Humphrey Clinker—Ossian, Burns, Thomson, Bunyan, Stoddart. The Continental Tour likewise: Milton, Johnny Gilpin's Chase, Swift's Brobdingnag, Southey, Chaucer, as well as an Inn Host who had reminded Dorothy of “some thriving Friar of old time,” but who, as she wrote up her Tour, having just reread Chaucer's Prologue, seemed rather the Hoste of the Tabard, with the implication that the Wordsworths were pilgrims. That 1820 Tour was a pilgrimage; in spirit a revisiting and in fact a new visiting of places significant for Wordsworth thirty years before. Dorothy was by nature a pilgrim, creating with Wordsworth, the personal holy places. In the Grasmere Journals she refers in terms of pilgrimage to her coming to the Lake District in 1794, the arrival in Staveley, “the first mountain village that I came to with Wm when we first began our pilgrimage together” (Grasmere Journals, 131-2). Her paths and roads gather up memories into ritual. At the same time, they are real enough: Dorothy loved the very “marks of sledges or wheel” in that track through green pastures under a glowing sky in the Trossachs (Journals, I, 367). And she could share Wordsworth's feelings of “spiritual right / To travel through that region bright” (Stepping Westward, 11.15-16). A road was “like a guide into eternity” (Prelude, 1805, XII, 151) as well as into the past. Bunyan was important. Life was pilgrimage. One recalls that last letter to Dora in 1838: “My Friend Mrs Rawson has ended her ninety and two years pilgrimage—and I have fought and fretted and striven—” (LY, III, 528).

And behind that intensity of intimacy and adventure which is pilgrimage, Dorothy saw, as she always had, the ordinariness of what was there. Travelling, she does not cook, as at Grasmere, but she notes the “miserable Trout” of Locarno “that made us think of a sickness among the fishes” (Journals, II, 202) and the well-cooked “moorfowl and mutton chops” at Tyndrum in 1803 (Journals, I, 339). She does not do washing, but she describes a washhouse in Glasgow with some 300 women, “arms, head and face all in motion” (Journals, I, 236-7). She does not make clothes, but she tells how she, Wordsworth and Mary stepped into an old-fashioned shop in Locarno to buy a cooler dress for Mary, and found such a courtesy there that it somehow made Dorothy fancy the times “when our great-Grandmother used to ride single to London with the “Merchants” from Penrith to purchase her yearly supply of goods” (Journals, II, 204). If she does not dress-make, she always needs a needle and thread. In Longtown, in 1803, she was unable to buy a silver thimble and had to make a halfpenny brass one do (Journals, I, 196), and she remembered this against Longtown in 1822—“mean shops that looked as if they could still supply nothing better than a brass thimble” (Journals, II, 340). In a high Alpine village in 1820, confined by storm and having seen a “Westmorland bridge” that afternoon, “M and I … sate at work as if we had been in England” (Journals, II, 180). Securities and recognitions are everywhere, and nowhere more than in Dorothy's homely likenesses.

These do not occur in orthodox tours—in Gilpin, Heron, Pennant, Ritson, Stoddart, or even in Humphrey Clinker—none of these has a play of images, no “moonshine like herrings in the water,” as earlier in the private Grasmere Journals. And so, writing more publicly in the Recollections, Dorothy almost apologises for her everyday similes. A variegated landscape “was (to use a woman's illustration) like a collection of patchwork, made of pieces as they might have chanced to have been cut by the mantua-maker, only just smoothed to fit each other …” (Journals, I, 207). The broad vale of Nith resembled “the old-fashioned valances of a bed” (Journals, I, 200). Cora Linn, in 1822, reflected in the mirror of a summer-house, was “bustling like suds in a washing-tub” (Second Tour, 153). Seabirds cover a small rock in the water “like comfits on a cake” (ibid., 18). Black stones on a beach are like “armies of Seals couched on shore” (ibid., 26). People walking west into evening sun are “almost like a blacksmith when he is at work at night” (Journals, I, 219). The King's Head Inn at Glen Coe was “as dirty as a house after a sale on a rainy day” (Journals, I, 334). There were “beds, or rather streams, of stones” on the way to Loch Etive, itself almost recognisable, for it had “familiar fire-side names,” including that of “the old woman with whom Wm lodged 10 years at Hawkshead”; these “streams of stones” appeared as “smooth as the turf itself, nay, I might say, as soft as the feathers of birds” (Journals, I, 307). But a well-built cottage, with bright windows, was like “a visitor, a stranger come into the Highlands”; indeed, it “fixed our attention almost as much as a Chinese or a Turk would do passing through the vale of Grasmere” (Journals, I, 347)—and we know from De Quincey how a similar stranger, a Malay, could fix Grasmere's attention. Yet Dorothy had homely associations even for the Chinese: in 1820, an old gentleman with an umbrella against the sun was like “a Chinese upon a punch-bowl or on Betty's Langdale teapot” (Journals, II, 52).

But how do ladies who keep travel Journals—and Dorothy objected to a Frenchman's referring to her and Mary as “two women”—how do they deal with scenes already dealt with by others? William Coxe's Sketches of Switzerland, 1779, made it, for example, seem unnecessary to Dorothy for her to set about another account of the Falls of Schaffhausen: “I took no description of the Falls at the time; nor will I now attempt to describe them. Coxe and other travellers have done it better than I could do” (Journals, II, 89). Here is a passage from Coxe's Schaffhausen description; phrases of hyperbole seem almost to overwhelm him:

… we looked down perpendicularly upon the cataract, and saw the river tumbling over the sides of the rock with amazing violence and precipitation. From hence we descended … and stood close to the fall; so that I could almost have touched it with my hands. A scaffolding is erected in the very spray of this tremendous cataract, and upon the most sublime point of view:—the sea of foam tumbling down—the continual cloud of spray scattered around at a great distance, and to a considerable height—in short, the magnificence of the whole scenery far surpassed my most sanguine expectations, and exceeds all description … the water forced itself through in an oblique direction, with inexpressible fury, and an hollow sound. After having continued some time, contemplating in silent admiration the awful sublimity of this wonderful landscape, we descended; and below the fall we crossed the river, which was exceedingly agitated.

(Sketches of the Natural, Civil, and Political State of Swisserland; in a series of letters to William Melmoth, Esq, William Coxe, London 1779, pp. 17-18).

Dorothy, having refused description, conveys the power of the Falls through the excited reaction of the viewers. They had descended to where “a roofed wooden gallery or platform has been erected and there (venturing to the extremity nearest to the tumult) cheared by our exulting guide, we were gloriously wetted and stunned and deafened by the waters of the Rhine … The whole stream falls like liquid emeralds … We walked upon the platform as dizzy as if we had been on the deck of a ship in a storm” (Journals, II, 89-90). Mary Wordsworth is more domestic, though she does retain the emeralds: “the colour of the River less bright, as if milk had been thrown into the green Water, & sullied that delicious clearness appearing, (as it did at the falls), like melted Emeralds” (DC MS 92). Another time, it was Mary, not Dorothy, who decided of a famous place, the Devil's Bridge, that “as everyone knows [it], [it] need not be described,” and again, both ladies offer personal responses. Here is Coxe:

We then came to a bridge thrown across a very deep chasm over the Reuss, which here forms a considerable cataract down the shagged sides of the mountain, and over immense fragments of rock which it has undermined in its course. … As we stood upon the bridge admiring the cataract, we were covered with a kind of drizzling rain; the river throwing up the spray to a considerable heighth. These are sublime scenes of horror, of which those who have not been spectators, can form no idea: neither the powers of painting nor poetry can give an adequate image of them.

(Sketches of the Natural, Civil, and Political State of Swisserland; in a series of letters to William Melmoth, Esq, William Coxe, London 1779, p. 160).

Coxe then describes the dark passage cut through rock and the sudden emergence into the “serene and cultivated valley of Ursuren” (pp. 160-1). His “immense fragments of rock” become, for Mary, “Architectural rocks, looking like the foundations of buildings—Ruins of Rome for instance” (DC MS 92)—which she would have known from prints, Piranesi perhaps; and for Dorothy, “like the ruins of a city” (Journals, II, 186). Both women add the flowers that grow about the bridge: Mary, “harebells, grass of Parnassus, Monks-hood, Columbine—also a flower, the only one of the kind I ever saw, the colour of a Michaelmas daisy, but in all other points like Camomile” (DC MS 92). Dorothy, less botanic, more elegant perhaps: “flowers in abundance:—Monks-hood, and many smaller flowers of gem-like brilliance, and the shrubby twigs of the Rosa Alpa bearing some lingering blossoms” (Journals, II, 186). Both note the orange lichens on the rocks and bridge. Both discount Coxe's notion that poetry “could give no adequate image of the scene”; they each quote from Wordsworth's Descriptive Sketches. Mary has two endearing touches: one, that, she may say, she was “rather disappointed [in the Devil's Bridge]”; and two, that Mr. Crabb Robinson had called her to look through the light-giving niche in the side of the rock tunnel, and so she had had a first and partial view of the vale of Ursuren, whereas “D said the natural way of coming upon it, without preparation, through the arch of the Cavern, was best” (DC MS 92). Dorothy's characteristic touches were her delight in that total surprise view, and her noting “Three young kids … standing in perfect peacefulness, on a crag close to the bridge and the impassioned torrent,—a living image of silence itself, in the midst of a deafening and dizzy tumult!” (Journals, II, 186).

The stillness of the kids beside the torrential water constitutes for Dorothy a visual equivalent to silence. Noise and stillness, movement and silence, have been frequent co-presences in her writing. At Alfoxden, in 1798, underneath roaring trees, dancing leaves and a furious wind, “Still the asses pastured in quietness under the hollies” (Journals, ed. Moorman, 4). Contrast itself was enlivening for Dorothy—the very exchange of the sublimity of the Devil's Bridge and the gloom of the granite passage for the soft and gentle vale of Ursuren, that, Dorothy wrote, “bursts upon our view.” Even Coxe, forty years before, had noted that “the change was so abrupt and instantaneous, that it seems like a sudden enchantment.” Dorothy, witness her verbs, expressed it more dramatically: “Consider what ruggedness we had been haunted by, what noise and tumult we had escaped from; and you may conceive that the transition was enchanting” (DC MS 90, omitted from Journals, II, 186). Dorothy seems often to point up contrast—almost as an element of composition. It is a nuance; she is never exclusively visual, has not the vocabulary of art, declared herself (strangely, in view of the Wordsworths' friendship for, say, Joseph Wilkinson or, especially, Sir George Beaumont) as “Little conversant in pictures” (Journals, II, 238). Even so, many a scene from her travel journals could be satisfactorily drawn.

She sees with her own eyes, respects the facts, and allows feeling. We see this best where we can compare versions, and luckily one rough notebook exists for the Continental Journal; it covers the last section. They had “dined,” wrote Dorothy in her Notebook, “at the Table d'hote—French officers—polite & gentlemanly—yet they spit on the floor at the dinner table.” Mary omits the spitting, and only records irritation as sight-seeing had been curtailed: “obliged to hurry without seeing more of the Town on acct. of dinner & now that that important business is over it is too late to go out—” (DC MS 91). She revises this petulant tone for her fair copy: “dined about 1/2 past five at Table d'hote with a party of French Officers—an inconvenient time for us as it prevented our being at liberty to walk” (DC MS 92). Dorothy in her fair copy simply says there was “not light sufficient to view anything distinctly,” but now adds that the dinner was “excellent” and that they endured “starvation [which has to do with cold, not hunger, cf. the “little peat fire” of the Grasmere Journals, 64]—“no fire-staring windows—and an outer door constantly open” (DC MS 90). She retained the spitting of the polite officers; it was omitted by her more genteel editor, de Selincourt.

The expansion might be moral comment—Dorothy's suspicion, for example, that an innkeeper's failure to serve them breakfast—purportedly lack of milk—was “some other reason.” In her fair copy Dorothy has found the reason: “probably indolence, which often in lonely places (for example in the Wilds of Scotland) makes the people prefer ease to accidental gain” (Journals, II, 314). Mary has neither the milk nor the moralising; nor does she indicate that on this same walk she went alone up a valley: “What if a wolf had crossed her path!” wrote Dorothy in the safety of retrospective trepidation in her fair copy, “Large troops of wolves haunt this district” (ibid.).

In this next example we see an expansion that develops feeling. Here first is Mary's description of the gardens at Fontainebleau: “The old garden with its pools & fountains very pleasing—rich flower gardens & fantastically cut trees—broad gravel walks—& then those stately peaceful creatures the Swans give spirit to the whole” (DC MS 91). Here is Dorothy in her Notebook: “Fontainebleau … Pool—swans—weeping willows.” Writing this up, perceiving the same whiteness in the water and the swans, and yet their contrasting restlessness and peace, Dorothy finds almost a supernaturalness; just as, in earlier days, she had found a life in mist or in shadows: “… the busy water had reminded us of drifting snow, as white as the swans floating the pool beneath. The contrast of that white restless substance with the silent untroubled gliding of the swans seemed to impart almost a supernatural composure to the fleecy forms of those living creatures” (DC MS 90). “Pool—swans—weeping willows” is then expanded into a complex of regrets that rise almost to Burkean elegy. None of this, incidentally, is in the printed edition.

A stern republican, after rambling in the forest, may look with contempt on the antique and costly gardens; but to us the transition was delightful; and we could not but regret that a greater number of similar specimens of the taste of our ancestors had not been left us in England, their place being ill supplied by our modern imitations of nature. Josephine's garden is, however, a sweet place, and, as a comment upon her judicious and quiet character, is very interesting; but to us who had not before seen anything so splendid in the ancient style, the Queen's garden was much more interesting—the statues, fountain, and flower borders all remaining in the same state as when Marie Antoinette, in the days of her glory, used to walk among them, little dreaming that in a few years, an obscure Individual should be regent of her pleasure-ground—plant and improve—and all again to be resigned to another, soon to be dispossessed like herself!

(ibid.)

For almost half of the 1822 Journal of the Second Tour of Scotland there are three versions: the rough Notebook and two expansions, both dotted with deletions and insertions. The recent splendid edition by Jiro Nagasawa allows us to register Dorothy's changes in detail, to see her first thoughts, even perhaps to regret her elaboration. Here is a place remembered from 1803—first, the Notebook: “Ferry house at Inversneyde just the same, excepting now a glass window. A Girl now standing at the door, but her I cannot fancy our Highland Girl, & the Babe, which its Grandame rocked, while the Babe squalled, now must be grown up to toil & perhaps hardship or is it in a quiet grave?” (Second Tour, 5-6). In the next two versions the pathos—hypothetical after all—is thickly and more thickly applied: “Ferry house at Inversneyd just the same, excepting now a glass window. A Girl standing at the door. We are not near enough to distinguish her person; but I cannot fancy her so fair as our Highland Girl; & poor Thing! I ask myself in vain what is become of her, and that little Babe that was still squalling the harder while its Grandame rocked as if to stifle its cries. Brought up with toil & hardship is it still struggling on, or, with the aged woman sleeping in the quiet grave?” (Second Tour, 52). And: “Ferry house at Inversneyde just the same, but there is now a glass window. A girl standing on the threshold. We are not near enough to distinguish whether her person be awkward or graceful, or her face pretty; but I cannot fancy her so pretty as our Highland Girl [Continues as above.]” (Second Tour, 98).

In the case of the umbrella, the expanded versions are necessary explanations of a telegraphic Notebook entry: “Up at 5. Umbrella—foggy, cold. I walked along Saltmarket. Joan[n]a stayed foot palsied. No umbrella[.] Mounted coach at 7. Boy comes. Fog …” (Second Tour, 19). The second version has an entry for four days earlier, September 20, 1822, recording Dorothy and Joanna's setting out for an excursion to Loch Lomond: “Rose at 5. Hurried away to reach Boat at 6. Discovered that J had left my umbrella at Fruiterers while I was in search of post office, & wrote an order for the waiter, to demand it before our return” (Second Tour, 47). They returned from Loch Lomond, and the third version continues the story: “Asked after my umbrella at the Fruiterer's Shop—if it had been fetched away. The Boy only knew that it was not in the shop; & his master's house was a half a mile distant. Found Joanna much fatigued” (Second Tour, 143-4). Next morning, as they were about to leave Glasgow for good, Dorothy makes a determined personal effort; the Notebook's “up at 5. Umbrella—foggy, cold. Joan[n]a stayed foot palsied. No umbrella[.] Mounted coach at 7. Boy comes. Fog …” is now fully explained:

Rose at 5 (to secure our umbrella) though the Coach was not to depart till 7. In fact I had been obliged in the evening to sally forth a second time, with the Boots, who had delivered our note, yet could not obtain the umbrella and I have little doubt that it had been removed from the Shop to the house purposely that the owner, (whom the Shopkeeper must have known to be a stranger) shrinking from trouble, might leave the umbrella behind her. A fraud easy to the conscience. Our attendant went in search of the Fruiterer's Dwelling. Joanna remained under the piazzas of the Tron house; & I walked down one of the picturesque old streets to the Salt Market[.] The poor Fellow returned unsuccessful, and we expected to lose the umbrella; but just when we were seated on the Coach & the Driver ready with his whip, we perceived the Fruiterer's Boy coming with it in his hand.

(ibid., 144)

De Selincourt, not correlating the three versions, simply missed the whole thing out.

We have heard before those staccato notes of the 1822 Journal, jottings written in haste, when there was little time for articles and verbs—the Grasmere Journals: “… Lloyds called. The hawthorns on the mountain sides like orchards in blossom. Brought Rhubarb down. It rained hard. Ambleside Fair” (Grasmere Journals, 107-8). The 1822 Notebook has an almost surreal economy: “Broken sash windows. Lieutenant. Stones, Fish. Father. Drunkenness. Shabby clothes, dirty shirt” (Second Tour, 11). The next two versions fill out the story of an alcoholic gentleman who eked out an allowance from his father by selling local curiosities: “Stones, Fish. Father”; and we have Dorothy's feeling, “Pitying his condition I said what a dismal life” (Second Tour, 66), but the vivid economy has gone.

Early and late in Dorothy's writings is recognition of Wordsworth's, and it is one of our recognitions to see Dorothy so close to his words that she used them as her own. In the Grasmere Journals she describes “our patient, bow-bent Friend with his little wooden box at his Back” carrying letters along the roads: “he goes at that slow pace every morning,” he “neither murmurs nor thinks it hard” (February 8, 1802). In his movements and in his patience, as well as in the one adjective, “bow-bent,” this letter-carrier must have behind him the Old Cumberland Beggar:

          Thus, from day to day,
Bowbent, his eyes forever on the ground,
He plies his weary journey …

(Old Cumberland Beggar, 51-3)

Or, there is that view over the islands of Loch Lomond which Gilpin, in his Observations, had dismissed as of little “value in a picturesque light. The surface of the lake is broken by a number of islands, which are scattered about it, and prevent all unity of composition” (Observations, relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty Made in the Year 1776, on Several Parts of Great Britain; particularly the High-Lands of Scotland, 2nd ed. 1792, II, 21). Dorothy is not concerned with unity of composition:

… we looked towards the foot of the lake, scattered over with islands without beginning and without end. The sun shone, and the distant hills were visible, some through sunny mists, others in gloom with patches of sunshine; the lake was lost under the low and distant hills, and the islands lost in the lake, which was all in motion with travelling fields of light, or dark shadows under rainy clouds. There are many hills, but no commanding eminence at a distance to confine the prospect, so that the land seemed endless as the water.

(Journals, I, 251-2)

This has an immensity, a relation somehow with the cosmic boat in Peter Bell that goes “among the scattered stars”

Up goes my boat between the stars,
Through many a breathless field of light,
Through many a long blue field of ether.

As Dorothy's “fields of light” indicate, she lived with the poetry; of the lines in The Solitary Reaper,

Oh listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound—

She told Lady Beaumont in November, 1805, “I often catch myself repeating them in disconnection with any thought, or even, I may say, recollection of the Poem” (EY, 650). It is an intimacy, a literary intimacy; Coleridge saw it and longed for it. At this very time, at Loch Lomond, he wrote in his Notebook: “What? tho' the World praise me, I have no dear Heart that loves my Verses—I never hear them in snatches from a beloved Voice, fitted to some sweet occasion, of natural Prospect, in Winds at Night—” (Coleridge, Notebooks, I, 1463). In this instance—of the islands of Loch Lomond—there is a further connection with Wordsworth's poetry: with Ruth, and this, possibly a result of John Stoddart's Remarks on Scotland, 1801. Immediately after describing the fields of light and the land ‘endless as the water’, Dorothy continues: “… it was an outlandish scene—we might have believed ourselves in North America.” Stoddart, describing those same islands, had quoted from Ruth:

                    All the fairy crowds
Of islands that together lie
As quietly as spots of sky
Among the evening clouds

(11.63-6)

This is one of his several admiring pointers to Wordsworth (though here unacknowledged). It cannot have failed to bring to Dorothy's mind the first lines of the verse quoted,

The Youth of green Savannahs spake
And many an endless, endless lake

and altogether to have prompted her thought, “We might have believed ourselves in North America.” Indeed, three paragraphs on, still discussing the islands, Dorothy comments “It was a place that might have been just visited by new settlers. I thought of Ruth and her dreams of romantic love” and she quotes the stanza from Ruth immediately following the one quoted by Stoddart (Journals, I, 254).

Stoddart was certainly an influence, and Dorothy refers to him several times in her Recollections. It was through him surely that they tried so hard to see Rubens' Daniel in the Lion's Den at Hamilton House. “I cannot see,” Mr. Gilpin had said of the painting in his Observations, “how two passions can exist together in the same place” (II, 60). Stoddart took issue in his Remarks: “the struggles of fear, with the prevailing emotion of hope are both present in the face of Daniel” (Remarks, I, 175). Dorothy and Wordsworth set out: “Aug. 22. Immediately after breakfast walked to the Duke of Hamilton's house to view the picture-gallery, chiefly the famous picture of Daniel in the Lion's Den, by Rubens” (Journals, I, 231). At the front door they were told by the porter that the housekeeper was unwell; they might come back in an hour but to a more obscure door. They apologised, walked about (though were not allowed to walk in the park), and returned:

We stopped at the proper door of the Duke's house, and seated ourselves humbly upon a bench, waiting the pleasure of the porter, who, after a little time, informed us that we could not be admitted, giving no reason whatever. When we got to the inn, we could just gather from the waiter that it was not usual to refuse admittance to strangers; but that was all: he could not, or would not, help us, so we were obliged to give it up, which mortified us, for I had wished much to see the picture. Wm vowed that he would write that very night to Lord Archibald Hamilton, stating the whole matter, which he did from Glasgow.

(Journals, I, 231-2)

It was Kafkaesque, and they never saw the Rubens. Nor did they have more luck at Cologne Cathedral in 1820 because “that Buonaparte seized on the picture [Rubens' Crucifixion of St Peter] and sent it to Paris” (Journals, II, 42).

It is in the mixed mode that the pleasures of Dorothy's own Journals lie, not of course coexisting in the grand Rubens' manner, but in the continuous glancing from description to anecdote to commentary, from high to low. We can glimpse the horse, for example, only in the interstices of the 1803 Scottish narrative: we have him plunging with fear and stamping about on the ferry as they crossed Loch Etive; at the next Loch, he had to go outside the boat—the first horse that swam with the ferry—but so frightened that he strove to push himself under the boat (the ferrymen had to be given whisky to control him); Dorothy feared for him (Journals, I, 319). Shortly after, he is not eating his corn, and they decide not to push beyond a “slow walk” (Journals, I, 342). He had to manage another ferry and was so exhausted that when the woman at Killiecrankie “refused to lodge us … we entreated again and again in behalf of the poor horse” (Journals, I, 348). Finally, as they got back into the Border Country, they knew that they could never get him even over the easy ford of the Tweed—“he had not forgotten the fright,” writes Dorothy, “at Connel Ferry” and they had to hire a man to help get him over (Journals, I, 398).

A few pages can show the mingled yarn of the Journals. Here is the sublime: the Glacier de Boissons at Chamouny (Dorothy's spelling): “A few steps brought us in view of the famous Pyramids, concealed from us when we were on the ice above them. Imagine a multitude of tall cones or needles mingled with other fantastic shapes—towers or fragments of towers—all as white as new-fallen snow, and in substance like alabaster—imagine these, rising, as it seems, out of a forest of pines—and their forms a model of the enduring pikes and needles of the Mountains” (Journals, II, 288).

It is like a Francis Towne. From this, the Wordsworths come down to “green fields and cottages,” alas a world less of the beautiful than of tourist manipulation: “… a little Girl began to talk to me at her Mother's door, with a civility which was quite unnatural—‘Madame, vous avez été sur la Glacière—ne l'avez vous pas trouvée très belle? n'êtes vous pas fatiguée?’ All this doubtless, in expectation of money. Thus the Inhabitants of this Vale have been corrupted …” (Journals, II, 289). Dorothy had been saddened years before in Grasmere when two healthy beggar boys had “addressed me with the Begging cant & the whining voice of Sorrow,” and then crept up to Matthew Harrison's house “with a Beggar's complaining foot” (Grasmere Journals, 10). The strands of generosity and a suspicion of exploitation are with Dorothy from the start of the Continental Journal. On her door in Calais was the notice, “Sterne's Room” for the Wordsworths stayed in the Hotel d'Angleterre, famous from A Sentimental Journey. They had seen Sterne's own remise (we are to believe) among the carriages for sale, and Dorothy could not fail to be reminded that Yorick's journey was not through great landscapes, cathedrals or galleries, but through the movements of the heart. And just like Sterne in Calais, she is moved to charity by a person who does not ask for it: “a squalid, ragged women. She sate alone upon some steps … a white dog beside her … she did not notice us; but her rags, and her melancholy and sickly aspect drew a penny from me, and the change in the woman's skinny, doleful face is not to be imagined: it was brightened by a light and gracious smile” (Journals, II, 12). Sterne's “pauvre honteux” thanked him with a tear (how genuine we cannot know): “—he pull'd out a little handkerchief, and wiped his face as he turned away—and I thought he thank'd me more than them all.” (L. Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Mr Yorick, ed. G. D. Stout, [1967], 134). Dorothy's ragged woman thanked with a smile. Another time, Dorothy was attracted by a beguiling child, a “little Wanderer” whose “cunning” made her “a successful beggar, but a useless appendage of hers, a sickly girl, who joined us in hopes that a little might fall to her share (though she had not a word to say for it) pleaded with me as powerfully for sous as my active, engaging little friend …” (Journals, II, 14-15). But this is not Dorothy's accustomed mode, and she gives less on the Continent than at home. Without ease of language, she cannot reach the old sailors, discharged soldiers, abandoned women, she cannot reach them for their stories. At the same time, she feels threatened. On leaving Calais, she sounds a little like Smelfungus, the caricature of Smollett in Sterne's Journey, who saw all Europeans as treacherous; this is one of several such grumbles: “Bought a pound of cherries for six sous, probably twice as much as would have been demanded from French people …” (Journals, II, 13). After that note of distaste for corruption which sounds in the vignette of the unnaturally attentive little girl who spoke to Dorothy when they had descended from the pinnacles of the Glacier, we have something quite different: the admirable story of Pierre, the Chamonix guide: his family in the valley five hundred years, his fields lost by a father's gambling, retrieved, and destroyed by avalanche, a child drowned in the Arve, and yet that cheerful dignity of the pastoral that the Wordsworths so deeply respected. Following this, the “sound of voices chanting” and a procession moving slowly round the church at Argentière, the women—

from head to foot, covered with one piece of white cloth, resembled the small pyramids of the Glacier, which were before our eyes; and it as impossible to look at one and the other without fancifully connecting them together. Imagine the moving Figures, like a stream of pyramids—the white Church, the half-concealed Village, and the Glacier close behind, among pine-trees,—a pure sun shining over all! and remember that these objects were seen at the base of those enormous mountains, and you may have some faint notion of the effect produced on us by that beautiful spectacle. It was a farewell of the Vale of Chamouny that can scarcely be less vividly remembered twenty years hence …

(Journals, II, 291)

We are back with the sublime. That repeated design of ice pyramids, mountains and human figures, Dorothy bids her reader see as impressive, commends it to future memory, and clearly shares a response to it with Wordsworth, whose poem, “Processions,” goes beyond “beautiful spectacle” to a meditation on myth and metamorphosis, for the resemblances between the living and the icy—People, Pillars and the Mountain—had set the mind in play, even frighteningly:

Trembling, I look upon the secret springs
Of that licentious craving in the mind
To act the God among external things,
To bind, on apt suggestion, or unbind;

(‘Processions’, Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, XXXII, 64-7)

Again, the old relationship of the two writers—Dorothy content to note and remember, Wordsworth to brood upon the mind. From that living stream of pyramids Dorothy shifts again; she characteristically finds her own landscape, a “hamlet under shaded trees,” a “Valley of Westmorland” and so, at the end of the day they come once more to that green dell of Trientz, and “we ourselves within the deep enclosure,” the “aboriginal vale.” For a second time they are pilgrims here. It had been “the most romantic of our fancies” to stay with Wordsworth there for a night. But there was another side, and Dorothy is honest: there were fleas in the beds. She and Mary were up the “long, but I must not say tedious night,” filled with “images and thoughts of simple and quiet life” (Journals, II, 293-4), protests Dorothy, trying hard. She is not a Smelgungus sweeping into condemnation of “execrable auberges … nothing but dirt and imposition (Smollett, Travels, Letter I).

Despite her recognitions of Westmorland, she does not travel a parochial Smelgungus; nor does she set out from the aggressive opposite—“They order, said I, this matter better in France,” Sterne's polemical beginning to his fictional Sentimental Journey. Dorothy has her share of prejudices; she finds the green glacial lake and river waters less able “than our own pellucid lakes” to take the delicacies of reflection; that so much less clearly is that other sky “received into the bosom”; she misses, despite her fear of cows, the troops of cattle “that enliven the banks of our lakes, or beautify the pastures” (Journals, II, 109); she finds Catholicism meaningless, the Mass a performance with the priest in gaudy dress, opening and shutting a little cupboard, the vocal service gabbled (Journals, II, 11), and priests generally “spattering over the prayers” (Journals, II, 18). Even so, she is never so hostile as was Smollett, for example, who wrote in his Travels that he thought that Catholicism produced a “frivolous taste for frippery and shew, and encouraged a habit of idleness” (Letter IV). In Milan the Wordsworths went to the Opera, had to stand in the Pit it was so crowded and, Dorothy noted, the stage only was illuminated. They preferred the English way: “We did not think the additional brilliancy given to it by contrast with the rest of the house made amends for the dullness cast over the spectators” (Journals, II, 236). They left before the end.

Dorothy was not a solitary traveller, bolstering her prejudices or having adventures of the heart. She travelled, as she lived, with her family. Certainly, she took her world with her, and “looked about for what she remembered,” but she also “looked for new things.” And in both quests she was gratified. Above Chamonix, in 1820, she and Wordsworth are the same people as when in John's Grove in Grasmere in 1802, “William lay, & I lay in the trench under the fence—he with his eyes shut & listening to the waterfalls & the Birds.” In Chamonix they lie and listen again to what in 1802 Dorothy had called “the peaceful sounds of the earth: “W. and I lay down upon a sunny bank beside a rivulet … We shut our eyes to listen, and to feel the pleasure of the sunshine in perfect rest (Journals, II, 283). Dorothy is the main character in all her Journals. No one but she entering the Assembly Rooms at Brussels where the Duchess of Richmond had given the Ball five years before on the night before Waterloo, would first of all count the chandeliers and the mirrors: “17 lustres—14 huge mirrors—14 marble Ionic pillars—scarlet sofas—” (Journals, II, 26), before commenting on the “young officers hurried away in their dancing shoes to meet the Enemy” (Journals, II, 27). Incidentally, Dorothy, naturally loyal to Wordsworth's disapproval, reveals no awareness whatsoever of the most popular of all travel books, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Her memories of Lake Geneva, unlike Mary Shelley's four years earlier in 1816, need nothing from Canto III. When she goes to Chillon she does note that Lord Byron's poem, which she mistitles “The Fortress of Chillon,” was there among “a few other books,” but having, in her forthright way, got into the kitchen, and “There I sate by the fire” (Journals, II, 297), and then having looked round the place “which tells its tale of sickening sorrow—of groans long since laid asleep, the mind,” she wrote, “is not satisfied with its own imaginings; it craves something more,” and so they listen to the Warder's tales of tyranny, “which have only left an indistinct impression on my memory” (Journals, II, 297). No persons but the Wordsworths could have been in Chillon, craving something more for the mind, having Byron's poem to hand, and could yet have preferred the Warder's unmemorable chat. No journal writer but Dorothy could have recorded it without comment. But then, there are some prejudices that are unalterable, and it is for her humanness that we read Dorothy Wordsworth.

Notes

I am grateful to my fellow Trustees of the Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Grasmere, for permission to quote from the manuscript Notebooks and Journals of Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth. All abbreviations to quoted sources are standard. The following abbreviations refer to the various published versions of Dorothy's Journals: Journals (ed. De Selincourt, 1952); Journals, ed. Moorman (ed. Mary Moorman, 2nd ed., 1971); Second Tour (Journal of My Second Tour in Scotland, ed. Jiro Nagasawa, 1989); Grasmere Journals (The Grasmere Journals, ed. Pamela Woof, 1991).