embellished with carving.  One window there was—­a perfect and unpretending cottage window, with little diamond panes, embowered at almost every season of the year with roses; and, in the summer and autumn, with a profusion of jasmine, and other fragrant shrubs....  I was ushered up a little flight of stairs, fourteen in all, to a little drawing-room, or whatever the reader chooses to call it.  Wordsworth himself has described the fireplace of this room as his

    ‘Half-kitchen and half-parlour fire.’

It was not fully seven feet six inches high, and in other respects pretty nearly of the same dimensions as the rustic hall below.  There was, however, in a small recess, a library of perhaps three hundred volumes, which seemed to consecrate the room as the poet’s study and composing room, and such occasionally it was.  But far oftener he both studied, as I found, and composed on the high road.” [B]

Other poems of later years refer, much more fully than the above, to this cottage, and its orchard ground, where so many of Wordsworth’s lyrics were composed.

The “orchard ground,” which was for the most part in grass, sloped upwards; but a considerable portion of the natural rock was exposed; and on its face, some rough stone steps were cut by Wordsworth, helped by a near neighbour of his—­John Fisher—­so as more conveniently to reach the upper terrace, where the poet built for himself a small arbour.  All this garden and orchard ground is not much altered since 1800.  The short terrace walk is curved, with a sloping bank of grass above, shaded by apple trees, hazel, holly, laburnum, laurel, and mountain ash.  Below the terrace is the well, which supplied the cottage in Wordsworth’s time; and there large leaved primroses still grow, doubtless the successors of those planted by his own and his sister’s hands.  Above, and amongst the rocks, are the daffodils, which they also brought to their “garden-ground;” the Christmas roses, which they planted near the well, were removed to the eastern side of the garden, where they flourished luxuriantly in 1882; but have now, alas! disappeared.  The box-wood planted by the poet grows close to the cottage.  The arbour is now gone; but, in the place where it stood, a seat is erected.  The hidden brook still sings its under-song, as it used to do, “its quiet soul on all bestowing,” and the green linnet may doubtless be seen now, as it used to be in 1803.  The allusions to the garden ground at Dove Cottage, in the poems which follow, will be noted as they occur.—­Ed.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote A:  See the ‘Memoirs of Wordsworth’, vol. i. p. 156.—­Ed.]

[Footnote B:  See ‘Recollections of the Lakes’, etc., pp. 130-137, Works, vol. ii., edition of 1862.—­Ed.]

* * * * *

“BLEAK SEASON WAS IT, TURBULENT AND BLEAK” [A]

Composed (probably) in 1800.—­Published 1851