Wordsworths Monastic Inheritance Poetry Place and The Sense of Community Jessica Fay All Chapter

Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance:
Poetry, Place, and the Sense of

Community Jessica Fay
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OX F O R D E N G L I S H M O N O G R A P H S
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PAULINA KEW ES LA URA MA RCUS P E T E R M C C U L L O U GH
HE ATHE R O’ DON OG H UE S EA MUS P E R R Y L L O Y D P R A T T
FI ON A S T A FFORD
Wordsworth’s Monastic
Inheritance
Poetry, Place, and the Sense
of Community
J E S S I C A FAY
1
3
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In memory of Tom Fay,

who taught me all I know.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the Fellows of St John’s College, Oxford, for the award of
a Lamb and Flag Scholarship which enabled me to undertake doctoral
study and the Leverhulme Trust for the Early Career Research Fellowship
which gave me the time to revise my doctoral thesis into its current form.
I am also obliged to the Trustees of the Wordsworth Trust for permission
to use and quote from their manuscripts and to Jeff Cowton, Melissa
Mitchell, and Rebecca Turner for all of their help at the Jerwood Centre.
I am grateful to Taylor and Francis for permission to reproduce research
that was originally published in ‘Prospects of Contemplation: Wordsworth’s
Winter Garden at Coleorton, 1806–1811’, ERR, 24 (2013): 307–15
(<http://www.tandfonline.com>). Chapter 6 is a development of work
that initially appeared in two separate places: ‘A Question of Loyalty:
Wordsworth and the Beaumonts, Catholic Emancipation and Ecclesiastical
Sketches’, Romanticism, 22 (2016): 1–14 and ‘Wordsworth’s Northumbria:
Bede, Cuthbert, and Northern Medievalism’, MLR, 111 (2016): 917–35.
Edinburgh University Press and the MHRA have kindly granted permis-
sion to reprint sections of these articles. Figures 1, 2, 3, and 4 appear by
permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford.
My greatest personal debt of gratitude is to Jon Roberts, through whose
inspirational teaching I first encountered Wordsworth. I was then
extremely fortunate to have Fiona Stafford as a graduate supervisor;
I could not wish for a better role model. The wisdom, generosity, and
kindness of Stephen Gill is immeasurable; it has been a privilege to receive
his guidance. I am also indebted to Emma Mason who constructively
examined my doctoral thesis and to Seamus Perry for offering helpful sug-
gestions as the thesis developed. I subsequently learned a great deal from
colleagues at the University of Bristol, in particular, Tamsin Badcoe,
Stephen Cheeke, Edward Holberton, and Ad Putter; I wish especially to
mention Lesel Dawson, Samantha Matthews, and Ralph Pite. Andrew
Bennett has been an excellent mentor; I have been inspired by his skilful
reading and clarity of thought.
Many friends have helped in numerous ways; in particular I would like
to thank Judyta Frodyma, Suzannah Hexter, Sophie Howarth, Rosie H.
Mulqueen, Thomas Palmer, Ying Roberts, Julia Tejblum, Clare Tilbury,
Bonnie Wulff, and Philip Wulff. A special mention is due to Micha
viii Acknowledgements
Lazarus. I will for ever be grateful for the friendship of Tom Owens and for
all that we shared while this work was in progress. I also remember with
gratitude the help and encouragement I received from Pat McGuire. I could
not have written this book without the support of my family; for them,
I always endeavour to be the best that I can be.
Contents
List of Figures and Map xi
Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
Monasticism and Wordsworth’s ‘Middle Years’ 3
Ruins and their Resonances 13
Books and Birds: St Francis and Laverna 17
Wordsworthian ‘Monks’ 25
1. Wordsworth’s Creation of Taste 28

Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Wordsworth’s Purified Romance 32
Suffering, Reverence, and Aspiration 43
Poets as ‘powerful Religionists’: Spenser, Wordsworth, Keble 53
Problems with Prescribing Taste 58
2. Quakerism, Cultivation, and the Coleorton Period 63

Thomas Clarkson: Quakerism and the ‘Seed of the Kingdom’ 65
Thomas Wilkinson: Gardening and Reaping 70
Quakerism and Monasticism: Ruins and Consecrated Ground 75
Coleorton and its Heritage 81
The Winter Garden 92
3. ‘My second Self when I am gone’: Legacy, Memorialization,

and Incarnation 99
Whitaker and The White Doe: Bloodlines, Progeny,
and Inheritance 101
The Tuft of Primroses and St Basil: Trees and the Trinity 111
From the People and for the People: Cintra and Democratic
Representation 120
Epitaphs and Incarnation 127
4. Pastoral Reclusion and The Excursion 133

Wordsworth’s Gothic Church 135
Pastoralism and Monasticism 145
Pastoralism Corrected 150
The Wanderer’s Eloquence 159
x Contents
5. Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Heritage 168

Wordsworth’s Northumbria 172
Sketches and Inscriptions 183
The Sense of Community 192
Epilogue: The Medieval Revival 196
Appendix I. Table of Monastic Sites Visited and/or

Studied by Wordsworth 201
Appendix II. Map of Sites within the Scope of Wordsworth’s
Monastic Inheritance 205
Bibliography 207
Index 233
List of Figures and Map
Figures
1. ‘East View of Bolton Abbey’, in Thomas Dunham Whitaker,
The History and Antiquities of the Deanery of Craven in the County
of York (London, 1801), Douce W. 268, illustration following p. 324.
Reproduced by permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University
of Oxford.33
2. ‘Grace Dieu’, in John Nichols, The History and Antiquities of the
County of Leicester, 4 vols (London, 1795–1811), iii, pt. ii (1804),
Gough Leic. 19, illustration between pp. 650 and 651. Reproduced
by permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. 89
3. ‘South East View of Kirkstall Abbey’, in Thomas Dunham Whitaker,
The History and Antiquities of the Deanery of Craven in the County
of York (London, 1801), Douce W. 268, illustration following p. 55.
Reproduced by permission of The Bodleian Libraries,
The University of Oxford. 90
4. ‘North View of Bolton Abbey’, in Thomas Dunham Whitaker,
The History and Antiquities of the Deanery of Craven in the
County of York (London, 1801), Douce W. 268, illustration
following p. 324. Reproduced by permission of The Bodleian
Libraries, The University of Oxford. 110
Map
Map 1. Sites within the Scope of Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance. 206
Abbreviations
Chronology Mark L. Reed, Wordsworth: The Chronology of the
Middle Years, 1800–1815 (Cambridge, Mass., 1975).
CLB Charles Lamb Bulletin.
DWJ The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, ed. Pamela Woof

(2002; reissued Oxford, 2008).
Excursion The Excursion, ed. Sally Bushell, James A. Butler, and

Michael C. Jaye (Ithaca, NY, and London, 2007).
ELH English Literary History.
ERR European Romantic Review.
EY The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth:
The Early Years, 1787–1805, ed. Chester L. Shaver
(Oxford, 1967).
Grosart Prose The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed.

A. B. Grosart, 3 vols (London, 1876).
IF Notes The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Jared R.

Curtis (London, 1993).
JEGP Journal of English and Germanic Philology.
LY i The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth:

The Later Years pt. I, 1821–1828, ed. Alan G. Hill
(Oxford, 1978).
LY ii The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth:
The Later Years pt. II, 1829–1834, ed. Alan G. Hill
(Oxford, 1979).
LY iii The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth:
The Later Years pt. III, 1835–1839, ed. Alan G. Hill
(Oxford, 1982).
LY iv The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth:
The Later Years pt. IV, 1840–1853, ed. Alan G. Hill
(Oxford, 1988).
Lyrical Ballads Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James
Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY, and London,
1992).
xiv Abbreviations
MLN Modern Language Notes.
MLR Modern Language Review.
MY i The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth:
The Middle Years pt. I, 1806–1811, ed. Mary Moorman
(Oxford, 1969).
MY ii The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth:
The Middle Years pt. II, 1812–1820, ed. Mary Moorman
and Alan G. Hill (Oxford, 1970).
Oxford Handbook Richard Gravil and Daniel Robinson, eds, The Oxford
Handbook of William Wordsworth (Oxford, 2015).
P2V Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807,

ed. Jared R. Curtis (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1983).
PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association.
Primroses The Tuft of Primroses, with Other Late Poems for ‘The
Recluse’, ed. Joseph Kishel (Ithaca, NY, and London,
1986).
Prose The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed.
W. J. B. Owen and Jane Smyser, 3 vols
(Oxford, 1974).
RES Review of English Studies.
SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900.

Shorter Poems Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. Carl H. Ketcham
(Ithaca, NY, and London, 1989).
Sonnet Series Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1820–1845, ed.
Geoffrey Jackson (Ithaca, NY, and London, 2004).
Thirteen-Book Prelude The Thirteen-Book Prelude, ed. Mark L. Reed, 2 vols

(Ithaca, NY, and London, 1991), i.
TWC The Wordsworth Circle.
White Doe The White Doe of Rylstone; or The Fate of the Nortons,
ed. Kristine Dugas (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1988).
W’s Reading I Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 1770–1799
(Cambridge, 1993).
W’s Reading II Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 1800–1815
(Cambridge, 1995).
And all the Hills were glad to bear

Their part in this effectual prayer.
The White Doe of Rylstone (lines 1794–5)
Introduction
On 25 October 1853, the Anglo-Irish poet Aubrey De Vere wrote excitedly

from Leicestershire to Wordsworth’s friend Isabella Fenwick, reporting a
recent excursion to the ruins of Grace Dieu Priory: ‘My dear Miss Fenwick,—
I really cannot help writing you a few lines to tell you of the great pleasure
I have had in treading again Wordsworthian ground.’1 Situated close to
Coleorton Hall, the Leicestershire residence of Wordsworth’s patron Sir
George Beaumont (1753–1827), Grace Dieu Priory was dissolved in 1539,
after which it passed into the hands of Beaumont’s ancestors.2 Wordsworth
visited the ruins of the priory twice while staying on the Coleorton Estate
during the winter of 1806.3 The idea of ‘treading’ a piece of ground distin-
guished by the historical presence of others was important for Wordsworth
and by taking pleasure from being in a place Wordsworth had visited
De Vere was, therefore, following in the poet’s footsteps figuratively as well
as literally. De Vere’s trip to Leicestershire also included the village of
Whitwick, which is just a short distance from Grace Dieu and is the site of
the first monastery established in England after the Reformation, Mount
Saint Bernard.4 De Vere heard the monks of this new Cistercian abbey
at prayer, noting that ‘whatever time is not spent in psalmody, vigil and
meditation, is spent in manual labour’.5 He was pleased that Wordsworth
himself had encountered this community of monks in 1841 and asserted
that Wordsworth ‘must have heard . . . the very same harmonies as in the
time of St. Bernard, and, centuries earlier, of St. Benedict. I have no doubt
1 Aubrey De Vere, a Memoir Based on His Unpublished Diaries and Correspondence,

ed. Wilfred Philip Ward (London, 1904), p. 223.
2 John Nichols, The History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester, 4. vols, 8 pts
(London, 1795–1815), iii, pt ii (1804), pp. 651–64.
3 De Vere Memoir, p. 224. Wordsworth’s visits to Grace Dieu are noted in MY i., pp. 108–9,
and 121. The monastic site and its historic association with the Beaumont family is the subject
of Wordsworth’s ‘Inscription for a Seat in the Groves of Coleorton’ which was erected in
the grounds of Coleorton in 1812. See Shorter Poems, pp. 107–8.
4 LY iv., p. 218 n. 1. Mount Saint Bernard opened in 1835; the architect was A. W. N. Pugin.
Whitwick became significant to the Wordsworth family after Wordsworth’s son John accepted
a curacy there in 1827. See LY i., pp. 557 and 559–60.
5 De Vere Memoir, p. 225.
2 Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance
he was delighted with all he saw; and gave it at least a poetical, if not a
theological, blessing.’6 For Wordsworth, monastic ruins did indeed consti-
tute a deeply resonant aspect of the landscape and he was particularly struck
by Grace Dieu when he visited its remains in 1806. Contrary to the tone of
De Vere’s testimony, however, Wordsworth’s response to monasticism was
far from uniformly positive. Wordsworth was wary of certain types of reli-
gious reclusion and, as is evident from his own report of Mount Saint
Bernard (given in 1841), he had a strong antipathy towards the foundation
of Roman Catholic monasteries in England.7 Wordsworth’s subtle, complex,
and often conflicted thinking about the routines and legacies of monasti-
cism is the focus of this book. This topic is not merely of interest in terms of
what it suggests about religious dimensions of Wordsworth’s writings or his
opinions concerning Roman Catholicism; rather, Wordsworth’s thinking
about monasticism offers new insights into a range of important issues in his
poetry and prose, including the historical resonances of the landscape, local
attachment and memorialization, gardening and cultivation, Quakerism
and silence, solitude and community, pastoral retreat and national identity.
De Vere’s account serves to introduce the parameters of the present
study and to highlight the caution needed when assessing Wordsworth’s
responses to monasticism. First, De Vere alerts us to the significance, for
Wordsworth, of Sir George Beaumont’s Coleorton estate in Leicestershire.
The poet’s eight-month residence there in 1806–7 was a transitional
moment in his career and it marked the start of a period in which he
recurrently read about and visited monastic sites. Secondly, De Vere’s claim
that Wordsworth would have appreciated the audible harmony connect-
ing the nineteenth-century monks of Mount Saint Bernard with the
medieval inhabitants of Grace Dieu opens up questions about the value,
for Wordsworth, of monastic sites as loci that draw together temporally
disparate communities. Enriched by the passage of time and the work of
nature, such sites become palimpsests of collective identity; centuries of
worship in these places produces a spiritual legacy that is inherited and
enriched by successive generations and that creates a sense of local
attachment and transhistorical community.8 Thirdly, De Vere’s claim that
6 Ibid., p. 226. De Vere makes this observation not in the letter to Fenwick but in a letter
to his sister of 27 October 1853. De Vere’s enthusiasm for Mount Saint Bernard was perhaps
coloured by his recent conversion to Roman Catholicism.
7 LY iv., p. 218.
8 Alexandra Walsham notes the widely accepted conceptualization of the landscape as
a palimpsest ‘upon which each generation inscribes its own values and preoccupations
without ever being able to erase entirely those of the preceding one’. In other words, ‘the
landscape is a repository of the collective memory of its inhabitants, a mnemonic to their
knowledge of previous eras, and a source of ideas about their social identity’. See The
Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, & Memory in Early Modern Britain & Ireland
Introduction 3
Wordsworth would have given ‘a poetical, if not a theological blessing’ to

Mount Saint Bernard, implies a tension between Wordsworth’s aesthetic
appreciation of monasticism and his objections to Roman Catholicism.
The most complex example of this tension occurs in Wordsworth’s
Ecclesiastical Sketches, a series of sonnets on the history of the Church in
England first published in 1822. Ecclesiastical Sketches, which expresses
Wordsworth’s allegiance to the Church of England and his desire for
national ecclesiastical unity, is the culmination of a sustained period of
interest in the monastic history of his local region and therefore it marks
the end of the present study.9 My purpose is to show that Wordsworth’s
writings from 1806 to 1822 are persistently responsive to the cultural and
material remains—the routines and structures, the landscapes and archi-
tecture—of the monastic system. I will argue that attention to such the-
matic dimensions of Wordsworth’s poetry and the rhetorical strategies he
developed to articulate them opens up an important new perspective from
which to read and interpret Wordsworth’s mature work.
M O N A S T I C I S M A N D WO R D S WO RT H ’ S
‘MIDDLE YEARS’
While there has been no previous book-length study of the topic, readers and
critics have, in different contexts and from various perspectives, detected
traces of monasticism in Wordsworth’s verse. For example, Aubrey De Vere
records that the abbot of Mount Saint Bernard admitted his ‘first inclination
to the monastic life’ had arisen from reading lines in The Excursion (1814):
The life where Hope and Memory are one,
Earth quiet and unchanged; the human soul
Consistent in self-rule; and heaven revealed
To meditation in that quietness.10
(Oxford, 2011), pp. 6–7. Fiona Stafford’s account of the importance, for Wordsworth, of
poetry that is situated or attached, physically or emotionally, to a particular space or place is
a foundation for the present study. I consider that this sense of ‘local attachment’ under-
pinned Wordsworth’s interest in the monastic history of the north of England. See Local
Attachments: The Province of Poetry (Oxford, 2010).
9 I follow Robert M. Ryan in considering the unorthodox religious tendencies that
Wordsworth adopted during the 1790s as anomalous within the larger Christian context of
his life; that is to say, I interpret his later Anglicanism as a return to the religion of his
childhood rather than apostasy from political and religious radicalism. See The Romantic
Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789–1824 (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 80–118.
10 De Vere Memoir, pp. 224–5. De Vere quotes lines from The Excursion, III. 407–10,
which Wordsworth originally composed in 1808 for The Tuft of Primroses, ll. 305–8. See
Excursion, pp. 114–15 and Primroses, pp. 47–8. I discuss this passage at length in Chapter 4.
The abbot had been drawn to this passage from Book III of The Excursion
in which Wordsworth’s despondent Solitary celebrates the monastic world
as a realm in which the anticipated stability and tranquillity of heaven may
be glimpsed. This laudation is itself complicated because it is spoken by
the religious sceptic, the Solitary; yet, the fact that these lines are said to
have ignited the abbot’s sense of his vocation makes Wordsworth’s own
disapproval of Mount Saint Bernard all the more striking. After visiting
that working monastery in 1841, Wordsworth wrote:
Where are these things to stop, is a question which any one who has reflected
upon the constitution of the Romish Church will naturally put to himself
with such objects before him and not without some apprehensions of
mischief. Perhaps alarm may be needless, but surely it is too late in the day
for such Institutions to be of much service, in England at least. [T]he whole
appearance had in my eyes something of the nature of a dream, and it has
often haunted me since—11
Wordsworth’s confession that he was ‘haunted’ by the image of cowled
monks chanting psalms in the Leicestershire countryside suggests not just
prejudice against Catholicism but a repulsion for monastic practices. The
abbot of Mount Saint Bernard (who had a portrait of Wordsworth hang-
ing on an abbey wall)12 had certainly not misread The Excursion, yet he
perhaps failed to register the subtleties of Wordsworth’s appreciation for
monasticism, some of which are hinted at here in the qualification that it
is ‘too late . . . in England at least’.
Like the abbot, a reviewer of Ecclesiastical Sketches interpreted Wordsworth’s
position positively: a writer for the General Weekly Register was led by the
sonnets’ treatment of the dissolution of the monasteries to characterize the
poet as ‘a champion of monastic institutions’; yet the sonnets catalogue
various ‘monastic abuses’ and the ‘Advertisement’ to the volume states that
Wordsworth’s purpose was to garner opposition to the Roman Catholic
Relief Bill which was under parliamentary debate in 1821.13 Another
example of Wordsworth’s ambivalence towards monasticism occurs in
‘Stanzas, Suggested in a Steam-boat off St. Bees’ Heads’ (1833). The poem
celebrates a local abbey as a bulwark of piety, charity, hospitality, and educa-
tion, but in an accompanying note Wordsworth modifies this praise
by arguing that ‘while we deplore and are indignant at these [monastic]
abuses, . . . Charity is, upon the whole, the safest guide that we can take in
11 LY iv., p. 218. 12 De Vere Memoir, p. 226.

13 The review appeared on 5 May 1822. See Donald H. Reiman, ed., The Romantics
Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers, Part A: The Lake Poets, 2 vols
(London, 1972), ii, 551. See Sonnet Series, p. 137 for the ‘Advertisement’ and Chapter 5 for
my discussion of Ecclesiastical Sketches.
Introduction 5
judging our fellow-men, whether of past ages, or of the present time.’14

What Wordsworth was willing to own as a charitable assessment was, in
1885, in the eyes of a Catholic historian, wholehearted admiration: ‘[a]mong
the modern poets, no one has celebrated with more feeling and truth the
glory of the Monastic Orders, nor more eloquently deplored their ruin,
than the English Wordsworth’.15 In fact, however, Wordsworth’s engage-
ment with monasticism suggests something more complex than a charit-
able portrayal of ‘fellow-men . . . of ages past’ and something more nuanced
than a celebration of monastic ‘glory’.
Wordsworth’s interest in monasticism is conveyed in a letter of
December 1844 in which he attempted to help Henry Crabb Robinson
towards a clear understanding of his position. The letter recommends
Samuel R. Maitland’s The Dark Ages (1844) which, Wordsworth writes,
‘confirms, without alluding to any thing of mine all that I had previously
thrown out upon the benefits conferred by monastic institutions’.16
Maitland commends the social function of the monasteries claiming that
as places of refuge ‘for the orphan[,] maiden and the desolate widow’, and as
centres of learning, their value was ‘beyond all price’. But Maitland (who
was librarian at Lambeth Palace) argues that the monastic and conventual
system ‘never can be adapted to meet the present exigencies of the Church
of England; and that any attempt to revive that system in this time and
country can only prove a sad and mischievous failure’, not least because
the current ‘way of living’ is ‘characterized by an increasing tendency to
independence, individualization, and . . . the dissociation, and disconnection
of men’.17 The idea of a monastery as an abstract social model is appealing,
but the nineteenth-century reality (from an Anglican perspective at least)
would be much more complicated to achieve. Wordsworth’s appraisal of
Maitland’s work goes some way towards helping to identify the poet’s pos-
ition but its value is limited. As I will explain, a substantial shift in thinking
about the monastic world took place during Wordsworth’s lifetime: by
1844—fifteen years after Catholic Emancipation had been granted and
just before the Oxford Movement began to wane—prevailing opinions were
very different from those of half a century earlier.18 Wordsworth’s perspective
14 Sonnet Series, pp. 638–9. The poem was published in 1835.

15 Charles Forbes Montalembert, The Monks of the West: From St. Benedict to St. Bernard,
6 vols (London, 1896), i, 56 n. 96.
16 LY iv., p. 633.
17 Samuel R. Maitland, The Dark Ages; A Series of Essays, Intended to Illustrate the State of
Religion and Literature in the Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Centuries (London, 1844),
pp. iv, vi, and xix.
18 Anti-clerical sentiment and opposition to Roman Catholic Relief was strong in the
1790s. Following the dissolution of the Church in France, the arrival in London of many of
the French émigré clergy did much to counter British prejudice. Edmund Burke, in particular,
was not always aligned with widespread public opinion, but this cultural
shift means that his letter to Crabb Robinson was written and received in
a context widely different from that in which he composed the poetry that
will be under discussion in this book.
In her 1940 edition of The White Doe of Rylstone, Alice Pattee Comparetti
noted the importance of the Cistercian and Benedictine Rule in Words
worth’s verse ‘not alone in The Ecclesiastical Sonnets or the stanzas extolling
the community at St. Bees, but in The White Doe as well’.19 Comparetti is
the only critic to have made such a specific statement but she does not
expand on this astute observation. The Cistercian and Benedictine Rule is
indeed significant to Wordsworth because this type of monasticism was
predominant in the north of England throughout the Middle Ages;
moreover, the Cistercians and Benedictines operated under the principles
established by St Basil (b. circa ad 330), which dictated that monks live
in community rather than in solitude. This emphasis on communal life
is the basis of the coenobium or ‘conventual establishment’, which con-
trasts with eremitical forms of monasticism in which an eremite (recluse
or hermit) lives alone. As I will show, Comparetti was right to note
Wordsworth’s specific interest in these coenobitic orders. While one of the
most dangerous and debilitating forms of monasticism, for Wordsworth,
is solitary eremitism, he values the coenobium because, by contrast, it
exemplifies stable community and shared observation of silence.20 The
White Doe of Rylstone (composed in 1807) is at the centre of Wordsworth’s
response to the coenobitic history of the north of England and it is at the
centre of the present study.
In the early Victorian period (before the publication of Matthew
Arnold’s popular 1879 edition) Wordsworth’s post-1807 poetry—particularly
exerted himself to ensure that French nuns, monks, and priests received a warm welcome.
See Derek Beales, ‘Edmund Burke and the Monasteries of France’, The Historical Journal,
48 (2005): 415–36.
19 The White Doe of Rylstone, ed. Alice Pattee Comparetti (Ithaca, NY, 1940), p. 19.
Wordsworth changed the title of Ecclesiastical Sketches to Ecclesiastical Sonnets in 1836.
20 See Chapter 4 for my discussion of reclusion and the gradations between eremites,
coenobites, and recluse-poets. I am aware that narratives of the origins and development of
monasticism (including my own) are often simplified and generalized. J. William Harmless
SJ shows that monasticism does not in fact have ‘nameable founders and known origins’,
there were not ‘clear, easily identifiable stages of development’, and the two organizational
patterns of coenobitic and anchoritic ‘do not begin to do justice to the wide-ranging experi-
ments in monastic living that sprouted up’ from the third century onwards. See ‘Monasticism’,
in Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian
Studies (Oxford, 2008), pp. 493–517 (pp. 498 and 493). I aim to present a picture of monastic
history Wordsworth could have constructed from the sources he encountered. To treat monks
and hermits synonymously is to underestimate Wordsworth’s knowledge of the monastic
world. I have not, therefore, been concerned with hermits such as the one in ‘Lines written
a few miles above Tintern Abbey’.
Introduction 7
The White Doe and The Excursion—was widely read and appreciated.21
Throughout the twentieth-century, however, critical acclaim of the poetry
of Wordsworth’s so-called ‘Great Decade’ (1797–1807) meant that the phrase
‘late poetry’—whether that refers to post-1807 or post-1814 output—came
to denote the less impressive portion of his work.22 To some extent, lack
of modern critical enthusiasm for the ‘later’ Wordsworth was shaped by
responses of the second-generation Romantic poets. Jeffrey Cox has shown,
for example, that in the post-Napoleonic era Wordsworth ‘was seen as
promulgating a conservative position’ and the poets of the Cockney School
felt impelled to rework and reframe The Excursion (which was ‘the central
poem in their Wordsworth canon’) in an effort to reaffirm the radical intel-
lectual and political ideals they believed he had lost.23 In the context of
‘St Bees’ Heads’ (1833), Peter Manning notes that twentieth-century
‘distaste’ for Wordsworth’s conservative views precluded close attention to
the ‘kinds of poetry he evolved to convey’ those views.24 Manning implies
that although Wordsworth’s political and religious perspective changed as
he matured, the poet remained committed to stylistic and formal innov-
ation. One of the aims of this study is to show that the poetry Wordsworth
produced as his career progressed remained radical insofar as it continued
to be generically experimental. Monasticism is a rich area of research
because it occurs in Wordsworth’s writings as both a theme and a style. As
the content of Wordsworth’s writings began to be inflected by knowledge
of monasticism, this knowledge also coloured the ways he chose to push
against established literary norms.25
21 Stephen Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford, 1998), pp. 1–2.
22 James M. Garrett summarizes the situation: ‘The persistence of the Great Decade
Wordsworth and the narratives of anticlimax and decline is remarkable . . . A. C. Bradley
was arguably one of the last critics to reject the two Wordsworths (one lyrical and one
philosophical) . . . offering praise even of Wordsworth’s late poetry. With very few excep-
tions, however, Wordsworth criticism has proceeded under the tacit assumption that little
of value happens after 1807 or 1814.’ See Wordsworth and the Writing Nation (Aldershot,
2008), p. 187 n. 12.
23 Jeffrey N. Cox, ‘Cockney Excursions’, TWC, 42 (2011): 106–15 (pp. 106 and 108).
Keats, of course, was enamoured with The Excursion yet disappointed by Wordsworth’s
political leanings. The younger poets’ disappointment in Wordsworth’s later politics has
been interrogated by Duncan Wu, however, who shows that influential responses to
Wordsworth’s 1816 ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ from Byron, Shelley, and Hazlitt were rooted more
in prejudice and misinformation than in any actual reading of the poem. See ‘Wordsworthian
Carnage’, Essays in Criticism, 66 (2016): 341–59.
24 Peter Manning, ‘Wordsworth at St Bees: Scandals, Sisterhoods, and Wordsworth’s
Later Poetry’, ELH, 52 (1985): 33–58 (p. 33).
25 Tintern Abbey is perhaps the most prominent monastery in Wordsworth’s verse,
even if critics—from Marjory Levinson’s ‘Insight and Oversight: Reading “Tintern Abbey” ’,
in Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 14–57 to Ryan
Haas’s ‘Wordsworth and the Monks of Tintern Abbey’, Modern Philology, 114 (2016):
82–105—have debated the terms on which the abbey is in fact present in the poem. I do not
That which is commonly denoted Wordsworth’s ‘later poetry’ has

recently been subject to reappraisal (Tim Fulford’s The Late Poetry of the
Lake Poets, which discusses Wordsworth’s tour poems of the 1820s and
1830s, is a prime example).26 While this reconsideration of the ‘late’
poetry is important, the demarcation of Wordsworth’s work as either
‘early’ or ‘late’ has resulted in the relative neglect of what, in these terms,
constitutes the ‘middle’; that is to say, analysis of the transition between
these two versions of Wordsworth has been elided.27 And yet, the poet’s
assertion of the cohesiveness of the whole body of his work should per-
haps caution critics against such divisions in the first place. In the Preface
to The Excursion Wordsworth famously describes his oeuvre as a ‘gothic
Church’, in relation to which the smaller poems resemble ‘the little Cells,
Oratories, and sepulchral Recesses, ordinarily included in those Edifices’
and to which The Prelude stands as an ‘Anti-chapel’.28 This metaphor is
important both for its monastic implications and for indicating that
Wordsworth did not conceive of sections of his work in isolation. When
in the Preface to Poems (1815) Wordsworth suggests ‘that the small pieces
of which these volumes consist . . . might be regarded under a two-fold
view; as composing an entire work within themselves, and as adjuncts
to the philosophical Poem, “The Recluse” ’, he is offering instructions
regarding how to read his poetry and it is significant that these volumes
(and all subsequent lifetime collected editions) disavow chronological
discuss ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’, however, because it was
composed during a period of religious radicalism, before Wordsworth was reintegrated
into the Church of England and before he embarked on his reading of monastic history.
Moreover, Tintern is not included in this study as it was not part of the poet’s local
region. I discuss Wordsworth’s expanded sense of regionalism in Chapter 5. Using
‘Tintern Abbey’ as a starting point, Dennis Taylor argues that ‘the experience of Catholic
monks and hermits’ is analogous with the psychological experience of Wordsworth’s
‘spots of time’: for Taylor, monkish existence is Wordsworth’s prime analogy for the
‘natural solitude’ that is the ‘mainstay of his imaginative life’. Taylor’s argument is
rich and convincing with regard to ‘Tintern Abbey’ and The Prelude, but it is not easily
applicable to Wordsworth’s experience of monasteries after 1806 when the poet sees
ruins as symbolic of communal identity and shared heritage. See ‘Wordsworth’s Abbey
Ruins’, in J. Robert Barth, ed., The Fountain Light: Studies in Romanticism and Religion
(New York, 2002), pp. 39–40 and 52.
26 A resurgence of interest in The Excursion began with Sally Bushell’s Re-Reading ‘The
Excursion’: Narrative, Response and the Wordsworthian Dramatic Voice (Aldershot, 2001), but
more recently critics have ventured beyond 1814. See Tim Fulford’s The Late Poetry of the
Lake Poets: Romanticism Revisited (Cambridge, 2013).
27 For the Oxford editors of The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, the ‘middle
years’ are 1806–20; in Mark L. Reed’s Chronology, the ‘middle years’ are 1800–15, which is
the same span as that of the second volume of Duncan Wu’s Wordsworth’s Reading. That
these key sources by Reed and Wu stop at 1815 has, arguably, contributed to the relative lack
of critical investigation into Wordsworth’s post-1815 work.
28 Excursion, p. 38.
Introduction 9
arrangement.29 Wordsworth never distinguished his poems according to

periods of composition; thus, by focusing on the transitional years of 1806
to 1822, I aim to undo the ‘overdramatized polarization’ of Wordsworth’s
poetry into ‘early’ and ‘late’ in order to advance a greater understanding
of the coherence of the whole.30
Chapters 1–4 of this study focus on Wordsworth’s career from 1806 to
1815, during which time his knowledge of and imaginative engagement
with the history of monasticism was continually developing. Wordsworth’s
life and work during these years was, in many respects, riddled with anxiety,
grief, and failure. Following the poor reception of Poems, in Two Volumes
(1807), he refused to publish The White Doe of Rylstone (which would have
eased the family’s financial worries) due to negative comments from
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb; in 1808 he aborted The Tuft
of Primroses in mid-sentence without shaping it into a complete section of
The Recluse; he was deeply troubled by the signing of the Convention of
Cintra and the events of the Peninsular War, and his extended prose dis-
cussion of the controversy failed to sell when it was published in 1809.31
Coleridge was under pressure to produce his periodical, The Friend, and
his disintegrating marriage and bad health were the cause of much anxiety
in the Wordsworth household at Allan Bank in Grasmere.32 As the long
European war dragged on, the relationship with Coleridge broke down,
and then in 1812 the Wordsworths suffered the deaths of two of their
children, Catherine and Thomas. Wordsworth composed much of The
Excursion during this time of deep personal sorrow, professional struggle,
and financial difficulty when friendships were strained and the anxieties of
war prevailed.33
29 Prose, iii, 28. Based on the poet’s lifelong practice of re-experiencing and revising his
poetry, Stephen Gill’s Wordsworth’s Revisitings (Oxford, 2011) demonstrates the extent to
which Wordsworth’s work (in manuscript and in published form) exists as an evolving
organic whole.
30 Alan G. Hill complains of this ‘polarization’ in ‘Wordsworth’s “Grand Design” ’,
Proceedings of the British Academy, 72 (1986): 187–204 (p. 203). In a very subtle and moving
essay, Peter Manning shows that Wordsworth’s ‘middle-aged’ narrators powerfully harness
the distance between ‘an unsettled here and an unknown there’. By focusing on the distinc-
tion between youth and age, and noting that Wordsworth takes his impetus from this
‘middle’ position, Manning indirectly offers a convincing argument in support of greater
critical attention to the ‘middle’ years, to which this book contributes. See ‘Wordsworth in
Youth and Age’, ERR, 25 (2014): 385–96 (p. 385).
31 De Quincey took on the role of Wordsworth’s London editorial assistant but the
confusion over the publication process almost ruined their relationship. See Prose, i, 201–17.
32 Wordsworth travelled to London in February 1808 because of ‘such alarming accounts’
(MY i., p. 198) of Coleridge’s health.
33 Jeffrey N. Cox explores the cultural and literary impact of the Napoleonic Wars on the
second generation Romantic poets in Romanticism in the Shadow of War: Literary Culture in
the Napoleonic War Years (Cambridge, 2014).
However, the work Wordsworth produced during this time is consistent,

focused, and highly illuminating with regard to his ambitions for his
overarching poetic project. With The Prelude complete in thirteen books,
the period saw Wordsworth confidently developing clear themes as manu-
script drafts were shaped into published poems and privately articulated
ambitions were crafted into a new poetic manifesto. The period begins
with the long sojourn at Beaumont’s Coleorton estate over the winter
of 1806–7 and ends with Wordsworth dedicating his collected Poems to
Sir George in 1815; it is circumscribed by The White Doe of Rylstone, which
he conceived in 1807 and published in 1815, while sections of The Tuft
of Primroses (initially drafted in 1808) were integrated into The Excursion
by 1814; it starts with Wordsworth formulating critical statements in a
private letter to Lady Beaumont of 1807 and ends with the defiant public
proclamation of these ideas in the ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’
(1815).34 As well as the deepening attachment to Sir George and Lady
Beaumont, Wordsworth forged other important friendships during these
years, meeting De Quincey for the first time in November 1807 and Henry
Crabb Robinson in March 1808.35
Crucially, during this period, Wordsworth’s work was badly received
both privately and in the periodical press. As his published writings failed
to sell (it was not until The River Duddon volume of 1820 that Wordsworth
really began to gain popularity) he despaired of the reading public’s
inability to appreciate his work. This prompted his public assertion in 1815
that ‘every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had
the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed’.36 Wordsworth
perceived that the excesses of gothic novels—which are more straightfor-
wardly anti-Catholic and abound with haunted monastic buildings, evil
monks, and corrupt nuns—contributed to the blunting of readers’ sens-
ibilities. His interest in monastic history, therefore, was sustained along-
side a concerted effort to produce poetry that would reformulate and
refine readers’ taste: his thematic treatment of monasticism (attention to
its architecture, routines, organization etc.) is, at least in part, an engagement
with ecclesiastical history; but analysis of these themes helps explain
stylistic shifts in his writing. In this often-neglected phase of his career,
Wordsworth undertakes a series of generic experiments in order to craft
poems capable of regenerating taste; he adapts popular narrative forms and
challenges pastoral conventions, creating difficult, austere poetry which,
34 The letter of 21 May 1807 (MY i., pp. 145–51) is Wordsworth’s response to Lady
Beaumont’s proclamation of support following poor reviews of Poems, in Two Volumes.
35 See Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (1989; repr. Oxford, 1990), p. 272 and
Chronology, p. 378.
36 Prose, iii, 80.
Introduction 11
he hopes, will encourage contemplation and subdue readers’ appetites for

exciting narrative action. In this context, this book grants poems such as
The White Doe of Rylstone and The Excursion the centrality Wordsworth
believed they deserved, and reveals how Wordsworth’s engagement with
the monastic history of his local region inflected his radical strategies for
the creation of taste.
Wordsworth’s poetry deals thematically with monasticism in a very
particular way. While it is not possible to provide an exhaustive account
of what Wordsworth knew about the topic, we do know that he gained a
nuanced understanding of the monastic world through a series of topo-
graphical, antiquarian, and hagiographic writings (composed in the seven-
teenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries) by William Cave, John
Weever, Thomas West, and Thomas Dunham Whitaker.37 Although they
have long been identified as works that informed The White Doe, The Tuft
of Primroses, and the Essays upon Epitaphs, these sources have not received
from critics the careful attention they were given by Wordsworth, and
scholars have neglected to note that together they amount to a substantial
study of monastic history.38 These sources detail how the cultural and
geographical landscape of the north of England was shaped by the rise
and dissolution of powerful monastic houses. Such antiquarian studies are
repositories of the cultural heritage of specific rural communities within
Wordsworth’s local region; as layers of topographical and human history
accumulate, his perception of that landscape and the identity of its present
community is enriched. In addition to providing antiquarian minutiae,
these sources make sense of feelings of local attachment and the instinct
for memorialization; thus, monasticism resonates with Wordsworth as
much more than ‘Roman Catholicism’.
For this reason, the present study is not particularly concerned with the
development of Wordsworth’s High-Anglicanism and it differs from earlier
accounts of the religious dimensions of his poetry in that it does not attempt
to map explicit or subliminal theistic sympathies in his work, or in his
privately or publically articulated beliefs.39 Moreover, it is evident that the
37 See Chapter 3 for full details.

38 As I explore the significance of this set of sources, I will question Tom Duggett’s
assertion that antiquarian materials were, for Wordsworth, ‘only curiosities’ that he soon
outgrew. While I agree with Duggett that Wordsworth was keen to distance himself from
the type of romance writing at which Walter Scott excelled, I suggest that Wordsworth
was in fact extensively influenced by local antiquarianism, which, for him, offered more
than historical minutiae. See Gothic Romanticism: Architecture, Politics, and Literary Form
(Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 12–13.
39 See, for example, H. N. Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry, 6 vols (New York,
1939–68), iii (1949), 138–262; M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and
Revolution in Romantic Literature (London, 1971); Nancy Easterlin, Wordsworth and the
open and suggestive style in which Wordsworth conveys religious ideas

together with his thinking about the relationship between imagination and
faith allows for (and even perhaps encourages) divergent interpretations of
those ideas. From one perspective, for example, Richard E. Brantley makes
the case that Wordsworth was inclined towards Evangelical Anglicanism,
while at another extreme, John G. Rudy finds Zen Buddhism to be part of
Wordsworth’s inclusive radical spirituality.40 Undoubtedly, Wordsworth’s
interest in monasticism is grounded in material evidence of faith within a
particular denominational context: he is concerned with ruined monaster-
ies, coenobitic life, and ecclesiastical history and it is difficult to see how
this could not have influenced the development of his High-Anglicanism;
yet, within the antiquarian volumes through which Wordsworth encoun-
ters it, monastic history is framed as an aspect of England’s topographical
and cultural heritage. Monasticism in England exists as a residual presence,
as a religious legacy, which is inscribed in the landscape, in architecture, in
graveyards, even in trees. Indeed, such natural features, relics, and ruins
have increased value because they carry ‘That incommunicable sanctity |
Which Time and nature only can bestow’.41 Wordsworth’s thematic engage-
ment with monasticism, therefore, has a local topographical inflection and
is not restricted to theological or ecclesiastical issues.42 In The White Doe of
Rylstone, for example, Wordsworth emphasizes the long history of Bolton
Abbey: Emily’s Catholic heritage has evolved and has been purified, not
eradicated or secularized, but it is her experience of sorrow in that place
that enables her to find fortitude. Furthermore, it is Wordsworth’s own
visit to the ruins of Bolton Abbey in July 1807 that inspires him to read
Whitaker’s work and to write the poem. Wordsworth does not have to
Anglicize or secularize the monastic site and its surrounding landscape in
order to make it palatable; rather, its affective power is enhanced because
it has endured the passage of time.
While Wordsworth incorporated elements of monasticism into his poetry
thematically, he also began to adopt its tenets as an aspect of his evolv-
ing style. In particular, as I have noted, a monastic aesthetic infiltrated
Wordsworth’s attempt to ‘create the taste’ for his work. Again The White
Doe of Rylstone exemplifies the process. In this poem, Wordsworth with-
holds narrative action and refuses to offer the exciting romance style that
Question of ‘Romantic Religion’ (Lewisburg, Pa, 1996); Robert M. Ryan, The Romantic
Reformation; William A. Ulmer, The Christian Wordsworth, 1798–1805 (Albany, NY, 2001).
40 Richard E. Brantley, Wordsworth’s ‘Natural Methodism’ (New Haven, 1975); John G.
Rudy, Wordsworth and the Zen Mind: The Poetry of Self-Emptying (Albany, NY, 1996).
41 The Tuft of Primroses, ll. 116–17, in Primroses, p. 42.
42 As an important aspect of Sir George Beaumont’s heritage, Grace Dieu is an exception
to my emphasis on Wordsworth’s ‘local’ monastic history. See Chapter 2.
Introduction 13
contemporary readers had been led to expect. In comparison with popular

romance literature, The White Doe is a strikingly austere poem: very little
seems to happen. Yet (as I argue in Chapter 1) narrative reticence is a strat-
egy Wordsworth deploys as a means of encouraging the reader to gener-
ate interpretative energy that will cleanse aesthetic taste. More than an
encounter with the beliefs and practices of Roman Catholic monks and
nuns, Wordsworth’s engagement with monasticism is an exploration of
the spiritual presences in the landscape; it is a means of accessing a sense of
community; it throws light on his thinking about the power of poetic
suggestion, about readerly experience, and the regeneration of taste.43
RU I N S A N D T H E I R R E S O N A N C E S
Monastic ruins were appropriated for various political and aesthetic

purposes: as emblems of melancholy or mortality for the poets of the
‘Graveyard School’, as loci of supernaturalism and terror for gothic novelists,
and as a physical manifestation of the fascination with literary fragments
and forgeries that fuelled the ballad revival. In a political context, ruins
were symbolic of the defeat of popish superstition and the overthrow of
the servitude of the monastic system, while also being a potent resource
for Roman Catholics, who used them to assert their entitlement to a stake
in national identity during the Catholic Emancipation debate.44 Monastic
ruins also often featured in picturesque landscape art and garden design.
William Westall’s image of Rievaulx Abbey taken from an elevated per-
spective has been interpreted as indicative of the Hanoverian triumph
over Jacobite Catholicism; yet Thomas Dunham Whitaker criticized Westall’s
engraving, suggesting instead that the more picturesque view of the abbey
is the one from below that encourages sympathy for the monks.45 The
43 Following William Empson’s examination of ‘Sense in The Prelude’ (from The Structure
of Complex Words (London, 1951), pp. 289–305), my use of ‘sense’ keeps in view the full
range of meanings Wordsworth incorporates into that concept, from bodily sensation
to imagination. That is to say, Wordsworth’s ‘sense’ of community includes present inhab-
itants as well as ancestors whose presence is felt and imagined through his experience of
the landscape.
44 Anne Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Cambridge,
Mass., and Oxford, 1990); Michael Tomko, British Romanticism and the Catholic Question:
Religion, History and National Identity, 1778–1829 (Basingstoke, 2011), pp. 39–41.
45 Westall’s picture and Thomas Dunham Whitaker’s criticism appear in A Series of
Views of the Abbeys and Castles in Yorkshire (London, 1820), which is quoted and analysed
in Michael Charlesworth, ‘The Ruined Abbey: Picturesque and Gothic Values’, in Stephen
Copley and Peter Garside, eds, The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape, and
Aesthetics since 1779 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 62–80.
difference between sympathetic and politically triumphant interpretations

of ruins in the landscape was, therefore, a matter of perspective.
Wordsworth’s visit to the ruins of Bolton Abbey in July 1807 (and other
such visits) may be seen as conventional picturesque activity.46 Tour guides
such as William Gilpin’s series of Observations popularized this type of
excursion, and his Three Essays (which defines picturesque objects in terms
of roughness) asserts that the picturesque traveller delights most in ‘the
elegant relics of ancient architecture; the ruined tower, the Gothic arch,
the remains of castles, and abbeys’; these edifices are ‘consecrated by time;
and almost deserve the veneration we pay to the works of nature itself ’.47
Sir Uvedale Price extended Gilpin’s emphasis on the picturesque value
of rough objects by attempting to rescue dilapidated buildings, ruined
bridges, and ancient trees (which can only evolve over time) from the smooth
uniformity imposed by modern landscape garden ‘improvers’.48 Price’s
approach was much more objective than Gilpin’s, yet Wordsworth approved
of Price’s Essay on the Picturesque.49 In his own Guide through the District of
the Lakes, Wordsworth praises the ‘joint work of nature and time’ and argues
that ‘Antiquity, who may be styled the co-partner and sister of Nature’
should not be ‘denied the respect to which she is entitled’.50 Accordingly,
Wordsworth celebrates not just monastic ruins but also humble cottages
that ‘remind the contemplative spectator of a production of nature, and
may . . . rather be said to have grown than to have been erected’.51
Wordsworth explains the significance of these picturesque dwellings:
Hence buildings, which in their very form call to mind the processes of
nature, do thus, clothed in part with a vegetable garb, appear to be received
into the bosom of the living principle of things, as it acts and exists among
46 Wordsworth was highly aware of the pervasive culture of the picturesque. The
Wordsworths had a Claude Glass at Dove Cottage (DWJ, p. 29) and picturesque vocabulary
is used throughout Dorothy’s Grasmere Journal.
47 Gilpin’s series of Observations began to appear in 1782. Three Essays; On Picturesque
Subjects; with a Poem on Landscape Painting (1792; 3rd edn, London, 1808), p. 46.
48 Uvedale Price, An Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the
Beautiful (1794; 2nd edn, London, 1796).
49 Dorothy notes Wordsworth’s approval of Price’s Essay in a letter to Lady Beaumont
(MY i., p. 3). On Price’s understanding of the objective, atomic composition of the pic-
turesque see Andrew Ballantyne, ‘Genealogy of the Picturesque’, British Journal of Aesthetics,
32 (1992): 320–9. Wordsworth cannot conceive of the picturesque objectively however:
‘our business’, he writes in 1825, ‘is not so much with objects as with the law under which
they are contemplated’ (LY i., p. 322).
50 Prose, ii, 220 and 212. This is why the Wordsworths disapproved of follies and imported
ruins (such as those seen by Dorothy on an excursion to Crowcombe Court in the Quantocks:
DWJ, p. 152). Wordsworth’s Guide first appeared in monthly instalments as an accom-
paniment to Joseph Wilkinson’s Select Views in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire
(London, 1810).
51 Prose, ii, 202.
Introduction 15
the woods and fields; and, by their colour and their shape, affectingly direct
the thoughts to that tranquil course of nature and simplicity, along which the
humble-minded inhabitants have, through so many generations, been led.52
Wordsworth appreciates the form, colour, and shape of these buildings
but only insofar as they ‘affectingly direct the thoughts’ of the spectator
to the characters and customs of generations of inhabitants. In this spirit,
the Guide opens with a recommendation of the remains of Fountains,
Jervaulx, and Kirkstall Abbeys as pleasing sites to pass on the way into the
Lake District.53 These ruined edifices are an apt gateway to the region not
merely because they exhibit the roughness, sudden variation, and intricacy
that picturesque tourists sought,54 but because they announce its medieval
history: the tourist is immediately introduced to the landscape as a repository
of the social and religious identity of previous inhabitants, while current
residents perpetuate this legacy by maintaining appropriate dwellings.
Wordsworth is less interested than Gilpin and Price in form and texture,
and more concerned with the personal or communal history attached to
aged features of the landscape. Yet his responses to ruins do not place him
in direct opposition to Gilpin: recent studies of Gilpin’s manuscripts reveal
the extent to which he was also concerned with layers of human history
and valued emotive responses to scenery.55 When Wordsworth denounces
the picturesque as ‘a strong infection of the age’ he is rejecting those versions
of picturesque aesthetics that prioritize visual appearances and impose a
system of taste according to which natural scenery is judged as if it were a
painting; yet he retains and extends those aspects of the picturesque that
involve non-visual, imaginative, and affective responses to landscapes.56
For example, in the Guide he laments the loss of every ‘vestige’ of an Oratory
upon Chapel-Holm in Windermere and regrets the disappearance of any
trace of the Chantry that had been on St Herbert’s Island, Derwentwater.57
For many years after the oratory and chantry had fallen silent, the histor-
ical presence of these places of worship was discernible in their ruins and,
consequently, the prayerful sounds that had once emanated from these
sites remained accessible to the imaginations of visitors. Since the ruins
disappeared, however, tourists have little chance of knowing (ostensibly)
52 Ibid., p. 203. 53 Ibid., pp. 155–6.

54 Price’s Essay celebrated these qualities of the picturesque in contrast with the smooth
flowing lines produced by garden ‘improvers’ such as William Kent and Humphrey Repton.
55 Zoë Kinsley, ‘William Gilpin at the Coast: A New Perspective on Picturesque Travel
Writing’, RES, 68 (2017): 322–41. Nicola Trott explains the common ground between
Wordsworth and Gilpin in ‘Wordsworth and the Picturesque: A Strong Infection of the
Age’, TWC, 18 (1987): 114–21.
56 Thirteen-Book Prelude, AB-Stage, XI. 156. See Charles Kostelnik, ‘Wordsworth,
Ruins, and the Aesthetics of Decay’, TWC, 19 (1988): 20–8.
57 Prose, ii, 184.
that these holy buildings ever existed. Wordsworth’s particular mention

of Chapel-Holm and St Herbert’s Island implies, however, that they
persist as places of special interest even though there are no ruins to be
seen: Wordsworth aimed to perpetuate remembrance of and respect for
them. By calling attention to that which is no longer visibly evident he
implicitly encourages tourists to witness to a cultural and religious heritage
that is only now communicated through imagination, the affections, and
collective memory. Wordsworth’s consideration for such spots perhaps
explains Aubrey De Vere’s mistake in presuming the poet would have
received pleasure from hearing ‘the very same harmonies’ at Mount Saint
Bernard as had existed ‘in the time of St. Bernard, and, centuries earlier,
of St. Benedict’. Wordsworth was in fact uncomfortable when he heard
Cistercian monks chanting in Leicestershire in 1841: in this context, his
regret at the loss of the ‘vestiges’ of a Lakeland oratory and chantry implies
that he would rather imagine the tones of historical chanting than actually
hear them in the present.
As a tourist, Wordsworth was attuned to the imaginative, affective, and
cultural (not necessarily aural) resonances of the landscapes he visited.
During their 1803 tour of Scotland, for example, William and Dorothy
visited the Narrow Glen, which inspired William’s composition of ‘Glen
Almain’ (1807). At that time, they did not know they were visiting the sup-
posed resting place of Ossian, yet Dorothy noted how the secluded dell
‘[fixed] its own peculiar character of removedness from the world, and the
secure possession of the quiet of nature more deeply in our minds’.58 The
Wordsworths later discovered that generations of people held to the belief
that Glen Almain was the burial place of Ossian; this shared conclusion
was not based on any documentary evidence but was due to a felt under-
standing of the grave-like quality that was encoded in the ‘silence of this
Dell’ (24) and upheld by the ‘meek Streamlet’ (4):
Does then the Bard sleep here indeed?
Or is it but a groundless creed?
What matters it? I blame them not
Whose Fancy in this lonely Spot
Was moved; and in this way express’d
Their notion of it’s perfect rest. (17–22)59
The ‘creed’ may be ‘groundless’ insofar as it is unsubstantiated but it is,
nonetheless, vouchsafed by the ground itself which engenders a sense of
‘perfect rest’; previous visitors’ interpretations of this grave-like quietness
58 Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, ed. Carol Kyros Walker (New Haven and
London, 1997), pp. 175–6.
59 Quotation of ‘Glen Almain’ is from P2V, p. 187.
Introduction 17
enhance and help perpetuate that sense of rest. A similar topographically

confirmed truth was experienced by Wordsworth at the abbey of
Vallombrosa in Tuscany during his 1837 tour of Italy. Wordsworth’s poem,
‘At Vallombrosa’, reveals his acute awareness that he was walking in the
footsteps of John Milton, who, according to tradition, stayed at the abbey
during his Italian tour of 1638–9. The facts of Milton’s visit are uncertain,
but that is not relevant: Wordsworth discerns the ‘grandeur’ of Milton’s
spirit in the rocks, the ‘beauty austere’ of that spirit in the pine trees,
and the older poet’s ‘genius’ in the ‘flower-besprent meadows’ (11–13).
Wordsworth writes: ‘The Monks still repeat the tradition with pride, |
And its truth who shall doubt? for his Spirit is here’ (9–10).60 Milton is the
genius loci of Vallombrosa just as Ossian is of Glen Almain. At monastic
sites and places of burial in particular, the landscape gathers meaning as
it is inherited and continually shared: it is marked by the presence of
those who came before. As Fiona Stafford puts it, ‘successive generations
participate in the same communal truths by inhabiting the same place
as their predecessors: ancient and modern are linked by places that form
permanent bridges across the gulf of time’.61 These truths may not be
visually or aurally verifiable, but they are felt, imagined, and sustained by
communities. Similarly, Wordsworth’s engagement with the monastic
ruins of his local landscape is much more than a fashionable pastime and
goes much deeper than surface-level appreciation of picturesque forms.
BOOKS AND BIRDS: ST FRANCIS

A N D L AV E R N A
On 27 May 1837, surrounded by forests at the top of a ‘lofty mountain’ in

Tuscany, the 67-year-old Wordsworth spent the night sleeping in a friar’s
cell. He and his companion, Henry Crabb Robinson, were visiting the
Franciscan monastery of Laverna. After trekking up the steep mountain-
side they were ‘courteously received by the poor and humble monks’; the
visitors explored the forest and ‘chatted with several monks, all dull-
looking men and very dirty, but humble and kind’; Robinson noted that
‘Our cells were small and cold, and our beds hard, but we slept well.’62
60 ‘At Vallombrosa’ in Sonnet Series, pp. 775. See also Robin Jarvis, ‘Shades of Milton:
Wordsworth at Vallombrosa’, Studies in Romanticism, 25 (1986): 483–504 (p. 493).
61 ‘Wordsworth’s Poetry of Place’, in Oxford Handbook, pp. 309–24 (p. 322). Stafford
suggests that Wordsworth anticipated contemporary theories of place such as that of Lucy
R. Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentred Society (New York and
London, 1997).
62 Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Thomas Sadler,
3 vols (London, 1869), iii, 126–7. Hereafter HCR Diary.
On one hand, the image of Wordsworth sleeping in an Italian monastic

cell shows him, even in later life, to be a curious and robust tourist, keen to
observe a new landscape and experience the strictures of a foreign religion.
On the other hand, at a time when the Oxford Movement was at its height,
it suggests Wordsworth’s High-Anglican interest in ecclesiastical history
and is in harmony with his sympathetic treatment of monasticism in The
Tuft of Primroses, The Excursion, Ecclesiastical Sketches, and ‘St Bees’ Heads’.
Laverna is one of the ‘three great Tuscan Sanctuaries’ Wordsworth
visited during his Italian tour; the others were the monasteries of Cam
aldoli (a citadel of hermitages for a particularly ascetic group of eremites)
and Vallombrosa (where Wordsworth met the gentlemen scholars of the
monastic world, the Benedictines).63 These visits are captured in a series
of poems in ‘Memorials of a Tour in Italy, 1837’, first published in Poems,
Chiefly of Early and Late Years (1842). While the monks Wordsworth
encountered at Camaldoli prompted a poetic exploration of some of the
dangers and absurd incongruities of eremitical reclusion, Wordsworth’s
sense that he was walking in Milton’s footsteps took precedence over any
reflection on monastic life at Vallombrosa.64 ‘The Cuckoo at Laverna’,
however, celebrates Wordsworth’s delight at hearing the shout of a cuckoo,
through which he came to feel an affinity with the founder of the Order,
St Francis of Assisi (b. circa 1182). The Italian ‘Memorials’ lie outside the
parameters of this book; nonetheless, a brief consideration of ‘The Cuckoo
at Laverna’ usefully highlights differences between the Franciscans and the
coenobitic monastic communities that were more familiar to Wordsworth;
it serves to demonstrate the extent to which opinions regarding monasti-
cism shifted during the first decades of the nineteenth century, and to
explain the processes through which Wordsworth chiefly came to conceive
an appreciation for monastic history.
St Francis renounced a comfortable life, gave away his possessions, and
embraced extreme poverty as a means of serving God. He established the
63 LY iii., pp. 404–7 (p. 405). Robinson did not accompany Wordsworth to Vallombrosa
and he seems to have confused the Camaldolese with the Benedictines in his diary. See HCR
Diary, iii, 127. Wordsworth refers to these monasteries by the collective title given to them
in Lady Charlotte Bury’s illustrated guide, The Three Great Sanctuaries of Tuscany: Valombrosa,
Camaldoli, Laverna; a Poem, with Historical and Legendary Notices (London, 1833), which
Bury presented to Wordsworth in 1834. See LY ii., p. 712.
64 The sonnet ‘At the Convent of Camaldoli’, for example, warns against retreating into
a monastic cell for the purpose of hiding from worldly sorrows: the ‘most profound repose’
of a monk’s cell can never be the source of ‘inward peace’ (13–14). ‘At the Eremite or Upper
Convent of Camaldoli’ captures Wordsworth’s incredulity at witnessing a pair of ‘Enormous’
monks ‘panting’ for breath at the top of a hill (2–3). Purple is the liturgical colour of
penance and abstinence but it is the monks’ cheeks that are ‘empurpled’ (and their eyes
‘pampered’) as they clearly have not exchanged bodily indulgence for divine succour (4). See
Sonnet Series, pp. 772–4.
Introduction 19
Order of Friars Minor in 1223 and the following year, after receiving the
stigmata in the forest at La Verna, proceeded to build a church there.
Wordsworth writes:
For see, Laverna! mark the far-famed Pile,
High on the brink of that precipitous rock,
Implanted like a Fortress, as in truth
It is, a Christian Fortress, garrisoned
In faith and hope, and dutiful obedience,
By a few Monks, a stern society,
Dead to the world and scorning earth-born joys.
Nay—though the hopes that drew, the fears that drove,
St. Francis, far from Man’s resort, to abide
Among these sterile heights of Apennine,
Bound him, nor, since he raised yon House, have ceased
To bind his spiritual Progeny, with rules
Stringent as flesh can tolerate and live;
His milder Genius (thanks to the good God
That made us) over those severe restraints
Of mind, that dread heart-freezing discipline,
Doth sometimes here predominate, and works
By unsought means for gracious purposes;
For earth through heaven, for heaven, by changeful earth,
Illustrated, and mutually endeared. (29–48)65
Wordsworth presents two aspects of Franciscan life: the first is character-
ized by emotional and physical austerity and the second by a ‘milder’ grace
that ‘works | By unsought means’. One of Wordsworth’s main objections
to monasticism arises when the first predominates and the changefulness of
earthly experience is obscured. The perilous location—on the ‘brink’ of a
real precipice and figuratively on the ‘brink’ of death—matches the ‘rules |
Stringent as flesh can tolerate’ by which the friars (just about) live. Garrisoned
by their vows, the friars stand guard at this ‘Christian Fortress’ which is
ill-suited to ‘earth-born joys’. With the heavy accumulation of militaristic
language and images of restraint, Wordsworth suggests that the friars live
without any interchange between rigour and joy. Such uniformity means
that heaven cannot be ‘Illustrated’ or ‘endeared’ by moments of earthly
pleasure: the implication is that faith and hope are effectively imprisoned.
However, Francis did not forsake all earthly happiness. Wordsworth suggests
that the saint’s ‘milder’ spirit ‘Doth sometimes here predominate’ and this
happens ‘by unsought means’ through the natural world.
65 Quotation of ‘The Cuckoo at Laverna’ is taken from Sonnet Series, pp. 766–72.
Wordsworth glimpsed ‘heaven, by changeful earth’ at Laverna when he

unexpectedly heard a cuckoo:
List—’twas the Cuckoo.—O with what delight
Heard I that voice! and catch it now, though faint,
Far off and faint, and melting into air,
Yet not to be mistaken. Hark again!
Those louder cries give notice that the Bird,
Although invisible as Echo’s self,
Is wheeling hitherward. Thanks, happy Creature,
For this unthought-of greeting! (1–8)
The cuckoo’s call is characterized by iterations of sound interspersed with
silence. In this sense, the cuckoo is peculiarly suited to help refine one’s
listening skills. As Wordsworth recalls the birdsong in the past tense, his
ear imaginatively catches it again, faintly, in the present. The emphasis on
catching the sound implies its fleeting physicality before it ‘melt[s] into air’:
combining melting and evaporation, Wordsworth’s metaphor suggests
that the song remains present in the interstices of silence as does evaporated
water in the atmosphere. As he becomes more attentive and eager within
the pause between parts of the cuckoo’s call, the next iteration is more
thrilling (‘Hark again!’).66 This interchange between waiting expectantly
to hear the cuckoo’s refrain and actually catching it may be interpreted as
an analogue for the more general exchange between the anticipation of joy
and joy itself, which is integral to human experience and of which the
‘stern society’ of soldierly friars are largely deprived.
Franciscans are mendicant friars; they are not enclosed in a specific mon-
astery but spend most of their time travelling, preaching, and subsisting as
beggars. In this sense, Franciscans differ from the Cistercian and Benedictine
monks that were dominant in the north of England throughout the Middle
Ages; they also differ from the secluded eremites of whom Wordsworth
disapproved. While the coenobites remained within relatively wealthy
communities linked with local laity and surrounding estates, and while
eremites lived in complete solitude, Franciscans were itinerants.67 This
mendicant mode of monasticism is, therefore, very different from that
which Wordsworth could have imagined from visits to the coenobitic ruins
of his native region and from accounts in the antiquarian sources he read
at home. Franciscan friars have no inherent attachment to any particular
66 In the Fenwick Note to the poem Wordsworth confesses that his joy at hearing the
cuckoo was partly the result of concerns about losing his hearing in old age: IF Notes,
pp. 71–2.
67 John Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order from its Origins to the Year 1517
(Oxford, 1968), pp. 3–74. For this reason, Franciscans are known as friars, not monks.
Introduction 21
location; in this context, it is notable that Wordsworth’s affinity with Francis,

which occurs when the poet is travelling and feeling homesick, comes
through the mediation of an itinerant bird, the ‘simple Cuckoo, | Wandering
in solitude’ (97–8).68 That is to say, Wordsworth comes to appreciate Francis’s
teachings about the natural world when he is himself in a Franciscan mode.
And yet, Wordsworth’s attention to the cuckoo resembles his means of
witnessing the value of the coenobitic communities of his native region.
With the kind of attention that involves the whole being, Wordsworth
‘received into a conscious ear’ the ‘sedulous iteration’ of the cuckoo’s song
which ‘thrilled with joy’ his heart (88–91). As one ‘who [walks] in the world’s
ways’ (92), Wordsworth distinguishes his own capacity to receive this heav-
enly joy from that of some of the friars. Nonetheless, he believes that,
’mid the austere Band,
Who breathe the air he breathed, tread where he trod,
Some true Partakers of his loving spirit
Do still survive, and, with those gentle hearts
Consorted, Others, in the power, the faith
Of a baptized imagination, prompt
To catch from Nature’s humblest monitors
Whate’er they bring of impulses sublime. (66–73)
The ability to ‘catch’ sublime impulses from ‘Nature’s humblest monitors’
unites the friars in the spirit of their founder; the identity of their community
is not based on their proximity to one another, nor their attachment to a
specific abbey, but on the shared capacity of their ‘baptized imagination’ to
transform humble natural processes into glimpses of heaven. Franciscans
considered book-learning and academic knowledge as possessions, renoun-
cing intellectual endeavour along with material wealth. In place of books,
Francis and the ‘true Partakers of his loving spirit’ allowed their passions to
be instructed by the ‘impulses’ of nature. This Franciscan rejection of
books in favour of an unmediated wisdom imparted by nature is akin to
the development of understanding via ‘wise passiveness’, which Wordsworth
promotes in ‘Expostulation and Reply’ and ‘The Tables Turned’ (1798).
‘One impulse from a vernal wood’ (21), Wordsworth writes, can teach
more than all the books of moral philosophy:
Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife,
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music; on my life
There’s more of wisdom in it. (9–12)69
68 Wordsworth missed the affectionate support of female members of his family. See, for
example, LY iii., pp. 404. 409, 411.
69 Lyrical Ballads, p. 109.
The process of receiving these ‘impulses’ is significant because it matches

the way Wordsworth came to understand St Francis’s teaching during his
visit to Laverna.
Edith Batho argues that Wordsworth’s opinion of the saint was far removed
from that which had prevailed (‘except among Roman Catholics’) in the
previous three centuries when opinions were ‘formed out of condes-
cending pity, or disgust for dirty and fanatical friars’.70 Batho claims that
‘Wordsworth seems to be the first Englishman—we might say with little
exaggeration, the first modern European—to understand St Francis.’71
While Bruce Graver has tempered Batho’s claim by showing that Words
worth’s understanding was informed by details he found in popular travel
guides, Batho was in fact right to say that the poet’s unique perspective was
ultimately not derived from books: this is because his keenest response
to Laverna developed when the cuckoo ‘thrilled’ his heart ‘with joy’.72 In
other words, Wordsworth’s appreciation of St Francis was the result of an
‘impulse’. Attending to the landscape and absorbing its ‘unsought’ graces
is also Wordsworth’s preferred means of appreciating the monastic reson-
ances of his own local region.
During his school-days, Wordsworth was exposed to written histories
of monasticism steeped in enlightenment principles. Insofar as monastic
institutions and their members seemed to renounce rationality, economic
common sense, and individualism, they were presented in these volumes
as corrupt and superstitious.73 Edward Gibbon, for example, describes
the debilitating living conditions of ascetics who ‘chastised their body,
mortified their affections, and embraced a life of misery, as the price of
eternal happiness’.74 Pierre Bayle notes that avaricious nuns and monks
took advantage of the ‘superstitious credulity of the Laity’ by forging ‘a
thousand Saints and Relicks’ with which to entice the faithful to part
70 Edith Batho, The Later Wordsworth (Cambridge, 1933), p. 296.

71 Ibid., p. 297.
72 Bruce E. Graver, ‘Wordsworth, St Francis, and Lady Charlotte Bury’, Philological
Quarterly, 65 (1986): 371–80. A letter from Frederick William Faber to the Tractarian poet
John Keble of 12 November 1842 (currently in Keble College Library, Oxford) explains that
Wordsworth continued to pursue his interest in St Francis years after the Italian tour. See
Brian W. Martin, ‘Wordsworth, Faber, and Keble: Commentary on a Triangular Relationship’,
RES, 26 (1975): 436–42 (p. 436). Alan G. Hill explains that Wordsworth met Johann von
Gӧrres in Munich on his return journey from Italy and suggests that the two men may have
conversed about Gӧrres’s pamphlet, Der heilige Franciskus von Assisi ein Troubadour. See
‘Wordsworth’s Reception in Germany: Some Unfamiliar Episodes and Contacts, 1798–1849’,
RES, 59 (2008): 568–81 (p. 571).
73 Simon Jarvis explores Wordsworth’s responses to these enlightenment perspectives in
Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 111–32.
74 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Other Selected Writings
(1776–1787), ed. H. R. Trevor-Roper (Buckinghamshire, 1966), p. 168. See W’s Reading I,
p. 158.
Introduction 23
with their money.75 In the context of the French Revolution and the wide-
spread anti-clericalism that precipitated the dissolution of many European
monasteries in the 1790s, travel narratives such as Joshua Lucock Wilkinson’s
The Wanderer (1795) and Robert Southey’s Letters from Spain and Portugal
(1797) reported similar monastic vices. Wilkinson asserts that these
‘institutions . . . are no way favourable to the improvement of the condition
of mankind’, whilst Southey observes that ‘the bigot whose mind is rendered
dark and sullen . . . will alike love the tranquillity of the Convent; for tran-
quillity is all they ask, and this the Convent can bestow’.76
While such derision was, of course, not the whole picture at the turn
of the century, subsequent decades saw a significant shift of opinion in
favour of monastic institutions.77 Southey’s 1819 Quarterly Review essay
in response to Thomas Dudley Fosbrooke’s British Monachism (1802) serves
to demonstrate the nature of this shift.78 Southey praises the coenobitic
orders governed by St Benedict’s Rule, stating that Benedict ‘is to be ranked
among the reformers, not among the knaves, fanatics or madmen of a
fraudulent church’ as his system offered religious retirement to men who
were ‘in full possession of their intellects’.79 Southey observes that ‘were
the present age divested of all that it owes to the patient and humble
75 Pierre Bayle, A General Dictionary, Historical and Critical, trans. J. P. Bernard and
others, 10 vols (London, 1734–41), i, 28. See W’s Reading I, p. 10.
76 Joshua Lucock Wilkinson, The Wanderer; Or, a Collection of Anecdotes and Incidents,
with Reflections, Political and Religious During Two Excursions, in 1791 and 1793, in
France, Germany, and Italy, 2 vols (London, 1795), i, 284. See W’s Reading I, pp. 148–9.
Robert Southey, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (Bristol,
1797), pp. 271–2.
77 Roger E. Moore’s recent study of Jane Austen and the Reformation: Remembering the
Sacred Landscape (Aldershot, 2016) argues that Austen grew up in a society that harboured
significant nostalgia for its monastic past. Prominent ruins in the landscape were one of the
most tangible reminders of a world of hospitality and social order that had been destroyed
at the Reformation. With illuminating readings of Northanger Abbey and Sanditon, where
Austen interrogates the consequences of the loss of centres of spiritual refreshment and
shelter, Moore shows that Austen considers ‘that the violent elimination of the material
vestiges of Catholicism impoverished English culture’ (p. 147).
78 ‘Review of British Monachism, or Manners and Customs of the Monks and Nuns of England’,
Quarterly Review, 22 (July 1819): 59–102. Peter Manning describes Fosbrooke’s text and the
context of Southey’s review in ‘Wordsworth at St Bees’, pp. 35–41. Manning’s comprehen-
sive discussion of ‘Stanzas, Suggested in a Steam-boat off St Bees’ Heads’ explains that the
poem was Wordsworth’s contribution to a lively debate about the potential benefits of
the foundation of Protestant nunneries. The lack of provision for unmarried women wish-
ing to live a life of service and devotion after the Reformation had been noted over a century
earlier by Mary Astell in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1690). From a different perspective,
Tonya Moutray suggests that Wordsworth’s enthusiasm for alternative Protestant social and
educational uses of ex-Catholic monasteries is part of a radical vision of ecological preserva-
tion. See ‘Remodelling Catholic Ruins in William Wordsworth’s Poetry’, ERR, 22 (2011):
819–31. The changing attitudes captured by Southey’s essay helped to bring about Catholic
Emancipation in 1829.
79 Southey, ‘Review’, p. 74.
labour of the Benedictines, we should be poor indeed’.80 The coenobitic

monasteries:
afforded an encouragement to literature which no other establishments have
yet supplied; men who loved laborious research for its own sake, and for the
pleasure which they found in preserving old records from obscurity for
the information and use of future ages, were enabled to follow their meri-
torious pursuits[.]81
Despite such praise for scholarly monks, Southey reserves scorn for the
Franciscan Order, which he says was founded on ‘numerous’ and ‘mon-
strous’ miracles.82 This distinction between educated gentleman monks
and the curiously deranged Franciscans was not an uncommon position.
Henry Hallam, for example, depicts Francis as a ‘harmless enthusiast,
pious and sincere, but hardly of sane mind’ and ‘much rather accessory to
the intellectual than to the moral degradation of his species’.83 An 1849
biography of the saint concurred that Francis was an ‘unlearned, half-crazy
fugitive’ without ‘originality of thought’.84 More sympathetically, Joseph
Forsyth describes Francis as ‘a genuine hero’ whose ‘powers seemed designed
to regenerate society; but, taking a wrong direction, they sank men into
beggars’.85 To the eyes of the educated historian, even when various other
forms of monasticism had been reappraised, the Franciscan renunciation
of intellectualism looked absurd. Today, Francis is commonly celebrated
for his love of animals and nature, but these nineteenth-century judgements
highlight the radical originality of Wordsworth’s appreciation of Franciscan
principles; they also emphasize the striking character of the poet’s own
elevation of natural impulses over books in Lyrical Ballads.
‘The Cuckoo at Laverna’, then, indicates one of the major claims of the
present study: that Wordsworth’s conception of the legacy of monasticism
was not rooted in enlightenment histories; indeed he did not find its
ultimate significance in written documents at all. Although I explore the
antiquarian sources Wordsworth consulted, those sources in fact directed
Wordsworth to the resonances of the monastic world in his local hills
and valleys. They showed him that he was (to adapt Aubrey De Vere’s
phrase) ‘treading monastic ground’: monasticism is a presence Wordsworth
80 Ibid., p. 76. 81 Ibid., p. 88. 82 Ibid., p. 84.

83 Henry Hallam, View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, 2 vols (London,
1818), ii, 67.
84 James Stephen, Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography, 2 vols (London, 1849), i, 150.
85 This passage from Forsyth’s Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters during an Excursion
in Italy, in the years 1802 and 1803 (London, 1813) is quoted in Bury, The Three Great Sanctuaries,
p. 91. Bury offers a much more sympathetic assessment, describing Francis as ‘unquestionably
a remarkable being in the history of mankind’ (p. 92). Wordsworth refers to Bury’s volume
in a note to ‘The Cuckoo at Laverna’: Sonnet Series, p. 791.
Introduction 25
itnessed in the landscape or, in the case of Laverna, in the cry of a cuckoo.
w
Wordsworth implies that vital connections with ancestors can be felt by
attending closely to the landscape with a ‘conscious ear’, and that such
understanding cannot be gained from written documents alone. In this
sense, it is not absurd that a poet should invite readers to close their
books: reading poetry is valuable but only insofar as it helps sharpen that
‘conscious ear’ and refine the reader’s aptitude to receive the impulses of
nature. Wordsworth’s treatment of monasticism thus operates differently
from the majority of eighteenth-century histories of the subject; it also
develops before the nineteenth-century High-Anglican revival which saw
writers such as Southey (and later the Oxford Tractarians) calling for renewed
appreciation of the social value of monastic institutions. In this context,
Wordsworth’s poetic engagement with monasticism from 1806 to 1822
deserves careful attention; it helps elucidate the development of his mature
style and it highlights his continued commitment to using poetry to
unsettle and reformulate readers’ perceptions.
WO R D S WO RT H I A N ‘ M O N K S ’
In his essay on ‘Heinrich Heine’ (1863), Matthew Arnold distinguishes

between writers who capture the ‘Modern’ liberal and progressive spirit
(those associated, for example, with Renaissance humanism or with the
culture of learning and criticism found in Germany in the first decades of
the nineteenth century) and those whose ideas remain in a ‘Middle-Age’
realm of conservatism and anti-intellectualism. In this context, Arnold
asserts that Wordsworth fell from the position of the greatest English
man of letters when he ‘retired (in Middle-Age phrase) into a monastery.
I mean, he plunged himself in the inward life, he voluntarily cut himself off
from the modern spirit.’86 Arnold uses monastic retirement as a metaphor
for inwardness and political and intellectual regression, implying that
Wordsworth’s poetic power waned as he retired figuratively from a world
of ‘modern’ ideas. And yet, as I explore what happened when Wordsworth
did enter what might be legitimately called a monastic period, I challenge
Arnold’s conceptualization of monasticism as an isolationist rejection of
social and intellectual progress.
Arnold returns to this image of a monastic Wordsworth in his presiden-
tial address to the Wordsworth Society (1883), where he asserts that the
86 Matthew Arnold’s Essays in Criticism: First Series, ed. Sister Thomas Marion Hoctor
(Chicago and London, 1968), p. 108.
tenets of poverty, chastity, and obedience pervade Wordsworth’s poetry.87

As such, Arnold suggests that the poetry and, by extension, the Wordsworth
Society (as an enclave for professed followers) are places of refuge from
the ‘modern’ world. In the context of Arnold’s disinclination to accept this
presidency, his comments in the essay on Heine which align Wordsworth’s
figurative retirement into a monastery with anti-intellectualism, and his
wariness of the blind devotion of admirers who identify themselves as
‘Wordsworthians’, this address to an audience of (what may be called)
‘Wordsworthian monks’ is a covert warning against blindly admiring the
poet for his moral ideas rather than for the quality of the poetry itself.88
Arnold’s implicit warning is pertinent to the present study yet I suggest
that a sympathetic reading of the poetry Wordsworth produced between
1806 and 1822, which demonstrates his sense of the value of monastic
history, is crucial for scholarly understanding of how and why his style
evolved as it did.
Chapter 1 provides the conceptual background against which Words
worth’s engagement with monastic history took place; Chapters 2 to 5
then move chronologically through writings Wordsworth produced between
1806 and 1822. By focusing on the prefatory material surrounding The
White Doe of Rylstone and the ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ (both
published in 1815), Chapter 1 explores the ideas underpinning Wordsworth’s
self-proclaimed desire to ‘[create] the taste by which he is to be enjoyed’
and his endeavour to purify the romance revival. Chapter 2 considers the
connections Wordsworth perceived between Quakerism and monasticism,
and examines the significance of his sojourn at Coleorton in 1806–7, during
which time he undertook a major gardening project for the Beaumonts
which had both monastic and Quakerish inflections. Chapter 3 traces the
cumulative influence of the topographical and antiquarian studies Words
worth consulted between 1807 and 1810 as he composed The White Doe of
Rylstone, The Tuft of Primroses, Concerning the Convention of Cintra, and
the Essays upon Epitaphs, arguing that knowledge of the civic operation of
87 ‘Address as President, 1883’, in William Knight, ed., Wordsworthiana: A Selection of

Papers Read to the Wordsworth Society (London, 1889), pp. 124–8. Arnold notes, for example:
‘He was “frugal and severe”; he ever calls us to “plain living and high thinking” ’ (p. 125).
88 See Leon Gottfried, Matthew Arnold and the Romantics (London, 1963), pp. 47–60.
The Wordsworth Society was founded in 1880 to act primarily as ‘a bond of union amongst
those who are in sympathy with the general teaching and spirit of Wordsworth’: on the
membership, activities, and principles of the Society see Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians,
pp. 235–46 (p. 235). The Society was dissolved in 1886. Gill notes that ‘For most readers
accommodating the Wordsworthian creed meant absorbing it somehow into the matrix of
beliefs and conceptions which regulated the course of their lives’ (p. 171). Robert M. Ryan
explores the existence in the Victorian era of ‘the remarkably large and ecumenical congre-
gation of believers who considered Wordsworth their priest, prophet, or spiritual director’
in Charles Darwin and the Church of Wordsworth (Oxford, 2016), p. 8.
Introduction 27
the monastic world inflected his thinking about modes of inheritance,

living legacies, democratic representation, and memorialization. Chapter 4
considers tensions between reclusion and community in The Excursion
and argues that Wordsworth develops a new mode of pastoralism as a
means of critiquing oversimplified portrayals of secluded rural life. Finally,
Chapter 5 analyses the significance of national ecclesiastical cohesion in
Ecclesiastical Sketches and offers an expanded view of what constitutes
Wordsworth’s ‘local’ region by revealing his awareness of his Anglo-Saxon
heritage. I argue that, in the 1820s, he adapted the sonnet form as a means
of balancing his aesthetic appreciation of monasticism with his political
and religious prejudices. In turn, this discussion establishes a context in
which to consider the Victorian revival of enthusiasm for monasticism and
ruined abbeys, antiquarianism, ecclesiology, and medievalism.
One of the underlying concerns of this book is the significance, for
Wordsworth, of quietness. Wordsworth’s thinking about conventual life
and monastic sites—including the silences that are inseparable from
them—is closely linked with his vision for how readers ought to interact
with and respond to his verse. Wordsworth’s Preface to The Excursion,
which presents his poems as analogous to the various ‘Cells, Oratories, and
sepulchral Recesses’ of a ‘gothic Church’, implicitly invites readers to
approach his poems as if they were spaces for contemplation. In many ways,
this is a study of poems and places that convey and induce quietness.
1
Wordsworth’s Creation of Taste
It is an awful truth, that there neither is, nor can be, any genuine
enjoyment of Poetry among nineteen out of twenty of those persons
who live, or wish to live, in the broad light of the world—among
those who either are, or are striving to make themselves, people of
consideration in society. This is a truth, and an awful one, because to
be incapable of a feeling of Poetry in my sense of the word is to be
without love of human nature and reverence for God.1
In this passage from his letter to Lady Beaumont of 21 May 1807,

Wordsworth makes a striking claim: if poetry is to be ‘genuinely’ enjoyed,
the reader must cultivate a certain ‘feeling’ or sensibility; possession of this
‘feeling of Poetry’ supports ‘love of human nature’ and is related to ‘reverence
for God’. The remarkable implication is that Wordsworth believes those
without poetic sensibility lack a degree of human compassion and also
that readers without religious devotion might be disadvantaged in any
attempt to appreciate verse. The purpose of Wordsworth’s letter is to assure
Lady Beaumont that he is not downcast by negative reviews of Poems, in
Two Volumes.2 Wordsworth is undeterred because, in his opinion, the
reviewers are ‘altogether incompetent judges’:
These people in the senseless hurry of their idle lives do not read books, they
merely snatch a glance at them that they may talk about them. And even if
this were not so, never forget what I believe was observed to you by Coleridge,
that every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or original,
must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished; he must teach the
art by which he is to be seen; this, in a certain degree, even to all persons,
however wise and pure may be their lives, and however unvitiated their taste;
but for those who dip into books in order to give an opinion of them, or
1 MY i., p. 146.
2 For example, writing in the Edinburgh Review Francis Jeffery argues that ‘[i]f the
printing of such trash as this be not felt as an insult on the public taste, we are afraid it
cannot be insulted’. The anonymous report in the Critical Review complains that ‘[a] silly
book, is a serious evil; but it becomes absolutely insupportable when written by a man of
sense’. See Robert Woof, ed., William Wordsworth: The Critical Heritage, 1793–1820 (London,
2001), pp. 194 and 171.
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strange that a dispensation so cruel should visit them; when, in
reality, it was an occasion for joy, that they should thus be made, in
suffering, partakers of the glory of Christ, won in like manner. He
moreover warns them to keep a constant watch over their conduct,
to be prudent and careful, because “the accusing prosecutor” was
constantly prowling around them, seeking to attack some one of
them with his devouring accusations. Him they were to meet, with a
solid adherence to the faith, knowing as they did, that the
responsibilities of their religious profession were not confined within
the narrow circle of their own sectional limits, but were shared with
their brethren in the faith throughout almost the whole world.
From all these particulars the conclusion is inevitable, that there

was in the condition of the Christians to whom he wrote, a most
remarkable crisis just occurring,――one too of no limited or local
character; and that throughout Asia Minor and the whole empire, a
trying time of universal trouble was immediately beginning with all
who owned the faith of Jesus. The widely extended character of the
evil, necessarily implies its emanation from the supreme power of
the empire, which, bounded by no provincial limits, would sweep
through the world in desolating fury on the righteous sufferers; nor is
there any event recorded in the history of those ages, which could
thus have affected the Christian communities, except the first
Christian persecution, in which Nero, with wanton malice, set the
example of cruel, unfounded accusation, that soon spread
throughout his whole empire, bringing suffering and death to
thousands of faithful believers.
Accusing prosecutor.――The view which Hug takes of the scope of the epistle, throws
new light on the true meaning of this passage, and abundantly justifies this new translation,
though none of the great New Testament lexicographers support it. The primary, simple
senses of the words also, help to justify the usage, as well as their similar force in other
passages. A reference to any lexicon will show that elsewhere, these words bear a meaning
accordant with this version. The first noun never occurs in the New Testament except in a
legal sense. The Greek is Ὁ αντιδικος ὑμων διαβολος, (1 Peter v. 8,) in which the last word
(diabolos) need not be construed as a substantive expression, but may be made an
adjective, belonging to the second word, (antidikos.) The last word, under these
circumstances, need not necessarily mean “the devil,” in any sense; but referring directly to
the simple sense of its primitive, must be made to mean “calumniating,” “slanderous,”
“accusing,”――and in connection with the technical, legal term, αντιδικος, (whose primary,
etymological sense is uniformly a legal one, “the plaintiff or prosecutor in a suit at law,”) can
mean only “the calumniating (or accusing) prosecutor.” The common writers on the epistle,
being utterly ignorant of its general scope, have failed to apprehend the true force of this
expression; but the clear, critical judgment of Rosenmueller, (though he also was without
the advantage of a knowledge of its history,) led him at once to see the greater justice of the
view here given; and he accordingly adopts it, yet not with the definite, technical application
of terms justly belonging to the passage. He refers vaguely to others who have taken this
view, but does not give names.
The time when this epistle was written is very variously fixed by the different writers to
whom I have above referred. Lardner dating it at Rome, concludes that the time was
between A. D. 63 and 65, because he thinks that Peter could not have arrived at Rome
earlier. This inference depends entirely on what he does not prove,――the assertion that by
Babylon, in the date, is meant Rome. The proofs of its being another place, which I have
given above, will therefore require that it should have been written before that time, if Peter
did then go to Rome. And Michaelis seems to ground upon this notion his belief, that it “was
written either not long before, or not long after, the year 60.” But the nobly impartial Hug
comes to our aid again, with the sentence, which, though bearing against a fiction most
desirable for his church, he unhesitatingly passes on its date. From his admirable detail of
the contents and design of the epistle, he makes it evident that it was written (from Babylon)
some years after the time when Peter is commonly said to have gone to Rome, never to
return. This is the opinion which I have necessarily adopted, after taking his view of the
design of the epistle.
Another series of passages in this epistle refers to the remarkable

fact, that the Christians were at that time suffering under an
accusation that they were “evil-doers,” malefactors, criminals liable
to the vengeance of the law; and that this accusation was so
general, that the name, Christian, was already a term denoting a
criminal directly liable to this legal vengeance. This certainly was a
state of things hitherto totally unparalleled in the history of the
followers of Christ. In all the accounts previously given of the nature
of the attacks made on them by their enemies, it is made to appear
that no accusation whatever was sustained or even brought against
them, in reference to moral or legal offences; but they were always
presented in the light of mere religious dissenters and sectaries. At
Corinth, the independent and equitable Gallio dismissed them from
the judgment-seat, with the upright decision that they were
chargeable with no crime whatever. Felix and Festus, with king
Agrippa II., also, alike esteemed the whole procedure against Paul
as a mere theological or religious affair, relating to doctrines and not
to moral actions. At Ephesus, even one of the high officers of the city
did not hesitate to declare, in the face of a mob raging against Paul
and his companions, that they were innocent of all crime. And even
as late as the seventh year of Nero, the name of Christian had so
little of an odious or criminal character, that Agrippa II. did not
disdain to declare himself almost persuaded to assume the name
and character. And the whole course of their history abundantly
shows, that so far from the idea of attacking the Christian
brotherhood in a mass, as guilty of legal offenses, and making their
very name nearly synonymous with criminal, no trace whatever of
such an attack appears, until three years after the last mentioned
date, when Nero charged the Christians, as a sect, with his own
atrocious crime, the dreadful devastation by fire of his own capital;
and on this ground, every where instituted a cruel persecution
against them. In connection with this procedure, the Christians are
first mentioned in Roman history, as a new and peculiar class of
people, called Christiani, from their founder, Christus; and in
reference to this matter, abusive charges are brought against them.
Evil doers.――These passages are in ii. 12, iii. 16, iv. 15, where the word in Greek is
κακοποιοι, (kakopoioi,) which means a malefactor, as is shown in John xviii. 30, where the
whole point of the remark consists in the fact, that the person spoken of was considered an
actual violator of known law; so that the word is evidently limited throughout, to those who
were criminals in the eye of the law.
The name Christian denoting a criminal.――This is manifest from iv. 16, where they are
exhorted to suffer for this alone, and to give no occasion whatever for any other criminal
accusation.
BETHLEHEM, AT NIGHT.
A third characteristic of the circumstances of those to whom this

epistle is addressed, is, that they were obliged to be constantly on
their guard against accusations, which would expose them to capital
punishment. They were objects of scorn and obloquy, and were to
expect to be dragged to trial as thieves, murderers, and as wretches
conspiring secretly against the public peace and safety; and to all
this they were liable in their character as Christians. The apostle,
therefore, in deep solicitude for the dreadful condition and liabilities
of his friends, warns those who, in spite of innocence, are thus made
to suffer, to consider all their afflictions as in accordance with the
wise will of God, and, in an upright course of conduct, to commit the
keeping of their souls to him, as a faithful guardian, who would not
allow the permanent injury of the souls which he had created. Now,
not even a conjecture can be made, much less, any historical proof
be brought, that beyond Palestine any person had ever yet been
made to suffer death on the score of religion, or of any stigma
attaching to that sect, before the time when Nero involved them in
the cruel charge just mentioned. The date of the first instances of
such persecutions was the eleventh year of the reign of Nero, under
the consulships of Caius Lecanius Bassus, and Marcus Licinius
Crassus, according to the Roman annals. The commencement of the
burning of Rome, which was the occasion of this first attack on the
Christians, was in the last part of the month of July; but the
persecution did not begin immediately. After various contrivances to
avert the indignation of the people from their imperial destroyer, the
Christians were seized as a proper expiatory sacrifice, the choice
being favored by the general dislike with which they were regarded.
This attack being deferred for some time after the burning, could not
have occurred till late in that year. The epistle cannot have been
written before its occurrence, nor indeed until some time afterwards;
because a few months must be allowed for the account of it to
spread to the provinces of Asia, and it must have been still later
when the news of the difficulty could reach the apostle, so as to
enable him to appreciate the danger of those Christians who were
under the dominion of the Romans. It is evident, then, that the epistle
was not written in the same year in which the burning occurred; but
in the subsequent one, the twelfth of Nero’s reign, and the sixty-fifth
of the Christian era. By that time the condition and prospects of the
Christians throughout the empire were such as to excite the deepest
solicitude in the great apostle, who, though himself residing in the
great Parthian empire, removed from all danger of injury from the
Roman emperor, was by no means disposed to forget the high
claims the sufferers had on him for counsel and consolation. This
dreadful event was the most important which had ever yet befallen
the Christians, and there would certainly be just occasion for
surprise, if it had called forth no consolatory testimony from the
founders of the faith, and if no trace of it could be found in the
apostolic records.
Committing the keeping of their souls to God.――This view of the design of the epistle
gives new force to this passage, (iv. 19.)
First mentioned in Roman history.――This is by Tacitus, (Annals xv. 44,) who thus
speaks of them:――“Nero condendae urbis novae et cognomento suo appellandae gloriam
quaerere, et sic jussum incendium credebatur. Ergo abolendo rumori subdidit reos, et
quaesitissimis poenis affecit, quos per flagitia invisos, vulgus Christianos appellabat,”
&c.――“It was believed that Nero, desirous of building the city anew, and of calling it by his
surname, had thus caused its burning. To get rid of this general impression, therefore, he
brought under this accusation, and visited with the most exquisite punishments, a set of
persons, hateful for their crimes, commonly called Christians. The name was derived from
Christus, who, in the reign of Tiberius, was seized and punished by Pontius Pilate, the
procurator. The ruinous superstition, though checked for a while, broke out again, not only
in Judea, the source of the evil, but also in the city, (Rome.) Therefore those who professed
it were first seized, and then, on their confession, a great number of others were convicted,
not so much on the charge of the arson, as on account of the universal hatred which existed
against them. And their deaths were made amusing exhibitions, as, being covered with the
skins of wild beasts, they were torn to pieces by dogs, or were nailed to crosses, or, being
daubed with combustible stuff, were burned by way of light, in the darkness, after the close
of day. Nero opened his own gardens for the show, and mingled with the lowest part of the
throng, on the occasion.” (The description of the cruel manner in which they were burned,
may serve as a forcible illustration of the meaning of “the fiery trial,” to which Peter alludes,
iv. 12.) By Suetonius, also, they are briefly mentioned. (Nero, chapter 15.) “Afflicti suppliciis
Christiani, genus hominum superstitionis novae et maleficae.”――“The Christians, a sort of
men of a new and pernicious (evil doing) superstition, were visited with punishments.”
That this Neronian persecution was as extensive as is here made to appear, is proved
by Lardner and Hug. The former in particular, gives several very interesting evidences, in
his “Heathen testimonies,” especially the remarkable inscription referring to this persecution,
found in Portugal. (Collection of Ancient Jewish and Heathen Testimonies, chapter iii.)
From the uniform tone in which the apostle alludes to the danger
as threatening only his readers, without the slightest allusion to the
circumstance of his being involved in the difficulty, is drawn another
important confirmation of the locality of the epistle. He uniformly uses
the second person when referring to trials, but if he himself had then
been so situated as to share in the calamity for which he strove to
prepare them, he would have been very apt to have expressed his
own feelings in view of the common evil. Paul, in those epistles
which were written under circumstances of personal distress, is very
full of warm expressions of the state of mind in which he met his
trials; nor was there in Peter any lack of the fervid energy that would
burst forth in similarly eloquent sympathy, on the like occasions. But
from Babylon, beyond the bounds of Roman sway, he looked on
their sufferings only with that pure sympathy which his regard for his
brethren would excite; and it is not to be wondered, then, that he
uses the second person merely, in speaking of their distresses. The
bearer of this epistle to the distressed Christians of Asia Minor, is
named Silvanus, generally supposed to be the same with Silvanus or
Silas, mentioned in Paul’s epistles, and in the Acts, as the
companion of Paul in his journeys through some of those provinces
to which Peter now wrote. There is great probability in this
conjecture, nor is there anything that contradicts it in the slightest
degree; and it may therefore be considered as true. Some other
great object may at this time have required his presence among
them, or he may have been then passing on his journey to rejoin
Paul, thus executing this commission incidentally.
This view of the scope and contents of this epistle is taken from Hug, who seems to
have originated it. At least I can find nothing of it in any other author whom I have consulted.
Michaelis, for instance, though evidently apprehending the general tendency of the epistle,
and its design to prepare its readers for the coming of some dreadful calamity, was not led
thereby to the just apprehension of the historical circumstances therewith connected. (Hug,
II. §§ 162‒165.――Michaelis Vol. IV. chapter xxvii. §§ 1‒7.)
the second epistle.
After writing the former epistle to the Christians of Asia Minor,

Peter probably continued to reside in Babylon, since no occurrence
is mentioned which could draw him away, in his old age, from the
retired but important field of labor to which he had previously
confined himself. Still exercising a paternal watchfulness, however,
over his distant disciples, his solicitude before long again excited him
to address them in reference to their spiritual difficulties and
necessities. The apprehensions expressed in the former epistle,
respecting their maintenance of a pure faith in their complicated
trials, had in the mean time proved well-grounded. During the
distracting calamities of Nero’s persecution, false teachers had
arisen, who had, by degrees, brought in pernicious heresies among
them, affecting the very foundations of the faith, and ending in the
most ruinous consequences to the belief and practice of some. This
second epistle he wrote, therefore, to stir up those who were still
pure in heart, to the remembrance of the true doctrines of
Christianity, as taught by the apostles; and to warn them against the
heretical notions that had so fatally spread among them. Of the
errors complained of, the most important seems to have been the
denial of the judgment, which had been prophesied so long.
Solemnly re-assuring them of the certainty of that awful series of
events, he exhorted them to the steady maintenance of such a holy
conduct and godly life, as would fit them to meet the great change
which he so sublimely pictured, whenever and however it should
occur; and closed with a most solemn charge to beware lest they
also should be led away by the error of the wicked, so as to fall from
their former steadfast adherence to the truth. In the former part of the
epistle he alluded affectingly to the nearness of his own end, as an
especial reason for his urgency with those from whom he was so
soon to be parted. “I think it meet as long as I am in this tabernacle,
to stir you up to the remembrance of these things, knowing as I do
that the putting off of my tabernacle is very near, according to what
our Lord Jesus Christ made known to me.” This is an allusion to the
prophecy of his Master at the meeting on the lake, after the
resurrection, described in the last chapter of John’s gospel.
“Therefore,” writes the aged apostle, “I will be urgent that you, after
my departure, may always hold these things in your memory.” All
which seems to imply an anticipated death, of which he was
reminded by the course of natural decay, and by the remembrance
of the parting prophecy of his Master, and not by anything very
imminently dangerous or threatening in his external circumstances,
at the time of writing. This was the last important work of his
adventurous and devoted life; and his allusions to the solemn scenes
of future judgment were therefore most solemnly appropriate. Those
to whom he wrote could expect to see his face no more, and his
whole epistle is in a strain accordant with these circumstances,
dwelling particularly on the awful realities of a coming day of doom.
The first epistle of Peter has always been received as authentic,

ever since the apostolic writings were first collected, nor has there
ever been a single doubt expressed by any theologian, that it was
what it pretended to be; but in regard to the epistle just mentioned as
his second, and now commonly so received, there has been as
much earnest discussion as concerning any other book in the sacred
canon, excepting, perhaps, the epistle to the Hebrews and John’s
Revelation. The weight of historical testimony is certainly rather
against its authenticity, since all the early Fathers who explicitly
mention it, speak of it as a work of very doubtful character. In the first
list of the sacred writings that is recorded, this is not put among
those generally acknowledged as of divine authority, but among
those whose truth was disputed. Still, quotations from it are found in
the writings of the Fathers, in the first, second and third centuries, by
whom it is mentioned approvingly, although not specified as inspired
or of divine authority. But even as late as the end of the fourth
century there were still many who denied it to be Peter’s, on account
of supposed differences of style observable between this and the
former epistle, which was acknowledged to be his. The Syrian
Christians continued to reject it from their canon for some time after;
for in the old Syriac version, executed before A. D. 100, this alone, of
all books supposed to have been written before that translation that
are now considered a part of the New Testament, is not contained,
though it was regarded by many among them as a good book, and is
quoted in the writings of one of the Syrian Fathers, with respect.
After this period, however, these objections were soon forgotten, and
from the fifth century downwards, it has been universally adopted
into the authentic canon, and regarded with that reverence which its
internal evidences of truth and genuineness so amply justify. Indeed,
it is on its internal evidence, almost entirely, that its great defense
must be founded,――since the historical testimonies, (by common
confession of theologians,) will not afford that satisfaction to the
investigator, which is desirable on subjects of this nature; and though
ancient usage and its long-established possession of a place in the
inspired code may be called up in its support, still there will be
occasion for the aid of internal reasons, to maintain a positive
decision as to its authenticity. And this sort of evidence, an
examination by the rigid standards of modern critical theology proves
abundantly sufficient for the effort to which it is summoned; for
though it has been said, that since the ancients themselves were in
doubt, the moderns cannot expect to arrive at certainty, because it is
impossible to get more historical information on the subject, in the
nineteenth century, than ecclesiastical writers had within reach in the
third and fourth centuries; still, when the question of the authenticity
of the work is to be decided by an examination of its contents, the
means of ascertaining the truth are by no means proportioned to the
antiquity of the criticism. In the early ages of Christianity, the science
of faithfully investigating truth hardly had an existence; and such has
been the progress of improvement in this department of knowledge,
under the labors of modern theologians, that the writers of the
nineteenth century may justly be considered as possessed of far
more extensive and certain means of settling the character of this
epistle by internal evidence, than were within the knowledge of those
Christian fathers who lived fourteen hundred years ago. The great
objection against the epistle in the fourth century, was an alleged
dissimilarity of style between this and the former epistle. Now, there
can be no doubt whatever that modern Biblical scholars have vastly
greater means for judging of a rhetorical question of this kind, than
the Christian fathers of the fourth century, of whom those who were
Grecians were really less scientifically acquainted with their own
language, and no more qualified for a comparison of this kind, than
those who live in an age when the principles of criticism are so much
better understood. With all these superior lights, the results of the
most accurate modern investigations have been decidedly favorable
to the authenticity of the second epistle ascribed to Peter, and the
most rigid comparisons of its style with that of the former, have
brought out proofs triumphantly satisfactory of its identity of origin
with that,――proofs so much the more unquestionable, as they are
borrowed from coincidences which must have been entirely natural
and incidental, and not the result of any deliberate collusion.
This account of the second epistle is also taken from Hug and Michaelis, to whom, with
Lardner, reference may be made for the details of all the arguments for and against its
authenticity.
As to the place and time of writing this epistle, it seems quite

probable that it was written where the former one was, since there is
no account or hint whatever of any change in Peter’s external
circumstances; and that it was written some months after it, is
unquestionable, since its whole tenor requires such a period to have
intervened, as would allow the first to reach them and be read by
them, and also for the apostle to learn in the course of time the
effects ultimately produced by it, and to hear of the rise of new
difficulties, requiring new apostolical interference and counsel. The
first seems to have been directed mainly to those who were
complete Jews, by birth or by proselytism, as appears from the terms
in which he repeatedly addresses them in it; but the sort of errors
complained of in this epistle seem to have been so exclusively
characteristic of Gentile converts, that it must have been written
more particularly with reference to difficulties in that part of the
religious communities of those regions. He condemns and refutes
certain heretics who rejected some of the fundamental truths of the
Mosaic law,――errors which no well-trained Jew could ever be
supposed to make, but which in motley assemblages of different
races, like the Christian churches, might naturally enough arise
among those Gentiles, who felt impatient at the inferiority in which
they seemed implicated by their ignorance of the doctrines of the
Jewish theology, in which their circumcised brethren were so fully
versed. It seems to have been more especially aimed at the rising
sect of the Gnostics, who are known to have been heretical on some
of the very points here alluded to. Its great similarity, in some
passages, to the epistle of Jude, will make it the subject of allusion
again in the life of that apostle.
his death.
Henceforth the writings of the New Testament are entirely silent as

to the chief apostle. Not a hint is given of the few remaining actions
of his life, nor of the mode, place, or time of his death; and all these
concluding points have been left to be settled by conjecture, or by
tradition as baseless. The only passage which has been supposed to
give any hint of the manner of his death, is that in the last chapter of
John’s gospel. “Jesus says to him――‘I most solemnly tell thee,
when thou wast young, thou didst gird thyself and walk whither thou
wouldst; but when thou shalt be old, another shall gird thee, and
carry thee whither thou wouldst not.’ This he said, to make known by
what sort of death he should glorify God.” It has been commonly said
that this is a distinct and unquestionable prophecy that he should in
his old age be crucified,――the expression, “another shall gird thee
and carry thee whither thou wouldst not,” referring to his being bound
to the cross and borne away to execution, since this was the only
sort of death by which an apostle could be said, with much propriety
or force, to glorify God. And the long-established authority of tradition
coinciding with this view, or rather, suggesting it, no very minute
examination into the sense of the passage has ever been made. But
the words themselves are by no means decisive. Take a common
reader, who has never heard that Peter was crucified, and it would
be hard for him to make out such a circumstance from the bare
prophecy as given by John. Indeed, such unbiased impressions of
the sense of the passage will go far to justify the conclusion that the
words imply nothing but that Peter was destined to pass a long life in
the service of his Master,――that he should after having worn out his
bodily and mental energies in his devoted exertions, attain such an
extreme decrepid old age as to lose the power of voluntary motion,
and die thus,――at least without necessarily implying any bloody
martyrdom. Will it be said that by such a quiet death he could not be
considered as glorifying God? The objection surely is founded in a
misapprehension of the nature of those demonstrations of devotion,
by which the glory of God is most effectually secured. There are
other modes of martyrdom than the dungeon, the sword, the axe, the
flame, and the stone; and in all ages since Peter, there have been
thousands of martyrs who have, by lives steadily and quietly devoted
to the cause of truth, no less glorified God, than those who were rapt
to heaven in flame, in blood, and in tortures inflicted by a malignant
persecution. Was not God truly glorified in the deaths of the aged
Xavier, and Eliot, and Swartz, or the bright, early exits of Brainerd,
Mills, Martyn, Parsons, Fisk, and hundreds whom the apostolic spirit
of modern missions has sent forth to labors as devoted, and to
deaths as glorious to God, as those of any who swell the deified lists
of the ancient martyrologies? The whole notion of a bloody
martyrdom as an essential termination to the life of a saint, grew out
of a papistical superstition; nor need the enlightened minds of those
who can better appreciate the manner in which God’s highest glory
is secured by the lives and deaths of his servants, seek any such
superfluous aids to crown the mighty course of the great apostolic
chief, whose solid claims to the name and honors of Martyr rest on
higher grounds than so insignificant an accident as the manner of his
death. All those writers who pretend to particularize the mode of his
departure, connect it also with the utterly impossible fiction of his
residence at Rome, on which enough has been already said. Who
will undertake to say, out of such a mass of matters, what is truth
and what is falsehood? And if the views above given, on the high
authority of the latest writers of even the Romish church, are of any
value for any purpose whatever, they are perfectly decisive against
the notion of Peter’s martyrdom at Rome, in the persecution under
Nero, since Peter was then in Babylon, far beyond the vengeance of
the Caesar; nor was he so foolish as ever after to have trusted
himself in the reach of a perfectly unnecessary danger. The
command of Christ was, “When you are persecuted in one city, flee
into another,”――the necessary and unquestionable inference from
which, was, that when out of the reach of persecution they should
not wilfully go into it. This is a simple principle of Christian action,
with which papist fable-mongers were totally unacquainted, and they
thereby afford the most satisfactory proof of the utter falsity of the
actions and motives which they ascribe to the apostles. One of these
stories thus disproved is connected with another adventure with that
useful character, Simon Magus, who, as the tale runs, after being
first vanquished so thoroughly by Peter in the reign of Claudius,
returned to Rome, in the reign of Nero, and made such progress
again in his magical tricks, as to rise into the highest favor with this
emperor, as he had with the former. This of course required a new
effort from Peter, which ended in the disgrace and death of the
magician, who, attempting to fly through the air in the presence of
the emperor and people in the theater, was by the prayer of Peter
caused to fall from his aspiring course, to the ground, by which he
was so much injured as to die soon after. The emperor being
provoked at the loss of his favorite, turned all his wrath against the
apostle who had been directly instrumental in his ruin, and
imprisoned him with the design of executing him as soon as might be
convenient. While in these circumstances, or as others say, before
he was imprisoned, he was earnestly exhorted by the disciples in
Rome, to make his escape. He accordingly, though very desirous of
being killed, (a most abominably irreligious wish, by the way,) began
to move off, one dark night; but had hardly got beyond the walls of
the city,――indeed he was just passing out of the gate-
way,――when, whom should he meet but Jesus Christ himself,
coming towards Rome. Peter asked, with some reasonable surprise,
“Lord! where are you going?” Christ answered, “I am coming to
Rome, to be crucified again.” Peter at once took this as a hint that he
ought to have stayed, and that Christ meant to be crucified again in
the crucifixion of his apostle. He accordingly turned right about, and
went back into the city, where, having given to the wondering
brethren an account of the reasons of his return, he was immediately
seized, and was crucified, to the glory of God. Now it is a sufficient
answer to this or any similar fable, to judge the blasphemous
inventor out of his own mouth, and out of the instructions given by
Christ himself to his servants, for their conduct, in all cases where
they were threatened with persecution, as above quoted.
Referring to his being bound to the cross.――Tertullian seems to have first suggested
this rather whimsical interpretation:――“Tunc Petrus ab altero cingitur, quum cruci
adstringitur.” (Tertullian, Scorpiace, 15.) There seems to be more rhyme than reason in the
sentence, however.
The rejection of this forced interpretation is by no means a new notion. The critical
Tremellius long ago maintained that the verse had no reference whatever to a prophecy of
Peter’s crucifixion, though he probably had no idea of denying that Peter did actually die by
crucifixion. Among more modern commentators too, the prince of critics, Kuinoel, with
whom are quoted Semler, Gurlitt and Schott, utterly deny that a fair construction of the
original will allow any prophetical idea to be based on it. The critical testimony of these great
commentators on the true and just force of the words, is of the very highest value; because
all received the tale of Peter’s crucifixion as true, having never examined the authority of the
tradition, and not one of them pretended to deny that he really was crucified. But in spite of
this pre-conceived erroneous historical notion, their nice sense of what was grammatically
and critically just, would not allow them to pervert the passage to the support of this long-
established view; and they therefore pronounce it as merely expressive of the helplessness
and imbecility of extreme old age, with which they make every word coincide. But
Bloomfield, entirely carried away with the tide of antique authorities, is “surprised that so
many recent commentators should deny that crucifixion is here alluded to, though they
acknowledge that Peter suffered crucifixion.” Now this last circumstance might well
occasion surprise, as it certainly did in me, when I found what mighty names had so
disinterestedly supported the interpretation which I had with fear and trembling adopted, in
obedience to my own long-established, unaided convictions; but my surprise was of a
decidedly agreeable sort.
The inventors of fables go on to give us the minute particulars of
Peter’s death, and especially note the circumstance that he was
crucified with his head downwards and his feet uppermost, he
himself having desired that it might be done in that manner, because
he thought himself unworthy to be crucified as his Master was. This
was a mode sometimes adopted by the Romans, as an additional
pain and ignominy. But Peter must have been singularly
accommodating to his persecutors, to have suggested this
improvement upon his tortures to his malignant murderers; and must
have manifested a spirit more accordant with that of a savage
defying his enemies to increase his agonies, than with that of the
mild, submissive Jesus. And such has been the evident absurdity of
the story, that many of the most ardent receivers of fables have
rejected this circumstance as improbable, more especially as it is not
found among the earliest stories of his crucifixion, but evidently
seems to have been appended among later improvements.
peter’s martyrdom.
The only authority which can be esteemed worthy of consideration on this point, is that
of Clemens Romanus, who, in the latter part of the first century, (about the year 70, or as
others say, 96,) in his epistle to the Corinthians, uses these words respecting
Peter:――“Peter, on account of unrighteous hatred, underwent not one, or two, but many
labors, and having thus borne his testimony, departed to the place of glory, which was his
due,”――(ὁυτως μαρτυρησας επορευθη εις τον οφειλομενον τοπον δοξης.) Now it is by no means
certain that the prominent word (marturesas) necessarily means “bearing testimony by
death,” or martyrdom in the modern sense. The primary sense of this verb is merely “to
witness,” in which simple meaning alone, it is used in the New Testament; nor can any
passage in the sacred writings be shown, in which this verb means “to bear witness to any
cause, by death.” This was a technical sense, (if I may so name it,) which the word at last
acquired among the Fathers, when they were speaking of those who bore witness to the
truth of the gospel of Christ by their blood; and it was a meaning which at last nearly
excluded all the true original senses of the verb, limiting it mainly to the notion of a death by
persecution for the sake of Christ. Thence our English words, martyr and martyrdom. But
that Clement by this use of the word, in this connection, meant to convey the idea of Peter’s
having been killed for the sake of Christ, is an opinion utterly incapable of proof, and
moreover rendered improbable by the words joined to it in the passage. The sentence is,
“Peter underwent many labors, and having thus borne witness” to the gospel truth, “went to
the place of glory which he deserved.” Now the adverb “thus,” (ὁυτως,) seems to me most
distinctly to show what was the nature of this testimony, and the manner also in which he
bore it. It points out more plainly than any other words could, the fact that his testimony to
the truth of the gospel was borne in the zealous labors of a devoted life, and not by the
agonies of a bloody death. There is not in the whole context, nor in all the writings of
Clement, any hint whatever that Peter was killed for the sake of the gospel; and we are
therefore required by every sound rule of interpretation, to stick to the primary sense of the
verb, in this passage. Lardner most decidedly mis-translates it in the text of his work, so that
any common reader would be grossly deceived as to the expression in the original of
Clement,――“Peter underwent many labors, till at last being martyred, he went,” &c. The
Greek word, ὁυτως, (houtos,) means always, “in this manner,” “thus,” “so,” and is not a mere
expletive, like the English phrase, “and so,” which is a mere form of transition from one part
of the narrative to the other.
In the similar passage of Clemens which refers to Paul, there is something in the
connection which may seem to favor the conclusion that he understood Paul to have been
put to death by the Roman officers. His words are,――“and after having borne his testimony
before governors, he was thus sent out of the world,” &c. Here the word “thus,” coming after
the participle, may perhaps be considered, in view also of its other connections, as implying
his removal from the world by a violent death, in consequence of the testimony borne by
him before the governors. This however, will bear some dispute, and will have a fuller
discussion elsewhere.
But in respect to the passage which refers to Peter, the burden of proof may fairly be
said to lie on those who maintain the old opinion. Here the word is shown to have, in the
New Testament, no such application to death as it has since acquired; and the question is
whether Clemens Romanus, a man himself of the apostolic age, who lived and perhaps
wrote, before the canon was completed, had already learned to give a new meaning to a
verb, before so simple and unlimited in its applications. No person can pretend to trace this
meaning to within a century of the Clementine age, nor does Suicer refer to any one who
knew of such use before Clement of Alexandria (See his Thesaurus; Μαρτυρ.) Clement
himself uses it in the same epistle (§ xvii.) in its unquestionable primary sense, speaking of
Abraham as having received an honorable testimony,――(εμαρτυρηθη;) for who will say that
Abraham was martyred, in the modern sense? The fact too that Clement nowhere else
gives the least glimmer of a hint that Peter died any where but in his bed, fixes the position
here taken, beyond all possibility of attack, except by its being shown that he uses this verb
somewhere else, with the sense of death unquestionably attached to it.
There is no other early writer who can be said to speak of the manner of Peter’s death,
before Dionysius of Corinth, who says that “Peter and Paul having taught in Italy together,
bore their testimony” (by death, if you please,) “about the same time.” An argument might
here also be sustained on the word εμαρτυρησαν, (emarturesan,) but the evidence of
Dionysius, mixed as it is with a demonstrated fable, is not worth a verbal criticism. The
same may be said of Tertullian and the rest of the later Fathers, as given in the note on
pages 228‒233.
An examination of the word Μαρτυρ, in Suicer’s Thesaurus Ecclesiasticus, will show the
critical, that even in later times, this word did not necessarily imply “one who bore his
testimony to the truth at the sacrifice of life.” Even Chrysostom, in whose time the peculiar
limitation of the term might be supposed to be very well established, uses the word in such
applications as to show that its original force was not wholly lost. By Athanasius too,
Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego are styled martyrs. Gregory Nazianzen also speaks of
“living martyrs.” (ζωντες μαρτυρες.) Theophylact calls the apostle John a martyr, though he
declares him to have passed through the hands of his persecutors unhurt, and to have died
by the course of nature. Clemens Alexandrinus has similar uses of the term; and the
Apostolical Constitutions, of doubtful date, but much later than the first century, also give it
in such applications. Suicer distinctly specifies several classes of persons, not martyrs in
the modern sense, to whom the Greek word is nevertheless applied in the writings of even
the later Fathers; as “those who testified the truth of the gospel of Christ, at the peril of life
merely, without the loss of it,”――“those who obeyed the requirements of the gospel, by
restraining passion,” &c. In some of these instances however, it is palpable that the
application of the word to such persons is secondary, and made in rather a poetical way,
with a reference to the more common meaning of loss of life for the sake of Christ, since
there is always implied a testimony at the risk or loss of something; still the power of these
instances to render doubtful the meaning of the term, is unquestionable. (See Suicer’s
Thesaurus Ecclesiasticus, Μαρτυρ, III. 2, 5, 6.)
Perhaps it is hardly worth while to dismiss these fables altogether, without first alluding
to the rather ancient one, first given by Clemens Alexandrinus. (Stromata, 7. p. 736.) and
copied verbatim by Eusebius, (Church History, III. 30.) Both the reverend Fathers however,
introduce the story as a tradition, a mere on dit, prefacing it with the expressive phrase,
“They say,” &c. (Φασι.) “The blessed Peter seeing his wife led to death, was pleased with
the honor of her being thus called by God to return home, and thus addressed her in words
of exhortation and consolation, calling her by name,――‘O woman! remember the Lord.’”
The story comes up from the hands of tradition rather too late however, to be entitled to any
credit whatever, being recorded by Clemens Alexandrinus, full 200 years after Christ. It was
probably invented in the times when it was thought worth while to cherish the spirit of
voluntary martyrdom, among even the female sex; for which purpose instances were sought
out or invented respecting those of the apostolic days. That Peter had a wife is perfectly
true; and it is also probable that she accompanied him about on his travels, as would
appear from a passage in Paul’s writings; (1 Corinthians ix. 5;) but beyond this, nothing is
known of her life or death. Similar fables might be endlessly multiplied from papistical
sources; more especially from the Clementine novels, and the apostolical romances of
Abdias Babylonius; but the object of the present work is true history, and it would require a
whole volume like this to give all the details of Christian mythology.
In justification of the certainty with which sentence is pronounced against the whole story
of Peter’s ever having gone to Rome, it is only necessary to refer to the decisive argument
on pages 228‒233, in which the whole array of ancient evidence on the point, is given by
Dr. Murdock. If the support of great names is needed, those of Scaliger, Salmasius,
Spanheim, and Bower, all mighty minds in criticism, are enough to justify the boldness of
the opinion, that Peter never went west of the Hellespont, and probably never embarked on
the Mediterranean. In conclusion of the whole refutation of this long-established error, the
matter cannot be more fairly presented, than in the words with which the critical and learned
Bower opens his Lives of the Popes:
“To avoid being imposed upon, we ought to treat tradition as we do a notorious and
known liar, to whom we give no credit unless what he says is confirmed to us by some
person of undoubted veracity. If it is affirmed by him alone, we can at most but suspend our
belief, not rejecting it as false, because a liar may sometimes speak truth; but we cannot,
upon his bare authority, admit it as true. Now that St. Peter was at Rome, that he was
bishop of Rome, we are told by tradition alone, which, at the same time tells us of so many
strange circumstances attending his coming to that metropolis, his staying in it, his
withdrawing from it, &c., that in the opinion of every unprejudiced man, the whole must
savor strongly of romance. Thus we are told that St. Peter went to Rome chiefly to oppose
Simon, the celebrated magician; that at their first interview, at which Nero himself was
present, he flew up into the air, in the sight of the emperor and the whole city; but that the
devil, who had thus raised him, struck with dread and terror at the name of Jesus, whom the
apostle invoked, let him fall to the ground, by which fall he broke his legs. Should you
question the truth of this tradition at Rome, they would show you the prints of St. Peter’s
knees in the stone, on which he kneeled on this occasion, and another stone still dyed with
the blood of the magician. (This account seems to have been borrowed from Suetonius,
who speaks of a person that, in the public sports, undertook to fly, in the presence of the
emperor Nero; but on his first attempt, fell to the ground; by which fall his blood sprung out
with such violence that it reached the emperor’s canopy.)
“The Romans, as we are told, highly incensed against him for thus maiming and bringing
to disgrace one to whom they paid divine honors, vowed his destruction; whereupon the
apostle thought it advisable to retire for a while from the city, and had already reached the
gate, when to his great surprise, he met our Savior coming in, as he went out, who, upon St.
Peter’s asking him where he was going, returned this answer: ‘I am going to Rome, to be
crucified anew;’ which, as St. Peter understood it, was upbraiding him with his flight;
whereupon he turned back, and was soon after seized by the provoked Romans, and, by an
order from the emperor, crucified.”
Nor do the fables about Peter, by the inveterate papists, cease

with his death. In regard to the place of his tomb, a new story was
needed, and it is accordingly given with the usual particularity. It is
said that he was buried at Rome in the Vatican plain, in the district
beyond the Tiber, in which he was said to have first preached among
the Jews, and where stood the great circus of Nero, in which the
apostle is said to have been crucified. Over this bloody spot, a
church was afterwards raised, by Constantine the Great, who chose
for its site part of the ground that had been occupied by the circus,
and the spaces where the temples of Mars and Apollo had stood.
The church, though of no great architectural beauty, was a building
of great magnitude, being three hundred feet long, and more than
one hundred and fifty feet wide. This building stood nearly twelve
hundred years, when becoming ruinous in spite of all repairs, it was
removed to give place to the present cathedral church of St. Peter,
now the most immense and magnificent building in the world,――not
too much praised in the graphic verse in which the pilgrim-poet sets
it beyond all comparison with the greatest piles of ancient or modern
art:
“But lo! the dome! the vast and wondrous dome,
To which Diana’s marvel was a cell;――
Christ’s mighty shrine above his martyr’s tomb.――
I have beheld the Ephesians’ miracle,
Its columns strew the wilderness, and dwell
The hyena and the jackall in their shade.
I have beheld Sophia’s bright roofs swell
Their glittering mass in the sun, and have surveyed
Its sanctuary, while the usurping Moslem prayed.
“But thou, of temples old, or altars new,
Standest alone, with nothing like to thee.
Worthiest of God, the holy and the true!
Since Zion’s desolation, when that He
Forsook his former city, what could be
Of earthly structures in his honor piled,
Of a sublimer aspect?”――
Within the most holy place of this vast sanctuary,――beneath the

very center of that wonderful dome, which rises in such unequaled
vastness above it, redounding far more to the glory of the man who
reared it, than of the God whose altar it covers,――in the vaulted
crypt which lies below the pavement, is a shrine, before which a
hundred lamps are constantly burning, and over which the prayers of
thousands are daily rising. This is called the tomb of the saint to
whom the whole pile is dedicated, and from whom the great high
priest of that temple draws his claim to the keys of the kingdom of
heaven, with the power to bind and loose, and the assurance of
heaven’s sanction on his decrees. But what a contrast is all this
“pride, pomp and circumstance,” to the bare purity of the faith and
character of the simple man whose life and conduct are recorded on
these pages! If any thing whatever may be drawn as a well-
authorized conclusion from the details that have been given of his
actions and motives, it is that Simon Peter was a “plain, blunt” man,
laboring devotedly for the object to which he had been called by
Jesus, and with no other view whatever, than the advancement of
the kingdom of his Master,――the inculcation of a pure spiritual faith,
which should seek no support, nor the slightest aid, from the
circumstances which charm the eye and ear, and win the soul
through the mere delight impressed upon the senses, as the
idolatrous priests who now claim his name and ashes, maintain their
dominion in the hearts of millions of worse than pagan worshipers.
His whole life and labors were pointed at the very extirpation of
forms and ceremonies,――the erection of a pure, rational, spiritual
dominion in the hearts of mankind, so that the blessings of a glorious
faith, which for two thousand years before had been confined to the
limits of a ceremonial system, might now, disenthralled from all the
bonds of sense, and exalted above the details of tedious forms, of
natural distinctions, and of antique rituals,――spread over a field as
wide as humanity. For this he lived and toiled, and in the clear hope
of a triumphant fulfilment of that plan, he died. And if, from his
forgotten, unknown grave, among the ashes of the Chaldean
Babylon, and from the holy rest which is for the blessed, the now
glorified apostle could be called to the renewal of breathing, earthly
life, and see the results of his energetic, simple-minded
devotion,――what wonder, what joy, what grief, what glory, what
shame, would not the revelation of these mighty changes move
within him! The simple, pure gospel which he had preached in
humble, faithful obedience to the divine command, without a thought
of glory or reward, now exalted in the idolatrous reverence of
hundreds of millions,――but where appreciated in its simplicity and
truth? The cross on which his Master was doomed to ignominy, now
exalted as the sign of salvation, and the seal of God’s love to the
world!――(a spectacle as strange to a Roman or Jewish eye, as to a

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Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance:

Poetry, Place, and the Sense of

In memory of Tom Fay,

1. Wordsworth’s Creation of Taste 28

2. Quakerism, Cultivation, and the Coleorton Period 63

3. ‘My second Self when I am gone’: Legacy, Memorialization,

4. Pastoral Reclusion and The Excursion 133

5. Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Heritage 168

Epilogue: The Medieval Revival 196

Appendix I. Table of Monastic Sites Visited and/or

List of Figures and Map

DWJ The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, ed. Pamela Woof

Excursion The Excursion, ed. Sally Bushell, James A. Butler, and

Grosart Prose The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed.

IF Notes The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Jared R.

JEGP Journal of English and Germanic Philology.

LY i The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth:

P2V Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807,

RES Review of English Studies.

SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900.

Thirteen-Book Prelude The Thirteen-Book Prelude, ed. Mark L. Reed, 2 vols

And all the Hills were glad to bear

On 25 October 1853, the Anglo-Irish poet Aubrey De Vere wrote excitedly

1 Aubrey De Vere, a Memoir Based on His Unpublished Diaries and Correspondence,

2 Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance

Wordsworth would have given ‘a poetical, if not a theological blessing’ to

4 Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance

11 LY iv., p. 218. 12 De Vere Memoir, p. 226.

judging our fellow-men, whether of past ages, or of the present time.’14

14 Sonnet Series, pp. 638–9. The poem was published in 1835.

6 Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance

8 Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance

That which is commonly denoted Wordsworth’s ‘later poetry’ has

arrangement.29 Wordsworth never distinguished his poems according to

10 Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance

However, the work Wordsworth produced during this time is consistent,

he hopes, will encourage contemplation and subdue readers’ appetites for

37 See Chapter 3 for full details.

12 Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance

open and suggestive style in which Wordsworth conveys religious ideas

contemporary readers had been led to expect. In comparison with popular

Monastic ruins were appropriated for various political and aesthetic

14 Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance

difference between sympathetic and politically triumphant interpretations

52 Ibid., p. 203. 53 Ibid., pp. 155–6.

16 Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance

that these holy buildings ever existed. Wordsworth’s particular mention

enhance and help perpetuate that sense of rest. A similar topographically

BOOKS AND BIRDS: ST FRANCIS

On 27 May 1837, surrounded by forests at the top of a ‘lofty mountain’ in

18 Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance

On one hand, the image of Wordsworth sleeping in an Italian monastic

20 Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance

Wordsworth glimpsed ‘heaven, by changeful earth’ at Laverna when he

location; in this context, it is notable that Wordsworth’s affinity with Francis,

22 Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance

The process of receiving these ‘impulses’ is significant because it matches

70 Edith Batho, The Later Wordsworth (Cambridge, 1933), p. 296.

24 Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance

labour of the Benedictines, we should be poor indeed’.80 The coenobitic

80 Ibid., p. 76. 81 Ibid., p. 88. 82 Ibid., p. 84.

In his essay on ‘Heinrich Heine’ (1863), Matthew Arnold distinguishes

26 Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance

1. Wordsworth’s Creation of Taste 28

2. Quakerism, Cultivation, and the Coleorton Period 63

4. Pastoral Reclusion and The Excursion 133

5. Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Heritage 168

Epilogue: The Medieval Revival 196