19 April 1802 – 25 April 1802

A beautiful morning. The sun shone. William wrote a conclusion to the poem of the Butterfly:-- I've watched you now a full half-hour. I was quite out of spirits, and went into the orchard. When I came in, he had finished the poem. It was a beautiful afternoon. The sun shone upon the level fields, and they grew greener beneath the eye. Houses, village, all cheerful--people at work. We sate in the orchard and repeated The Glow-worm and other poems. Just when William came to a well or trough, which there is in Lord Darlington's park, he began to write that poem of The Glow-worm; ... interrupted in going through the town of Staindrop, finished it about 2 miles and a half beyond Staindrop. He did not feel the jogging of the horse while he was writing; but, when he had done, he felt the effect of it, and his fingers were cold with his gloves. His horse fell with him on the other side of St. Helens, Auckland. So much for The Glow-worm. It was written coming from Middleham on Monday, 12th April 1802.... On Tuesday 20th, when we were sitting after tea, Coleridge came to the door. I startled him with my voice. C. came up fatigued, but I afterwards found he looked well. William was not well, and I was in low spirits.

William and I sauntered a little in the garden. Coleridge came to us, and repeated the verses he wrote to Sara. I was affected with them, and in miserable spirits. The sunshine, the green fields, and the fair sky made me sadder; even the little happy, sporting lambs seemed but sorrowful to me. The pile wort spread out on the grass a thousand shiny stars. The primroses were there, and the remains of a few daffodils. The well, which we cleaned out last night, is still but a little muddy pond, though full of water.... Read Ferguson's life and a poem or two....

A fine mild morning. We walked into Easedale. The sun shone. Coleridge talked of his plan of sowing the laburnum in the woods. The waters were high, for there had been a great quantity of rain in the night. I was tired and sate under the shade of a holly tree that grows upon a rock, and looked down the stream. I then went to the single holly behind that single rock in the field, and sate upon the grass till they came from the waterfall. I saw them there, and heard William flinging stones into the river, whose roaring was loud even where I was. When they returned, William was repeating the poem:-- I have thoughts that are fed by the sun. It had been called to his mind by the dying away of the stunning of the waterfall when he got behind a stone....

It being a beautiful morning we set off at 11 o'clock, intending to stay out of doors all the morning. We went towards Rydale, and before we got to Tom Dawson's we determined to go under Nab Scar. Thither we went. The sun shone, and we were lazy. Coleridge pitched upon several places to sit down upon, but we could not be all of one mind respecting sun and shade, so we pushed on to the foot of the Scar. It was very grand when we looked up, very stony, here and there a budding tree. William observed that the umbrella yew tree, that breasts the wind, had lost its character as a tree, and had become something like to solid wood. Coleridge and I pushed on before. We left William sitting on the stones, feasting with silence; and Coleridge and I sat down upon a rocky seat--a couch it might be under the bower of William's eglantine, Andrew's Broom. He was below us, and we could see him. He came to us, and repeated his poems while we sate beside him upon the ground. He had made himself a seat in the crumbling ground. Afterwards we lingered long, looking into the vales; Ambleside vale, with the copses, the village under the hill, and the green fields; Rydale, with a lake all alive and glittering, yet but little stirred by breezes; and our dear Grasmere, making a little round lake of nature's own, with never a house, never a green field, but the copses and the bare hills enclosing it, and the river flowing out of it. Above rose the Coniston Fells, in their own shape and colour--not man's hills, but all for themselves, the sky and the clouds, and a few wild creatures. C. went to search for something new. We saw him climbing up towards a rock. He called us, and we found him in a bower--the sweetest that was ever seen. The rock on one side is very high, and all covered with ivy, which hung loosely about, and bore bunches of brown berries. On the other side it was higher than my head. We looked down on the Ambleside vale, that seemed to wind away from us, the village lying under the hill. The fir-tree island was reflected beautifully. About this bower there is mountain-ash, common-ash, yew-tree, ivy, holly, hawthorn, grasses, and flowers, and a carpet of moss. Above, at the top of the rock, there is another spot. It is scarce a bower, a little parlour only, not enclosed by walls, but shaped out for a resting-place by the rocks, and the ground rising about it. It had a sweet moss carpet. We resolved to go and plant flowers in both these places to-morrow. We wished for Mary and Sara. Dined late. After dinner Wm. and I worked in the garden. C. received a letter from Sara.

A very wet day. William called me out to see a waterfall behind the barberry tree. We walked in the evening to Rydale. Coleridge and I lingered behind. C. stopped up the little runnel by the road-side to make a lake. We all stood to look at Glow-worm Rock--a primrose that grew there, and just looked out on the road from its own sheltered bower. The clouds moved, as William observed, in one regular body like a multitude in motion--a sky all clouds over, not one cloud. On our return it broke a little out, and we saw here and there a star. One appeared but for a moment in a pale blue sky.

After breakfast we set off with Coleridge towards Keswick. Wilkinson overtook us near the Potter's, and interrupted our discourse. C. got into a gig with Mr. Beck, and drove away from us. A shower came on, but it was soon over. We spent the morning in the orchard reading the Epithalamium of Spenser; walked backwards and forwards....