guarantees a permanent place among the poets of England. His brightest passages shine with a reflected light from Rydal's bright particular star—for Wordsworth had been, from his youth upwards, and under circumstances ill adapted to foster any such predilection, the venerated object of his poetical studies and musing sympathies.
Mr. Quillinan was a soldier by profession, but literature was his lifelong pursuit. He was born at Oporto in 1791, of Irish parents, from whom he was parted in his seventh year, in order to receive an English school education. At fourteen he returned to Oporto; but everything was changed—his mother dead—his father married again—and the counting-house to which he was introduced so heartily sickened him ("for my passion," he says, "was for books very unlike ledgers"), that he speedily left for England, settled awhile in London, and in 1808 purchased a cornetcy in the "Heavy Dragoons." With some brother officers he engaged in certain satirical brochure writing, which "brought him in" a dividend of three duels at once. The latter part of the Peninsular campaign he passed with his regiment in Spain. After the peace, he published a poem called "The Sacrifice of Isabel" (1816), which he described as an endeavour to portray with energy and simplicity, natural feelings in trying situations. It was dedicated to Sir Egerton Brydges,
whose daughter, Jemima, he married in the following year. In 1821, being quartered at Penrith, he went over to Rydal with a letter of introduction to Wordsworth; but, Mr. Johnston tells us, "singularly enough,[1] as Mr. Quillinan approached Rydal Mount he became ashamed of presenting himself with a letter which he was aware spoke of him in rather flattering terms, and he rode back again to Penrith with the specific object of his journey unaccomplished." He soon, however, retraced his steps, and made a friend for life. About the same time he quitted the army, and took a cottage on the banks of the Rotha—a stream whose name he gave to his second daughter, just as Coleridge gave that of the Derwent to his second son. He lost his wife in the following year, and went abroad in bitter anguish, "endeavouring to dissipate by change of scene the burden of sorrow which it had pleased Heaven to lay upon him." It is, perhaps, to the "shock and passion of grief" by which his spirit was then rent, and afterwards again when bereaved of his second wife (Dora Wordsworth), that we owe the most impressive and affecting
- ↑ Not absolutely without precedent, however. Twice seven years before this date, a far more profound and impassioned admirer of William Wordsworth undertook on two occasions a long journey expressly for the purpose of paying his respects to that great poet; and on each occasion he tells us, "I came as far as the little rustic inn at Church Coniston—and on neither occasion could I summon confidence enough to present myself before him. …… I was not deficient [he adds] in a reasonable self-confidence towards the world generally. But the very image of Wordsworth, as I prefigured it to my own planet-struck eye, crushed my faculties as before Elijah or St. Paul. …… Once I absolutely went forward to the very gorge of Hammerscar," within sight of the poet's cottage, and, "catching one hasty glimpse of this loveliest of landscapes, I retreated like a guilty thing, for fear I might be surprised by Wordsworth, and then returned faint-heartedly to Coniston, and so to Oxford, re infectâ. …… And thus far, from mere excess of nervous distrust in my own powers for sustaining a conversation with Wordsworth, I had, for nearly five yeani, shrunk from a meeting for which, beyond all things under heaven, I longed."—Lake Reminiscences: by the English Opium-eater.
