Dean Stanley added a note to the effect that the monument was "Erected
by his widow, who, after long waiting and sending many in search of him,
herself departed to seek and to find him in the realms of light, 18th
July, 1875, aged eighty-three years."
But to return to Grasmere. Wordsworth lived there from 1803 to 1809 at
the Dove Cottage, of which, in the first canto of "The Waggoner," he
wrote:
For at the bottom of the brow
Where once the "Dove and Olive-Bough"
Offered a greeting of good ale
To all who entered Grasmere Vale;
And called on him who must depart
To leave it with a jovial heart;
There, where the "Dove and Olive-Bough"
Once hung, a poet harbours now,
A simple water-drinking Bard.
When Wordsworth moved to Rydal Mount, this cottage, which had formerly
been a public-house, was taken by that master of English prose, Thomas
de Quincey, author of the _Confessions of an English Opium Eater_.
[Illustration: RYDAL MOUNT.]
[Illustration: THE POET'S SEAT, RYDAL WATER.]
Wordsworth had the habit of reciting his poetry aloud as he went along
the road, and on that account the inhabitants thought he was not quite
sane.
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