47 
mist and gracious lady who ruled at the Knoll. Across the 
valley towards Loughrigg, we see the holiday haunt, Fox 
Howe, that Dr. Arnold planned and whose chimneys were 
Wordsworth’s design and special care. 
The district in the neighbourhood of Fox Howe and Rydal 
is reminiscent of great literati, Matthew Arnold, Dean Stanley, 
Lady Augusta Stanley, W. G. Forster, Edward Quillinan, 
and others. Rydal Mount was the last of the four homes 
of the poet in these dales. Hither he came driven by domestic 
sorrow from Grasmere Rectory in 1813. Here he lived till 
his favourite cuckoo clock struck the hour of noon upon 
an April day in 1850 — day famous as both the birthday and 
deathday of Shakespeare — April 23rd. Here too, a hope- 
less invalid for the last twenty years of her life, Dorothy 
Wordsworth, in her garden chair, murmured snatches of 
her brother’s songs till death gave her back, as we trust, 
full companionship with the beloved on January, 1855; 
and here 
“With an age serene and bright 
And lovely as a Lapland night ” 
did Mary Wordsworth, the poet’s wife, linger on in peaceful 
resignation and content, even though blind for the last three 
years of her life, until January, 1859, when her life of calm 
devotion and unselfish love quietly came to an end. 
It was in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal that was recorded 
the circumstance which led to the writing of the “ Daffodils ” 
poem. A hundred years ago at the head of Lake Ullswater 
in April, in the woods at Lowbarrow Park, were a few daffodils 
close to the water side. “We fancied,” she writes, “ that 
the waves of the lake had floated the seed ashore and that 
the little colony of daffodils had so sprung up. But as we 
went along there were more and yet more and at last, under 
the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt 
of them along the shore about the breadth of a country turn- 
pike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew 
among the mossy stone about and above them ; some rested 
their heads on these stones as on a pillow for weariness ; and 
the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they 
verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the 
lake ; they looked so gay, ever glancing, ever changing, 
The sight of the belt of daffodils on that day enriched our 
literature. The eyes of the poet and poetress, and the heart 
of a poet’s wife joined in the making of the daffodil song 
that we shall never let die : 
