Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 132.djvu/310

304 say that "he never saw an amiable single woman without wishing that she were married."

Yet two of these, his untiring aids and companions, were single women, and had they been married, some of Wordsworth's poetry might never have been written. Sara Hutchinson, a woman of no slender intellect, passed her time between Brinsop Court, Rydal Mount, the poet's home, and Greta Hall. It was to her he wrote the lines on her spinning-wheel; and the two poems signed S. H., honored by a niche in his own poetical volumes, are her composition. She was afterwards Southey's amanuensis. Dorothy Wordsworth, the sister who was his constant friend from childhood, and to whom so many of his poems are addressed, was also frequently in this our moated grange. She was, like her brother, a great walker, and at sixty would take her ten miles' walk among the Herefordshire meads, woods, or orchards. But she outwalked her strength by crossing the Alps more than once, and was an invalid for the last twenty years of her life. Miss Hutchinson has a charming and touching photograph of her, taken during this trying period, and when she was verging on eighty. Her face appears placid and unwrinkled, if pensive, and is surrounded by a full-bordered cap.

A story is told of a favorite Brinsop dog, interesting from its connection with Dorothy Wordsworth and Mr. Quillinan, afterwards her nephew, by marriage with Dora Wordsworth. Dorothy was not naturally fond of dogs, but this one, Prince by name, attached himself to her, and accompanied her unheeded, during her long, solitary Herefordshire rambles. On the eve of one of her departures from the Court, he discovered, as dogs will, what was about to happen, and lay at her bedroom door all the night. The following morning he secreted himself in the cart that conveyed her luggage to Hereford, and finally met her at the coach. It was with difficulty that they could restrain the affectionate animal from following her, and with still greater that they could get him home again. Sometime after, when poor Prince was, like Dorothy, "stricken in years," he became sadly infirm, and a burden not only to those about him, but to himself. We hope that aged dogs do not fully understand what that means, or their declining years would be more burdensome still. However, Prince's young master, George Hutchinson, Mrs. Wordsworth's nephew, did not find the old dog a burden, and when the command to get rid of him was repeatedly issued, he begged him off with entreaties and tears.

At last, however, the fiat went forth that Prince must die. There was no kindly chloroform in those days, so the faithful dog was hanged by a servant named Jerry Preece, during the temporary absence of his friend George. Quillinan was staying at the Court at the time, and was engaged in laying night-lines across the moat. When the boy returned, he unadvisedly sent him to search for worms in "the duck's nest," a spot immortalized by Wordsworth in his fifteenth miscellaneous sonnet: —

When George, in high spirits at his quest, drew near this retired place, he chanced to look up at a neighboring willow-tree. There he saw his beloved Prince ignominiously hanging by the neck. The shock was so great that the boy went half mad with grief, and would not be consoled. Quillinan, who had not known of the place of execution, was much distressed. Retiring to his room, he hastily wrote the following impromptu lines by way of consolation, which he threw out of the window facing the cedar and moat, to the boy wailing beneath it, with the words, "Look, George! Here's an epitaph."

We do not know whether these verses consoled George Hutchinson, but they were engraven on stone, and placed at the head of Prince's grave. The remains of the good dog still rest at Brinsop Court, but the tombstone has been removed to Miss Hutchinson's garden at West Malvern. The lines, composed in a few minutes, afford proof, if any be needed, of Quillinan's genius, to whom Wordsworth wrote as follows before he became his son-in-law in 1840: — 