"Saturday morning, 30th August.--William finished his inscription of the Pathway, then walked in the wood, and when John returned he sought him, and they bathed together."
To what poem Dorothy Wordsworth referred under the name of the "Inscription of the Pathway" has puzzled me much. There is no poem amongst his "Inscriptions" (written in or before August 1800) that corresponds to it in the least. But, if my conjecture is right that this "Poem on the Naming of Places," beginning:
'When, to the attractions of the busy world,'
was composed at two different times, it is quite possible that "the Firgrove" which was read--along with 'Joanna'--to Coleridge on September 1st, 1800, was the first part of this very poem.
If this supposition is correct, some light is cast both on the "Inscription of the Pathway." and on the date assigned by Wordsworth himself to the poem. There is a certain fitness, however, in this poem being placed--as it now is--in sequence to the 'Elegiac Verses' in memory of John Wordsworth, beginning, "The Sheep-boy whistled loud," and near the fourth poem 'To the Daisy', beginning, "Sweet Flower! belike one day to have."
The "Fir-grove" still exists. It is between Wishing Gate and White Moss Common, and almost exactly opposite the former. Standing at the gate and looking eastwards, the grove is to the left, not forty yards distant. Some of the firs (Scotch ones) still survive, and several beech trees, not "a single beech-tree," as in the poem. From this, one might infer that the present colony had sprung up since the beginning of the century, and that the special tree, in which was the thrush's nest, had perished; but Dr. Cradock wrote to me that "Wordsworth pointed out the tree to Miss Cookson a few days before Dora Wordsworth's death. The tree is near the upper wall and tells its own tale." The Fir-grove--"John's Grove"--can easily be entered by a gate about a hundred yards beyond the Wishing-gate, as one goes toward Rydal. The view from it, the "visionary scene,"
'the spectacle Of clouded splendour, ... this dream-like sight Of solemn loveliness,'
is now much interfered with by the new larch plantations immediately below the firs. It must have been very different in Wordsworth's time, and is constantly referred to in his sister's Journal as a favourite retreat, resorted to