There is a Peele Castle, on a small rocky island, close to the town of Peele, in the Isle of Man; yet separated from it, much as St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall is separated from the mainland.  This castle was believed by many to be the one which Sir George painted, and which gave rise to the foregoing lines.  I visited it in 1879, being then ignorant that any other Peele Castle existed; and although, the day being calm, and the season summer, I thought Sir George had idealized his subject much—­(as I had just left Coleorton, where the picture still exists)—­I accepted the customary opinion.  But I am now convinced, both from the testimony of the Arnold family, [B] and as the result of a visit to Piel Castle, near Barrow in Furness, that Wordsworth refers to it.  The late Bishop of Lincoln, in his uncle’s ‘Memoirs’ (vol. i. p. 299), quotes the line

  “I was thy neighbour once, thou rugged pile,”

and adds,

  “He had spent four weeks there of a college summer vacation at the
  house of his cousin, Mr. Barker.”

This house was at Rampside, the village opposite Piel, on the coast of Lancashire.  The “rugged pile,” too, now “cased in the unfeeling armour of old time,” painted by Beaumont, is obviously this Piel Castle near Barrow.  I took the engraving of his picture with me, when visiting it:  and although Sir George—­after the manner of landscape artists of his day—­took many liberties with his subjects, it is apparent that it was this, and not Peele Castle in Mona, that he painted.  The “four summer weeks” referred to in the first stanza, were those spent at Piel during the year 1794.

With the last verse of these ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ compare stanzas ten and eleven of the ‘Ode, Intimations of Immortality’, vol. viii.

One of the two pictures of “Peele Castle in a Storm”—­engraved by S. W. Reynolds, and published in the editions of Wordsworth’s poems of 1815 and 1820—­is still in the Beaumont Gallery at Coleorton Hall.

The poem is so memorable that I have arranged to make this picture of “Peele Castle in a Storm,” the vignette to vol. xv. of this edition.  It deserves to be noted that it was to the pleading of Barron Field that we owe the restoration of the original line of 1807,

  ‘The light that never was, on sea or land.’

An interesting account of Piel Castle will be found in Hearne and Byrne’s ‘Antiquities’.  It was built by the Abbot of Furness in the first year of the reign of Edward iii.—­Ed.

[Footnote B:  Miss Arnold wrote to me, in December 1893: 

“I have never doubted that the Peele Castle of Wordsworth is the Piel off Walney Island.  I know that my brother Matthew so believed, and I went with him some years ago from Furness Abbey over to Piel, visiting it as the subject of the picture and the poem.”

Ed.]

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ELEGIAC VERSES,