“Due honour is done to ‘Peter Bell’, at this time, by students of poetry in general; but some, even of Mr. Wordsworth’s greatest admirers, do not quite satisfy me in their admiration of ’The Waggoner’, a poem which my dear uncle, Mr. Southey, preferred even to the former.  ‘Ich will meine Denkungs Art hierin niemandem aufdringen’, as Lessing says:  I will force my way of thinking on nobody, but take the liberty, for my own gratification, to express it.  The sketches of hill and valley in this poem have a lightness, and spirit—­an Allegro touch—­distinguishing them from the grave and elevated splendour which characterises Mr. Wordsworth’s representations of Nature in general, and from the passive tenderness of those in ‘The White Doe’, while it harmonises well with the human interest of the piece; indeed it is the harmonious sweetness of the composition which is most dwelt upon by its special admirers.  In its course it describes, with bold brief touches, the striking mountain tract from Grasmere to Keswick; it commences with an evening storm among the mountains, presents a lively interior of a country inn during midnight, and concludes after bringing us in sight of St. John’s Vale and the Vale of Keswick seen by day-break—­’Skiddaw touched with rosy light,’ and the prospect from Nathdale Fell ‘hoar with the frost-like dews of dawn:’  thus giving a beautiful and well-contrasted Panorama, produced by the most delicate and masterly strokes of the pencil.  Well may Mr. Ruskin, a fine observer and eloquent describer of various classes of natural appearances, speak of Mr. Wordsworth as the great poetic landscape painter of the age.  But Mr. Ruskin has found how seldom the great landscape painters are powerful in expressing human passions and affections on canvas, or even successful in the introduction of human figures into their foregrounds; whereas in the poetic paintings of Mr. Wordsworth the landscape is always subordinate to a higher interest; certainly, in ‘The Waggoner’, the little sketch of human nature which occupies, as it were, the front of that encircling background, the picture of Benjamin and his temptations, his humble friends and the mute companions of his way, has a character of its own, combining with sportiveness a homely pathos, which must ever be delightful to some of those who are thoroughly conversant with the spirit of Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry.  It may be compared with the ale-house scene in ‘Tam o’Shanter’, parts of Voss’s Luise, or Ovid’s Baucis and Philemon; though it differs from each of them as much as they differ from each other.  The Epilogue carries on the feeling of the piece very beautifully.”

The editor of Southey’s ’Life and Correspondence’—­his son, the Rev. Charles Cuthbert Southey—­tells us, in a note to a letter from S.T.  Coleridge to his father, that the Waggoner’s name was Jackson; and that “all the circumstances of the poem are accurately correct.”  This Jackson, after retiring from active work as waggoner, became the tenant of Greta Hall, where first Coleridge, and afterwards Southey lived.  The Hall was divided into two houses, one of which Jackson occupied, and the other of which he let to Coleridge, who speaks thus of him in the letter to Southey, dated Greta Hall, Keswick, April 13, 1801: