Lustily
I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the water like a swan -
When, from behind that craggy steep till then
The bound of the horizon, a huge cliff,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Upreared its head.
Wordsworth wrote about it, Joseph Wright painted it - each responding in his own way to the majestic southern reaches of Ullswater in the Lake District.
Wordsworth's description is in his long autobiographical poem The Prelude, a manuscript copy of which, copied by the poet's sister Dorothy, is now in the collection of the Wordsworth Trust at Grasmere.
So, too, is Wright's painting. Dating from 1794-95, it is the last he completed and shows the lake in evening light with, on the left, Place Fell, which "upreared its head" and filled the young William Wordsworth with terror. In the foreground floats a skiff similar to the one he stole and rowed.
Poem and painting are now housed in the £31.5m Jerwood Centre, close to Wordsworth's Dove Cottage, officially opened this week by Seamus Heaney and built to house the trust's 30,000 manuscripts, 12,000 books and 8,000 prints, paintings and drawings connected with English romanticism. The collection includes 90% of Wordsworth's surviving working papers.
The new building, a modern version of a Lakeland barn, is celebrated with the publication of a book highlighting 100 treasures in the collection. In it, Robert Woof, the Wordsworth Trust's director, describes the Wright, bought in 1991, as the greatest painting the trust has acquired.
"Wright, of course, did not know Wordsworth, nor Wordsworth Wright," he says. "But the excitement for the visitor comes from seeing the two great works of art, each powerful in their own way, enriching each other."
The Jerwood Centre, funded by the Jerwood Foundation, the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Northwest Regional Development Agency and the European Regional Development Fund, has already been hailed by the Civic Trust as "a breathtakingly beautiful building of sheer simplicity".
"If you want to study Shakespeare you have to go to the Folger library in America, but to study Wordsworth and the romantics, you now come to Grasmere, right in the centre of the landscape that provided their inspiration," said Dr Woof. "No other writer of importance has this resource, where almost all of his manuscripts, books, letters and paraphernalia are found where he lived and drew his inspiration from."
At the opening, Heaney read a poem (right), never published before, about Dorothy Wordsworth, and praised "the integrity and vision" of those involved in creating the collection and the new centre.
"For more than 100 years, the trust has proved itself not just as a terrific custodian of possessions such as its archives and Dove Cottage, but also as an educator of the nation in Wordsworth and romanticism," he said.
"The voluntary gifting from the Wordsworth family alone makes that place worthy and proper as a centre of romantic and Wordsworth studies."
As part of the wider romanticism holdings, the collection includes a watercolour by Caroline Bowles (1786-1854) of Robert Southey's study at Greta Hall, with some of its 14,000 books. Shelley visited this room in 1811-12 but was forbidden to take any books from the shelves.
In 1993, the trust acquired a drawing by James Gillray of Mary of Buttermere, the bride of a bigamous husband (and later heroine of a Melvyn Bragg novel). With it came a letter from Coleridge expressing concern for the wronged woman.
In 2004, Michael Foot announced at the opening in Grasmere of an exhibition on Hazlitt's Spirit of the Age that he would donate his Hazlitt library. Part of the collection is already with the trust.
