It was a windy day in the Lake District more than 220 years ago when Dorothy Wordsworth and her poet brother William walked along the shores of Ullswater. “The wind seized our breath. The lake was rough,” Dorothy wrote in her diary entry for April 15, 1802. As they rounded a wood, a vista opened up with a magnificent sweep of daffodils along the water’s edge.
“I never saw daffodils so beautiful, they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them,” she wrote.
Those flowers later became the most celebrated daffodils in literature, inspiring William Wordsworth’s poem I wandered lonely as a cloud, written in 1804.
“I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.”
But during that walk in 1802 the weather turned increasingly stormy. As Dorothy wrote: “We rested again and again. The bays were stormy, and we heard the waves at different distances, and in the middle of the water, like the sea …. All was cheerless and gloomy, so we faced the storm.” Shortly afterwards it poured with rain and the Wordsworths were drenched before they could reach shelter at their friends, Mr and Mrs Luff. It carried on blowing a gale when they retired for the night.
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As for Dorothy, her biographer Ernest De Selincourt believed she was the most distinguished of English writers. “No one, not even her brother,” he wrote, “has captured with a more delicate perception the distinctive beauties of the countryside.”
