WORDSWORTH'S ELDEST GRANDCHILD.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXI, Issue LXII, 11 May 1912, Page 10

WORDSWORTH'S ELDEST GRANDCHILD.

Jane Stanley Kennedy died at Bournemouth, after a long illness, a few weeks ago. Mrs Kennedy was the widow of the Rev. Bennet Sherard Kennedy, formerly of Stapleford Park, Melton Mowbray, the great granddaughter of John Christian Curwen, M.P., of Workington Hall, Cumberland, and the eldest grandchild of William Wordsworth, the poet, who celebrated her birth in 1833 in one of his poems. Her father was the godson of De Quincey. Much of her early childhood was spent at Rydal Mount, she and her brother, William Wordsworth, of Capri, being the poet's favourite grandchildren. She had many recollections of her grandfather, and used to speak of the great tenderness which in his old age had toned down his native sternness. "Nay, Mary, they are but young," was a frequent plea urged by him when his grandchildren were* being chidden for turbulence by their grandmother, who . was a strict disciplinarian. Jane Wordsworth was at Rydal Mount on the evening when a command came to the Laureate to compose an ode to record the installation of the Prince Consort as Chancellor of the University of Oxford, and remembered how her grandfather, despairing of being able to write the: verses—his daughter Dora lying dead in the house at the time —sent for Quillman, his son-in-law, with whose help the ode was in the end completed. She remembered also, how, shortly after the publication of "We are Seven," she said to her grandfather. "The papers are saying that you only put in those words 'dear brother Jim' in the first line so as to have a rhyme to 'in every limb.' " "Why, of course, that was the reason, my dear, 0 said the old gentleman. Mrs Kennedy was also very intimate with the Arnolds and Coleridges, and leaves a great circle of friends to regret her loss, especially in the English and American colonies in Italy. Much of the later part of her life was spent at the Villa Wordsworth at Capri.