ABSTRACT
It was Felicia Hemans who introduced Graves to Wordsworth (he was the son of her doctor). When he visited Rydal Mount in 1833 he was still studying at Trinity College, Dublin; he decided to look for a curacy in the Lake District, drawn by his admiration for Wordsworth and also by reluctance to enter the Irish church, in which he found ‘an uncongenial spirit’. Wordsworth was favourably impressed by Graves from the first, and exerted himself to find him a position (first checking that he disapproved of the ‘injudicious zeal’ of the Evangelicals). In 1835 Graves succeeded to the curacy at Bowness, where he stayed for the next thirty years, which seems to confirm Hemans’ judgment that he was ‘thoroughly unworldly’, since he was clearly a man of talents (see LY II, pp. 636–8, p. 647, and p. 672). Wordsworth continued to think him ‘a very admirable young Man, zealous and efficient, both in the Church, and out of it, as a Pastor’ (LY IV, p. 68), and he became a good friend of the family. Graves was something of a poet (he had in 1833 addressed a ‘very elegant sonnet’ to Wordsworth (LY II, p. 649)), and late in his life he wrote the biography of his friend Sir William Hamilton. He died in 1893.
