4. WORDSWORTH: Returning to England at the close of 1792, he spent some time in London in great mental perplexity. He was horrified with the excesses in which the Revolution had landed; yet not the less he clung to his republican faith, and his hope in the revolutionary cause. When every month brought tidings of fresh enormities in France, and opponents taunted him with these results of equality and popular government, he retorted that these were but the overflow of a reservoir of guilt, which had been filling up for centuries by the wrongdoings of kings and nobles. Soon France entered on a war of conquest, and he was doomed to see his last hopes of liberty betrayed. Still striving to hide the wounds of mortified presumption, he clung, as he tells us, more firmly than ever to his old tenets, while the friends of old institutions goaded him still further by their triumphant scorn. Overwhelmed with shame and despondency at the shipwreck of his golden dreams, he turned to probe the foundations on which all society rests. Not only institutions, customs, law, but even the grounds of moral obligation and distinctions of right and wrong disappeared. Demanding formal proof, and finding none, he abandoned moral questions in despair. The nether gloom into which he was plunged, and the steps by which he won his way back to upper air, are set forth in the concluding Books of The Prelude, and partly in the character of the Solitary in The Excursion. These self-descriptions are well worth attention for the light they throw on Wordsworth's own mental history, and as illustrating by what exceptional methods one of the greatest minds of that time floated clear of the common wreck in which so many were entangled. His moral being had received such a shock that, as regards both man and Nature, he tried to close his heart against the sources of his former strength. The whole past of history, he believed, was one great mistake, and the best hope of the human race was to cut itself off even from all sympathy with it. Even the highest creations of the old, poets lost their charm for him. They seemed to him mere products of passion and prejudice, wanting altogether in the nobility of reason. He tried by narrow syllogisms, he says, to unsoul those mysteries of being which have been through all ages the bonds of man's brotherhood; that is, he grew sceptical of all those higher faiths which cannot be demonstrably proved. This moral state reacted on his feelings about the visible universe. It became to him less spiritual than it used to be. He fell for a time under a painful tyranny of the eye, that craves ever new combinations of form, uncorrected by the reports of the other senses, uninformed by that finer influence that streams from the soul into the eye. In this sickness of the soul, this "obscuration of the master-vision," his sole sister came, like his better angel, to his side. Convinced that his office on Earth was to be a poet, not to break his heart against the hard problems of political philosophy, she led him away from perplexing theories and crowded cities into the open air of heaven. Together they visited, travelling on foot, many of the most interesting districts of England, and mingled freely with the country people and the poor. There, amid the freshness of Nature, his fevered spirit was cooled down, Earth's "first diviner influence" returned, he saw things again as he had seen them in his boyhood. This free intercourse with Nature in time brought him back to his true self, so that he began to look on life and the framework of society with other eyes, and to seek there for that which is permaner.: and intrinsically good. At this time, as he and his sister wandered about in various out-of-the-way parts of England, where they were strangers, he found not delight only, but instruction, in conversing with all whom he met. The lonely roads were open schools to him. There, as he entered into conversation with the poorest, and heard from them their own histories, he got a new insight into human souls, discerned in them a depth and a worth where none appeared to careless eyes. The perception of these things made him loathe the thought of those ambitious projects which had lately deceived him. He ceased to admire strength detached from moral purpose, and learned to prize unnoticed worth, the meek virtues and lowly charities. Settled judgments of right and wrong returned, but they were essential, not conventional, judgments. n. SKETCH OF HIS LIFE. 5 Though this inward fermentation working itself into clearness was the most "She gave me eyes, she gave me ears; The first home which they shared together was at Racedown in Dorsetshire, here they settled in the Fall of 1795, on the strength of the £900. Wordsworth ways looked back to this residence with special love. So retired was the place, at the post came only once a week. But the two read Italian together, garened, and walked in the meadows and on the tops of combs. These were their creations. For serious work, Wordsworth fell first to writing Imitations of venal, in which he assailed fiercely the vices of the time; but these he never blished. Then he wrote his poem of Guilt and Sorrow, which is far superior any of his earlier pieces; also his tragedy of The Borderers, and a few shorter ems. More important, however, than any poetry composed at Racedown was his st meeting there with Coleridge. Perhaps no two such men have met anyhere on English ground during this century. Wordsworth read aloud to his sitor nearly twelve hundred lines of blank-verse, "superior," says Coleridge, to any thing in our language." This was probably the story of Margaret, hich now stands in the First Book of The Excursion. When they parted, oleridge says, "I felt myself a small man beside Wordsworth; while, of Coleridge, Wordsworth, certainly no over-estimater of other men, said, "I have nown many men who have done wonderful things, but the only wonderful man ever knew was Coleridge." Their first intercourse had ripened into friendship. Colovideo was then living at Nother Stowov in Somersetshire the Words 6 WORDSWORTH: worths moved in the Fall of 1797 to Alfoxden, in the immediate neighbourhood. The time spent there was one of the most delightful in Wordsworth's life. The two young men were of one mind in their poetic tastes and principles; one too in their political and social views; and each admired the other more than he did any other living man. In outward circumstances, too, they were alike; both poor in money, but rich in thought and imagination; both in the prime of youth, and boundless in hopeful energy. That Summer, as they wandered aloft on the airy ridge of Quantock, or dived into its sylvan combs, what high talk they must have held! Long after, Wordsworth speaks of this as a very pleasant and productive time. The poetic well-head, now fairly unsealed, was flowing freely. Many of the shorter poems were then composed from the scenery that was before him, and from the incidents there seen or heard. The occasion of their making a joint literary adventure was curious. Coleridge, Wordsworth, and his sister, wished to make a walking-tour, for which five pounds were needed, but were not forthcoming. To supply this want, they agreed to make a joint poem, and send it to some magazine which would give the required sum. Accordingly, one evening, as they trudged along the Quantock Hills, they planned The Ancient Mariner, founded on a dream which a friend of Coleridge had dreamed. Coleridge supplied most of the cidents, and nearly all the lines. The poem soon grew, till it was beyond e desired five pounds' worth, so they thought of a joint volume. Coleridge was to take supernatural subjects, or romantic, and invest them with a human interest and resemblance of truth. Wordsworth was to take every-day incidents, and, by faithful adherence to nature, and true, but modifying colours of imagination, was to shed over common aspects of earth and facts of life such a charm as light and shade, sunlight and moonlight, shed over a familiar landscape. Wordsworth was so much the more industrious of the two, that he had completed enough for a volume when Coleridge had only finished The Ancient Mariner, and begun Christabel and The Dark Ladie. Čottle, a Bristol bookseller, was called in, and he agreed to give Wordsworth thirty pounds for the pieces of his which made up the first volume of the Lyrical Ballads; while for The Ancient Mariner, which was to head the volume, he made a separate bargain with Coleridge. This volume, published in the Fall of 1798, was the first which made Wordsworth known to the world as a poet; the Descriptive Sketches having attracted little notice. The volume closes with the poem on Tintern Abbey, in which the poet speaks out his inmost feelings, and in his own "grand style." It was completed during a walking-tour on the Wye with his sister, just before leaving Alfoxden for the Continent. Before the volume appeared, Wordsworth and his sister had sailed with Coleridge to Germany. At Hamburg, however, they parted company. Their ostensible purpose was to learn German, but Wordsworth and his sister did little at this. He spent the Winter of 1798-99 in Goslar, and there his mind reverted to Esthwaite and Westmoreland hills, and struck out a number of poems in his finest vein. So Wordsworth omitted German, and gave the world, instead, immortal poems. Coleridge went alone to Gottingen, learned German, dived for the rest of his life deep into transcendental metaphysics, and the world got no more Ancient Mariners. In the Spring of 1799, Wordsworth and his sister set forth from Goslar on their return home. Arrived in England, they passed most of the remainder of the year with their kindred, the Hutchinsons, at Sockburn-on-Tees. In September, Wordsworth took Coleridge, who also had returned from abroad, and had seen but few mountains in his life, on a walking-tour, to show the hills and lakes of Westmoreland. "Haweswater," Coleridge writes, "kept my eyes dim with tears, but I received the deepest delight from the divine sisters, Rydal and Grasmere." It was then that Wordsworth saw the small house at the TownEnd of Grasmere, which he and his sister soon after fixed on as their home. They reached that place in December, 1799, and settled there in a small twostorey cottage. With barely a hundred pounds a year between them, they were SKETCH OF HIS LIFE. ning their backs on the world, cutting themselves off from professions, chances getting on, and settling down in an out-of-the-way corner, with no employnt but verse-making, no neighbours but unlettered rustics. In the world's e nothing but success will justify such a course, and the world will not be too dy to grant that success has been attained. But Wordsworth, besides a proet-like devotion to the truths he saw, had a prudence, self-denial, and perseance rare among the sons of song. "Plain living and high thinking" were t only praised in verse, but acted out by him and his sister in that cottageme. The year 1800 was ushered in by a long storm, which blocked up the ads for months, and kept them much indoors. Spring set them free, and ought to them their much-loved sailor brother, John, who was captain of an diaman. There was one small room containing their few books, which was led, by courtesy, the library. But Wordsworth was no reader; the English ets and ancient history were the only subjects he was really well read in. He Is a friend that he had not spent five shillings on new books in as many years, d of the few old ones which made up his collection, he had not read one-fifth. for his study, that was in the open air. "By the side of the brook that runs rough Easdale," says he, “I have composed thousands of verses." The first months at Grasmere were so industriously employed, that some time the year 1800, when a second edition of the first volume of Lyrical Ballads s reprinting, he added to it a new volume. The old Earl of Lonsdale, who Il withheld from the Wordsworths their due, died in 1802, and was succeeded a better specimen of manhood, who not only paid the original debt of £5000, t also the whole interest, amounting to £3500. This £8500 was divided into e shares, two of which went to the poet and his sister. Being thus strengthed in worldly means, the poet, in October, 1802, enriched his fireside with a fe; the lady being Mary Hutchinson, his cousin, and the intimate friend of s sister. In August, 1803, Wordsworth and his sister set out from Keswick th Coleridge on their memorable tour in Scotland. They travelled great part the way on foot, up Nithsdale, and so on towards the Highlands. Coleridge rned back soon after they had reached Loch Lomond, being either lazy or out spirits. Everywhere, as they trudged along, they saw the old familiar Highnds sights, as if none had ever seen them before; and wherever they moved ong the mountains, they left foot-prints of immortal beauty. He expressed at he saw in verse, she in prose, and it is hard to say which is the more etie. Early in 1805, the first great sorrow fell upon the poet's home, in the loss of s brother, Captain Wordsworth. He was leaving England, intending to make e more voyage, and then to return and live with his sister and brother, when s ship was run on the shambles of the Bill of Portland by the carelessness of e pilot, and he with the larger part of his crew perished. For a long time the et was almost inconsolable, he so loved and honoured his brother. His letters the time, and his poems long after, are darkened with this grief. Captain ordsworth greatly admired his brother's poetry, but saw that it would take me to become popular, and would probably never be lucrative; so he would ork for the family at Town-End, he said, and William would do something the world. In 1807, Wordsworth came out with two more volumes of poetry, mostly ritten at Grasmere. He was now in his thirty-seventh year, so that these volnes may be said to close the spring-time of his genius, and to be its consumate flower. Some of his later works many have equalled these, and may even now an increased moral depth and religious tenderness; but there is about the est of the Grasmere poems a touch of ethereal ideality which he perhaps never terwards reached. Among these is the Ode on Intimations of Immortality, which arks the highest point that the tide of poetic inspiration has reached in Engnd since the days of Milton. The cottage at Town-End, Grasmere, was Wordsworth's home from the too small for his increasing family, he moved to Allan Bank, -a new house, on the top of a knoll to the west of Grasmere, overlooking the lake. There he remained till 1811, Coleridge being an inmate of his home during the earlier part of that time. In the Spring of 1811, he was obliged to remove thence to the Parsonage of Grasmere, where his home was darkened by the loss of two of his little children, a boy and a girl, who were laid side by side in Grasmere churchyard. This affliction, which at the Parsonage was rendered insupportable by the continual sight of the graves, made the poet and his family glad to quit Grasmere for a new home at Rydal Mount, which offered itself in the Spring of 1813. This was their last migration, and there the poet and his wife lived till, many years after, they were carried back to join their children in Grasmere churchyard. Besides those two children, his family consisted of a daughter and two sons. The daughter, Dorothy, but commonly called "Dora," afterwards Mrs. Quillinan, died before her father; the sons still survive. Few poets have been by nature so fitted for domestic happiness, and fewer still have been blessed with so large a share of it. The strength and purity of his home affections, so deep and undisturbed, entered into all that he thought and sang. Herein may be said to have lain the heart of "central peace" that sustained the fabric of his life and poetry. The foregoing Sketch is mainly condensed from Professor J. C. Shairp's admirable paper on Wordsworth in his Studies in Poetry and Philosophy. It seems needful to add a few particulars touching the poet's subsequent life. To the volumes of poetry already mentioned, others were added from time to time, -as, The Excursion, in 1814; The White Do? of Rylstone, in 1815; Peter Bell, and The Waggoner, in 1819; The River Duddon and other Poems, in 1820; Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, and Ecclesiastical Sonnets, in 1822; Yarrow Revisited, and other Poems, in 1835. After the latter date, he wrote but little poetry, chiefly sonnets, which were subsequently distributed among the earlier pieces. Towards the close of his life, he gathered together all the poems of his then in print that he cared to preserve, gave them a careful revision, (in fact he was always revising them,) rearranged them, and set them forth in a collected edition. The Prelude, though written before The Excursion, was not published till after his death. About the time of his settlement at Rydal Mount, Wordsworth was appointed distributor of stamps for Westmoreland county. This office brought him a considerable addition of income; in fact, secured him an casy competence; while its conditions were such as to disburden him of private cares, without oppressing him with public ones; thus releasing him from anxiety, and at the same time leaving his freedom and leisure unimpaired. From this time onward his life flowed in an even, tranquil course: his whole heart was in his home, his whole soul in his high calling as a poet: every year brought him increasing returns of honour and gratitude from those who had deeply felt the blessing of his genius and wisdom: his great, simple, earnest mind had all that it needed for delight and nourishment in the grand and lovely forms and aspects of Nature that waited on his steps, and in the widening circle of friends whom he had himself inspired with congenial thoughts and congenial tastes: so that he was conducted to an old age as beautiful and free, perhaps, as ever fell to the lot of any human being. On the death of Southey, in March, 1843, the office of Poet Laureate, thus made vacant, was, with the full approval of the Queen, offered to Wordsworth. He at first declined the honour on the ground of his being too far advanced in age to undertake the duties of the office. This brought him a special letter from Sir Robert Peel, then Prime Minister, urging his acceptance, and assuring him that "the offer was made, not for the purpose of imposing on him any onerous or disagreeable duties, but in order to pay him that tribute of respect which was justly due to the first of living poets.' With this understanding, he accepted the appointment. The office was, indeed, well bestowed: old as |