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MEMOIR.

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JILLIAM WORDSWORTH, the most distinguished philosophical poet that England has produced, was born at Cockermouth, in Cumberland, on the 7th of April, 1770.

The family of Wordsworth appears to have been of some little antiquity, as members of it are found settled at Pennistone, near Doncaster, so far back as the reign of Edward III., and the poet himself had in his possession an antique oak chest, or almery, of the reign of Henry VIII. (1525), on which was recorded, in curious carving, some generations of the family pedigree. But the branch from which he sprang was originally planted at Falthwaite, near Stainborough, and removed thence to Sockbridge, in Westmoreland, about the beginning of the last century.

The poet's father, who is said to have been a man of vigorous mental powers and of some eloquence, was an attorney, and held the appointment of law-agent to the Earl of Lonsdale. Ann Cookson, the poet's mother, was the daughter of a mercer of Penrith, and was descended, on her mother's side, from a very ancient familythe Crackanthorpes-who had been seated at Newbiggen Hall, in Westmoreland, for more than five hundred years. She appears to have been a woman of gentle and affectionate disposition, of much wisdom, high moral principle, and unaffected piety. She died when the poet was in his eighth year; so that, like Cowper, he had hardly listened to the language of maternal love when it was lost to him for ever. Henceforth he was confided to the care of strangers. But the impressions left upon his mind by his mother's tender treatment, and by the liberal and enlarged, yet gentle and confiding spirit in which she conducted the moral and mental training of his childhood, appear to have been deep and abiding, for he has embodied them in one or two passages of his poems, in lines as full of truthful feeling and tender pathos as any in the language.

The family consisted of five children-four sons and one daughter. The eldest son became an attorney and died in 1816; the third went to sea, became com. mander of the Earl of Abergavenny, East Indiaman, and perished by shipwreck off Weymouth in 1805. The youngest, Christopher, entered the Church, and became well known as Dr. Wordsworth,* author of a work entitled "Ecclesiastical

* Two of Dr. Wordsworth's sons have become somewhat distinguished. One of them-. Christopher Wordsworth, D.D.-is the present able and learned Bishop of Lincoln, the writer of

Biography,” and for many years Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Dorothy Wordsworth, the only daughter, and the constant companion of the poet down to the day of her death, was, like her mother, a woman of gentle and affectionate nature, but of exquisite sensibility, and of considerable literary and poetic

power.

But the poet, it would appear, was the only one of the family about whose future welfare his mother was anxious. He, she is recorded to have said, would be remarkable either for good or for evil. "The cause of this was," he says, "that I was of a stiff, moody, and violent temper; so much so, that I remember going once into the attics of my grandfather's house at Penrith, upon some indignity having been put upon me, with the intention of destroying myself with one of the foils which I knew was kept there. I took the foil in hand-but my heart failed." Another and better destiny was in store for him.

He received the first rudiments of learning at a dame-school at Penrith, where he was often taken when a child to reside with his maternal grand-parents. And here he had for classmate a little girl, a few months younger than himself, named Mary Hutchinson, who, some thirty years afterwards, became sole mistress of his house and heart.

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After having spent a year or two at school at Cockermouth, he was, in 1778, when in the ninth year of his age, sent to the endowed Grammar-school of Hawkshead, in Lancashire, where he remained till he was fourteen. And it was while here his first attempts at verse-making were made. One of the pieces he composed unmistakably presaged two of his most prominent mental characteristics. "It was," he says, a long poem running upon my own adventures, and the scenery of the country in which I was brought up.' These verses, he adds, were admired far more than they deserved, "for they were but a tame imitation of Pope's versification, and a little in his style." The days he spent at school here, he says, were amongst the happiest of his life, chiefly because he was at liberty to read whatever books he liked. "I read," he says, “all Fielding's works, ‘Don Quixote,' 'Gil Blas,' 'Gulliver's Travels,' and the 'Tale of a Tub;' the two latter," he adds, "being much to my taste," a circumstance which may account for the remarkable strength and purity of his English style.

In 1783 his father died, leaving little fortune to his children, beyond some heavy claims for professional labour rendered to the Earl of Lonsdale, whose lawagent, as already mentioned, he was. But as this nobleman refused to recognise these claims, or to meet them in any way, they remained unpaid till his death in 1802. In the meantime, the poet, and his three brothers and his sister, were thrown upon the care of their two uncles-Richard Wordsworth and Christopher

the poet's life, and the author of various valuable works on religious, classical, historical, literary, and polemical subjects. The other-Charles Wordsworth, D.D.-equally able and learned, and the author of the best and most popular Greek Grammar of the present day, and of a number of other works on religious and literary topics-is Bishop of St. Andrews in the Episcopal Church of Scotland.

Crackanthorpe-who appear to have treated them with the greatest kindnes and consideration.

In 1787 Wordsworth, when in his eighteenth year, was sent by his uncles to St. John's College, Cambridge, where he remained for four years. But his university career was neither pleasant to himself nor satisfactory to his friends. His early scholastic training does not appear to have been of a kind to enable him to pursue his university studies with the same prospect of success as was within reach of youths who had been reared at the great public schools; and he consequently felt inwardly dissatisfied and ill at ease, and spent his time in aimless projects and in desultory pursuits. Besides, in other respects, the cloistered silence and constraint of these classic shades seem to have been unsuited to his nature. They "froze the genial current of his soul," for the only poem composed while he was at Cambridge was the "Evening Walk," none of the imagery of which is derived from academic scenes. It certainly does appear, at first sight, somewhat singular, that a mind so meditative, so calmly philosophical, should have felt so ill at ease in this 'garden of great intellects.". But the cause is clear. His love of nature from childhood upwards was intense. "The sounding cataract, the tall rock, the mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, their glorious colours and their glowing forms," haunted him like a passion; so that, amid these grand old halls, grey with age and rich in historic and intellectual renown-for centuries "the sacred nurseries of blooming youth "—his spirit pined for the freedom of its native hills and dales; and at every convenient opportunity he seems to have escaped from academic rule, and to have rambled, at will, for months together, among his beloved lakes and mountains.

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In the autumn of 1790, his last college vacation, he made, in the company of a fellow-collegian, Mr. Jones, afterwards a clergyman of the Church of England, a pedestrian tour through France and Switzerland to the north of Italy. “We went staff in hand," he says, "without knapsacks, and carrying each his needments tied up in a pocket-handkerchief, with about £20 apiece in our pockets." During this journey he seems to have become infected with the prevailing revolutionary fever, which had just then become epidemic in France; and he hailed the rising revolution with feelings of enthusiastic admiration, as a new era of liberty and happiness that was about to burst upon mankiħd.

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive;

But to be young was very heaven."

Few of the younger spirits of the time escaped the contagion—the poets especially, Burns, Byron, Coleridge, Southey, Campbell all felt the flame more or less intensely. The poem entitled "Descriptive Sketches arose out of materials obtained during this ramble.

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In January, 1791, he took his degree of B. A. and left Cambridge; and, after a few months' residence in London, he paid a visit to his friend Jones, at the house of his father in Wales, and with him made a pedestrian excursion among the magnificent mountains of North Wales.

About this time he was urged by some of his friends to enter the Church; but probably his republican sentiments, and the unsettled state of his mind, rendered him averse to such a step. In the meantime he resolved to visit France again.

The first thrilling scenes of the great revolutionary drama which was then enacting on the soil of France seem to have stirred his soul "like the sound of a trumpet." The flutter of the tricolor was for ever in his eyes, and the deep roll of the tocsin for ever in his ears, and he became too excited to remain a mere distant spectator. In November, 1791, therefore, he hurried across the little strip of silver sea that separated him from them, and spent the following year in the midst of them. He passed a few days at Paris, listened to the harangues in the National Assembly and at the Club of the Jacobins, picked up a stone as a relic from the ruins of the Bastille; and

Became a patriot-and his heart was all

Given to the people; and his love was theirs."

From Paris he proceeded to Orleans; and, as he marched along the endless avenues of elms, and passed each vine-clad slope, it seemed, to his excited mind, as if

"From every cot the watchful bird

Crowed with ear-piercing power till then unheard."

At Orleans he became acquainted with the republican General Beaupuis, whom he has described in glowing and affectionate terms as an ardent patriot, a brave soldier, and a wise and virtuous philosopher. On the banks of the Loire, and in the woods near Orleans, the enthusiastic and delighted pair took long and frequent walks, in which they talked in rapt and hopeful terms of an approaching “progeny of golden years" that were about to bless mankind. His friend ultimately fell" fighting in supreme command"-in one of the many engagements which took place on the banks of the Loire.

In the spring of 1792 Wordsworth left Orleans for Blois, where he spent the summer. In the autumn he proceeded to Paris, which he reached while the blood of the massacres of September may be said to have still clung to the streets. Royalty had fallen, and was speedily to perish. The unfortunate king, and his still more unfortunate family, were in prison, and apart. France was a republic. And everywhere the general joy was being proclaimed amidst the roll of drums, the rattle of arms, and the shouts of maddened multitudes marching to the music of the Marseillaise. But clouds had already begun to gather. The first red drops had fallen ominous precursors of the coming torrents that were to drench the soil with blood. Such were the libations poured out to so-called Liberty! The poet, says his nephew, visited the dungeon and the palace, and the Place du Carrousel, where

"So late had lain

The dead upon the dying heaped."

"He describes the awe which he felt by night in the high, dark, lonely chamber in which he lodged, when he thought of those scenes of carnage, until he seemed

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