The Seasons; and Cowper, in his turn, had used a more flexible vocabulary than Gray. The mystic relation between man and nature which is the secret of the romantic movement had assumed articulate shape very gradually. Collins' Ode to Evening, for example, shows a precocious sense of that wonderful mystery, cramped by the irons of a cold and formal vocabulary, a tradition of inexpressive words which, in their scantiness and absolute lack of variety, were quite enough to kill poetry for ever. Nevertheless, in spite of the obstacle of a fixed poetic diction, progress had been made. Cowper, still tied to formality, anticipates Wordsworth and forms a fresh link in the chain of poetry; Crabbe gives his verse something of the homeliness and simplicity which formed so important a part of Wordsworth's theory. There are signs and mutterings which precede every revolution; and the romantic movement had many such harbingers. Consequently, the new poetry, by itself, would have been no great theories the surprise to readers; its revolutionary element lay, not reason of their early in the novelty of its manner, but in the novelty of the un popu- theories which accompanied it. Side by side with larity. it came a formulated scheme, a new gospel and philosophy of poetry, laying down principles which gained ardent disciples and excited conservative hostility. The new poets worked upon a system, a constitution which, in spite of individual prejudices and mutual criticism, laid down as its first law the sincere recognition of nature in its indefinable relation to man, and, as an inevitable corollary, the doctrine of a new and free poetic diction. This, now so familiar and so firmly established that it seems an eternal axiom, was the foundation of a theory which at first met with the most pronounced opposition and finally had to triumph on its own merits. Poetry, as is always the case, transmitted its laws to prose; and the romantic spirit occupied the whole of English literature. Their formulated WILLIAM §2. The twin founders of modern English poetry are known from their ultimate place of residence as the Lake Poets; and with them has always been associated a third, the WORDS- less original Southey, a writer of admirable prose, WORTH but in no sense a great poet. WILLIAM WORDS(1770-1850). WORTH was born at Cockermouth on April 7, 1770, while Johnson's literary dictatorship was at its height. His father was an attorney; his mother died when he was scarcely eight years old. In his ninth year he was sent to school at Hawkshead, on the shores of Coniston, where the boys, instead of living under the same roof with a master, were boarded among the villagers and were at liberty to roam over the surrounding country by day and night. Thus, during the first years of his life, Wordsworth steeped his imagination in the splendid scenery of the English Lakes, slowly developing his poetical talent. When he was nearly fourteen, his father died, and his two uncles took tionary enthusiasm. charge of the orphan family. They kept him at Hawkshead until he was seventeen, and then sent him to St. John's College, Cambridge (1787). Here he did very little but take his degree; he resided for the ordinary time, taking At Cam bridge. his share in the amusements of the University, reading and meditating a great deal, and spending his holidays, like Gray, in picturesque tours. His brother Christopher, on the other hand, who had been at Trinity, clave to Cambridge, became Master of his illustrious college, and was the founder of the great episcopal family of Wordsworth. The poet's tastes called him in another direction. In 1791 he left St. John's and went abroad, landed at Calais on the eve of "the feast of pikes," and travelled to Switzerland through Revolu Burgundy and Dauphiné. The dawn of the French Revolution unsettled him ; and he embraced the ideas of the most extreme republicans. These early dreams were the cause which confirmed him in his romanticism. The spiritual history of this intellectual crisis may be read in The Prelude. Like many other poets, he lived to see his hopes disappear in the chaos of 1793 and the empire of Napoleon; but, although he renounced his extreme politics and became little by little a steady Conservative, he never lost the bright reflection of his early impressions or doubted their truth. After a long spell of depression, bewilderment, mortification, and sore disappointment," writes Mr. John Morley, "the old faith in new shapes was given back." If one manifestation failed, another must succeed. In the early part of 1792 he was at Orleans and Blois; in October, 1792, when the tragedy was hurrying to its climax, he was in Paris and was compelled by his friends to return to England. During this period of his life, his relatives had felt some anxiety and doubt on his Earliest behalf; and it was to vindicate his talent that he poems (1793). began to publish. In 1793 a little book appeared containing two poems in the heroic couplet, An Evening Walk, which referred to the Lakes and had been written between 1787 and 1789, and the Descriptive Sketches, which were the result of his tour in the Alps and were written in France during 1791 and 1792. The second poem shows a certain advance upon the first and approximates more nearly to the eventual standard of the Lyrical Ballads; but both bear signs of that unmistakable simplicity which is emphatically Wordsworthian. elder poets on Wordsworth: its Influence of The history of Wordsworth's life is primarily intellectual; and it is important to notice the influences which moved him during this early period. His obligations to the Nocturnal Reverie of Lady Winchilsea are not only implied in his preface to Lyrical Ballads, but have been discovered in his earliest pieces, the Evening Walk and the sonnet "written in very early youth" (1786). The very fine Remembrance of Collins (1789) bears obvious witness to a second influence, indirectly referring us to result. Thomson. That he studied Thomson, and especially The Castle of Indolence, is the testimony of many of his poems both early and late. In 1815 he wrote a sonnet to the memory of John Dyer, the author of The Fleece and Grongar Hill. We can find no clearer proof of the debt which Wordsworth owed to the close study of the pioneers of nature-poetry, no surer sign of his position in the direct chain of English poets. In 1793-4 he finished his story of Guilt and Sorrow, known better as Salisbury Plain, which had been begun two years before and was partially published in 1798 under the title of The Female Vagrant. A long ramble over Salisbury Plain, during which his mind was oppressed by the terrible result of the Revolution, led to its completion; but it was not published in its final form till 1842. It is written in the Spenserian stanza of The Castle of Indolence, and is the first of Wordsworth's great poems. Not long after he had written it, his perBeginning plexities and wanderings came to an end. A friend of life with his sister. named Raisley Calvert left him a legacy of £900 in 1795, and so enabled him to indulge the great wish of his heart, to live with that most remarkable of women, his sister Dorothy, and devote himself entirely to poetry. Although the legacy was small, it was enough for his simple tastes. one could be more frugal or economic; his Hawkshead training had taught him the art of plain living; and during his travels he had fallen into no serious temptation. Such temperance and economy, natural to him from childhood, gave his character a rigid austerity and coldness which are clearly perceptible in his poetry and certainly do not add to its attractions. Life at No His In the autumn of 1795 he and his sister went to live at Racedown, on the borders of Somerset and Dorset. He began by paraphrasing several satires of Juvenal and applying them to the political abuses which his creed denounced; these, however, he never published. second experiment was the tragedy of The Borderers, written during 1795-6, rejected by Covent Garden, and not printed until 1842. The active co-operation of Dorothy Wordsworth in his work is an influence not to be forgotten; as a participatress in her brother's tastes, as a sympathetic critic, and, above all, as a woman of singular intellectual power and originality, she became Wordsworth's second self. In June, 1797, a second critic came to Racedown from his home in West Somerset. Coleridge and Wordsworth had met before; but this short visit cemented their acquaintance. A month later the Wordsworths moved to Alfoxden in the Quantocks, close to Coleridge's temporary home at Nether Stowey. The story of the plan which had its result in Lyrical Ballads is more properly part of Coleridge's life than Wordsworth's; at present it is enough to say that the volume was intended to defray the expenses of a walking tour in the Quantocks and Exmoor which the Removal to (1798). three friends took during the early winter of 1797. It was published in the following September by an ardent Bristol bookseller, Joseph Cottle, the friend and early patron of Coleridge; it opened with Coleridge's Ancient Mariner; but the bulk of the little volume consisted of pieces by Wordsworth, of which the chief was unquestionably Tintern Abbey. The rest, like The Idiot Boy and Simon Lee, were those famous experiments in so-called simple diction whose lack of humour and more than occasional inanity unfortunately have been regarded by careless readers as typical of Wordsworth's style. They were the sincere expression of a dogmatic theory on the poetry of rustic life which was formulated two years later, when the second edition appeared. In the same month (September) the Wordsworths and Coleridge travelled together to Germany. Coleridge left them after their visit to Travels in Germany. Klopstock, the German epic poet; and the brother and sister stayed for four months at Goslar in Saxony. They lodged at a draper's house during a bitter winter, Wordsworth exclaiming, "A plague on your languages, German and Norse!" and working up reminiscences of Alfoxden and other places into verse. But, on returning to England in 1799, they did not go back to Somerset ; but sought their native Lakes, taking a cottage at the north end of Grasmere. The valley which they chose for their home became the central Settlement shrine of English poetry during the next half century. Coleridge soon followed them to the Lakes, and was followed in his turn by Southey. John Wilson, of Blackwood's Magazine, was living on Windermere; and, in 1809, De Quincey, the most brilliant of journalists, came to live at Grasmere. The indiscriminate title of "The Lake School," has been applied to this constellation of men of letters who had no very great community of aim or method and were not invariably on the best terms. Nevertheless, by the geographical position of their homes, "The Lake School" they seem destined to remain. at Grasmere. edition of Ballads (1800). Wordsworth began The Prelude soon after reaching Grasmere. This review of his intellectual progress, which has appealed so differently to different readers, was Composition finished in 1805, but was not fully published till of" The July, 1850, nearly three months after his death. Prelude" It was addressed to Coleridge, who read much of and second it during his erratic journeys in the South of "Lyrical Europe. Meanwhile, Wordsworth was preparing a second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, which appeared in 1800, augmented by a second volume and by the famous preface on poetic style and diction. While Wordsworth's criticisms were in the main justifiable, their dogmatic tone was infallibly a challenge to reactionaries, who, in assailing them, attacked the poems also. Moreover, the poems in themselves were not altogether illustrative of their author's theory; and Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria, Words very conclusively proved the discrepancy between the conversational language of common life and its imitation in Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth henceforward had to meet with opposition. His personal circumstances were at the same time much improved by an addition to his income. A long-standing debt which had been due to his father was paid to the family in 1802, when the debtor, Lord Lonsdale, died. His own share enabled him to marry his sister's friend, Mary worth's mar. Hutchinson, to whom he had been long attached'; riage. Poems and it was during 1802 and the succeeding years of 1807. that he wrote some of his noblest poetry. Most of this appeared in two volumes of Poems (1807), which contained the Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle, and, with that magnificent triumph of lyric song, his first sonnets, the Ode on Intimations of Immortality, the Ode to Duty, Peele Castle, Resolution and Independence (better known as "the LeechGatherer"), and The Happy Warrior. When we add to these such exquisite minor pieces as Yarrow Unvisited, and the famous I wandered lonely as a cloud, it is unquestionable that in these two volumes we see Wordsworth at his prime. The minor poems of the following years up to 1814 1807-1814. are not many; they are chiefly political sonnets, inspired by the indignation which he felt at the grasping tyranny of Napoleon and the Convention of Cintra. In 1809 he published a pamphlet against the Convention; but his protest awakened little enthusiasm. During this period he had changed his residence from his cottage at Town-end (which De Quincey occupied after 1809) to another cottage near Grasmere, at Allan Bank; in 1810 he migrated to Grasmere parsonage; and in 1813 he finally removed to Rydal Mount, at the southern end of the lake. He had been preparing for many years a poem, first planned at Racedown and Alfoxden, and meditated ever since. This, the first-fruits of" The of Rydal, was published as The Excursion (1814). Excursion It formed a fragment of a projected moral epic (1814). which was to discuss and solve the mightiest questions concerning God, nature, man, our moral constitution, our duties, and our hopes. The Excursion is the epic of Wordsworth's later style, as The Prelude is of his earlier; with small dramatic interest and a construction that owes very little to art, it has nevertheless the fullest share of that elevation of tone and that superhuman quietism which grew stronger as the poet grew older. Publication " "The White narrative. The White Doe of Rylstone, written in 1807, was published in 1815. This was Wordsworth's single effort in prolonged Its subject was melancholy, turning Doe" and chiefly on the complete ruin of a north-country "Laodamia" family in the "Rising of the North" of 1569; (1815). its atmosphere of mysterious and supernatural influence, combined with the purity and unearthliness of the |