WILLIAM WORDSWORTH: SKETCH OF HIS LIFE. E birth-place of William Wordsworth is in Cumberland, a county lying in north-west corner of England, and separated from Scotland by Solway Frith. at region is specially distinguished in having numerous small lakes cradled ong its hills and mountains, all of which have now been crowned with classic hours by the poet's hand. His father, John Wordsworth, was an attorney, and, ing been engaged as law-agent by the Earl of Lonsdale, was set over the westportion of the wide domain of Lowther, and lived at Cockermouth, in a manoruse belonging to that family. There William was born on the 7th of April, 70, the second of four sons. There was only one daughter in the family, orothy, who came next after the poet. Cockermouth stands on the Derwent, led by the poet" the fairest of all rivers," and looks back to the Borrowdale ountains, among which that river is born. The voice of that stream, he tells flowed along his dreams while he was a child. His mother, a wise and pious woman, told a friend that William was the only e of her children about whom she felt anxious, and that he would be "remarkle either for good or evil." This was probably from what he himself calls his stiff, moody, and violent temper." Of this, which made him a wayward and adstrong boy, all that he seems afterwards to have retained was that resolutess of character which stood him in good stead when he became a man. Of his mother, who died when he was eight years old, the poet retained a faint t tender recollection. At the age of nine, he, along with his elder brother chard, left home for school. It would be hard to conceive a better school-life r a future poet than that in which Wordsworth was reared at Hawkshead. igh-pressure was then unknown; nature and freedom had full swing. Bounds d locking-up hours they had none. The boys lived in the cottages of the village mes, in a natural, friendly way, like their own children. Their play-gounds ere the fields, the lake, the woods, the hillsides, far as their feet could carry them. heir games were crag-climbing for ravens' nests, skating on Esthwaite Lake, tting springes for woodcocks. In Wordsworth's fourteenth year, when he and his brother were at home for e Christmas holidays, their father, who had never recovered heart after the eath of his wife, followed her to the grave. The old home at Cockermouth as broken up, and the orphans were but poorly provided for. Large arrears were deed due to their father from the strange, self-willed Earl of Lonsdale; but these is lordship never chose to make good. Nevertheless the boys returned to school, nd William remained there till his eighteenth year, when he left for Cambridge. From Hawkshead Wordsworth took several good things with him. In bookarning, there was Latin enough to enable him to read the Roman poets with leasure in after-years; of mathematics, more than enough to start him on quality with the average of Cambridge freshmen; of Greek, probably not much,t least we never heard of it afterwards. It was here that he began that intimacy ith the English poets which he afterwards perfected: but neither at school nor a often lifa was hò a dovonror of books. 2 WORDSWORTH: Of verse-making, his earliest attempts date from Hawkshead. A long copy of verses, written on the second centenary of the foundation of the school, was much admired; but he himself afterwards pronounced them but a "tame imitation of Pope." But more than any book-lore, more than any skill in versemaking, or definite thoughts about poetry, was the free, natural life he led at Hawkshead. It was there that he was smitten to the core with that love of Nature which became the prime necessity of his being. Not that he was a moody or peculiar boy, nursing his own fancies apart from his companions: so far from this, he was foremost in all schoolboy adventures, the sturdiest oar, the hardiest cragsman at the harrying of ravens' nests. Weeks and months, he tells us, passed in a round of school tumult. No life could have been every way more unconstrained and natural. But, school tumult though there was, it was not in a made play-ground at cricket or rackets, but in haunts more fitted to form a poet, -on the lakes and the hillsides. All through his school-time, he says that in pauses of the "giddy bliss" he felt "gleams like the flashing of a shield." And as time went on, and common school pursuits lost their novelty, these visitations grew deeper and more frequent. In October, 1787, at the age of eighteen, Wordsworth passed from Hawkshead School to St. John's College, Cambridge. College life, so important to those whose minds are mainly shaped by books and academic influences, produced on him but little impression. The stripling of the hills had not been trained for college competitions: he felt that he "was not for that hour, nor for that place." The range of scholastic studies seemed to him narrow and timid. As for college honours, he thought them dearly purchased at the price of the evil rivalries and the tame standard of excellence which they fostered in the eager few who entered the lists. No doubt he was a self-sufficient, presumptuous youth, so to judge of men and things in so famous a university: but there were qualities of a rarer kind latent in him, which in time justified him in thus taking his own course. When arrived in Cambridge, a northern villager, he tells us there were other poor, simple schoolboys from the North, now Cambridge men, ready to welcome him, and introduce him to the ways of the place. So, leaving to others the competitive race, he let himself, in the company of these, drop quietly down the stream of the usual undergraduate jollities. In The Prelude he tells us how in a friend's room in Christ's College, once occupied by Milton, he toasted the memory of the abstemious Puritan, till the fumes of wine took his brain; - the first and last time that the future water-drinker experienced that sensation. During the earlier part of his college course he did just as others did, lounged and sauntered, boated and rode, enjoyed wines and supper-parties, "days of mirth and nights of revelry;" yet kept clear of vicious excess. When the first novelty of college life was over, growing dissatisfied with idleness, he withdrew somewhat from promiscuous society, and kept more by himself. Living in quiet, the less he felt of reverence for those elders whom he saw. the more his heart was stirred with high thoughts of those whom he could not see. He read Chaucer under the hawthorn by Trompington Mill, and made intimate acquaintance with Spenser. Milton he seemed to himself almost to see moving before him, as, clad in scholar's gown, that young poet had once walked those same cloisters in the angelic beauty of his youth. During the Summer vacations Wordsworth and his sister, who had been much separated since their childhood, met once more under the roof of their mother's kindred in Penrith. With her he then had the first of those rambles by the streams of Lowther and Emont- which were afterwards renewed with so happy results. Then, too, he first met Mary Hutchinson, his cousin, and his wife to be. It was during his second or third year at Cambridge, that he first seriously formed the purpose of being a poet, and dared to hope that he might leave behind him something that would live. His last long vacation was devoted to a walking-tour on the Continent along with a college friend from Wales. For himself, he had long cast college studies and their rewards behind SKETCH OF HIS LIFE. 3 ; but friends at home could not see this without uneasy forebodings. What s to become of a penniless lad who thus played ducks and drakes with youth's den opportunities? But he had as yet no misgivings; he was athirst only Nature and freedom. So, with his friend Jones, staff in hand, he walked fourteen weeks through France, Switzerland, and the north of Italy. With r shillings each daily they paid their way. They landed at Calais on the eve the day when the King was to swear to the new constitution. All through ance, as they trudged along, they saw a people rising with jubilee to welcomethe dawn, as they thought, of a new era for mankind. Nor were they onkers only, but sympathizers in the intoxication of the time, joining in village els and dances with the frantic multitude. But these sights did not detain m, for they were bent rather on seeing Nature than man. Over the Alps I along the Italian lakes they passed with a kind of awful joy. In January, 1791, Wordsworth took a common degree, and quitted Cambridge. e crisis of his life lay between this time and his settling down at Grasmere. had resolved to be a poet; but even poets must be housed, clothed, and fed; 1 poetry has seldom done this for any of its devotees, least of all such poetry Wordsworth was minded to write. But it was not the question of bread ne, but one much wider and more complex, which now pressed upon him, the_question, What next? And the difficulty of meeting this was much ennced to him from the circumstance of his being turned loose upon a world t heaving with the first throes of the French Revolution. He had seen that ent while it still wore its earliest auroral hues, when the people were mad with , as at the dawn of a renovated Earth. That he should have staked his ole hope on it, looked for all good things from it, who shall wonder? leridge, Southey, almost every high-minded young man of that time, hailed with fervour. Wordsworth would not have been the man he was, if he could ve stood proof against the contagion. On leaving Cambridge he had gone London. The Spring and early Summer months he spent there, not mingling society, but wandering about the streets, noting all sights, observant of men's ces and ways, haunting the open book-stalls. During these months he tells us was preserved from the cynicism and contempt for human nature which the formities of crowded life often breed, by remembrance of the kind of men he ad first lived amongst, in themselves a manly, simple, uncontaminated race, d invested with added interest and dignity by living in the same hereditary elds where their forefathers had lived, and by moving about among the grand companiments of mountain storms and sunshine. The good had come first, d the evil, when it came, did not stamp itself into the groundwork of his imination. The following Summer he visited his travelling companion Jones Wales, and made a walking-tour in that country. In November, 1791, he visited Paris, and there heard the speeches that were ade in the Hall of the National Assembly, while the Brissotins were in the scendant. A few days he wandered about the city, surveyed the scenes renered famous by recent events, and even picked up a stone as a relic from the te of the demolished Bastile. This rage for historic scenes he however consses to have been in him more affected than genuine. From Paris he went to rleans, and sojourned there for some time to learn the language. When, in he Fall of 1792, he returned to Paris, the September massacre had taken place ut a month before; the King and his family were in prison; the Republic was roclaimed, and Robespierre in power. The young Englishman ranged through he city, passed the prison where the King lay, visited the Tuileries, lately tormed, and the Place de Carrousel, a month since heaped with the dead. As e lay in the garret of a hotel hard by, sleepless, and filled with thoughts of what had just occurred, he seemed to hear a voice that cried aloud to the whole city, "Sleep no more.' Years after, those scenes still troubled him in dreams. He had ghastly visions of scaffolds hung with innocent victims, or of crowds ready for butchery, and mad with the levity of despair. In his sleep he seemed to be pleading in vein for the life of friends or for his own ibunal |