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 clders 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 him; but friends at home could not see this without uneasy forebodings. What was to become of a penniless lad who thus played ducks and drakes with youth's golden opportunities? But he had as yet no misgivings; he was athirst only for Nature and freedom. So, with his friend Jones, staff in hand, he walked for fourteen weeks through France, Switzerland, and the north of Italy. With four shillings each daily they paid their way. They landed at Calais on the eve of the day when the King was to swear to the new constitution. All through France, as they trudged along, they saw a people rising with jubilee to welcomein the dawn, as they thought, of a new era for mankind. Nor were they onlookers only, but sympathizers in the intoxication of the time, joining in village revels and dances with the frantic multitude. But these sights did not detain them, for they were bent rather on seeing Nature than man. Over the Alps and along the Italian lakes they passed with a kind of awful joy. In January, 1791, Wordsworth took a common degree, and quitted Cambridge. The crisis of his life lay between this time and his settling down at Grasmere. He had resolved to be a poet; but even poets must be housed, clothed, and fed; and poetry has seldom done this for any of its devotees, least of all such poetry as Wordsworth was minded to write. But it was not the question of bread alone, but one much wider and more complex, which now pressed upon him, the question, What next? And the difficulty of meeting this was much enhanced to him from the circumstance of his being turned loose upon a world just heaving with the first throes of the French Revolution. He had seen that event while it still wore its earliest auroral hues, when the people were mad with joy, as at the dawn of a renovated Earth. That he should have staked his whole hope on it, looked for all good things from it, who shall wonder? Coleridge, Southey, almost every high-minded young man of that time, hailed it with fervour. Wordsworth would not have been the man he was, if he could have stood proof against the contagion. On leaving Cambridge he had gone to London. The Spring and early Summer months he spent there, not mingling in society, but wandering about the streets, noting all sights, observant of men's faces and ways, haunting the open book-stalls. During these months he tells us he was preserved from the cynicism and contempt for human nature which the deformities of crowded life often breed, by remembrance of the kind of men he had first lived amongst, in themselves a manly, simple, uncontaminated race, and invested with added interest and dignity by living in the same hereditary fields where their forefathers had lived, and by moving about among the grand accompaniments of mountain storms and sunshine. The good had come first, and the evil, when it came, did not stamp itself into the groundwork of his imagination. The following Summer he visited his travelling companion Jones in Wales, and made a walking-tour in that country. In November, 1791, he visited Paris, and there heard the speeches that were made in the Hall of the National. Assembly, while the Brissotins were in the ascendant. A few days he wandered about the city, surveyed the scenes rendered famous by recent events, and even picked up a stone as a relic from the site of the demolished Bastile. This rage for historic scenes he however confesses to have been in him more affected than genuine. From Paris he went to Orleans, and sojourned there for some time to learn the language. When, in the Fall of 1792, he returned to Paris, the September massacre had taken place but a month before; the King and his family were in prison; the Republic was proclaimed, and Robespierre in power. The young Englishman ranged through the city, passed the prison where the King lay, visited the Tuileries, lately stormed, and the Place de Carrousel, a month since heaped with the dead. As he 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 vain for the life of friends, or for his own, before a savage tribunal. 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 enormitics 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. Though this inward fermentation working itself into clearness was the most important, the bread-question must, at the same time, have been tolerably urgent. To meet this, he had, so far as appears, simply nothing, except what was allowed him by his friends. Of course, neither they nor he could long tolerate such a state of dependence. What, then, was to be done? In his juncture, the newspaper press, an effectual extinguisher to a possible poet, was ready to have absorbed him. He had actually written to a friend in London, who was supporting himself in this way, to find him like employment, when he was delivered from these importunities by a happy occurrence. In the close of the year 1794, he was engaged in attending at Penrith a friend, Raisley Calvert, who had fallen into a deep consumption. Calvert died early in 1795, and he bequeathed to Wordsworth a legacy of £900. He had divined Wordsworth's genius, and believed that he would do great things. Seldom, indeed, has so small a sum produced larger results. It removed at once Wordsworth's anxiety about a profession, rescued him from the newspaper press, set him to follow his true bent, and give free rein to the poetic power he felt working within him. One of the first results of this legacy was to restore Wordsworth permanently to the society of his sister. Hitherto, though they had met whenever occasion offered, they had not been able to set up house together; but this was no longer impossible. And surely never has sister done a more delicate service for a brother than Dorothy Wordsworth did for the poet. She was a rarely-gifted woman, with eyes of preternatural brilliancy, imaginative, warm-hearted, and keenly responsive to every note of her brother's genius. De Quincey, who knew her well, describes her as "seeming inwardly consumed by a subtile fire of impassioned intellect." In many places of his works the poet bears grateful testimony to what she did for him. At this time, he tells us, it was she who maintained for him a saving intercourse with his true self, opened for him the obstructed passage between head and heart, whence in time came genuine self-knowledge and peace. Again he says that his imagination was by nature too masculine, austere, even harsh; he loved only the sublime and terrible, was blind to the milder graces of landscape and of character. She it was who softened and humanised him, opened his eye to the more hidden beauties, his heart to the gentler affections: "She gave me eyes, she gave me ears; The first home which they shared together was at Racedown in Dorsetshire, where they settled in the Fall of 1795, on the strength of the £900. Wordsworth always looked back to this residence with special love. So retired was the place, that the post came only once a week. But the two read Italian together, gardened, and walked in the meadows and on the tops of combs. These were their recreations. For serious work, Wordsworth fell first to writing Imitations of Juvenal, in which he assailed fiercely the vices of the time; but these he never published. Then he wrote his poem of Guilt and Sorrow, which is far superior to any of his earlier pieces; also his tragedy of The Borderers, and a few shorter poems. More important, however, than any poetry composed at Racedown was his first meeting there with Coleridge. Perhaps no two such men have met any. where on English ground during this century. Wordsworth read aloud to his visitor nearly twelve hundred lines of blank-verse, "superior," says Coleridge, "to any thing in our language." This was probably the story of Margaret, which now stands in the First Book of The Excursion. When they parted, Coleridge says, "I felt myself a small man beside Wordsworth; "while, of Coleridge, Wordsworth, certainly no over-estimater of other men, said, “ I have known many men who have done wonderful things, but the only wonderful man I ever knew was Coleridge." Their first intercourse had ripened into friendship. As Coleridge was then living at Nether Stowey in Somersetshire, the Words. 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 Howing 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 incidents, and nearly all the lines. The poem soon grew, till it was beyond the 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 two storey cottage. With barely a hundred pounds a year between them, they were |