WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.-1770-1850.

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THE father of William Wordsworth was an attorney, and he superintended part of the Lowther estates in Cumberland. His mother was a native of Penrith, and the poet was the second of five children, four sons and one daughter. Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth, 7th April 1770. When eight years of age his mother died, and it is said that the only one of her children about whom she was anxious was the future poet, whose strong self-will and violent temper led her to predict that he would grow up to be either a very good man, or a very wicked one. his ninth year, he was sent to school at Hawkshead, which stands at the head of Esthwaite Water, in the lake district of Lancashire, and about five miles from Ambleside. Here he remained for about nine years, and was left to do pretty much as he pleased. He read the Arabian Nights, Don Quixote, Gulliver's Travels, and the novels of Fielding, as well as Goldsmith, Gray, and Pope. The scholars were boarded among the villagers, and, out of school-hours, could wander where they pleased. In summer, they bathed, fished, and boated, in Lakes Esthwaite and Windermere, or rambled away among the hills; and in winter there was abundance of skating. Thus was developed that intense love of nature for which Wordsworth was afterwards so distinguished.

Wordsworth's father died in 1783, when his son was only in his fourteenth year. The bulk of his property was a sum of £5000, due to him from Sir James Lowther, afterwards Earl of Lonsdale, but this amount could never be obtained until after the earl's death in 1802. In the meantime, the care of the orphans devolved upon their uncles. One of them had been a fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, and there Wordsworth was sent in his eighteenth year. His career at the university was not a distinguished one; it seldom is with poets. He neglected the ordinary curriculum of the college, but studied Italian; and he read a great deal in English

literature, especially the works of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. In the long vacation of 1790, he and a fellow student, named Jones, a Welshman, started on a pedestrian tour through France, Switzerland, and the north of Italy. They were absent fourteen weeks, and as the money they took with them only allowed them four shillings a day each for all expenses, they were obliged to be frugal. All the luggage they had with them they tied up in their pocket handkerchiefs, and carried in their hands.

Wordsworth took his degree in 1791; and, after staying four months in London, went over to France, which was then in the midst of the Revolution. Like Southey and Coleridge, he was at this time an ardent republican, and at one time contemplated becoming naturalised as a Frenchman, in order to throw himself heart and soul into the struggle. Circumstances, however, compelled him to return to England towards the end of 1792, and thus, probably, he escaped the guillotine. He now fixed his residence in London, and, in the following year, published two short poems, The Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches: the latter had been written during his recent visit to France, and contained the recollections of some scenes he had witnessed. They did not, however, attract much attention. Coleridge was at this time at Cambridge; and when the volume came into his hands he at once announced "the emergence of an original poetical genius above the literary horizon." It is probable that identity of opinions and sentiment had something to do with the favour with which he viewed the new poet's productions.

In the meantime, Wordsworth's private circumstances were rather gloomy. He had been intended either for the church or the law. For the former his opinions, both political and religious, quite unfitted him; for the latter, he considered that "he had not strength of constitution, mind, or purse." He thought, therefore, of earning a livelihood by contributing to newspapers. Just at this time a young man named Calvert, to whom Wordsworth had shown some kindness for a few weeks previous to his

death, bequeathed him a sum of nine hundred pounds, as a mark of the high estimation he had for his poetical genius. With this sum the poet and his sister, Dorothea, commenced housekeeping; and so careful were they that they lived upon the amount for nearly eight years. The quietude of a settled home, and, still more, the influence of his sister-who in genius was almost his equal, and in moral character was at this time his superior-calmed down the restless excitement of his nature, and withdrew him from the study of politics to the pursuit of poetry.

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The autumn of 1795 found Wordsworth and his sister settled at Racedown Lodge, near Crewkerne, in Dorsetshire: and here he wrote his tragedy of The Borderers, though it was not published till long afterwards. 1797, he was visited by Coleridge, and a warm respect and friendship sprang up between the young poets. Coleridge was at this period in his prime, and Wordsworth was struck with the profusion of his ideas, the copiousness of his language, and the brilliancy of his illustration. He was living at this time at Nether Stowey, in Somersetshire, and a house being to let in the neighbouring village of Alfoxden, the Wordsworths hired it forthwith for the sake of being near him. This was in August 1797. In the following November, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and his sister started on a pedestrian excursion through the country; and as their united funds were small, the two poets agreed to unite in writing a poem from which they hoped to realise five pounds. A friend of Coleridge's had dreamt of a person who laboured under a curse for the commission of some crime. Wordsworth, who had recently been reading some voyages, suggested that the crime should be the shooting of the albatross. The poem was commenced; but Wordsworth soon found that in dealing with the supernatural, Coleridge was his superior, and he, therefore, left him to complete the poem in his own way and in his own language. Such was the origin of the "Ancient Mariner." It was not published, however, until the following year, when it appeared among the Lyrical Ballads.

Coleridge was visited at Nether Stowey by Thelwall, who had been tried for high treason along with Hardy and Horne Tooke, but was acquitted. He had now given up all political projects, and had taken to farming. The government, however, suspected his visit to Nether Stowey, and employed a spy to dog his steps. The spy could discover nothing treasonable in the conversations which he overheard between Thelwall and the poets, indeed he could not understand the discourse very often. His mission, however, became known to the rustics of the neighbourhood, and they agreed that the conduct of the two poets was suspicious. "As to Coleridge," said one of them, "there is not much harm in him, for he is a whirl-brain that talks whatever comes uppermost; but that Wordsworth! he is the dark traitor. You never hear him say a syllable on the subject." He was often met with wandering about by moonlight, and was overheard muttering to himself; and as he frequently haunted the sea-shore, some thought he was a smuggler. The upshot was that the agent of the landlord at Alfoxden refused to let the house any longer to such a dangerous character; and as there was no other residence to be had in the neighbourhood, the Wordsworths were obliged to remove elsewhere. In this dilemma they determined to spend a few months in Germany, and Coleridge agreed to accompany them.

In order to defray the expenses of this journey, the poets determined to print a joint volume. Cottle, the Bristol bookseller, agreed to pay Wordsworth the sum of thirty guineas for his contributions, and he made a sepa rate bargain with Coleridge for the "Ancient Mariner." Under the title of Lyrical Ballads the poems appeared in 1798, just about the time that the three friends sailed from Yarmouth. Coleridge's account of the origin of the Lyrical Ballads is this: "During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry-the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power

of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset, diffused over a known or familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And 'real' in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them when they present themselves. In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads, in which it was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic-yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief, for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself, as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the liveliness of the wonders of the world before us-an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand. With this view I wrote the "Ancient Mariner," and was preparing, among other poems, "The Dark Ladie" and the "Christabel," in which I have