WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM. 



WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM. 



810 



full sympathy with each other. He had never been subject to re- 

 straint ; his schooldays wore days of freedom ; and latterly, since the 

 death of Ms. parents, he was almost entirely his own master. In addi- 

 tion to this, bis natural temperament was eager, impetuous, and impa- 

 tient of control." At college, however, he read and thought much ; 

 he studied Italian ; and he began to feel himself a poet. He employed 

 the vacations in tours, to gratify his passion for the open air and for 

 scenes of natural beauty and grandeur ; and one of these tours, made 

 in the autumn of 1790, with a fellow-collegian, was a pedestrian one 

 through France and Switzerland, at tho very time when the French 

 Revolution was in its full tide of progress. In 1791, after taking his 

 degree, he spent some time in London, and made a pedestrian tour in 

 North Wales ; and in the autumn of that year he went over to France, 

 where he spent fifteen months in all, partly in Paris, partly in Orleans, 

 and partly in Blois. " It was," he says, " a stirring time. The king 

 was dethroned when I was at Blois ; and the massacres of September 

 took place vv hen I was at Orleans." Wordsworth was no mere indiffer- 

 ent spectator of the scenes of the Revolution. At this time of his life 

 he was a vehement republican, and an ardent partisan of revolutionary 

 France against all the rest of the world. He had friends too among 

 the revolutionists of the Girondist party, and so fully did he share 

 their enthusiasm that he even entertained the intention of becoming 

 a naturalised Frenchman, and throwing himself, heart and soul, into 

 the struggle for liberty believing that what it chiefly wanted to ensure 

 a glorious success was the activity of a few steady, virtuous, and lofty 

 minds, such as he was conscious of possessing. Of this he was still 

 more convinced after Robespierre began to exercise his power. Had 

 he carried out his intention, the probability, as he himself says, is that 

 he would have been one of Robespierre's victims, and have died on the 

 scaffold with some of his Girondist friends. Circumstances however 

 fortunately obliged him to return to England towards the end of 1792, 

 a little before the execution of the king. He took up his abode for 

 the time in London ; but his thoughts were still on the other side of 

 the Channel, and he followed the farther course of the Revolution 

 with intense interest, complicated by the feeling that Britain, in de- 

 claring war against France, had engaged in an unjust enterprise. 

 Much of the influence of this time, though greatly modified, remained 

 with Wordsworth throughout his life. 



From 1792 to 1795, Wordsworth lived in a desultory manner in 

 London and other parts of England. He had been destined for the 

 church, and his friends were much disappointed at his preferring what 

 seemed to them an idle and aimless life. His religious, as well as his 

 political, principles, at this time were not of a kind conformable to the 

 society in which he moved. Poetry, next to republican politics, was 

 his passion ; and he had already conceived the possibility of a new 

 kind of descriptive poetry, which should do justice to "the infinite 

 variety of natural appearances . that had been unnoticed by the poets 

 of any age or country." In the year 1793 ;he published his first 

 literary venture, two poems of this kind in the heroic couplet ' An 

 Evening Walk, addressed to a Young Lady,' and ' Descriptive Sketches, 

 taken during a pedestrian tour among the Alps.' It was the time of 

 the rise of a new poetical spirit in England, Bowles and Crabbe having 

 just appeared in the field after Cowper, and the Scottish poet Burns 

 being then iu the full flush of his fame. New poets were also spring- 

 ing up ; and one of these, Coleridge, thus describes the impression 

 made on him by the volume which Wordsworth had published : 

 " During the last year of my residence at Cambridge, I became 

 acquainted with Mr. Wordsworth's first publication; and seldom, if 

 ever, was the emergence of an original poetical genius above the 

 literary horizon more evidently announced." The volume did not 

 however attract general attention ; and for a while, Wordsworth's 

 prospects were very uncertain. Having no independent means of 

 livelihood, he contemplated entering the legal profession and support- 

 ing himself meanwhile as a political writer on the liberal side for the 

 London newspapers. From this situation he was rescued by the 

 discerning generosity of a young friend, named Calvert, who on his 

 death in 1795, left him 900J., expressly as a token of his admiration 

 and of his wish that he would devote himself to poetry. This sum, 

 judiciously managed, enabled Wordsworth and his sister (who came *.o 

 live with him about this time, and who exercised a wonderful influence 

 over his spirits and" his plans,) to live for some seven years, without 

 any necessity on his part to undertake any employment incompatible 

 with his freedom as a poet ; and as it fortunately happened that, at the 

 end of that time (1802), a sum of 8,5QQL was paid over to the family by 

 the second Earl Lonsdale in liquidation of the debt owing to their 

 father by his predecessor, there was again a sufficiency of means for 

 the poet's purposes. 



In the autumn of 1795, Wordsworth and his sister settled at Race- 

 down Lodge, near Crewkerne, in Dorsetshire ; and here, living in a 

 quiet and happy manner, he wrote his ' Salisbury Plain, or Guilt and 

 Sorrow,' and began his tragedy of ' The Borderers,' neither of which was 

 published till long afterwards. In June 1797, Coleridge, then residing 

 at Bristol, paid his first visit to the Wordsworths ; and " for the sake 

 of being near him when he had removed to Nether-Stowey in Somer- 

 setshire, we removed," says Wordsworth, " to Alfoxden, three miles 

 from that place." This was in August 1797, and one result of the 

 intimate association thus formed between the two poets was the 

 appearance in 1798 of the ' Lyrical Ballads/ a small duodecimo volume, 



published by Mr. Cottle of Bristol, the first composition of which was 

 the ' Ancient Mariner ' of Coleridge, and the rest, to the number of 

 twenty-two pieces, Wordsworth's. The edition consisted only of 500 

 copies, the greater portion of which remained unsold ; and when Mr. 

 Cottle shortly afterwards gave up business, and sold his copyrights to 

 the Messrs. Longman of London, the copyright of this little volume 

 was valued at nil. Mr. Cottle therefore, begged it back and presented 

 it to the authors. Little affected by the indifference with which the 

 volume had been received, or by the contemporaneous rejection of 

 tragedies which they had respectively submitted to London theatre- 

 proprietors, they were engaged in a new work. In 1798-9, they 

 travelled together in Germany ; and on their return, Wordsworth and 

 his sister settled at Grasmere. Grasmere was his residence from 1799 

 to 1808, when he removed to Allan Bank in the same neighbourhood, 

 and it was on account of his residence in thia Lake-district, and the 

 congregation or occasional stay in the same beautiful region of other 

 and kindred spirits such as Coleridge, Southey, De Quincey, and young 

 Wilson, that the nickname of the "Lake School" was invented as a 

 designation for him and his companions and disciples. From Grasmere 

 and Allan Bank he made occasional excursions of business or pleasure. 

 Thus in 1802 he made another tour in France ; on his return from 

 which he married Mary Hutchinson, whom he had known from her 

 childhood. Wordsworth's sister still continued a member of the 

 household, and the intellectual companion of William in all his 

 labours. In 1803, the poet, his wife, and his sister set out on a tour 

 in Scotland, in the course of which they made the acquaintance of 

 Scott, and gathered observations and impressions which served as 

 future materials and hints for many poems. Before their departure 

 for Scotland, the poet's eldest child, a sou, named John, was born ; 

 and the poet's other children were all born, either at Grasmere or at 

 Allan Bank a daughter, Dora, in 1804; a son, Thomas, in 1806; a 

 second daughter, Catharine, in 1808 ; and the youngest, a son, named 

 William, in 1810. 



The period of Wordsworth's residence at Grasmere and Allan Bank 

 (1799-1813) was the period of his memorable struggle against the 

 critics, and of the slow and gradual recognition of his poetic genius. 

 He was incessantly active, turning his observations and thoughts into 

 poems, and he had projected and was occasionally labouring at his 

 great philosophical poem in blank verse, of which ' the Prelude ' and 

 the ' Excursion ' are the accomplished fragments. What he presented 

 to the public however was his minor pieces. In 1800 appeared a 

 second edition of the ' Lyrical Ballads,' in two volumes, with nume- 

 rous additions; and there were subsequent editions in 1802 and 1805. 

 In 1807 appeared a distinct collection of pieces, entitled ' Poems in 

 two volumes ;' and in 1809 appeared his political prose ' Essay on the 

 Convention of Cintra.' 'This last work was published contempora- 

 neously with the first numbers of Coleridge's ' Friend,' to which 

 Wordsworth contributed his ' Essay on Epitaphs.' In 1810 the poet 

 wrote a portion of the letter-press for a volume entitled ' Select Views 

 in Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancashire,' edited by the Rev. 

 Joseph Wilkinson a fine mark of his interest in the lake scenery, and 

 his desire to diffuse the love of natural beauty. It seems to have been 

 Wordsworth's theory not only that the enjoyment of nature has a 

 medicinal effect on the minds of men in general, worthy of being 

 systematically taken into account and resorted to, but also, that it is 

 part of the functions of the poet to minister this influence of nature, 

 by permanently connecting himself with some one spot or district, so 

 as to transfer its peculiar facts and teachings into his poetry. Hence 

 a greater fitness in the name ' Lake Poets ' than was intended by those 

 who invented it. 



Wordsworth appeai'ed professedly not only as a new poet, but also 

 as the representative and champion of a new theory of poetry. In 

 the volumes he had published up to this time he had not only exem- 

 plified his principles of composition in the poems themselves, but he 

 had also propounded and illustrated those principles didactically in 

 prose prefaces and dissertations. He believed, with Coleridge, that 

 the period in the history of English Literature intervening between 

 Milton's age and his own had been, with a few exceptions, a kind of 

 interregnum in English poetry a period during which poetry had 

 been prosecuted on false principles, both as to themes and as to style ; 

 and what he claimed for himself and for those who were associated 

 with him, was the merit of reviving the true notion and art of poetry. 

 The following summary has been given of his views : " Poetry, 

 according to Wordsworth, takes its origin from emotion recollected in 

 tranquillity ; what the poet chiefly does, or ought to do, is to represent 

 out of real life, scenes and passions of an affecting or exciting character. 

 Now, men originally placed in such scenes or animated by such 

 passions use a nervous and exquisite language expressly adapted for 

 the occasion by nature herself ; and the poet therefore in imitating 

 such scenes and passions, will recall them more vividly in proportion 

 as he can succeed in employing the same language. Only one consi- 

 deration should operate to make him modify that language the con- 

 sideration, namely, that his business as a poet is to give pleasure. All 

 such words or expressions therefore as though natural in the original 

 transaction of a passionate scene, would be unpleasant or disgusting 

 in the poetic rehearsal, must be omitted. Pruned and weeded in 

 accordance with this negative rule, any description of a moving 

 occurrence, whether in prose or in verse, would be true poetry. But to 



