WORDSWORTH 



6357 



WORDSWORTH 



mand of the ironclad Montauk. In this ca- 

 pacity he destroyed the Confederate ship 

 Nashville in February, 1863, and on April 7 

 aided Admiral DuPont in an attack on Charles- 

 ton. He was promoted to the rank of commo- 

 dore in 1868 and to that of rear-admiral in 1872. 

 In 1886 he retired. 



WORDSWORTH, wurdz ' wurtfh, WILLIAM 

 (1770-1850), an English poet, the greatest of 

 tin Lake School. He was born April 7, 1770, 

 at Cockermouth, Cumberland, of an old and 

 respected family of England. At the age of 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 

 Nothing Is ugly or commonplace In his world ; 

 on the contrary, there is hardly one natural phe- 

 nomenon which he has not glorified by pointing 

 out some beauty that was hidden from our eyes. 



LO'NO. 



eiuht he was sent to the grammar school at 

 Hawkshead, in the Esthwaite Valley, where he 

 remained for nine years, spending much of his 

 time in out-of-door sports or in still more en- 

 joyable walks through the hills. Even in these 

 early years his love for nature was almost a 

 passion, and it grew with his growth until he 

 merited tin name which has been applied to 

 him --"tin- hinh priest of nature." From 1787 

 to 1791 he was a student at Cambridge, where 

 he did nothing to prove himself in any way 

 remarkable. 



Effect of Continental Travel. During t In- 

 vocation of his thinl yr:ir at tin- university 

 Wordsworth made a short Continental tour. 

 and soon after his grud \eled again to 



I'.urop. . which was at that tim<> Minvd by the 

 Prenrli Kr\olution. Coming und. r tin- influ- 

 ence of the liberal ideas in whn -h th.it struggle 

 h:ul hrirun. Wordsworth became an ardent re- 

 publican and n i named in France until 1792, 



when he was recalled to England by relatives 

 who withheld from him his income that they 

 might check his too liberal tendencies. 



Radical as he had been, however, he was far 

 from being in sympathy with the excesses into 

 which the Revolution ran, and gradually be- 

 came again a conservative in politics. Byron, 

 Shelley and other fervent upholders of revolu- 

 tionary principles were much wrought up over 

 his defection from their ranks, and Browning, 

 in his Lost Leader, shows their attitude toward 

 him. No such reason, however, as Browning 

 gives really caused the change in Wordsworth- 

 he was influenced by no "ribband to stick in his 

 coat." 



The Lyrical Ballads. In 1793 appeared 

 Wordsworth's first poems, his Descriptive 

 Sketches Taken during a Pedestrian Tour 

 among the Alps. The poet had not yet evoh < <1 

 the principles which guided him in his later 

 work, and these Sketches were modeled largely 

 on Pope, though in their occasional accurate 

 pictures of natural scenes they give hints of 

 the real genius of the author. Two years later 

 the poet was enabled by a friend's beque- 

 make a home with his sister in the Lake Re- 

 gion. In 1797 they removed to Alfoxden, near 

 Nether Stowey, where Coleridge lived. The 

 two men were quite unlike, but they developed 

 a warm friendship and were much in each 

 other's society. The results of their association 

 were shown in the Lyrical Ballads, published in 

 1798, in which appeared, with other poems, 

 Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and \Yord-worihV 

 We Arc Seven and Lines on Tintern Abbey. 

 Criticism was plentiful and appreciation very 

 rare, but in the light of later developments it 

 is clear that this little volume marked the be- 

 ginning of a new epoch in English po< 

 Shortly after the book was published Words- 

 worth and his sister went with Coleridge to 

 Germany, to spend the winter of 1798-1799. 

 Here Wordsworth wrote some of his finest 

 poems. 



At Grasmere and Rydal Mount. On t!. 

 turn to England the Wordsworths settled at 

 Grasmere, where several years were spent in 

 the seclusion and the communion with nature 

 which more than anything else Wordsworth's 

 genius needed. In 1802 he married Mary 

 Hutchinson, whom he had kno\\n HIIC< boy- 

 hood, and in 1813 he removed with lu> wife and 

 sister to Rydal Mount. \\h. re h- n mamed until 

 his death. In the same year he was made col- 

 lector of stamps for Westmoreland and Cum- 

 berland, and was thus afforded an income 



