Lowther, afterwards Earl of Londsdale, from whom it was found impossible to obtain it. By his successor it was in 1801 repaid with interest; but in the meantime the Wordsworth family was left poor, and William owed his university educa tion to the liberality of his uncles. He entered St. John's College, Cambridge, in his eighteenth year. To the ordinary studies of the place he paid little more attention than enabled him, in 1791, to take his degree of B.A.; but he studied. Italian and the works of the greatest English poets, and acquired a rich store of new ideas by a pedestrian tour with a friend Jones, in 1790, through France, Switzerland, and the North of Italy. After leaving the University, he spent some time in London, living on an allowance from his friends, and without any definite aim. He then, in 1791, went over to Paris, at that time in the heat of the Revolution frenzy. Like Southey and Coleridge, Wordsworth in his youth shared the golden hopes of universal emancipation then current among many men, and at one time even had serious intentions of becoming naturalised as a Frenchman in order to take part in the great struggle. His friends, it appears, had more sense of the dangers to which he was thinking of exposing himself than he had, and in 1792 prudently recalled him to England by stopping the supplies. Of the many enthusiasts whose hearts were chilled and whose hopes of a new era for humanity were rudely shattered by the bloody massacres and cruelty of the French Revolution in its latter stages, none was more deeply affected than Wordsworth, and it took a considerable time to heal the wound thus caused.

In 1792 Wordsworth began his literary career by the publication of two poems, "The Evening Walk" and "Descriptive Sketches." They did not attract much attention, but Coleridge had the sagacity to see in them the promise of better things, and that they announced "the emergence of an originai poetic genius above the literary horizon." But the poet had as yet earned nothing, and was now obliged to bestir himself to obtain some field of labour. He thought of joining the newspaper press, and had actually written to a friend asking

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im to find him a situation of this nature, when he was ren-
dered comparatively easy as to money matters by a legacy of
£900 left him in 1795 by his friend and adviser, Raisley
Calvert. Upon this sum Wordsworth and his gifted and
devoted sister, Dorothy, set up housekeeping. They first
settled at Racedown in Dorsetshire, where Wordsworth wrote
some of his early poems, and where he became acquainted with
Coleridge. Soon after, in the autumn of 1797, the Words-
worths removed to Alfoxden, near the village of Nether
Stowey in Somersetshire, where Coleridge was then staying.
Here Coleridge and Wordsworth saw much of each other,
and spent many pleasant and profitable hours in discussing the
principles of poetry and in planning the pieces composing
the volume of "Lyrical Ballads," published in 1798. Most
of the little book was Wordsworth's; but Coleridge contri
buted to it that priceless gem, the "Ancient Mariner."
Wordsworth's share comprised some poems which were
justly liable to ridicule, such as "Goody Blake" and the
"Idiot Boy," but it also comprised such fine pieces as "Ex-
postulation and Reply," and the immortal "Lines Written
above Tintern Abbey," dear to the hearts of all who reverence
his memory.
After the publication of the "Ballads," Words-
worth and his sister spent a winter in Germany, where he
began the "Prelude," and wrote some of the best of his
shorter poems.
Soon after his return to England, the poet
took a cottage at Grasmere, and there entered upon his life in
the Lake country, almost every notable spot of which he has
celebrated in his poems. In the beginning of the century he
received his share of his father's money, which had been honour-
ably paid by the new Marquis of Lonsdale, and was thus, in
1802, enabled to marry, the object of his choice being Mary
Hutchison, whom he describes in the often-quoted lines—

"A creature not too bright or good
For human nature's daily food;
A perfect woman, robly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a spirit still, and bright
With something of an angel light."

Such is a hurried outline of the principal events in Wordsworth's early life. The main features of the rest of his career can be only briefly alluded to. Of external events of general interest his life does not afford many. His is pre-eminently the history of a mind. No poet ever lived who cherished a nore intense and thoroughgoing devotion to his art; under all circumstances of his life it was the uppermost thing in his thoughts, and to it everything else was made subservient. In 1802 he published another volume of "Lyrical Ballads,” containing, with two volumes of "Poems" published in 1807, the cream of his poetry; for, as Mr. Matthew Arnold has pointed out, almost all Wordsworth's really first-rate work was produced between 1798 and 1808. Jeffrey, a shrewd enough critic within a certain range, but apt to make terrible blunders when dealing with high-class works of the imagination, attacked the "Ballads" in the Edinburgh Review; and so powerful were then the critical dicta of that organ, that his criticism almost entirely stopped the sale. But Wordsworth's serene self-confidence enabled him to bear up manfully against criticism from whatever quarter, however unjust or injurious. He knew well that all-writers of commanding originality have to labour on till they educate the public sufficiently to appreciate their work, and was quite content to write what he was fully assured would be both unpopular and immortal.

In 1813 Wordsworth removed to Rydal Mount, his residence for the remainder of his life. About the same time he was, through the influence of Lord Lonsdale, appointed to the almost sinecure office of Distributor of Stamps for the county of Westmoreland, with a yearly salary of £500. In 1814 he published his largest, but by no means his greatest work, the "Excursion." Long though the "Excursion" is, it is only part of a greater design thus described in its preface: "Several years ago, when the author retired to his native mountains with the hope of being enabled to construct a literary work that might live, it was a reasonable thing that he should take a review of his own mind, and examine how far nature and education had qualified him for such an employment. As

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subsidiary to this preparation, he undertook to record in verse the origin and progress of his own powers, so far as he was acquainted with them. That work, addressed to a dear friend most distinguished for his knowledge and genius, and to whom the author's intellect is deeply indebted [Coleridge], has been long finished, and the result of the investigation which gave rise to it was a determination to compose a philosophical poem, containing views of man, nature, and society, and to be entitled the 'Recluse.'" Of the Recluse," which was to consist of three books, the "Excursion" was to form the second, but the design was never completed. The biographical poem referred to above, which " conducts the history of the author's mind to the point where he was emboldened to hope that his faculties were sufficiently matured for entering upon the arduous labour which he proposed to himself," was completed in,,1806, but not published till 1850, when it appeared under the title of the "Recluse."

Many other poems, among which "The White Doe of Rylstone" (1815), and the Ecclesiastical Sonnets," are not of great poetical value, but interesting as showing how thorough a Churchman and Conservative the quondam ardent sympathiser with the French Revolution had become, may be specially mentioned, were published by Wordsworth during the remaining years of his life. Gradually the taste for his poetry began to spread; he lived to witness the rise and fall of the overwhelming popularity of Scott and Byron; and the storm of applause which greeted him when, in 1839, he appeared in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford to receive the degree of Doctor of Laws, showed he was the favourite poet of, at all events, the rising generation. In 1842 he received a pension of £300 a year, and in the following year succeeded Southey as Poet-Laureate-rewards righteously earned, and bestowed with well-nigh universal approval. He died in 1850.

Wordsworth did not consider poetry a mere instrument of pleasure, a thing to be read or written in hours of relaxation. To him it was an art-the highest of all arts-to which life

might be profitably devoted, and in the exercise of which no pains were to be grudged by the singer gifted with the divine faculty of imagination. To his principles regarding this matter his practice fully corresponded. He was constantly meditating on his art, and gathering together materials for its exercise. For books he cared little, and most of his literary judgments were narrow and prejudiced. Of contemporary poets, the only one whom he at all cordially appreciated was Coleridge; Scott and Southey he did not think highly of; Shelley and Byron he knew only slightly; Keats not at all. His study was in the open air; his sources of inspiration caught from wandering to and fro amid the beautiful scenery of the Lake district. "Nine-tenths of my verses," said the poet in 1843, "have been murmured out in the open air. One day a stranger, having walked round the garden and grounds of Rydal Mount, asked of one of the female servants who happened to be at the door permission to see her master's study. This,' said she, leading him forward, 'is my master's library, where he keeps his books, but his study is out of doors.' After a long absence from home, it has more than once happened that some one of my co:tage neighbours has said, 'Well, there he is! We are glad to hear him booing about again.'" It was a natural result of his self-contained and independent mode of life acting upon a mind constitutionally self-confident that Wordsworth should have a very high opinion of his own works. No false delicacy restrained him from praising them himself when occasion offered. For example, when Harriet Martineau told him that his "Happy Warrior" was a favourite poem of Dr. Channing's: "Ay," replied Wordsworth, "that was not on account of the poetical conditions being best fulfilled in that poem, but because it is" (solemnly) "a chain of extremely vaiooable. thoughts; you see it does not best fulfil the conditions of poetry, but it is" (solemnly) "a chain of extremely valooable thoughts." Considering the high estimate Wordsworth had of his own powers and the fixity with which he clung to his own opinions, it is not surprising that he should