make his fortune by launching the young poets. Politics, tinged with republicanism, and literature, wedded to reaction, were the constant topics of talk. Its brilliancy was reinforced by the presence of John Thelwall, "Citizen Thelwall," Radical and Chartist, who had retired from active propagandism to cultivate his acres and the domestic virtues. His visit, the unconventional habits of the households, and the suspicious chatter of inquisitive rustics, brought down a Government spy, with the result that at the end of their year's tenancy, the renewal of the Wordsworths' lease was refused, and in July 1798, the gathering in the Quantocks was broken up.

It is unnecessary to protest the perfect innocence of "the conspirators." Indeed, the industry of Wordsworth, during his residence at Alfoxden, is the chief feature in their proceedings. In a letter of March 11th, 1798, he wrote that he had begun "a poem which I hope to make of considerable utility. Its title will be 'The Recluse, or Views of Man, Nature and Society."" A few weeks later, on April 20th, a start was made with Peter Bell; but the great work of the year was the first volume of Lyrical Ballads.* Since Wordsworth and Coleridge met almost every day, to discuss the theory and practice of poetics, it was natural that they should think of publishing a book in common. Moreover, their common pecuniary necessities served to recommend the scheme. On a November day, in 1797, Coleridge had been seized with the inspiration of the Ancient Mariner; Wordsworth supplied some lines, and it formed accordingly the nucleus of the collection. Coleridge was to continue in a similar vein, giving "to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, . a human interest and a semblance

...

* Lyrical Ballads, with a few other Poems. J. Cottle, Bristol, and J. & A. Arch, London, 1798.

of truth"; Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to reverse the process, and "to give a 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 loveliness and the wonders of the world before us" (Biog. Lit.). By the following spring, Wordsworth's output was far in excess of his collaborator's, and when the anonymous volume was published by Cottle, in September 1798, it contained only four poems by Coleridge,-The Ancient Mariner, The FosterMother's Tale, The Nightingale and The Dungeon. Wordsworth's contributions included The Idiot Boy, We are Seven, The Thorn, Anecdote for Fathers, Goody Blake and Harry Gill, "Her Eyes are Wild," Simon Lee, Lines written in Early Spring, Expostulation and Reply, and others. Coleridge's Dungeon and A Character by Wordsworth were subsequently omitted. Meanwhile, in July, Wordsworth and his sister had left Alfoxden to walk to Tintern Abbey up the Wye. The poet had traversed the same country with William Calvert in 1793, and his present revised impressions were the occasion of his magnificent Lines, Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, ('Five years have past,'-) which were sent straight to Bristol, and were included in the Lyrical Ballads.

1798-9.

With the proceeds of their various enterprises, Coleridge and the Wordsworths started to spend the winter in Germany. They were received in audience by the poet Klopstock, by whom they were considerably overawed; but beyond him they seem to have seen hardly anyone. They arrived in October at Goslar, where Coleridge parted company with the sister and brother in order to have more time for study. The weather, Wordsworth complains, was bitterly cold; he

found his neighbours ungenial; and, thwarted, to some extent, in his social purposes, he gave most of his time to writing. Lucy Gray, and Ruth, and The Poet's Epitaph belong in composition to these months, as well as the verses to Lucy, and the unspoken romance that inspired them. He was further engaged with elaborating his scheme for The Recluse; and, while taking stock of his faculties in this regard, he began his auto-psychological poem, afterwards entitled The Prelude, which was finished in 1805, but only posthumously published. At Göttingen, in February, the Wordsworths fell in with Coleridge again, and returned to England in the spring. For the rest of that year, 1799, they made Sockburn, near Northallerton, in Yorkshire, their head-quarters, where they stayed with Thomas Hutchinson and his sisters, Sarah and Mary. The record of the poet's life becomes more and more tranquil. It becomes, in W. M. Rossetti's phrase, more and more respectable.* On St Thomas' Day, December 21st, 1799, he settled with his sister in Dove Cottage, Town-end, Grasmere, a lovely retreat in that favourite Lake district to which he afterwards wrote a Guide, and to which he was faithful in preference till the end. During 1800 they entertained several visitors, John, their sailor brother, and Mary Hutchinson, and Coleridge among them. In July, the Coleridges took Greta Hall, a house twelve miles from Dove Cottage, and the intercourse again became frequent. A second series of Lyrical Ballads was discussed; but when in January 1801,† Longman & Rees (London), who

Settlement

in the Lake District.

* The charge of "respectability" with its somewhat bourgeois im; plication was made by Rossetti in his Preface to one edition of Moxon's complete Wordsworth, a Preface subsequently withdrawn at the earnest request of Wordsworth's surviving relatives.

+ The date on the title-page is 1800.

had bought out Cottle, published the Ballads in two volumes, Wordsworth's name appeared on the title-page, and Wordsworth's lengthy Preface explained and justified the purpose of the poems. Volume I. was a new edition of the 1798 publication, with Love by Coleridge added; volume II. contained Wordsworth's Goslar pieces and others of yet more recent date, the chief of which were the two pastoral idylls, Michael and The Brothers; The Oak and the Broom, "Tis said that some have died of love," The Waterfall and the Eglantine, etc.; as well as five poems On the Naming of Places, one of which was inscribed to M(ary) H(utchinson). A piece of more material good fortune this year, was a windfall of £8500, paid, in complete liquidation-of capital and interest-of a sum of money borrowed by Lord Lonsdale from his agent, John Wordsworth, by Lord Lonsdale's successor to John Wordsworth's children. It came at a most appropriate time, for the poet had been wearing himself out with work, and was thinking of taking seriously to the study of chemistry, with Calvert and Coleridge, as a relaxation from the strain of composition. By way of compromise, apparently, Wordsworth got married; for, in the whole biography of the poet, in nothing was he less like other men than in his wooing and his wedding. It is said that Dorothy had to write his love-letters: certainly, after the ceremony, on October 4th, 1802, she accompanied the pair on their honeymoon. The account of that day in Dorothy's diary, is curious. The trio stayed for an hour or two at Kirby, in Yorkshire, where her brother and she entertained themselves with examining children's grave-stones; later in the afternoon they caught sight of Rivaux Abbey, and Dorothy records, with a delicious touch of pity, "Dear Mary"-(for Mary Hutchinson, their old school-fellow, was the bride)—"had

never seen a ruined abbey before-except Whitby." That they arrived at their destination very late at night, and left by six in the morning, was an appropriate ending to the day.

Mary Wordsworth soon settled down to the long life à trois which centred about the poet. In the Autobiographical Memoranda, dictated at Rydal Mount in 1847, the events of the next forty years are very shortly summarised: "After our marriage we dwelt, together with our sister, at Town-end, where three of our children were born. In the spring of 1808, the increase of our family caused us to remove to a larger house, then just built, Allan Bank, in the same vale; where our two younger children were born, and who died at the Rectory, the house we afterwards occupied for two years. They died in 1812, and in 1813 we came to Rydal Mount, where we have since lived with no further sorrow till 1836, when my sister became a confirmed invalid, and our sister Sarah Hutchinson died." It will not be disrespectful to this reticence to fill in a few more details of Wordsworth's private life. Its seeming monotony was broken, in the first place, by occasional journeys abroad. In the summer after his marriage (1803), Wordsworth started with his sister and Coleridge on a Scotch tour, upon which Dorothy wrote a small volume of Recollections, which have been published. Mrs Wordsworth was unable to accompany them on this occasion, for her eldest son, John, had been born on June 18th; while of Coleridge, Wordsworth writes in a note to one of his own Memorials of the tour, "Poor C. was at that time in bad spirits, and somewhat too much in love with his own dejection, and he departed from us soon after we left Loch Lomond." The chief incident noted in Miss Wordsworth's Journal was the meeting with Walter

Travels.