BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

NOTWITHSTANDING the fact that the notes to this edition are biographical and critical, an attempt to reveal how Wordsworth became the poet of plain living and high thinking,

it may be well to review the main events of his life and the distinctive achievement of his art. It will help us to understand what Emerson wrote of him in 1854: "It is very easy to see that to act so powerfully in this practical age, he needed, with all his Oriental abstraction, the indomitable vigour rooted in animal constitution, for which his countrymen are marked, otherwise he could not have resisted the deluge streams of their opinion with success. One would say he is the only man among them who has not in any point succumbed to their way of thinking, and has prevailed.”

William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth, Cumberland, April 7, 1770. The house in which he was born, a large substantial mansion, still stands, and is of interest because of the garden and terrace-walk in the rear associated with events related in "The Sparrow's Nest" and "The Prelude." His father, John Wordsworth, a solicitor, and law agent of the Earl of Lonsdale, was a descendant of an old family which belonged to the middle class and had settled in Penistone, Yorkshire, in the reign of Edward the Third. An interesting old oak chest or almery, now in the possession of the poet's grandchildren at The Stepping Stones, Ambleside, bears the pedigree carved by one of the family in the reign of Henry the Eighth.

The poet's mother (Anne Cookson) was the daughter of William Cookson, mercer, of Penrith. She was descended on her mother's side from an ancient family of Crackanthorp, which, from the time of Edward the Third, had lived at Newbiggen Hall, Westmoreland. She married John Wordsworth at Penrith, February 5, 1766. Besides William, who was the second son, there were born at Cockermouth three sons, Richard, John, and Christopher, and one daughter, Dorothy.

Wordsworth's infancy and early boyhood were passed at Cockermouth, and with maternal relatives at Penrith. His teachers at this time were his mother, to whom he has paid a touching tribute in "The Prelude," and his father, who early taught him to commit to memory portions of the great English poets, the Rev. Mr. Gilbanks, of Cockermouth, and Dame Birkett, of Penrith. There was nothing in his character during these years that distinguished him in any way from other children in the family, unless it was the manifestation of that "indomitable vigour" which characterized him as a man. This manifested itself in such forms of will and temper as to cause his mother to remark that the only one of her five children about whose future she was anxious was William: “He will be remarkable either for good or for evil.” Yet there were influences of Nature and his own home acting silently upon him thus early which later became his most cherished memories, and revealed how favored he had been in his birthplace and training.

Wordsworth's mother, the heart and hinge of all his learning and his loves, died in 1778, and the family was broken up. William and Richard, the eldest boys, were sent to the old school at Hawkshead. It is hardly necessary to review in detail the events of Wordsworth's life from this time until he meets Coleridge in 1795, as it is given with scrupulous regard for truth and with entire freedom from vanity in "The Prelude," by the only man who could describe them with certainty. All who would read his poetry as he

wished it to be read should have this poem by heart. Only the main events will be reviewed here.

The old school, situated in a quaint rural village, and surrounded by the unambitious loveliness of Nature in hill and dale, rivers, woods, and fields, maintained a healthy, sound simplicity of social and academic culture. Competition and high pressure were unknown; there were the greatest freedom and variety of mental and physical training. The boys, while studying mathematics and the classics under accomplished and sympathetic teachers, lived in the cottages of the dalesmen, and were cared for by the homely and motherly dames. When out of school they were left to themselves and their own modest pleasures. They rowed or skated on the lake, ranged the fells for woodcock, fished in brooks or pools hid among the mountains, practiced crag-climbing and raven-nesting, until "feverish with weary joints and beating minds" home and to bed they went. In reviewing these happy days Wordsworth found two great periods in his development at the hands of Nature clearly revealed: first, that of unconscious receptivity when life was sweet he knew not why; and the second, that of conscious intercourse with aspects sublime and fair of the external world. Of this experience he writes:

I cannot paint

What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me

An appetite; a feeling and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm,

By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.

His pastime and his happiness now began to grow in the substantial world of great books; but his reading was not that of a student with a definite aim, rather that of a lover of romance, a child. He read as chance and curiosity dictated. He says:

What joy was mine! How often in the course

Of those glad respites, though a soft west wind

Ruffled the waters to the angler's wish,

For a whole day together, have I lain

Down by thy side, O Derwent! murmuring stream,

On the hot stones, devouring as I read,

Defrauding the day's glory, desperate!

Till with a sudden bound of smart reproach,

Such as an idler deals with in his shame,

I to the sport betook myself again.

The healthy activities of these days at Hawkshead, when spontaneous wisdom was breathed by health, and truth by cheerfulness, begat

A race of real children; not too wise,

Too learned, or too good; but wanton, fresh,
And bandied up and down by love and hate;
Not unresentful where self-justified;
Fierce, moody, patient, venturous, modest, shy;
Mad at their sports like withered leaves in winds;
Though doing wrong and suffering, and full oft
Bending beneath our life's mysterious weight
Of pain, and doubt, and fear, yet yielding not
In happiness to the happiest upon earth.

Before Wordsworth had completed his school days at Hawkshead his father died and the family was left in straitened circumstances owing to the fact that Sir James Lowther had borrowed nearly his entire savings and had refused to discharge the debt. Accordingly Dorothy was sent to live with maternal relatives at Penrith. Through the assistance of his uncles, William was enabled to enter St. John's College, Cambridge. Although he had looked forward with a boy's delight to this

Migration strange for a stripling of the hills,
A northern villager,

yet after the first novelty of the place and the quaint customs wore off he was filled with disappointment. But he confirmed to every outward requirement of the place and kept his homesickness to himself. Cambridge was at this time in the depths of intellectual sleep; enthusiasm was dead, and academic spirit was at a low ebb. Without stimulus to intellectual activity Wordsworth's thoughts were directed, first, quite unconsciously — as they had been previously with Nature to the historic past as revealed in his environment. Of this he says : —

Imagination slept,

And yet not utterly. I could not print

Ground where the grass had yielded to the steps

Of generations of illustrious men,

Unmoved. I could not always lightly pass

Through the same gateways, sleep where they had slept,

Wake where they waked, range that enclosure old,

That garden of great intellects, undisturbed.

Gradually he was aroused to the consciousness of the superficial religious and academic spirit of the place:

Decency and Custom starving Truth,

And blind Authority beating with his staff
The child that might have led him; Emptiness
Followed as of good omen, and meek Worth
Left to herself unheard of and unknown.

Realizing that he was not for that place nor for that time, he sought the comradeship of the poets who had made the name of Cambridge famous in the literature of the English tongue; and the love of man began to rise in his heart. Thenceforth he had a world of his own about him, both of Nature and of man; he made it and it lived to him alone. It is needless to say that this slight of the means upon which his future worldly maintenance must depend caused anxiety to those interested in his progress. In his first vacations he found consolation for this in revisiting his old haunts at Hawkshead, and in the company of his sister and Mary Hutchinson at Penrith. It was at Hawkshead, after a night spent with his old schoolmates at a farmhouse among the hills, that there was revealed to him as to Burns in "The Vision," that he was set apart for holy services.

And labourers going forth to till the fields.
Ah! need I say, dear Friend! that to the brim
My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly,
A dedicated Spirit.

The first fruits of this dedication are to be seen in "An Evening Walk," begun at the time, dedicated to his sister, and given to the world in 1793. Until this time he had written only a few school poems.

In his last college vacation he visited the Alps with a college friend, Robert Jones, of Wales, at a time when the rumblings of the Revolution in France were first heard in England. Europe was then thrilled with joy, and human nature seemed rejoicing in a new birth. They landed at Calais on the day when Louis XIV. swore fidelity to the new Constitution. They then made their way southward rejoicing with the enthusiastic bands of delegates sent from Marseilles to the Federation. They visited the Grand Chartreuse, spent several weeks at the Swiss and Italian lakes, and crossed the Simplon. On their return they met the

Brabant armies on the fret

For battle in the cause of liberty.

This journey aroused and fed his imagination by association with the grander aspects of Nature than he had viewed in England, but it also awoke a new sentiment within him, that Revolutionary fervor which was to influence his life work. The immediate results of this became evident to his friends in the "Descriptive Sketches;" these, expanded and enriched, may now be read in the sixth book of "The Prelude." The first distinctive notes in the great movement of the return to Nature, of which Wordsworth and Coleridge were to be the leaders, are to be heard in these sketches.

In 1791 Wordsworth took his degree of B. A. After visiting his sister at Forncett Rectory, where she was living with her uncle and conducting a little school, with no settled plan as to the future, but with a passion for travel, he repaired to London. Here he played the idler; mingled with all sorts and conditions of men, and saw human nature in those extremes of luxury and poverty which every great city affords. He became impressed with the power of the great metropolis over the fortunes of men and nations :

as he calls it.

Fount of my country's destiny and the world's,

After several months in London he visited his friend Jones in Wales. While there he became impressed with the picturesque scenery, the historical and legendary associations of the ancient principality, the splendor of the vale of Clwyd, the heights of Snowdon, Menai and her Druids, and the windings of the Dee.

His guardians now became more troubled about him, so he made plans to visit France and study the language in order to fit himself for a tutor; he would thus be able to continue his roving life and visit the country which had aroused his Revolutionary spirit. Accordingly he set out for Orleans, but delayed in Paris, where he

Saw the Revolutionary Power

Toss like a ship at anchor, rocked by storms.

He did not remain long at Orleans, but went to Blois, where he became associated with that remarkable philosopher and republican general, Michael Beaupuy.

By birth he ranked
With the most noble, but unto the poor
Among mankind he was in service bound,
As by some tie invisible, oaths professed
To a religious order. Man he loved
As man; and, to the mean and the obscure,
And all the homely in their homely works,
Transferred a courtesy which had no air
Of condescension; but did rather seem
A passion and a gallantry, like that
Which he, a soldier in his idler day,
Had paid to woman.

Many were their walks and talks together beside the Loire. They discussed the principles of civil rights which must be the foundation of every republican government. In July, 1792, Beaupuy left Blois for service with his regiment, and Wordsworth returned to Orleans, where he remained during the September Massacres ; not dismayed by these, he believed in the patriots' cause and hastened to Paris, where amid the tumult and the tragedy of those days his enthusiasm for the cause of liberty led him to think of offering himself as a leader. Fortunately before such a plan could be put in operation - a plan in which he would doubtless have perished his funds gave out and he was obliged to return to England.

While it is evident that Wordsworth's relatives distrusted him, yet he found comfort and inspiration in the society of the dear sister from whom he had been separated so long. So on his return from France with his future career still unsettled he sought her companionship at Forncett, and set about the publication of "An Evening Walk" and "Descriptive Sketches." While the Monthly Review, the Edinburgh Review, and Blackwood's could see in this work only subjects for clumsy satire and vulgar rebuff, saying: "Must eternal changes be rung on nodding forests, and brooding clouds, and cells and dells, and dingles ?" Coleridge, not yet out of the University, uttered the most significant literary prophecy and acute literary criticism to be found in our language. He says: During the last year of my residence at Cambridge, I became acquainted with Mr. Wordsworth's first publication, entitled 'Descriptive Sketches;' and seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon more evidently announced. In the form, style, and manner of the whole poem, and in the structure of the particular lines and periods, there is a harshness and acerbity connected and combined with words and images all a-glow, which might recall those products of the vegetable world, where gorgeous blossoms rise out of the hard and thorny rind and shell, within which the rich fruit was elaborating."

Wordsworth was now at the height of his republican ardor, and on hearing of the excitement in London over negro emancipation and the Revolution, he wrote: "I disapprove of monarchical and aristocratical governments however modified. Hereditary distinctions and privileged orders of every species, I think, must necessarily counteract the progress of human improvement." At this time, too, he wrote that remarkable pamphlet in reply to the avowal of political principles by the Bishop of Landaff. He pleaded with lofty eloquence and patriotic fervor for universal education to be followed by universal suffrage, and for a consideration of the great questions of how the general welfare of a nation was to be promoted — questions which at the present time in England are still uppermost.

In this unsettled condition of mind he was still more deeply agitated by the action of