The story of Wordsworth's earlier life is told in The Prelude, 'the long poem on my own education,' finished in 1805, but not published till after the author's death in 1850. This poem was addressed to Coleridge, who described it in the verses written in acknowledgment:

An Orphic song indeed,

A song divine of high and passionate thoughts
To their own music chanted.

It had to be kept back, because the great work to which it was an introduction-The Recluse, of which The Excursion is only a fragment-was never completed. If Wordsworth had published the Prelude immediately, it might have saved his literary reputation from some tedious controversies; it would certainly have given pleasure to Shelley and Keats, both of whom were fascinated by Wordsworth and anxious to discover his meaning. It is an authentic story; the course of his life and the growth of his faculties are described sincerely. It is one of the happiest of lives; blest from the outset with natural gifts of the most fortunate kind, a pilgrim's progress, in which the ordeals are indeed severe, but saved from the worst afflictions, and especially from low spirits. By keeping back the Prelude Wordsworth made the Excursion his most authoritative work regarding his own temper and ideas. His contemporaries generally judged him from the Excursion; and the Excursion, taken by itself, gives a false impression of Wordsworth. It makes him too much of a philosopher, too sedate, too tame. The Prelude is a story of life and will, not mainly of meditations or theories; these have their place in it, but the purport of the whole book is to show that his reflections spring from what is alive. Wordsworth's life, which to many of his readers has appeared a monotonous affair, comes out in the Prelude as a life of pure energy from the beginning, wakeful, alert, self-willed. Also by accident (or 'divine chance') he was carried into the middle of great things. He stood nearer to the reality of the French Revolution than any of his contemporaries in England, and he discovered the secret of the Alps. The slow mooning person which Wordsworth seemed to be in later life is hardly to be found in the Prelude. The story of his childhood and boyhood is an enthusiastic description of all kinds of adventure. The pride of life kindled and lit up his world for him; Nature for him was full throughout of danger and desire.'

He was born at Cockermouth, on 7th April 1770, the son of John Wordsworth, law-agent to Sir James Lowther. His mother, who died when he was eight years old, was anxious about him, owing to the faults of his disposition, more than about any of her other children. He says himself that he was 'of a stiff, moody, and violent temper;' but his wilfulness had nothing unsound

in it. His account of his school-life (at Hawkshead) would be interesting simply as a story of a boy's adventures. The early revelations of sublime things came to him not in moments of a wise passiveness, but in the crisis of heroic action: When I have hung

Above the raven's nest by knots of grass
And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock
But ill-sustained, and almost (so it seemed)
Suspended by the blast that blew amain,
Shouldering the naked crag, oh, at that time
While on the perilous ridge I hung alone,
With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind
Blow through my ear! The sky seemed not a sky
Of earth-and with what motion moved the clouds !
The first book of the Prelude is a commentary
on the lines in Tintern Abbey:

The coarser pleasures of my boyish days
And their glad animal movements all gone by.

It explains how different Wordsworth's love of Nature was from mere critical observation of the 'beauties' of Nature or what is called 'scenery.' It is through life that Nature is revealed to him, in rowing, riding, and skating; and the old panic terror found him, about his tenth year, in night raids on the fells :

I heard among the solitary hills

Low breathings coming after me, and sounds
Of undistinguishable motion, steps

Almost as silent as the turf they trod.

In October 1787 Wordsworth went up to St John's College, Cambridge. The change of scene was a trial for him, but he was not depressed. He found that his mistress, Nature, was lady of the fens also; and in the flat country he surrendered himself to the elemental beauty of light and air, and the broad general aspect of the earth :

As if awakened, summoned, roused, constrained, I looked for universal things, perused The common countenance of earth and sky. There was at the same time a certain lowering of temperature in his life, as was perhaps natural and right. The touch of worldliness in his conversation at Cambridge gave him tolerance, and saved his enthusiasm from wasting itself. In his third long vacation (1790) Wordsworth went for a walking tour in France and Switzerland with his friend Jones, of the same college, and found himself in the middle of the Revolution :

-Europe at that time was thrilled with joy,
France standing on the top of golden hours,
And human nature seeming born again.

There is no one who has borne better witness than Wordsworth to the unselfish happiness, the overpowering hope, that seemed to attend the first movement of the Revolution.

The two Cambridge men, however, saw one

thing to suggest what unexplored caprices might be latent in the power that had restored the golden age: 'arms flashing, and a military glare,' intruding into the quiet of the Grande Chartreuse. The contrast between the hopes and the disappointments of the Revolution was expressed in 1802 in a sonnet to his travelling companion:

Composed near Calais, on the Road leading to
Ardres, August 7, 1802.

Jones! when from Calais southward you and I
Went pacing side by side, this public Way
Streamed with the pomp of a too-credulous day,
When faith was pledged to new-born Liberty :
A homeless sound of joy was in the sky :
From hour to hour the antiquated Earth
Beat like the heart of Man: songs, garlands, mirth,
Banners, and happy faces, far and nigh!

And now, sole register that these things were,
Two solitary greetings have I heard,
'Good-morrow, Citizen!' a hollow word,
As if a dead man spake it! Yet despair
Touches me not, though pensive as a bird
Whose vernal coverts winter hath laid bare.

In 1790 Wordsworth confesses that he was as yet hardly able to appreciate the issues:

A stripling, scarcely of the household then Of social life, I looked upon these things As from a distance, heard and saw and felt, Was touched, but with no intimate concern. The year after he was to grow out of the stripling, and to give to a political cause all that energy of mind which had been bestowed before by him on the study of Nature. He took his degree in 1791, and spent some time in London, where he saw and heard a good deal, including the other great imaginative reasoner-Burke : With high disdain

Exploding upstart theory.

In November he went to France, meaning to spend the winter and learn the language. He stayed first at Orleans, then at Blois.

Of all the Englishmen who were affected by the French Revolution, none entered like Wordsworth into its vicissitudes of hope and fear. He had been welcomed by the people of France in their first revolutionary holiday. He listened, not long after, to the chaos of the Palais Orleans:

I stared and listened with a stranger's ears To Hawkers and Haranguers, hubbub wild, And hissing Factionists with ardent eyes In knots or pairs or single. Not a look Hope takes, or Doubt or Fear is forced to wear, But seemed there present, and I scanned them all. At Orleans in the society of royalist officers he recognised their magnanimity, but was not affected by their political views; there, too, he met and conversed intimately with Beaupuy, one of the most honourable and high-minded of the reformers. There can hardly have been anywhere in Europe a nobler devotion to high causes than in these two chance acquaintances; they have the inextinguish

able grace of lofty ideas, which were not refuted, though frustrated, by the events that followed. Wordsworth's political enthusiasm had the same root as his poetry-in his early life. He was not carried away by rhetoric merely; the new revolutionary world appeared to him as something familiar, and he interpreted equality and fraternity as what he had always known among his own people in the dales. There was a pith of commonsense in his revolutionary beliefs; they were not all vapourings, though both Wordsworth and Beaupuy failed. Beaupuy became a general, and was killed in 1796. Wordsworth thought at one time of throwing in his lot with the Girondists, in October 1792, when he had returned to Paris, a month after the September massacres; but his supplies came to an end, and that prosaic cause brought him back to England.

Wordsworth has uttered the hopes of his youth in a passage of verse which is to the political revival what Tintern Abbey is with regard to the poetical worship of Nature. It is one of the fragments of the Prelude published in Coleridge's Friend:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven! O times
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!

Now was it that both found, the meek and lofty
Did both find helpers to their hearts' desire
And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish,—
Were called upon to exercise their skill
Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,

Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where !
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us, the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!

The return from France was more than a change of climate to Wordsworth. The outbreak of the great war caused the most serious, perhaps the only dangerous, intellectual crisis in the whole of his life. When Shelley afterwards reproached him as a lost leader, whose early love of liberty had grown ossified, he did not know the full story, the tragic conflict through which Wordsworth had passed. Wordsworth was not frightened, and there was no inconsistency. He found himself divided between his patriotism, which was always strong, and his love for the ideas and the country of Beaupuy. He saw the worst parties in France gaining by the war :

Tyrants strong before

In wicked pleas were strong as demons now,
And thus on every side beset with foes
The goaded land waxed mad.

Wordsworth, in division against himself, fell into despondency and scepticism. He tried to find some new principles; but his critical inquiry was fruitless, or worse. Analysis could not provide him even with a theory; and it was not a theory

he required, but motives. He verified the saying of Burke, that the world would be ruined if the practice of all moral duties and the foundations of society rested upon having their reasons made clear and demonstrative to every individual.' His progress led him through the valley of Abstract Thought, where he was not happy:

Viewing all objects unremittingly

In disconnexion dead and spiritless,

as it is expressed in the Excursion; or as in the Prelude:

Dragging all precepts, judgments, maxims, creeds
Like culprits to the bar; calling the mind
Suspiciously to establish in plain day

Her titles and her honours.

His deliverance from futile analysis was in great part due, he says, to his sister Dorothy :

She in the midst of all preserved me still
A Poet, made me seek beneath that name,
And that alone, my office upon earth.

In 1795 they settled at Racedown, a house near Crewkerne in Dorset. There in June 1797 they were visited by Coleridge, who had read Wordsworth's Descriptive Sketches (published in 1793); the next month the Wordsworths moved to Alfoxden, a house in the Quantocks not far from Coleridge's home at Nether Stowey. Coleridge and Wordsworth, walking about the hills, found occasion for all sorts of imaginative projects; Lyrical Ballads, their common venture, came out in 1798, beginning with the 'Ancient Mariner' and ending with Tintern Abbey.' Coleridge explained their partnership later: 'It was agreed that my efforts should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith. Mr Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object to give the 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; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.'

Wordsworth and his sister did not stay long in Somerset. In the autumn of 1798 they went to Germany, travelling with Coleridge in the earlier part of their journey. German literature did not affect Wordsworth strongly; he imitated Bürger's verse in two of his worst poems, and disapproved of it in one of his critical essays. But his German winter was productive; the poems of that year are among the finest in the second volume of Lyrical Ballads, published in 1800. He came back to England in 1799, and settled at Grasmere. The

Prelude was already begun, part of the great ambition of Wordsworth's life-'a philosophical poem containing views of Man, Nature, and Society, and to be entitled The Recluse; as having for its principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement.' The Prelude was finished in 1805, but it was not the only work of these years. In 1807 appeared two volumes, about the same size as the Lyrical Ballads of 1800, containing poems in some respects considerably different from anything of Wordsworth's hitherto published: the 'Sonnets on Liberty;' the 'Happy Warrior;' the 'Ode to Duty ;' and at the end, with a motto of its own, paullo majora canamus, the 'Ode on Intimations of Immortality.' There were also the poems of the tour in Scotland in 1803 recorded in Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal-Yarrow Unvisited, Stepping Westward, The Solitary Reaper. The most obvious difference between 1800 and 1807 in Wordsworth's poetry was the result of his studies among the older English poets -Chaucer, Drayton, Daniel, Sidney-of whom he had known little or nothing before. Milton and Spenser he had long known and praised: now their influence returned to him along with the others, and gave a new character to his poetical language.

In 1813 he went to Rydal Mount, his home for the rest of his life. About the same time he obtained the office of Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland. In 1814 he made his second tour in Scotland (Yarrow Visited), and published the Excursion, 'being a portion of The Recluse, a Poem.' A collected edition of his Poems was published in the following year; and also in 1815, separately, The White Doe of Rylstone. Peter Bell, a tale in verse, begun long before among the Quantocks but not included in Lyrical Ballads, was published in 1819, preceded by the mischievous work of the same name, 'the ante-natal Peter,' a parody of Wordsworth by Keats's friend Reynolds, and followed by Shelley's Peter Bell the Third. Other publications are The Waggoner (1819), The River Duddon (1820), Memorials of a Tour on the Continent (1820), Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822). There were few adventures in Wordsworth's later life. He travelled in Switzerland, Italy, Holland, Wales, Ireland; in 1831, with his daughter, he went to see Scott at Abbotsford, just before his departure for Naples: Scott refusing Wordsworth's commendation of the Italian landscape, and quoting 'although 'tis fair, 'twill be another Yarrow.' Yarrow Revisited and other poems appeared in 1835; and at the end of the year, in the Athenæum, the 'Extempore Effusion on the Death of James Hogg'—Wordsworth's lament for the poets. Coleridge and Lamb had died the year before:

Like clouds that rake the mountain summits,
Or waves that own no curbing hand,
How fast has brother followed brother
From sunshine to the sunless land.

Wordsworth became Poet Laureate in succession to Southey in 1843. He wrote nothing after 1846; one of his latest poems in 1845 is constant to his early modes of thought and style:

So fair, so sweet, withal so sensitive, Would that the little flowers were born to live Conscious of half the pleasure which they give. That to this mountain-daisy's self were known The beauty of its star-shaped shadow thrown On the smooth surface of this naked stone. He died on St George's Day 1850; the Prelude was published a few months later. One book of the Recluse-that is, the first book of what was to have been the first part-was left in manuscript; it was printed in 1888.

Wordsworth claims for himself a mission to interpret Nature. He found himself 'a dedicated spirit' (early one morning on his way home from a dancing party; Prelude, Book IV.); he was more definitely and intensely conscious of his mission than any poet has ever been, more even than Milton. For Milton's ambition had always something of the school, something formal or abstract, in it; he was to compete with the old masters of heroic verse, to win the prize of Epic or Tragedy. Wordsworth took his start from reality; he had something to say which had been specially revealed to him in the accidents of his life. His poetical task was to find expression for this acquired and always increasing knowledge of his. Milton, with equal confidence in his vocation, was less certain about his themes. But this is saying little; for Wordsworth's security in the value of his own experience goes beyond all possibility of comparison and calculation.

It is not easy to determine or explain what Wordsworth meant by Nature; or rather it is easy to explain prosaically in such a way as to leave the result unprofitable. It may be turned from poetry into metaphysics; it is so translated, sometimes, by Wordsworth himself. But the essence of Wordsworth's theory is poetical, not distinctly philosophical, though it touches on philosophy. Where it is most philosophical, it is a belief in imagination, sometimes called the Imaginative Will, as a power of interpreting the world-not altering reality, nor remoulding the scheme of things, but reading it truly. It is this faculty that gets beyond ordinary trivial, partial, disconnected perceptions, and finds the solemn life of the universe astir in every moment of experience. Through imagination Wordsworth attains something like a mystical vision of the whole world as a living thing, every fragment of the world alive with the life of the whole. But this is hardly what is distinctive of his poetry, for such visions have come to many, without the accomplishment of verse, sometimes in opposition to all poetry. Also a formal theory of this sort is not protected against base uses; it may become, as Blake says of general ideas, the refuge of the

scoundrel and the hypocrite; it may be imitated without conviction or insight. Poetry cannot be reduced to ideas; and Wordsworth is not to be judged by the theories that may be abstracted from his poems.

Wordsworth separates himself, explicitly, from the eighteenth-century pursuit of the beauties of Nature: Even in pleasure pleased

Unworthily, disliking here and there
Liking, by rules of mimic art transferred
To things above all art-

though the Picturesque, as studied, for example, by Gilpin, was some part of his education. He liked to notice and recollect aspects of scenery, facts of Nature, hitherto unused in art. But this kind of observation, never without interest for Wordsworth, and proved, as has been seen already, in his latest poem, was always a subordinate part of his work. Closeness to reality, 'with his eye on the subject,' was consistently his aim; but his study of Nature involved more than observation, Nature was more than the object of perception; Nature 'full of danger and desire' could be rendered poetically only by enthusiastic imagination. The Picturesque might be taken coolly and examined technically, but Wordsworth's point of view is generally different. His didactic expo

sition no doubt often seemed to be much the same thing as had been customary for a generation or two before him with students of Nature, but his imagination was original and his own, and he knew that it derived its strength 'from worlds not quickened by the sun :' the poetic vision was idle, was nothing at all, without the poetic impulse. Even in the more didactic of his writings, and even apart from his poetical work altogether, as in the tract on the Convention of Cintra, he declares himself for passionate imagination as the guide of life; he speaks of 'the dignity and intensity of human desires;' imagination is not theoretic, it is 'imaginative will.' Though he has come to be with many readers the poet of meditation above all things, this was not what his youth desired. His poetry is a creature of a fiery heart,' and is not fit reading for the dispassionate understanding.

Wordsworth's policy has some resemblance to what is commonly called Realism, in its inclusion of subjects beneath the conventional dignity of art. But Realism, as that is generally understood, works in a cool temper, making intelligent notes, without affection. This was not Wordsworth's way. He does not fix upon common or mean things with a calm determination to make them interesting, to force them into the mould of his poetry. This is what he often appeared to be doing, and this irritated his fastidious readers. They thought that they were being held down by the uncourtly poet and compelled to look at disgusting objects-duffel cloaks, wash-tubs, polygamic potters, and so forth, according to the familiar catalogue which was repeated in various

might keep some of its old devices; 'deadly tube' for example, in the Recluse, means 'gun,' and the game of Noughts and Crosses, in the Prelude, is 'strife too humble to be named in verse.' But besides the correction of false rhetoric, about which there was no real difference of opinion among his contemporaries, Wordsworth had a theory of his own, which went somewhat further, and emphatically recommended the use of colloquial language, 'a selection of the language really spoken by men.'

himself had contrasted Truth and Nature with the 'sleepy bards' and their 'mechanic echoes;' Goldsmith had attacked 'the pompous epithet, laboured diction, and every other deviation from common-sense, which procures for the poet the applause of the month.' Wordsworth, however, had a meaning of his own in the doctrine of poetical language which he expounded in his Preface of 1800. His argument included at least two distinct positions: first, a commonplace and generally plausible objection to 'poetical diction,' in so far as that was merely a conventional vocabulary, to be learned like grammar by practitioners of verse, and applied as a sort of ornamental plaster to any subject. So far, the spirit of the time was with him. The periphrastic method, so splendid in Darwin's Botanic Garden, was at the end of its course, though Wordsworth himself

In his endeavour to comply with this theory there may have been something of bravado, as Coleridge thought; in some of the Lyrical Ballads he had to force himself to write down to his formula. The fallacies were examined and detected by Coleridge in Biographia Literaria; Wordsworth's own practice was easily shown to be inconsistent. But there still remained something unrefuted in the theory, when the worst had been said. It looked at first like a revolutionary levelling of diction, a polemic assertion of the equality of words, a denunciation of the vanity of class

distinctions in the vocabulary-ending, like other democratic equalities, in a preference for the lower and a proscription of the nobler orders. But Wordsworth had other motives than a preconceived and wilful sansculottism in his regard for plain language. He wished to get rid of all interference between the poetical object and the mind; the theme as conceived by the poet must tell itself in its own way. The true poetic conception must find its own language, and that language must be such as to convey, not particular fragmentary beauties, but the whole poetic idea, the emotional and imaginative creature of the mind, with no distraction or encumbrance. There is nothing new in this; it is the classical law of expression and right proportion. But few poets have lived in this artistic faith with such constancy as Wordsworth, with such fervent sincerity. After