WORDSWORTH.

1770-1850.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH was born in 1770 in Cumberland. His school life was passed in a picturesque district in the North of England, where he lived among the villagers and had freedom to roam over the country, in whose beauty he delighted even as a boy. From school he was sent to St. John's College, Cambridge, and, after taking his degree (1791), he went to France. He was enthusiastically in favour of the revolutionary ideas then abroad. To him, as to many others at that time, the overthrow of political oppression by the people of France seemed to promise a new and brighter era of liberty and splendid opportunity for every man, no matter how poor or lowly born.

He returned to England in 1793, before the execution of the French king, Louis XVI., by the Revolutionists. Then, having a small legacy bequeathed to him, and later inheriting a modest fortune, he devoted himself to poetry, from which for many years he gained scarcely any additional income. He visited Germany with his friend, the poet Coleridge, but his life for the most part was spent quietly at Rydal Mount, in the picturesque Lake District of Northern England. There he was the centre of a group of poets often

called the Lake Poets, of whom Southey and Coleridge were the other chief members.

Wordsworth was much disappointed at the failure of the bright hopes raised by the French Revolution, and at what he considered the abasement of the newly-freed French people under the rule of Napoleon I. (1802) his disappointment seemed for a time to cause him to lose his chief interests in life. But he was led back to his work and to sympathy with the world, partly by the affection of his sister, with whom he lived, and partly by his own reflective mind. His revolutionary opinions died out, though his sympathy for the oppressed and his enthusiasm for real liberty never changed.

His first published poems were called Descriptive Sketches (1793); next came Lyrical Ballads, some of which were by Coleridge. Two more volumes of poems and a long work, The Excursion, followed at different times early in the nineteenth century, when also The White Doe of Rylstone, Peter Bell, and The Waggoner appeared. He won scarcely any appreciation from the public until between 1830 and 1840, when he became much more popular, and on the death of Southey was made Poet Laureate (1843). His last publications were the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, Yarrow Revisited, and a complete collection of his poems. He died in his eightieth year (1850), and was buried in the little churchyard at Grasmere, near to his dwellingplace in life. The Prelude, an autobiographical poem, was not published in full until after his death.

Wordsworth's works are marked by two chief qualities, at that time fresh in English poetry. The first

H

is his feeling for inanimate nature, in which his observant and meditative eye everywhere found poetic material, from the majesty of mountain and ocean to the smallest wild-flower of the fields. He tells us himself in the Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,

"To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." He felt not only an admiration, but a passion for nature; he was a lover of the Earth herself, and to him her streams and trees and flowers were things of life like human friends. This attitude distinguishes him from other poets, and especially from those considered great earlier in the eighteenth century, like Pope and Goldsmith, who, in writing of nature, seem to treat its beauty as merely a frame for humanity. The second distinctive quality in his work is simplicity of language and subject. He announced his belief that the common language of the common people was also the language poetry should use; he drew "exquisite impressions" from the common things of everyday life. He did not always succeed in combining the simple and the poetic, however, nor did he always consistently attempt it. It was this theory which caused the whole of his work to be ridiculed at first; but we recognize now that in much of his poetry the simplicity of language is majestic or touching beyond what a more studied diction could attain. In this particular also we find a great contrast to the preceding generation of poets, who had invented a special, artificial phraseology for verse. For instance, they almost invariably call a countryman "a swain," and a field "a verdant

lawn," etc. Wordsworth is never artificial in this

way.

Wordsworth's poems may be roughly divided into lyrics (short, songlike, and simple verses), narratives, and philosophical or didactic poems. The subjects of the lyrics are for the most part drawn from the sights and sounds of nature, specimens of which are contained in this volume. Among the narratives areThe White Doe of Rylstone, Ruth and Peter Bell. The philosophical poems include The Excursion, his longest poem, and the Ode on Intimations of Immortality, one of the most perfect; but much of his writing under this class hardly justifies the poetic form. He attempted a drama, The Borderers, but for this kind of writing his genius was unsuitable. His distinctive features, the attitude to nature and the simplicity of subject and often of expression, were qualities much rarer when he wrote than since, for (partly on account of his influence) later English poets have turned more and more away from the polished artificialities of the poetry before his time, and more and more towards nature and real life. "He is the foremost singer of those who threw around the lives of homely men and women the glory and sweetness of song and his work has become what he desired it to be, a power like one of nature's."

BYRON.

1788-1824.

GEORGE GORDON NOEL BYRON was born in London in 1788. His parents, who were both of noble descent, separated from each other in his early childhood, and he was left in charge of his mother, a woman violent alike in her fondness and her ill-temper. Her husband had spent the fortune she had brought him, and after their separation she was extremely poor. In his eleventh year, his father being dead, Byron inherited the family title and large, though impoverished, estates from his grand-uncle. After attendance at

smaller schools, he was sent to Harrow, and thence to Cambridge. While at the University his first and comparatively weak poems, Hours of Idleness, were published (1807), and were at once very severely criticized by the Edinburgh Review. Byron was enraged at the criticism, and revenged himself by attacking his critics in a stinging satire called English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.

After leaving Cambridge he travelled through Europe, and acquired a considerable experience of its eastern parts. The result of these wanderings was the two first cantos of Childe Harold (1812), which obtained a great and immediate popularity. There followed a number of romantic tales in verse,-The Giaour, The