It is only after patient study that the beauty and dignity of his poems are revealed. He is like the poet whom he himself describes: "He is retired as noontide dew, But, once known and understood, the poems of William Wordsworth are a priceless and permanent possession. He was born at Cockermouth in Cumberland, April 7, 1770, the second son of John Wordsworth, attorney-at-law and law agent to Sir James Lowther, afterwards Earl of Lonsdale. This nobleman, owing to the fact that he borrowed practically all of John Wordsworth's fortune and refused to pay it back, now possesses a secure place in the annals of English literature. The poet's mother was Anne, only daughter of William Cookson, mercer, of Penrith. William was the second of five children. Richard, the eldest, became a successful lawyer. Dorothy, the third, described by Coleridge as his exquisite sister," was a woman of great intellectual and spiritual gifts. John, the fourth, was a sea captain. Christopher, the youngest, took orders and rose to be master of Trinity College, Cambridge. The poet's mother died 1778 in consequence of a cold contracted by sleeping in the "best bedroom" of a London friend. His father survived her five years. The care and education of the children were therefore assumed by uncles, who proved worthy of the privilege. William's infancy and boyhood were passed partly at Cockermouth and partly at Penrith. His disposition in these early years was so stiff, moody, and violent that his mother said he was the only one of her five children about whose future she was anxious. He, she added, would be remarkable either for good or for evil. Once, after being punished, he went into the attic with the intention of destroying himself with a foil. He took it in hand, but his heart failed. On another occasion, in a spirit of braggadocio, he ruined the portrait of one of his female ancestors by striking through it with a whip. This violence of temper was somewhat mollified by the gentleness of Dorothy, who speedily became his inseparable companion. His "Poems Referring to the Period of Childhood" contain some imperishable records of the influence she had on him. In "The Sparrow's Nest " he says: "She gave me eyes, she gave me ears: In "To a Butterfly " he thus contrasts her gentleness with his own impetuosity: The power of the lovely scenery in which he grew up was also at work before long upon his fiery temper. Long afterward he wrote: 99.66 His earliest school days were profitable, because his teacher, an old dame of Penrith, had never heard of modern pedagogy, and hence thought it no crime to train the memory of her pupils by making them learn by rote. In her school he sat by a little girl named Mary Hutschison, of whom we shall hear more anon. At Hawkshead School, whither he was transferred in his ninth year, he was happy because he was left at liberty to read Fielding, " Don Quixote," Gil Blas," ," "Gulliver's Travels," and "The Tale of a Tub." The first verses that he ever wrote were a task imposed by his master here. The subject was "The Summer Vacation," and of his own accord he added others on Return to School." They were almost as bad as such compositions usually are, but nevertheless in 1785 he was called upon to celebrate in verse the second centenary of the founding of the school, and responded with an imitation of Pope, which, having all of Pope's faults and none of his merits, was much admired and praised. Like many other boys he found more sympathy and inspiration in the masters of this humble school than later among his university professors; of one of them at least, whom he calls Matthew, he has left some verses which any teacher might be proud to have inspired. Yet Wordsworth was a perfectly normal boy. It was his habit to walk five miles around the Lake of Esthwaite before school hours; in the winter evenings he and his comrades all shod with steel hissed along the polished ice in games confederate; and on holidays fishing and hunting were his games. He wrote "Nothing at that time So welcome, no temptation half so dear, As that which urged me to a daring feat: Deep pools, tall trees, black chasms, and dizzy crags, And tottering towers-I loved to stand and read Their looks.' From Esthwaite he was transplanted in October, 1787, to St. John's College, Cambridge. The flatness of the Cambridge fens and the severity of the Cambridge discipline were in marked contrast to the hilly lake country and the freedom which he had left. Though inferior in scholastic attainments to most of his fellow students, he was already superior in spiritual growth to many of his instructors. His residence at Cambridge was therefore not as profitable as it should have been. Though he found welcome companionship among his fellow students, sauntered, played, and rioted with them, read lazily in trivial books, galloped through the country in blind zeal of senseless horsemanship, and felt the inspiration that comes to all who dwell in that garden of great intellects where grew Newton, Spenser, and Milton-the glory of lecture and examination was little sought by him and little won. He felt that he was not for that hour or for that place. And, when his first long vacation came, he escaped with a feeling akin to exultation back to his native hills. There he sauntered like a river murmuring and talking to itself. There perfect joy of heart returned to him like a returning spring. There he exclaimed: "When from our better selves we have too long And there, finally, his purpose in life was definitely revealed to him and he was happy. "To the brim," he wrote afterwards, "My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows In thankful blessedness, which yet survives." To him the joy of this moment seemed another morn risen on midnoon. He went back to Cambridge possessed with the idea that he might leave behind him some monument which pure hearts should reverence. There he plunged into the study of geometry, finding in its abstractions a corrective for the imaginative power of poetry. When summer came again, he gladly exchanged what he called the luxurious indolence of college life for tramps about England, in which he made quest for works of art and scenes renowned for beauty. In his third long vacation, with a friend named Jones, in hardy slight of college studies and their set rewards, he made a pedestrian tour of fourteen weeks to the Alps. The French Revolution had just begun. They landed at Calais on the very day when the king took the oath of fidelity to the new constitution. Everywhere as they journeyed south they found benevolence and blessedness spread like a fragrance, when spring has left no corner of the land untouched. From hill to vale they dropped; from vale to hill mounted; from province on to province swept; beheld Mont Blanc; and crossed the Simplon Pass into Italy. To Wordsworth the immeasurable height of woods decaying, never to be decayed, the stationary blasts of waterfalls, the thwarting winds, the torrents shooting from the clear blue sky, tumult and peace, the darkness and the light-were all like workings of one mind. In Italy he was impressed with the garden plots of Indian corn tended by dark-eyed maids. The travellers left the Swiss rejoicing in the emancipation of France, crossed the Brabant armies on the fret for battle in the cause of liberty, and went back to Cambridge, where in January, 1791, Wordsworth took his degree of Bachelor of Arts. After graduation, disregarding the wish of his guardians that he should take Holy Orders, he loafed for four months in London, which had had for him all of the wonder and obscure delight of golden cities ten months' journey deep among Tartarian wilds. His illusions were soon dispelled. He heard Burke speak; attended religious services conducted by a comely bachelor, fresh from a toilette of two hours, who stole his ideas from Ossian; heard for the first time a woman swear; beheld one of those parliaments of monsters which we in America call a dime museum; and half despised yet understood it all. Then, after a short pedestrian tour in Wales, he returned alone in November, 1791, to France. |