In an historical survey such as the present, it is necessary to insist on the fact that although Coleridge survived until 1834, and Wordsworth until 1850, the work which produced the revolution in poetic art was done before the close of 1800. It was done, so far as we can see, spontaneously. But in that year the Wordsworths and their friend proceeded to Germany, for the stated purpose of acquainting themselves with what the Teutonic world was achieving in literature. In Hamburg they visited the aged Klopstock, but felt themselves far more cordially drawn towards the work of Bürger and Schiller, in whom they recognised poets of nature, who, like themselves, were fighting the monsters of an old, outworn classicism. Wordsworth was but cautiously interested; he had just spoken scornfully of "sickly and stupid German tragedies." Coleridge, on the other hand, was intoxicated with enthusiasm, and plunged into a detailed study of the history, language, and philosophy of Germany. Bürger, whose Lenore (1774) had started European romanticism, was now dead; but Goethe and Schiller were at the height of their genius. The lastmentioned had just produced his Wallenstein, and Coleridge translated or

S. T. Coleridge

From a Drawing by J. Kayser in the possession of E. H. Coleridge, Esq.

paraphrased it in two parts; these form one of the very few versions from any one language into another which may plausibly be held to excel the original. In the younger men, with whom he should have been in more complete harmony-in Tieck, in the young, yet dying Novalis, in the Schlegels Coleridge at this time took but little interest. The fact is that, tempting as was to himself and Wordsworth then, and to us now, the idea of linking the German to the English revival, it was not very easy to contrive. The movements were parallel, not correlated; the wind of revolt, passing over European poetry, struck Scandinavia and Germany first, then England, then Italy and France, but each in a manner which forced it to be independent of the rest.

For the next fifteen years poetry may be said to have been stationary in England. It was not, for that reason, sluggish or unprolific; on the contrary, it was extremely active. But its activity took the form of the gradual acceptance of the new romantic ideas, the slow expulsion of the old classic taste, and the multiplication of examples of what had once for all been supremely accomplished in the hollows of the Quantocks. The career of the founders of the school during these years of settlement and acceptation may be briefly given. At the very close of 1799 Wordsworth went back to his own Cumbrian county, and for the next half-century he resided, practically without intermission,

beside the little lakes which he has made so famousGrasmere and Rydal. Here, after marrying in 1802, he lived in great simplicity and dignity, gradually becoming the centre of a distinguished company of admirers. From 1799 to 1805 he was at work on the Prelude, a didactic poem in which he elaborated his system of natural religion; and he began at Grasmere to use the sonnet with a persistent mastery and with a freedom such as it had not known since the days of Milton. In 1814 the publication of the Excursion made a great sensation, at first not

wholly favourable, and gave to the service of Wordsworth some of the pleasures of martyrdom. In 1815 the poet collected his lyrical writings.

This date, 1814-15, therefore, is critical in the career of Wordsworth. It forced his admirers and detractors alike to consider what was the real nature of the innovation which he had introduced, and to what extreme it could be pushed. In 1815 he once more 'put forth his views on the art of verse in a brilliant prose essay, which may be regarded as his final, or at least maturest utterance on the subject. At this moment a change came over the aspect of his genius: he was now forty-five years of age, and the freshness of his voice, which had lasted so long, was beginning to fail. He had a brief Virgilian period, when he wrote Laodamia and Dion, and then the beautiful talent hardened into rhetoric and sing-song. Had Wordsworth passed away in 1815 instead of 1850, English literature had scarcely been the poorer. Of

Coleridge there is even less to be said. His career was a miserable tissue of irregularity, domestic discord, and fatal indulgence in opium. In 1812 he recast his old drama of Osorio as Remorse, a fine romantic tragedy on Jacobean lines. He was occasionally adding a few lines to the delicious pamphlet of poetry which at length found a publisher in 1817 as Sibylline Leaves. Yet even here, all that was really important had been composed before the end of the eighteenth century. Save for one or two pathetic and momentary revivals of lyric power, Coleridge died as a poet before he was thirty.

From

He

The name of ROBERT SOUTHEY has scarcely been mentioned yet, although it is customary to connect it indissolubly with those of his great friends. He was slightly younger than they, but more precocious, and as early as 1793 he somewhat dazzled them by the success of his Joan of Arc. that time forth until shortly before his death, in 1843, Southey never ceased to write. He was always closely identified in domestic relations with Wordsworth, whose neighbour he was in the Lakes for forty years, and with Coleridge, who was his brother-in-law. early accepted what we may call the dry bones of the romantic system, and he published a series of ambitious epics-Thalaba, Madoc, Kehama, Roderick-which he intended as contributions to the new poetry. His After the Portrait by Carruthers disciple and latest unflinching admirer, Sir Henry Taylor, has told us that Southey "took no pleasure in poetic passion"-a melancholy admission. We could have guessed as much from his voluminous and vigorous writing, from which imagination is conspicuously absent, though eloquence, vehemence, fluency, and even fancy are abundant. The best part of Southey was his full admiration of some aspects of good literature, and his courageous support of unpopular specimens of these. When Wordsworth was attacked, Southey said, in his authoritative way, "A greater poet than Wordsworth there never has been, nor ever will be." He supported the original romantic movement by his praise, his weighty personality, the popular character of his contributions. But he added nothing to it; he could not do so, since, able and effective man of letters as he was, Southey was not, in any intelligible sense, himself a poet.

M

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), the second son of John Wordsworth and Anne Cookson-Crackanthorp, his wife, was born at Cockermouth, in Cumberland, on the 7th of April 1770. His father, an attorney, was confidential agent to Sir James Lowther, afterwards Earl of Lonsdale. His mother, who died when he was eight, remarked that the only one of her five children about whose future life she was anxious was William, who was of "a stiff, moody, and violent temper." After a period of schooling at Cockermouth, Wordsworth lived from 1778 to 1783, when his father died, at Penrith, and went to school at Hawkshead. Mr. John Wordsworth had been crippled by the extraordinary tyranny of Lord Lonsdale, who had forced him to lend him his whole fortune-£5000-and who refused to repay it. The orphans were, however, brought up by their paternal uncles, who, in 1787, sent William to St. John's College, Cambridge. Here his intellectual nature developed to a degree which made him henceforth, as he said, "a dedicated spirit." In the Prelude long afterwards he describes a visit to the Continent which he paid in 1790, a vacation ramble in Switzerland being then so unhackneyed an event that he is justified in calling it "an unprecedented course." Wordsworth took his degree early in 1791, and left Cambridge without having selected a profession. He lived for some months, vaguely, in London, with no expressed purpose; in the following winter he crossed over to France, arriving in Paris when the Revolution, with which he entirely sympathised, was

Dove Cottage
From a Photograph

at its height. The year 1792 was spent at Orleans and at Blois, and after the massacres of September Wordsworth returned, full of Girondist enthusiasm, to Paris. He was prevented from taking an active part in French politics only by the ignominious but most happy circumstance that his uncles cut off his allowance. The execution of Louis XVI. was a tremendous shock to his moral nature, and his exultation over France was turned to miserable grief. Between William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy there had subsisted from infancy the tenderest bond of sympathy; she was keeping house at Penrith when William rejoined his family early in 1793. Already they had formed the design of living together alone in some cottage. Meanwhile, upon his return from France, two thin pamphlets of Wordsworth's verse had been published-The Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, which were in the old Popesque manner, and which attracted no attention. In 1793 and 1794, when Wordsworth was not with his family, he was with Raisley Calvert, a young man of great intelligence. Calvert now died and left his friend a legacy of £900, on which he and his sister just contrived to live until the new Lord Lonsdale redeemed his father's pledges. In this way Wordsworth was able to devote himself entirely to meditation and poetry. In 1795 he persuaded his sister to join him in a small house at Racedown, near Crewkerne, in Dorset, where at last, in his twenty-sixth year, his genius began to display its true bent. Here he wrote

EVENING

WALK.

An EPISTLE;

IN VERSE.

ADDRESSED TO A YOUNG LADY,

FROM THE

IA KE S

OF THE

the tragedy of The Borderers, and began, perhaps in 1796, The Excursion. Coleridge, who had met with An Evening Walk, was enthusiastically anxious to know its author, and a visit which he paid to the Wordsworths in June 1797 revealed to himself and to them their splendid vocation. In July the Wordsworths were allowed to rent, for a nominal sum, the fine manor-house of Alfoxden, at the northern foot of the Quantocks, where they were within a walk of Coleridge's cottage at Nether Stowey. Here the friends wrote that amazing collection, the Lyrical Ballads, which, in its first one-volume form, was published by Cottle in 1798. William and Dorothy spent the ensuing winter months at Goslar, in Germany, and here the former wrote some of his most exquisite lyrics. Here, too, he planned and began The Prelude, which remained unpublished until 1850. The Wordsworths returned to England in 1799, and after some hesitation settled at Townend, near Grasmere. He thus returned, at the age of thirty, to the scenes of his childhood, scenes which were to accompany him for the remainder of his life. His sailor brother, John, shared the cottage with William and Dorothy during the greater part of 1800: this brother it was "a deep distress hath humanised my soul"-who died so tragically within sight of shore five years afterwards. Up to this time Wordsworth had lived mainly on Calvert's bequest, which was now reaching its end. He would have been forced to seek for employment, but most happily, at the critical moment, in 1801, Lord Lonsdale recognised the claim. upon him, and returned the £5000 which his father had borrowed, with £3500 as full interest on the debt. On the interest of their shares of this money, together with a small annuity, William and Dorothy were now able to subsist, with strict frugality still, but without anxiety. In 1802 Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson, of Penrith, a companion of the most delicate and appreciative susceptibility-Dorothy, of course, remaining a member of the household. In the summer of 1803 the three travelled through Scotland-a tour commemorated in several of William's best poems, especially The Highland Girl. In this year they formed the acquaintance of Walter Scott and of the painter, Sir George Beaumont, of Coleorton, who bought a little estate at Applethwaite, which he presented to Wordsworth, but the poet did not take it up. The friendship with Beaumont, however, became one of the closest of his life. The war with France, culminating in the battle of Trafalgar, excited the patriotism of Wordsworth, who wrote his Happy Warrior in 1805 as a requiem over Nelson, and his prose Convention of Cintra in 1808 as a contribution to practical politics. In 1807 a valuable collection of his Poems appeared, containing much of what he had written since 1800. Four children were born to him at Townend, when, in 1808, he moved to a larger house at the other end of Grasmere, where his last child, William, was born. In 1811 the Wordsworths moved again to the parsonage of

NORTH 07 ENGLAND.

W.

WORDS WORTH,
Of ST. JOHN's, CAMBRIDGE.

B. A.

LONDON: PRINTED FOR J. JOHNSON, ST. PAUL'S CHURCH-YARD. 1793

Title-page of Wordsworth's

"Evening Walk," 1793