FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

| Sir Thomas N. Talfourd. | James Sheridan Knowles.

HISTORIANS AND BIOGRAPHERS.

CHAPTER XVII.

FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY:

POETS.

1. William Wordsworth. 2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge.-3. Robert Southey.-4. Sir Walter Scott.-5. George Crabbe. — 6. Samuel Rogers.-7. Thomas Campbell.-8. Walter Savage Landor.-9. Thomas Moore.-10. Lord Byron.-11. Percy Bysshe Shelley.-12. John Keats.-13. Robert Bloomfield; William L. Bowles; Mary Tighe; James Montgomery; Robert Montgomery; Henry Kirke White; Reginald Heber; Felicia Hemans; James Hogg; T. L. Beddoes; John Keble; Ebenezer Elliott; Hartley Coleridge; Arthur Henry Hallam; Letitia Elizabeth Landon.

1. William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth, on the 7th of April, 1770, second son of John Wordsworth, attorney and law-agent to Sir James Lowther, afterwards Earl of Lonsdale. From 1770 to 1778, when his mother died of consumption, Wordsworth spent his infancy and early boyhood at Cockermouth, and sometimes with his mother's parents at Penrith. He was the only one of her five children about whom she was anxious; for he was, he says, of a stiff, moody, violent temper. He was bold in outdoor sports; and, free to read what he pleased, read Fielding through in his boyhood, "Don Quixote," "Gil Blas," "Gulliver's Travels," and the "Tale of a Tub." After home teaching at a dame school, and by a Rev. Mr. Gilbanks, Wordsworth was sent, in 1778, to Hawkshead School, in the Vale of Esthwaite, in Lancashire. father died in 1783, and bequeathed only a considerable debt from his employer, paid to his children long afterwards, when Lord Lonsdale died. In October, 1787, Wordsworth's uncles sent him to Cambridge, where the university life of that time fell below his young ideal. He spent his first summer vacation, 1788, in the old cottage at Esthwaite with Dame Tyson; his second vacation he spent with his uncles at Penrith, who were educating him, and who designed him for the church. But that

His

was the year when the Fall of the Bastile resounded through Europe, and young hearts leaped with enthusiastic hope. It was with young Wordsworth as with his Solitary in "The Excursion." Men had been questioning the outer and the inner life:

"The intellectual power, through words and things,
Went sounding on, a dim and perilous way,"

and men were roused from that abstraction:

"For lo! the dread Bastile,

With all the chambers in its horrid towers,
Fell to the ground; by violence overthrown
Of indignation, and with shouts that drowned
The crash it made in falling! From the wreck
A golden palace rose, or seemed to rise,
The appointed seat of equitable law
And mild paternal sway. The potent shock
I felt the transformation I perceived,
As marvellously seized as in that moment
When, from the blind mist issuing, I beheld
Glory, beyond all glory ever seen,
Confusion infinite of heaven and earth,
Dazzling the soul. Meanwhile, prophetic harps
In every grove were ringing' War shall cease;
Did ye not hear that conquest is abjured?

Bring garlands, bring forth choicest flowers, to deck
The tree of Liberty.' My heart rebounded;

My melancholy voice the chorus joined —
'Be joyful all ye nations; in all lands,

Ye that are capable of joy be glad!

Henceforth, whate'er is wanting to yourselves

In others ye shall promptly find; and all,

Enriched by mutual and reflected wealth,

Shall with one heart honor their common kind.'"

His next holiday Wordsworth took in France, with his friend Robert Jones, each carrying a stick, his luggage in a handkerchief, and twenty pounds in his pocket. They landed at Calais on the eve of the fête of the Federation, July 14, anniversary of the capture of the Bastile, when the king was to swear fidelity to the Constitution. All that he saw raised Wordsworth's enthusiasm as they travelled through France to the Alps:

66 a glorious time,

A happy time, that was; triumphant looks
Were then the common language of all eyes;
As if awaked from sleep, the nations hailed
Their great expectancy."

Wordsworth came home; graduated as B.A. in 1791; visited his friend Jones in the Vale of Clwydd, and made an excursion in North Wales. In the autumn he was in Paris again; went thence to Orleans, to learn French where there were fewer English. At Orleans, where he formed intimate friendship with the Republican general Beaupuis, at Blois, and at Paris, where he arrived a month after the September massacres, he spent thirteen months. In events terrible to him he saw the excesses of re-action, but he sympathized so strongly with the Brissotins that he would have made common cause with them, and perhaps have perished, if he had not been compelled to return to London before the execution of the king, January 21, 1793. Like other young men of the day, he was bitterly indignant at the alliance of his country with despotic powers to put down the Revolution. That war of the Revolution, which began in 1793, and ended at the Peace of Amiens in 1802, was in his eyes an unholy war, and laid the foundations of the patriotic war against Napoleon which followed, from 1803, to the battle of Waterloo, on the 18th of June, 1815. In 1793, after his return from France, Wordsworth published “Descriptive Sketches during a Pedestrian Tour on the Italian, Swiss, and Savoyard Alps;" also, "An Evening Walk, an Epistle in Verse." In May, 1794, he was planning a literary and political miscellany, called "The Philanthropist," which was to be Republican, not Revolutionary. In November, he was looking for employment on an Opposition newspaper, that he might pour out his heart against the war. But presently he heard of the sickness of a young friend at Penrith, Raisley Calvert, like himself the son of a law-agent. Wordsworth went to Penrith and nursed him. Calvert was dying, and had nine hundred pounds to leave, a sum that would make Wordsworth master of his fortunes. He died in January, 1795, and left Wordsworth his money. Then Wordsworth resolved, by frugal living, to secure full independence, and to be a poet.

In the autumn he and his sister Dorothy settled at Racedown, near Crewkerne, a retired place with a post once a week. And thus Wordsworth began his career at the time when that of Burns was ending. He was newly settled with his sister at Racedown when he heard of the death of Burns. He was at work on his tragedy of "The Borderers" (first published in 1842). At Racedown, in June, 1797, Coleridge, who had read the Descriptive Sketches," looked in upon Wordsworth and his sister. Each young poet felt the genius of the other, and there was soon a warm friendship between them. Soon the Wordsworths removed to Alfoxden in order to be near Coleridge, who then lived at Nether Stowey. The two poets then began to plan the volume of "Lyrical Ballads," first published in September, 1798. It included the "Ancient Mariner," with Wordsworth's "We are Seven," the " Idiot Boy," etc., written with distinct sense of a principle that deliberately condemned and set aside the poetic "diction" of the eighteenth century. As much pains was taken by Wordsworth to avoid the diction as other men take to produce it. The poet, he argued, thinks and feels in the spirit of human passions, and differs from others in a greater promptness to think and feel without immediate external excitement, and a greater power in expressing such thoughts and feelings as are produced in him in that manHis painting of men and nature must show his perception of deep truths; but to do that fitly, it must be true itself to the life of his fellow-men in every imagined incident, and speak the common language. A selection, he said, of the language really spoken by man, wherever it is made with taste and feeling, will itself form a distinction far greater than would at first be imagined, and will entirely separate the composition from the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life. For if the poet's subject be judiciously chosen, it will naturally, and upon fit occasion, lead him to passions, the language of which, if selected truly and judiciously, must necessarily be dignified and variegated, and alive with metaphors and figures. In their common work, Coleridge was to give the sense of reality to visions of the fancy, Wordsworth to make the soul speak from the common things of life. The first edition of the "Lyrical Ballads" was

ner.