favourite and last abode. Here he was surrounded by a small circle of distinguished friends-Southey, De Quincey, Coleridge, and Dr. Arnold of Rugby School. France, Scot etc. Wordsworth's favourite, indeed his only luxury was Tours in travelling; and his tours almost always bore poetic fruit. land, Wales, In August 1802, shortly before his marriage, he, with his sister, paid a short visit to France; a journey which gave birth to two of his noblest sonnets, Westminster Bridge, and "It is a beauteous evening," composed on the Calais sands. During a tour in Scotland (August 1803), made in company with Coleridge, Wordsworth and his sister were greatly struck with two Highland girls whom they met on the shore of Loch Lomond. "One of them," Miss Wordsworth writes, "was exceedingly beautiful. They answered us so sweetly that we were quite delighted, at the same time that they stared at us with an innocent look of wonder. I think I never heard the English language sound more sweetly than from the elder of these girls, . . . her face flushed with the rain; her pronunciation clear and distinct, yet slow, as if like a foreign speech." This encounter Wordsworth immortalised in his lines To a Highland Girl, which originated the opening of the poem to his own wife, "She was a phantom of delight." This tour also gave rise to At the Grave of Burns, Stepping Westward, The Solitary Reaper, and Rob Roy's Grave. A second tour in Scotland in 1814, produced The Brownie's Cell, and a few other pieces of no great note. Other tours, on the Continent, in North Wales, and in Ireland, followed. In the summer of 1807 Wordsworth visited, for the first time, the beautiful Revival of classical studies; Laodamia, and other poems. Latter days. country that surrounds Bolton Priory, in Yorkshire-a visit of which the striking poem, The White Doe of Rylstone, was the outcome. In 1831 he paid, with his daughter, a visit to Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford before the departure of the latter for Italy. Yarrow Revisited, and the touching sonnet, "A trouble not of clouds nor weeping rain," are memorials of that excursion. Between 1814 and 1816 Wordsworth's thoughts were directed into a fresh channel, while superintending his eldest son John's preparation for the University. For this purpose he read again with him some of the standard Latin poets; and was deeply influenced by the magic of Vergil's verse. Laodamia and its companion poem Dion (1816) form stately memorials of this classical renaissance in Wordsworth's poetic career. The exquisite poem Composed upon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendour and Beauty; a series of sonnets on the River Duddon (1820); the sonnet on King's College Chapel; To the Skylark, A Morning Exercise, and Scorn not the Sonnet; The Primrose of the Rock, a didactic poem on immortality; and two Evening Voluntaries, Calm is the Fragrant Air and By the Seashore, with other poems and sonnets chiefly didactic, bring us to the close of Wordsworth's poetical career. The death by shipwreck of his deeply loved and venerated brother John (1805), and, later on, the serious illness of his sister Dorothy (1832); the death of his bosom friend Coleridge (1834), and of his wife's sister, Sarah Hutchinson, for many years an inmate of Wordsworth's household; the illness and subsequent death in 1847 of his daughter Dora, who had married a Mr. Quillinan, threw a shadow over the poet's later years, though these sorrows were met with dignified fortitude and deepening religious resignation. On the other hand, these years were brightened by the evergrowing reverence with which the public had begun to cherish a name which for so long had been the butt of reviewers' ridicule and the object of contemptuous neglect. In the summer of 1839 Keble, the author of The Christian Year, and Professor of Poetry in the University, welcomed him, amidst a scene of unprecedented enthusiasm, to receive from the University of Oxford the honorary degree of Doctor of Common Law. In October 1842 Sir Robert Peel conferred upon him an annuity of £300 per annum from the Civil List in recognition of his distinguished literary merit. In March 1843, upon the death of Southey, he accepted with some reluctance the office of Poet Laureate. He closed a long and, on the whole, a happy life at Death. Rydal Mount, April 23, 1850, and was buried in Grasmere churchyard. The most remarkable feature of Wordsworth's Wordsworth's CHARACTER. tivity com character was its singular combination of the man's (a) Austerity lofty and austere self-control, an habitual consecration of and suscepall the energies to the highest moral and spiritual aims, bined. with the responsive, self-forgetful susceptivity of the child. His habits were almost ascetic in their simplicity. Like Milton, the revered subject of his sonnet, London, 1802, he lived through youth and manhood a life of flawless purity; like Milton, too, he lived in stirring times, and showed a capacity for taking a prominent part in public affairs; like Milton, lastly, he spent his whole life with an abiding sense that heaven had called him to (b) Sympathy with woman. hood and childhood. write something which should be one of humanity's landmarks; so that his whole-hearted self-dedication to this great work compelled him to live, like his prototype, hour by hour and day by day, "As ever in the great Taskmaster's eye." But he was deservedly happier and morally greater than Milton in his relations with womanhood and childhood. He had nothing of that half-contemptuous assumption of woman's inferiority which marks the poet of Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes. Milton turned his daughters into literary drudges; Wordsworth lived on terms of frank intellectual equality with his sister and his wife, and habitually sought their sympathetic criticism of his writings. He was forward to own that one of the brightest gems of his poetry (The Daffodils, 21, 22) was contributed by his wife; and that he owed some of his most characteristic gifts to his sister's early influence: "She gave me eyes, she gave me ears; And humble cares, and delicate fears; The depth of his love as a father has been already noted; while his sympathy with childhood is beautifully expressed in such well-known poems as We are Seven, Lucy Gray, and Alice Fell. And perhaps an even stronger proof of that sympathy was his inclusion among his own poems of two beautiful lyrics by his sister Dorothy, entitled Address to a Child and The Mother's Return. Of Wordsworth's own deep-seated childlikeness of soul, that divine weakness which is the secret of genius, perhaps the best illustration is to be found in The Poet's law and Lastly, a prominent feature of Wordsworth's character (c) His love of was his intense constitutional love of Order, Custom, and custom. Law. This may seem strange in one who was at one time so ardent an advocate of the French Revolution. Plainly it was rooted in his sense of the abiding calm of Nature, as seen in the Cumbrian lakes and mountains. That there was an element of fierce revolt latent in him is shown by the incident of his one attempt at suicide; and doubtless that element co-operated with his enthusiasm for the dignity of Man as Man, in his brief fever-fit of Revolutionary zeal. But it is clear that the subsequent history of France proved for him an impressive and neverto-be-forgotten object lesson on the moral worthlessness of lawless revolt. In the period of depression that followed, he seems to have anchored his soul in the conception of God as Eternal Law. And later, when the French Revolution merged itself in the military despotism of Napoleon, the whole force of his inborn patriotism fired |