MEMOIR.

THE main work of Wordsworth in literature was twofold: first, he carried into the nineteenth century, and at the same time he purified and elevated, the revolutionary ideas and feelings of the eighteenth century which belong to what has been called the "return to nature. He returned to nature in his sense of the importance of the relations between the human spirit and the material universe as apprehended by the imagination; he returned to nature in his recognition of the dignity of plain manhood and the elementary passions of humanity, and in his feeling for the brotherhood of men; he returned to nature in the sincerity and simplicity of his poetic diction. Secondly, Wordsworth, more perhaps than any other writer, had a part in the reaction against the mechanical view of the universe common in the second half of the eighteenth century; he felt, and made others feel, that the "nature with which we communicate and of which-in a certain sense-we are a part is spiritual. He belongs at once to the revolutionary movement and to what has been termed the transcendental movement. And yet, it should be added to make our view of Wordsworth

complete, he reverences the past. He reverences the past, because he reverences humanity, and perceives the continuity of the life of man. He is democratic, and at the same time conservative; he seeks for freedom by a return to nature, and at the same time he is aware that order and obedience are natural, and form a part of the freedom to which we can attain. His function in our century of spiritual trouble has been that of a healer and reconciler; and he is such by being also an impulse and an inspiration. He at once calms and quickens. And that he effects this for those who duly receive his influence is owing to the fact that he himself attained within himself to a spiritual harmony, and that in him powers which in most men are mutually opposed or work jarringly together the sense and the spirit, passion and thought, receptive patience and creative energy, quietude and rapture, the reason and the imagination-co-operated so as to form an inseparable unity. The poet Sotheby noticed to Coleridge as Wordsworth's central characteristic a "homogeneity of character;" and Coleridge speaks of him as "the only man who has effected a complete and constant synthesis of thought and feeling, and combined them in poetic form with the music of pleasurable passion and with Imagination." It is indeed this complex harmony of being which distinguishes Wordsworth from all his poetical contemporaries.

His life extended over thirty years of the last, and a full half of the present, century; he was born on April 7th, 1770, and died on April 23rd, 1850. The Wordsworth family can be traced back in Yorkshire to the fourteenth

century. The poet's grandfather, who was appointed superintendent of the Lowther estates, was the first of the name to settle in Westmoreland. His son, John, did business as an attorney at Cockermouth, in Cumberland, and in 1766, at the age of twenty-five, married Anne Cookson, daughter of a Penrith mercer. It was in a house at Cockermouth, still standing, that William, their second child, was born. The river Derwent ran below the terrace-walk at the end of the garden, "and from his fords. and shallows sent a voice" "-so Wordsworth writes in "The Prelude " "that flowed along my dreams." His elder brother, Richard, who became a solicitor, fills a small place in the poet's story; Dorothy, his only sister, born on Christmas day 1771, was the companion of his life and the inspirer of some of his most exquisite shorter pieces. The other children of his parents were John, who entered the merchant service and before his early death had risen high in the naval profession; and Christopher, whose life was that of a scholar, and who from 1820 until his death in 1846 held the Mastership of Trinity College, Cambridge. Seriousness of disposition and dignity of character are a portion of Wordsworth's inheritance from the father's side. Perhaps his sensitiveness and excitability-characteristics also of his sistercame from the Cooksons, or his maternal grandmother's family, the Crackenthorpes.

His early days were passed partly at Cockermouth and partly with his mother's parents at Penrith. He tells us that as a boy he was of a stiff, moody and violent temper. His mother declared that of her five children William was the only one about whose future life she was

anxious. She died when he was eight years old

"She who was the heart And hinge of all our learnings and our loves,"

and her husband never recovered his former cheerfulness. Wordsworth remembered her pinning a nosegay to his breast, when, before Easter, he went to church to repeat the catechism (see Ecclesiastical Sonnets," Part iii. 22). In the year of her death, 1778, he was sent to the grammar-school at Hawkshead, hard by Esthwaite Lake, where under a succession of masters—one of these, William Taylor, being the original of his "Matthew "— he remained until near his fourteenth birthday. It was a happy time of healthful energy; he boarded in the cottage of a motherly dame, Anne Tyson; lived with plain frugality; took part with vigour in all boyish sports and adventures on lake and hill; and while thus possessed of a strong and almost animal joy in the presence of nature, he felt ever and anon deeper and purer impulses both of beauty and of fear "gleams like the flashing of a shield".

"Hallowed and pure motions of the sense
Which seem, in their simplicity, to own
An intellectual charm.

His school-tasks were not neglected, and he read also freely for his own enjoyment-among other books the novels of Fielding, Don Quixote," "Gil Blas," "Gulliver," the "Tale of a Tub." The first verses which he wrote were an exercise, "The Summer Vacation," imposed by his master; of his own accord he wrote others upon "Return to School." Some Popelike couplets written for the bicentenary of