Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/710

668 O K VV O II "great pomp"; and in 1234 Henry III. held the Whitsuntide festival in the city. Queen Elizabeth rested there in one of her progresses; in 1687 James II. came, and touched for the king s evil? He attended mass in the Catholic chapel; but the mayor and the corporation, though accompanying him to the chapel door, firmly and patriotically declined to enter. For the part this city took in the great civil war see p. 666. WORCESTER, a city and the county seat of Worcester county, Massachusetts, United States, is situated in a region of Glacial hills, lakes, and ponds, which form varied and pleasing landscapes, 39 miles west of Boston. Besides the closely-built portion, the city includes a large suburban district, which contains fourteen villages of various sizes. The closely-built portion is very irregularly laid out, con forming in some degree to the slope of the ground. There are 197 miles of streets, very little of which is paved. The public parks have an aggregate area of 35 acres. The population in 1885 was 68,389 (20,182, or 29-51 per cent. of foreign birth). The proportion of coloured people was very small. The manufacturing industries are very large and varied; prominent among them are the manufactures of iron and steel, foundry and machine shop products and tools, and second to these the manufacture of boots and shoes. The settlement of Worcester began in 1713. Earlier attempts had been made, but the incursions of Indians had frustrated them. It was incorporated as a town in 1722, but made very slow progress in growth until the completion of the Boston and Worcester (now Boston and Albany) Railroad in 1835. Since that date, with the extension of its railroad connexions, it has developed rapidly. In 1848 it received a city charter, and at present it is the third city of the State in population and wealth. The population, which in 1765 was 1478 and in 1790 was 2095, rose to 4173 in 1830, 7497 in 1840, 17,049 in 1850, 41,105 in 1870, and 58,291 in 1880. WORCESTER, FLORENCE OF. See vol. ix. p. 337. WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM (1770-1850), the poet, was born at Cockermouth, on the Derwent, in Cumber land, on the 7th of April 1770. His parentage offers a curious parallel to Scott s : he was the son of an attorney, law-agent to the earl of Lonsdale, a prosperous man in his profession, descended from an old Yorkshire family of landed gentry. On the mother s side also Wordsworth was connected with the middle territorial class : his mother, Anne Cookson, was the daughter of a well-to-do mercer in Penrith, but her mother was a Crackanthorpe, whose ancestors had been lords of the manor of New- biggin, near Penrith, from the time of Edward III. He was thus, as Scott put it in his own case, come of "gentle" kin, and like Scott he was proud of it, and dictated the fact in his short fragment of prose auto biography. The country squires and farmers whose blood flowed in Wordsworth s veins were not far enough above local life to be out of sympathy with it, and the poet s interest in the common scenes and common folk of the North country hills and dales had a traceable hereditary bias. Though his parents were of sturdy stock, both died prematurely, his mother when he was five years old, his father when he was thirteen, the ultimate cause of death in his mother s case being exposure to cold in "a best bedroom " in London, in his father s exposure on a Cumberland hill, where he had been befogged and lost his way. At the age of eight Wordsworth was sent to school at Hawkshead, in the Esthwaite valley in Lanca shire. His father died while he was there, and at the age of seventeen he was sent by his uncle to St John s College, Cambridge. He did not distinguish himself in the studies of the university, and for some time after taking his degree of B.A., which he did in January 1791, he showed what seemed to his relatives a most perverse reluctance to adopt any regular profession. His mother had noted his "stiff, moody, and violent temper" in childhood, and it seemed as if this family judgment was to be confirmed in his manhood. After taking his degree, he was pressed to take holy orders, but would not ; he had no taste for the law ; he idled a few months aimlessly in London, a few months more with a Welsh college friend, with whom he had made a pedestrian tour in France and Switzerland during his last Cambridge vacation ; then in the November of 1791 he crossed to France, ostensibly to learn the language, made the acquaintance of revolu tionaries, sympathized with them vehemently, and was within an ace of throwing in his lot with the Brissotins to give them the steady direction that they needed. When it came to this, his relatives cut off his supplies, and he was obliged to return to London towards the close of 1792. But still he resisted all pressure to enter any of the regular professions, published An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches in 1793, and in 1794, still moving about to all appearance in stubborn aimlessness among his friends and relatives, had no more rational purpose of livelihood than drawing up the prospectus of a periodical of strictly republican principles to be called " The Phil anthropist." At this stage, at the age of twenty-four, Wordsworth seemed to his friends a very hopeless and impracticable young man. But all the time from his boyhood upwards a great purpose had been growing and maturing in his mind. The Prelude expounds in lofty impassioned strain, treat ing of simple facts in diction that would be " poetic " beyond the worst extravagances of the panegyrical school but for the genuine emotion that inspires its amplitude of phrase, how his sensibility for nature was "augmented and sustained," and how it never, except for a brief interval, ceased to be "creative" in the special sense of his subsequent theory. But it is with his feelings towards nature that The Prelude mainly deals ; it says little re garding the history of his ambition to express those feelings in verse. It is the autobiography, not of the poet of nature, but of the worshipper and priest. The salient incidents in the history of the poet he communi cated in prose notes and in familiar discourses. And it appears that, while he was still a schoolboy of fourteen, the delight that he took in contemplating and moralizing from nature was mingled with the enthusiasm of a poet s ambition and joy in the discovery of a fresh imperfectly worked field. Commenting on the couplet in the Evening Walk " And, fronting the bright west, yon oak entwines Its darkening boughs and leaves in stronger lines " he said : " This is feebly and imperfect!} exprest ; but I recollect distinctly the very spot where this first struck me. It was on the way between Hawkshead and Ambleside, and gave me extreme pleasure. The moment was important in my poetical history; for I date from it my consciousness of the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country, so far as I was acquainted with them ; and 1 made a resolution to snp2ny in some degree the deficiency. I could not at that time have been above fourteen years of age." About the same time he wrote, as a school task at Hawkshead, verses that show considerable acquaintance with the poets of his own country at least, as well as some previous practice in the art of verse-making. 1 The fragment that stands at the beginning of his collected works, recording a resolution to end his life among his 1 Memoirs of William Wordsicorth. by Canon Wordsworth, vol. i. pp. 10 ; 11. According to his own statement in the memoranda dic tated to his biographer, it was the success of this exercise that "put it into his head to compose verses from the impulse of his own mind." The resolution to supply the deficiencies of poetry in the exact de scription of natural appearances was probably formed while he was in this state of boyish ecstasy at the accidental revelation of his own powers. The date of his beginnings as a poet is confirmed by the lines in The Idiot Roy, written in 1798 " T to the Muses liavc been bound

These fourteen years by strong indentures."