Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/711

WORDSWOKTH 669 native hills, was the conclusion of a long poem written while he was still at school. And, undistinguished as he was at Cambridge in the contest for academic honours, the Eveniny Walk, his first publication, was written during his vacations. 1 lie published it in 1793, to show, as he said, that he could do something, although he had not distinguished himself in university work. It is significant of his persistency of purpose that in this poem, as well as in the Descriptive Sketches founded on his tour abroad during his last vacation, he is seen to be steadily fulfill ing his resolution to supply defects in the minute descrip tion of nature. There are touches here and there of the bent of imagination that became dominant in him soon afterwards, notably in the moral aspiration that accom panies his Remembrance, of Collins on the Thames : " O glide, fair stream! for ever so Thy quiet soul on all bestowing, Till all our minds for ever flow As thy deep waters now are flowing. " But in the main this first publication represents the poet in the stage described in the twelfth book of The Prelude : " Bent overmuch on superficial things, Pampering myself with meagre novelties Of colour and proportion ; to the moods Of time and season, to the moral power, The affections, and the spirit of the place Insensible." Nature was little more than a picture-gallery to him ; the pleasures of the eye had all but absolute dominion ; and he " Roamed from hill to hill, from rock to rock, Still craving combinations of new forms, New pleasures, wider empire for the sight, Proud of her own endowments, and rejoiced To lay the inner faculties asleep." But, though he had not yet found his distinctive aim as a poet, he was inwardly bent, all the time that his relatives saw in him only a wayward and unpromising aversion to work in any regular line, upon poetry as " his office upon earth." In this determination he was strengthened by his sister Dorothy, who with rare devotion consecrated her life henceforward to his service. A timely legacy enabled them to carry their purpose into effect. A friend of his, whom he had nursed in a last illness, Eaisley Calvert, son of the steward of the duke of Norfolk, who had large estates in Cumberland, died early in 1795, leaving him a legacy of 900. And here it may be well to notice how opportunely, as De Quincey half-ruefully remarked, money always fell in to Wordsworth, enabling him to pursue his poetic career without distraction. Cal vert s bequest came to him when he was on the point of concluding an engage ment as a journalist in London. On it and other small resources he and his sister, thanks to her frugal manage ment, contrived to live for nearly eight years. By the end of that time Lord Lonsdale, who owed Wordsworth s father a large sum for professional services, and had steadily refused to pay it, died, and his successor paid the debt with interest. His wife, Mary Hutchinson, whom he married in 1802, brought him some fortune; and in 1813, when in spite of his plain living his family began to press upon his income, he was appointed stamp-dis tributor for Westmorland, with an income of j500, after wards nearly doubled by the increase of his district. By this succession of timely godsends, Wordsworth, though 1 In The Prelude, book iv. , lie speaks of himself during his first vacation as " harassed with the toil of verse, much pains and little progress." To the same time belongs an incident recorded later in the same book, when he was returning in early morning from a dance " My heart was full : I made no vows, but vows Were then made for me ; bond unknown to me Was given, that I should be, else simiinfj greatly, A dedicated sjiiiit." he did not escape some periods of sharp anxiety, was saved from the necessity of turning aside from his vocation. To return, however, to the course of his life from the time when he resolved to labour with all his powers in the office of poet. The first two years, during which he lived with his self-sacrificing sister at Racedown, in Dorset, were spent in half-hearted and very imperfectly successful experiments, satires in imitation of Juvenal, the tragedy of The Borderers, 1 and a poem in the Spenserian stanza, the poem now entitled Guilt and, tiorroiv. How much longer this time of doubtful self-distrustful endeavour might have continued is a subject for curious speculation; an end was put to it by a fortunate incident, a visit from Coleridge, who had read his first publication, and seen in it, what none of the public critics had discerned, the advent of "an original poetic genius." It would be impossible to exaggerate the importance for Wordsworth of the arrival of this enthusiastic Columbus. Under his sister s genial influence 3 he was groping his way doubtfully out of the labyrinth of poetic conventions, beginning to see a new pathos and sublimity in human life, but not yet con vinced except by fits and starts of the Tightness of his own vision. Stubborn and independent as Wordsworth was, he needed some friendly voice from the outer world to give him confidence in himself. Coleridge rendered him this indispensable service. He had begun to seek his themes in " Sorrow, that is not sorrow, but delight ; And miserable love, that is not pain To hear of, for the glory that redounds Therefrom to human kind, and what we are." He read to his visitor one of these experiments, the story of the ruined cottage, afterwards introduced into the first book of The Excursion* Coleridge, who had already seen original poetic genius in the poems published before, was enthusiastic in his praise of them as having "a character, by books not hitherto reflected," and his praise gave new heart and hope to the poet hitherto hesitating and un certain. June 1797 was the date of this memorable visit. So pleasant was the companionship on both sides that, when Coleridge returned to Nether Stowey in Somerset, Words worth at his instance changed his quarters to Alfoxden, within a mile and a half of Coleridge s temporary resi dence, and the two poets lived in almost daily intercourse for the next twelve months. During that period Words worth s powers rapidly expanded and matured ; ideas that had been gathering in his mind for years, and lying there in dim confusion, felt the stir of a new life, and ranged themselves in clearer shapes under the fresh quickening breath of Coleridge s swift and discursive 2 Not published till 1842. For the history of this tragedy see Memoirs, vol. i. p. 113; for a sound, if severe, criticism of it, Mr Swinburne s Miscellanies, p. 118. And yet it w-as of the blank verse of The Borderers that Coleridge spoke when he wrote to Cottle that "he felt a little man by the side of his friend." 3 The character of Dorothy Wordsworth is shown in the extracts from her Journal printed in the Memoirs, and in her Recollections of a Tour in Scotland, edited by the late Principal Shairp, 1874. The poet s acknowledgments of obligation to her were not mere grateful words thrown out at random " She gave me eyes, she gave me ears, And humble cares, and delicate fears; A heart, the fountain of sweet tears, And love, and faith, and joy." The fourteenth book of The- Prelude especially enables us to under stand the full meaning of this eulogiuni, every word of which has been carefully weighed. This book contains a complete picture of the state of mind in which Coleridge found the poet, when he "seemed to gain clear sight of a new world a world, too, that was fit to be transmitted and made visible to other eyes." 4 The version read to Coleridge, however, must have been in Spen serian stanzas, if Coleriilge was right in his recollection that it was in the same metre with The, Female Vagrant, the original title of Guilt

and Sorrow.