Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.
But to be young was very heaven,
down to his "wantoning in wild poesy" with Coleridge (1797), he has told his tale in "The Prelude" (1799-1805).
This extremely long poem in blank verse was regarded by Wordsworth as "subsidiary to the preparation" for "the construction of a literary work that should live". After thus "investigating the origin and progress of his own powers as far as he was acquainted with them," Wordsworth intended to produce "a philosophical Poem... having for its principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement". This poem, also in blank verse, was to be called "The Recluse"; whereof only a few hundred lines exist, but "The Excursion" was designed for the second part. "The Recluse," Wordsworth says, was to be a kind of Gothic Cathedral: "The Prelude" is the "antechapel"; and the lyrics, sonnets, and other poems not so large as the antechapel "may be likened to the little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses, ordinarily included in these edifices". These oratories are the most favourite portions of Wordsworth's cathedral; and all his poems, long or short, except the tragedy "The Borderers," "have for their principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement," but listening with a keen ear to hints and murmurs of the world.
From enthusiasm for the French Revolution, Wordsworth, like Burns, "when haughty Gaul invasion threats," turned gradually to patriotism, as the French armies of emancipation conquered Switzerland, invaded Spain, and menaced England. Now, like Glenbucket at the battle of Sheriffmuir (1715) he prayed "for one hour of Dundee!" This unprincipled change of sides caused Wordsworth's poems to be insulted by Hazlitt, and in "The Edinburgh Review". He was constant, indeed, to his sympathy with poverty and toil, detested the factory system, and loved his mountains and lakes not only for the beauty of the clouds, mists, and gleams of sunlight, but because
Labour here preserves
His rosy face, a servant only here
Of the fireside or of the open field,
A Freeman therefore sound and unimpaired
—("The Recluse").
But Wordsworth had not a noble scorn of "militarism"; he sang of Nelson, and "The Happy Warrior," as well as of "The Lesser Celandine," and was attached to the Anglican Establishment; these things were not forgiven to the poetic renegade by Whig critics, or to Coleridge, or to Southey, while Scott, it was admitted, had never turned his coat.
Wordsworth was singularly fortunate in the ideal affection of his sister Dorothy,—whose eye for natural beauty was as keen as his own,—and in his wife, to whom he attributed two lines in "The Daffodils"—
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude.
Of his friendship with Coleridge, and of their volume "Lyrical Ballads," we have spoken. They contain examples of his theory, first given in the preface of the second edition of "Lyrical Ballads," that "the poet ought to imitate and, as far as is possible, adopt the very language of men... I have taken as much pains to avoid what is usually called poetical diction as others ordinarily take to produce it". But Wordsworth could not, of course, keep up to his own standard. Asked "What has become of the wild swans?" no mortal could reply