GRASMERE CHURCH
With the exception of a brief residence in France and Germany, Wordsworth spent eighty years on English soil, and mainly in the Lake Country. He was born in the North, went to school in a little village near Lake Windermere, and spent his life at Grasmere and at Rydal Mount only three or four miles distant. His life was free from struggles, either mental or material, and was one of meditation and quiet growth. In contrast with Byron, he was a poet of reflection; unlike Shelley, he saw Nature as the intimate companion of the spirit; and he sought beauty in the simplicity of obscure lives and daily experience rather than in the richness of imagination or in that fairy land of mythology which laid its spell on Keats. He was deeply religious, and saw Nature as a revelation of the divine mind; a visible and material creation, penetrated and filled by the divine spirit. His years of inspiration were few; but his conscientious industry was untiring. In his creative moods he wrote some of the noblest and most perfect poetry in English; in his moods of faithful industry he wrote much thoughtful but unpoetic verse. In the latter class fall his long poems; in the former class fall many of his shorter pieces, in which lofty thought and deep feeling are fused in an art of exquisite simplicity and purity. “The Prelude” and “The Excursion” contain passages of great beauty; but they are valuable chiefly to students. In the ten years which followed the publication of the “Lyrical Ballads” in 1798 he wrote many poems which are for all people and for all time. Such poetry as “Lucy,” “To a Highland Girl,” “The Solitary Reaper,” “To a Cuckoo,” “I Wandered Lonely,” “She Was a Phantom of Delight,” “Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shade,” ought to be planted in the minds of children as refuges from the commonplace, and as a protection from all that is cheap and inferior in life and art. In the “Ode to Duty,” that on “Intimations of Immortality,” in many stanzas from the long poems, and in a group of sonnets, Nature and Life are interpreted in an art which is both commanding and beautiful. At his best, in depth of thought, loyalty to truth, spiritual insight, purity of feeling, and that simplicity which is the last achievement of art, Wordsworth belongs among the half-dozen great poets of England.
RYDAL MOUNT
Wordsworth’s home.
ALFOXDEN HOUSE
Wordsworth’s temporary home as it is now.
