[2.] Great Poets.—The greatest poets of the first half of the nineteenth century may be best arranged in groups. There were Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey—commonly, but unnecessarily, described as the Lake Poets. In their poetic thought and expression they had little in common; and the fact that two of them lived most of their lives in the Lake country, is not a sufficient justification for the use of the term. There were Scott and Campbell—both of them Scotchmen. There were Byron and Shelley—both Englishmen, both brought up at the great public schools and the universities, but both carried away by the influence of the new revolutionary ideas. Lastly, there were Moore, an Irishman, and young Keats, the splendid promise of whose youth went out in an early death. Let us learn a little more about each, and in the order of the dates of their birth.
[3.] William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was born at Cockermouth, a town in Cumberland, which stands at the confluence of the Cocker and the Derwent. His father, John Wordsworth, was law agent to Sir James Lowther, who afterwards became Earl of Lonsdale. William was a boy of a stiff, moody, and violent temper; and as his mother died when he was a very little boy, and his father when he was fourteen, he grew up with very little care from his
parents and guardians. He was sent to school at Hawkshead, in the Vale of Esthwaite, in Lancashire; and, at the age of seventeen, proceeded to St John’s College, Cambridge. After taking his degree of B.A. in 1791, he resided for a year in France. He took sides with one of the parties in the Reign of Terror, and left the country only in time to save his head. He was designed by his uncles for the Church; but a friend, Raisley Calvert, dying, left him £900; and he now resolved to live a plain and frugal life, to join no profession, but to give himself wholly up to the writing of poetry. In 1798, he published, along with his friend, S. T. Coleridge, the Lyrical Ballads. The only work of Coleridge’s in this volume was the “Ancient Mariner.” In 1802 he married Mary Hutchinson, of whom he speaks in the well-known lines—
“Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair,
Like Twilight’s, too, her dusky hair;
But all things else about her drawn
From May-time and the cheerful dawn.”
He obtained the post of Distributor of Stamps for the county of Westmoreland; and, after the death of Southey, he was created Poet-Laureate by the Queen.—He settled with his wife in the Lake country; and, in 1813, took up his abode at Rydal Mount, where he lived till his death in 1850. He died on the 23d of April—the death-day of Shakespeare.
[4.] His longest works are the Excursion and the Prelude—both being parts of a longer and greater work which he intended to write on the growth of his own mind. His best poems are his shorter pieces, such as the poems on Lucy, The Cuckoo, the Ode to Duty, the Intimations of Immortality, and several of his Sonnets. He says of his own poetry that his purpose in writing it was “to console the afflicted; to add sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier; to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think, and feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous.” His poetical work is the noble landmark of a great transition—both in thought and in style. He drew aside poetry from questions and interests of mere society and the town to the scenes of Nature and the deepest feelings of man as man. In style, he refused to employ the old artificial vocabulary which Pope and his followers revelled in; he used the simplest words he could find; and, when he hits the mark in his simplest form of expression, his style is as forcible as it is true. He says of his own verse—
“The moving accident is not my trade,