"Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven
With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace,"
and of Milton whose soul seemed to Wordsworth "like a star."
Influence of the French Revolution.—His travels on the continent in his last vacation and after his graduation brought him in contact with the French Revolution, of which he felt the inspiring influence. He was fond of children, and the sight of a poor little French peasant girl seems to have been one of the main causes leading him to become an ardent revolutionist. The Prelude tells in concrete fullness how he walked along the banks of the Loire with his friend, a French patriot:—
"…And when we chanced
One day to meet a hunger-bitten girl,
Who crept along fitting her languid gait
Unto a heifer's motion, by a cord
Tied to her arm, and picking thus from the lane
Its sustenance, while the girl with pallid hands
Was busy knitting in a heartless mood
Of solitude, and at the sight my friend
In agitation said, ''Tis against that
That we are fighting.'"
Just as Wordsworth was prepared to throw himself personally into the conflict, his relatives recalled him to England. When the Revolution passed into a period of anarchy and bloodshed, his dejection was intense. As he slowly recovered from his disappointment, he became more and more conservative in politics and less in sympathy with violent agitation; but he never ceased to utter a hopeful though calm and tempered note for genuine liberty.
Maturity and Declining Years.—Although Wordsworth was early left an orphan, he never seemed to lack intelligent care and sympathy. His sister Dorothy, a rare soul, helped to fashion him into a poet. Their favorite pastime was walking and observing nature. De Quincey estimates that Wordsworth, during the course of his life, mast have walked as many as 175,000 miles. He acted on his belief that—
"All things that love the sun are out of doors,"
and he composed his best poetry during his walks, dictating it after his return.
He must have had the capacity of impressing himself favorably on his associates or he might never have had the leisure to write poetry. When he was twenty-five, a friend left him a legacy of £900 to enable him to follow his chosen calling of poet. Seven years later, friends saw that he was appointed distributor of stamps for Westmoreland, at the annual salary of £400. Years afterward, a friend gave him a regular allowance to be spent in traveling.
The summer of 1797 saw him and Dorothy begin a golden year at Alfoxden in Somersetshire, in close association with Coleridge. The result of this companionship was Lyrical Ballads, an epoch-making volume of romantic verse, containing such gems as Wordsworth's Lines composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, Lines written in Early Spring, We Are Seven, and Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner. "All good poetry," wrote Wordsworth in the Preface to the second edition of this volume, "is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." This is the opposite of the belief of the classical school.