Wordsworth was born in April, 1770, of parents sufficiently rich to give him the advantages of the usual school and collegiate education of English youth. He early manifested a love for study, but it may be inferred that his studies were such as mostly ministered to the imagination, from the fact that he displayed, from his earliest years, a passion for poetry, and never seems to have had a thought of choosing a profession. At the university of Cambridge he appears to have studied the classics with the divining eye and assimilating mind of a poet, and if he did not attain the first position as a classical scholar, he certainly drank in beyond all his fellows the spirit of the great writers of Greece and Rome. In a mind so observing, studious, thoughtful, imaginative and steadfast as his, whose power consisted more in concentration of view than rapidity of movement, the images of classical poetry must have been firmly held and lovingly contemplated; and to his collegiate culture we doubtless owe the exquisite poems of Dion and Laodamia, the grand interpretative, uplifting mythological passage in The Excursion, and the general felicity of his classical allusions and images throughout his works. He probably wrote much as well as meditated deeply at college, but very few of his juvenile pieces have been preserved, and those which are seem little more than exercises in expression. On leaving college he appears to have formed the determination of educating his poetical faculty by a communion with the forms of nature, as others study law and theology. He resided for some time in the west of England, and at about the age of twenty, made the tour of France, Italy, Switzerland and Germany, traveling, like our friend Bayard Taylor, mostly on foot, diving into forests, lingering by lakes, penetrating into the cottages of Italian peasants and rude German boors, and alternating the whole by a residence in the great European cities. This seems to have occupied nearly two years of his life; its immediate, but not its only result, was the publication of his “Descriptive Sketches in Verse,” indicating accurate observation rather than shaping imagination, and undistinguished by any marked peculiarities of thought or diction. We next hear of him at Bristol, the companion of Coleridge and Southey, and discussing with those eager and daring spirits the essential falsehood of current poetry as a representation of nature. The sensible conclusion of all three was this—that the worn-out epithets and images then in vogue among the rhymers, were meaningless; that poetry was to be sought in nature and man; and that the language of poetry was not a tinsel rhetoric, but an impassioned utterance of thoughts and emotions awakened by a direct contact of the mind with the objects it described. Of these propositions, the last was one of primary importance, and in a mind so grave, deep and contemplative as Wordsworth’s, with an instinctive ambition to be one of “Nature’s Privy Council,” and dive into the secrets of those visible forms which had ever thrilled his soul with a vague and aching rapture, the mere critical opinion passed into a motive and an inspiration.
“The Lyrical Ballads,” published in 1798, and to which Southey and Coleridge contributed, were the first poems which indicated Wordsworth’s peculiar powers and passions, and gave the first hints of his poetical philosophy, and the first startling shock to the tastes of the day. They were mostly written at Allfoxden, near the Bristol Channel, in one of the deepest solitudes in England, amid woods, glens, streams, and hills. Here Wordsworth had retired with his sister; and Coleridge was only five miles distant at Stowey. Cottle relates some amusing anecdotes of the ignorance of the country people, in regard to them, and to poets and lovers of the picturesque generally. Southey, Coleridge and his wife, Lamb, and the two Wedgewoods, visited Wordsworth in his retirement, and the whole company used to wander about the woods, and by the sea, to the great wonder of all the honest people they met. As they were often out at night, it was supposed they led a dissolute life; and it is said that there are respectable people in Bristol who believe now that Mrs. Coleridge and Miss Wordsworth were disreputable women, from a remembrance of the scandalous tattle circulating then. Cottle asserts that Wordsworth was driven from the place by the suspicions which his habits provoked, being refused a continuance of his lease of the Allfoxden house by the ignoramus who had the letting of it, on the ground that he was a criminal in the disguise of an idler. One of the villagers said, “that he had seen him wander about at night and look rather strangely at the moon! And then he roamed over the hills like a partridge.” Another testified “he had heard him mutter, as he walked, in some outlandish brogue, that nobody could understand.” This last, we suppose, is the rustic version of the poet’s own statement—
“He murmurs near the running brooks
A music sweeter than their own.”
Others, however, took a different view of his habits, as little flattering to his morals as the other view to his sense. One wiseacre remarked confidently, “I know what he is. We have all met him tramping away toward the sea. Would any man in his senses take all that trouble to look at a parcel of water? I think he carries on a snug business in the smuggling line, and, in these journeys, is on the lookout for some wet cargo.” Another, carrying out this bright idea, added, “I know he has got a private still in his cellar; for I once passed his house at a little better than a hundred yards distance, and I could smell the spirits as plain as an ashen faggot at Christmas.” But the charge which probably had the most weight in those times was the last. “I know,” said one, “that he is surely a desperd French Jacobin; for he is so silent and dark that no one ever heard him say one word about politics.” The result of all these various rumors and scandals was the removal of Wordsworth from the village. It is curious that, with such an experience of English country-people, Wordsworth should never have looked at them dramatically, and represented them as vulgar and prejudiced human beings as well as immortal souls. It proves that humor did not enter at all into the constitution of his nature; that man interested him more than men; and that his spiritual affections, connecting humanity constantly with its divine origin, shed over the simplest villager a light and atmosphere not of earth.
While the ludicrous tattle to which we have referred was sounding all around him, he was meditating Peter Bell and the Lyrical Ballads, in the depths of the Allfoxden woods, and consecrating the rustics who were scandalizing him. The great Poet of the Poor, who has made the peasant a grander object of contemplation than the peer, and who saw through vulgar externals and humble occupations to the inmost soul of the man, had sufficient provocations to be the satirist of those he idealized.
In these Lyrical Ballads, and in the poems written at the same period of their publication, we perceive both the greatness and the limitations of Wordsworth, the vital and the mechanical elements in his poetry. As far as his theory of poetic diction was unimaginative, as far as its application was willful, it became a mere matter of the understanding, productive of little else than shocks to taste and the poetic sense, and indicating the perversity of a powerful intellect, pushing preconceived theories to the violation of ideal laws, rather than the rapt inspiration of the bard, flooding common words and objects with new life and divine meanings. It is useless to say that the passages to which we object would not provoke a smile if read in the spirit of the author. They are ludicrous in themselves, and would have made the author himself laugh had he possessed a moderate sense of the humorous. But the gravest objection against them is, that they do not harmonize with the poems in which they appear—are not vitally connected with them, but stand as excrescences plastered on them—and instantly suggest the theorizer expressing his scorn of an opposite vice of expression, by deliberately substituting for affected elegance a simplicity just as full of affectation. Wordsworth’s true simplicity, the simplicity which was the natural vehicle of his grand and solemn thoughts, the simplicity which came from writing close to the truth of things, and making the word rise out of the idea conceived like Venus from the sea, cannot be too much commended; but in respect to his false simplicity, his simplicity for the sake of being simple, we can only say that it has given some point to the sarcasm, “that Chaucer writes like a child, but Wordsworth childishly.” These objectionable passages, however, are very few; they stand apart from his works and apart from what was essential in him; and they are to be pardoned, as we pardon the occasional caprices of other great poets.
Another objection to the Lyrical Ballads, and to Wordsworth’s poems generally, is an objection which relates to his noblest creations. He never appears to have thoroughly realized that other men were not Wordsworths, and accordingly he not infrequently violates the law of expression—which we take to be the expression of a man to others, not the expression of a man to himself. He speaks, as it were, too much to his own ear, and having associated certain words with subtle thoughts and moods peculiar to himself, he does not seem aware that the words may not of themselves convey his meaning to minds differently constituted, and accustomed to take the expressions at their lexicon value. In this he differs from Coleridge, whose words and music have more instantaneous power in evoking the mood addressed, and thread with more force and certainty all the mental labyrinths of other minds, and act with a tingling and inevitable touch on the finest nerves of spiritual perception. The Ancient Mariner and Christobel almost create the moods in which they are to be read, and surprise the reader with a revelation of the strange and preternatural elements lying far back in his own consciousness. Wordsworth has much of this wondrous wizard power, but it operates with less direct energy, and is not felt in all its witchery until we have thought into his mind, become enveloped in its atmosphere, and been initiated into the “suggestive sorcery” of his language. Then, it appears to us, he is even more satisfying than Coleridge, moving, as he does, in the transcendental region of thought with a calmer and more assured step, and giving evidence of having steadily gazed on those spiritual realities which Coleridge seems to have casually seen by flashes of lightning. His language consequently is more temperate, as befits a man observing objects familiar to his mind by frequent contemplation; but, to common readers, it would be more effective if it had the suddenness and startling energy coming from the first bright vision of supernatural objects. As it is, however, his style proves that his mind had grown up to those heights of contemplation to which the mind of Coleridge only occasionally darted, under the winged impulses of imagination; and therefore Wordsworth gives more serene and permanent delight, more “sober certainty of waking bliss,” than Coleridge, however much the latter may excel in instantaneousness of effect.
The originality of the Lyrical Ballads consisted not so much in an accurate observation of nature as in an absolute communion with her, and interpretation of the spirit of her forms. They combine in a remarkable degree ecstasy with reflection, and are marvelously refined both in their perception of the life of nature and the subtle workings of human affections. Those elusive emotions which flit dimly before ordinary imaginations and then instantly disappear, Wordsworth arrests and embodies; and the remotest shades of feeling and thought, which play on the vanishing edges of conception, he connects with familiar objects, and brings home to our common contemplations. In the sphere of the affections he is confessedly great. The still, simple, searching pathos of “We are Seven,” the mysterious, tragic interest gathered around “The Thorn,” and the evanescent touch of an elusive mood in “The Anecdote for Fathers,” indicate a vision into the finest elements of emotion. The poems entitled, “Expostulation and Reply,” “The Tables Turned,” “Lines Written in Early Spring,” “To My Sister,” and several others, referring to this period of 1798, evince many of the peculiar qualities of his philosophy, and combine depth of insight with a most exquisite simplicity of phrase. The following extracts contain hints of his whole system of thought, expressing that belief in the life of nature, and the mode by which that life is communicated to the mind, which reappear, variously modified, throughout his writings:
Nor less I deem that there are Powers