The great philosophical poet of our age, William Wordsworth, died at Rydal Mount, in Westmoreland—among his native lakes and hills—on the 23d of April, in the eighty-first year of his age. Those who are curious in the accidents of birth and death, observable in the biographies of celebrated men, have thought it worthy of notice that the day of Wordsworth's death was the anniversary of Shakspeare's birth.
William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth, in Cumberland, on the 7th of April, 1770, and educated at Hawkeshead Grammar School, and at St. John's College, Cambridge. He was designed by his parents for the Church—but poetry and new prospects turned him into another path. His pursuit through life was poetry, and his profession that of Stamp Distributor for the Government in the counties of Cumberland and Westmoreland: to which office he was appointed by the joint interest, as we have heard, of his friend, Sir George Beaumont, and his patron, Lord Lonsdale.
Mr. Wordsworth made his first appearance as a poet in the year 1793, by the publication of a thin quarto volume entitled "An Evening Walk—an Epistle in Verse, addressed to a young Lady from the Lakes of the North of England, by W. Wordsworth, B.A., of St. John's College, Cambridge." Printed at London, and published by Johnson in St. Paul's Church-yard from whose shop seven years before had appeared "The Task" of Cowper. In the same year he published "Descriptive Sketches in Verse, taken during a Pedestrian Tour in the Italian, Grison, Swiss and Savoyard Alps."
What was thought of these poems by a few youthful admirers may be gathered from the account given by Coleridge in his "Biographia Literaria." "During the last year of my residence at Cambridge, 1794, I became acquainted with Mr. Wordsworth's first publication, entitled 'Descriptive Sketches;' and seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon more evidently announced." The two poets, then personally unknown to each other, first became acquainted in the summer of 1796, at Nether Stowey, in Somersetshire. Coleridge was then in his twenty-fourth year, and Wordsworth in his twenty-sixth. A congeniality of pursuit soon ripened into intimacy; and in September, 1798, the two poets, accompanied by Miss Wordsworth, made a tour in Germany.
Wordsworth's next publication was the first volume of his "Lyrical Ballads," published in the summer of 1798 by Mr. Joseph Cottle, of Bristol, who purchased the copyright for thirty guineas. It made no way with the public, and Cottle was a loser by the bargain. So little, indeed, was thought of the volume, that when Cottle's copyrights were transferred to the Messrs. Longman, the "Lyrical Ballads" was thrown in as a valueless volume, in the mercantile idea of the term. The copyright was afterward returned to Cottle; and by him transferred to the great poet, who lived to see it of real money value in the market of successful publications.
Disappointed but not disheartened by the very indifferent success of his "Lyrical Ballads," years elapsed before Mr. Wordsworth again appeared as a poet. But he was not idle. He was every year maturing his own principles of poetry and making good the remark of Coleridge, that to admire on principle is the only way to imitate without loss of originality. In the very year which witnessed the failure of his "Lyrical Ballads," he wrote his "Peter Bell," the most strongly condemned of all his poems. The publication of this when his name was better known (for he kept it by him till, he says, it nearly survived its minority) brought a shower of contemptuous criticisms on his head.
Wordsworth married in the year 1803 Miss Mary Hutchinson of Penrith, and settled among his beloved Lakes—first at Grasmere, and afterward at Rydal Mount. Southey's subsequent retirement to the same beautiful country, and Coleridge's visits to his brother poets, originated the name of the Lake School of Poetry—"the school of whining and hypochondriacal poets that haunt the Lakes"—by which the opponents of their principles and the admirers of the Edinburgh Review distinguished the three great poets whose names have long been and will still continue to be connected.
Wordsworth's fame increasing, slowly, it is true, but securely, he put forth in 1807 two volumes of his poems. They were reviewed by Byron, then a young man of nineteen, and as yet not even a poet in print, in the Monthly Literary Recreations for the August of that year. "The poems before us," says the reviewer, "are by the author of 'Lyrical Ballads,' a collection which has not undeservedly met with a considerable share of public applause. The characteristics of Mr. Wordsworth's muse are, simple and flowing, though occasionally inharmonious verse, strong and sometimes irresistible appeals to the feelings, with unexceptionable sentiments. Though the present work may not equal his former efforts, many of the poems possess a native elegance, natural and unaffected, totally devoid of the tinsel embellishments and abstract hyperboles of several contemporary sonneteers. 'The Song at the feasting of Brougham Castle,' 'The Seven Sisters,' 'The Affliction of Margaret ——, of ——,' possess all the beauties and few of the defects of this writer. The pieces least worthy of the author are those entitled 'Moods of My Own Mind.' We certainly wish these moods had been less frequent." Such is a sample of Byron's criticism—and of the criticising indeed till very recently of a large class of people misled by the caustic notices of the Edinburgh Review, the pungent satires of Byron, and the admirable parody of the poet's occasional style contained in the "Rejected Addresses."
His next publication was "The Excursion, being a portion of The Recluse," printed in quarto in the autumn of 1814. The critics were hard upon it. "This will never do," was the memorable opening of the review in the Edinburgh. Men who thought for themselves thought highly of the poem—but few dared to speak out. Jeffrey boasted wherever he went that he had crushed it in its birth. "He crush 'The Excursion!'" said Southey, "tell him he might as easily crush Skiddaw." What Coleridge often wished, that the first two books of "The Excursion" had been published separately under the name of "The Deserted Cottage" was a happy idea—and one, if it had been carried into execution, that would have removed many of the trivial objections made at the time to its unfinished character.
While "The Excursion" was still dividing the critics much in the same way that Davenant's "Gondibert" divided them in the reign of Charles the Second, "Peter Bell" appeared, to throw among them yet greater difference of opinion. The author was evidently aware that the poem, from the novelty of its construction, and the still greater novelty of its hero, required some protection, and this protection he sought behind the name of Southey: with which he tells us in the Dedication, his own had often appeared "both for good and evil." The deriders of the poet laughed still louder than before—his admirers too were at first somewhat amazed—and the only consolation which the poet obtained was from a sonnet of his own, in imitation of Milton's sonnet, beginning: