Though his parents were of sturdy stock, both died prematurely, his mother when he was five years old, his father when he was thirteen, the ultimate cause of death in his mother's case being exposure to cold in “a best bedroom” in London, in his father’s exposure on a Cumberland hill, where he had been befogged and lost his way. At the age of eight Wordsworth was sent to school at Hawkshead, in the Esthwaite valley in Lancashire. His father died while he was there, and at the age of seventeen he was sent by his uncle to St John’s College, Cambridge. He did not distinguish himself in the studies of the university, and for some time after taking his degree of B.A., which he did in January 1791, he showed what seemed to his relatives a most perverse reluctance to adopt any regular profession. His mother had noted his “stiff, moody, and violent temper” in childhood, and it seemed as if this family judgment was to be confirmed in his manhood. After taking his degree, he was pressed to take holy orders, but would not; he had no taste for the law; he idled a few months aimlessly in London, a few months more with a Welsh college friend, with whom he had made a pedestrian tour in France and Switzerland during his last Cambridge vacation; then in the Novémber of 1791 he crossed to France, ostensibly to learn the language, made the acquaintance of revolutionaries, sympathized with them vehemently, and was within an ace of throwing in his lot with the Brissotins to give them the steady direction that they needed. When it came to this, his relatives cut off his supplies, and he was obliged to return to London towards the close of 1792. But still he resisted all pressure to enter any of the regular professions, published An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches in 1793, and in 1794, still moving about to all appearance in stubborn aimlessness among his friends and relatives, had no more rational purpose of livelihood than drawing up the prospectus of a periodical of strictly republican principles to be called “The Philanthropist.” At this stage, at the age of twenty-four, Wordsworth seemed to his friends a very hopeless and impracticable young man.

But all the time from his boyhood upwards a great purpose had been growing and maturing in his mind. Tlιe Prelude expounds in lofty impassioned strain, treating of simple facts in diction that would be “poetic” beyond the worst extravagances of the panegyrical school but for the genuine emotion that inspires its amplitude of phrase, how his sensibility for nature was “augmented and sustained,” and how it never, except for a brief interval, ceased to be “creative” in the special sense of his subsequent theory. But it is with his feelings towards nature that The Prelude mainly deals; it says little regarding the history of his ambition to express those feelings in verse. It is the autobiography, not of the poet of nature, but of the worshipper and priest. The salient incidents in the history of the poet he communicated in prose notes and in familiar discourses. And it appears that, while he was still a schoolboy of fourteen, the delight that he took in contemplating and moralizing from nature was mingled with the enthusiasm of a poet’s ambition and joy in the discovery of a fresh imperfectly worked field. Commenting on the couplet in the Evening Walk—

“And, fronting the bright west, yon oak entwines Its darkening boughs and leaves in stronger lines—” he said:

“This is feebly and imperfectly exprest; but I recollect distinctly the very spot where this first struck me. It was on the way between Hawkshead and Ambleside, and gave me extreme pleasure. The moment was important in my poetical history; fori date from it my consciousness of the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country, so far as I was acquainted with them; and, 1 made a resolution to supply in some degree the deficiency. I could not at that time have been above fourteen years of age.”

About the same time he wrote, as a school task at Hawkshead, verses that show considerable acquaintance with the poets of his own country at least, as well as some previous practice in the art of verse-making. The fragment that stands at the beginning of his collected works, recording a resolution to end his life among his native hills, was the conclusion of a long poem written while he was still at school. And, undistinguished as he was at Cambridge in the contest for academic honours, the Evening Walk, his first publication, was written during his vacations. He published it in 1793, to show, as he said, that he could do something, although he had not distinguished himself in university work. It is significant of his persistency of purpose that in this poem, as well as in the Descriptive Sketches founded on his tour abroad during his last vacation, he is seen to be steadily fulfilling his resolution to supply defects in the minute description of nature. There are touches here and there of the bent of imagination that became dominant in him soon afterwards, notably in the moral aspiration that accompanies his Remembrance of Collins on the Thames :—

“O glide, fair stream! for ever so Thy quiet soul on all bestowing, Till all our minds for ever flow As thy deep waters now are flowing.”

But in the main this first publication represents the poet in the stage described in the twelfth book of The Prelude :—

“Bent overmuch on superficial things, Pampering myself with meagre novelties Of colour and proportion; to the moods Of time and season, to the moral power, The affections, and the spirit of the place Insensible.”

Nature was little more than a picture-gallery to him; the pleasures of the eye had all but absolute dominion; and he

“Roamed from hill to hill, from rock to rock, Still craving combinations of new forms, New pleasures, wider empire for the sight, Proud of her own endowments, and rejoiced To lay the inner faculties asleep.”

But, though he had not yet found his distinctive aim as a poet, he was inwardly bent, all the time that his relatives saw in him only a wayward and unpromising aversion to work in any regular line, upon poetry as “his office upon earth.”

In this determination he was strengthened by his sister Dorothy, who with rare devotion consecrated her life henceforward to his service. A timely legacy enabled them to carry their purpose into effect. A friend of his, whom he had nursed in a last illness, Raisley Calvert, son of the steward of the duke of Norfolk, who had large estates in Cumberland, died early in 1795, leaving him a legacy of <£900. And here it may be well to notice how opportunely, as De Quincey half-ruefully remarked, money always fell in to Wordsworth, enabling him to pursue his poetic career without distraction. Calvert’s bequest came to him when he was on the point of concluding an engagement as a journalist in London. On it and other small resources he and his sister, thanks to her frugal management, contrived to live for nearly eight years. By the end of that time Lord Lonsdale, who owed Wordsworth’s father a large sum for professional services, and had steadily refused to pay it, died, and his successor paid the debt with interest. His wife, Mary Hutchinson, whom he married in 1802, brought him some fortune; and in 1813, when in spite of his plain living his family began to press upon his income, he was appointed stamp-distributor for Westmorland, with an income of £500, afterwards nearly doubled by the increase of his district. By this succession of timely godsends, Wordsworth, though he did not escape some periods of sharp anxiety, was saved from the necessity of turning aside from his vocation.

To return, however, to the course of his life from the time when he resolved to labour with all his powers in the office of poet. The first two years, during which he lived with his self-sacrificing sister at Racedown, in Dorset, were spent in half-hearted and very imperfectly successful experiments, satires in imitation of Juvenal, the tragedy of The Borderers and a poem in the Spenserian stanza, the poem now entitled Guilt and Sorrow. How much longer this time of doubtful self-distrustful endeavour might have continued is a subject for curious speculation; an end was put to it by a fortunate incident, a visit from Coleridge, who had read his first publication, and seen in it, what none of the public critics had discerned, the advent of “an original poetic genius.” It would be impossible to exaggerate the importance for Wordsworth of the arrival of this enthusiastic Columbus. Under his sister’s genial influence he was groping his way doubtfully out of the labyrinth of poetic conventions, beginning to see a new pathos and sublimity in human life, but not yet convinced except by fits and starts of the rightness of his own vision. Stubborn and independent as Wordsworth was, he needed some friendly voice from the outer world to give him confidence in himself. Coleridge rendered him this indispensable service. He had begun to seek his themes in

“Sorrow, that is not sorrow, but delight; And miserable love, that is not pain To hear of, for the glory that redounds Therefrom to human kind, and what we are.”

He read to his visitor one of these experiments, the story of the ruined cottage, afterwards introduced into the first book of The Excursion. Coleridge, who had already seen original poetic genius in the poems published before, was enthusiastic in his praise of them as having “a character, by books not hitherto reflected,” and his praise gave new heart and hope to the poet hitherto hesitating and uncertain.

June 1797 was the date of this memorable visit. So pleasant was the companionship on both sides that, when Coleridge returned to Nether Stowey in Somerset, Wordsworth at his instance changed his quarters to Alfoxden, within a mile and a half of Coleridge’s temporary residence, and the two poets lived in almost daily intercourse for the next twelve months. During that period Wordsworth’s powers rapidly expanded and matured; ideas that had been gathering in his mind for years, and lying there in dim confusion, felt the stir of a new life, and ranged themselves in clearer shapes under the fresh quickening breath of Coleridge’s swift and discursive dialectic. The radiant restless vitality of the more variously gifted man stirred the stiffer and more sluggish nature of the recluse to its depths, and Coleridge’s quick and generous appreciation of his power gave him precisely the encouragement that he needed.

The Lyrical Ballads were the poetic fruits of their companionship. Out of their frequent discussions of the relative value of common life and supernatural incidents as themes for imaginative treatment grew the idea of writing a volume together, composed of poems of the two kinds. Coleridge was to take the supernatural; and, as his industry was not equal to his friend’s, this kind was represented by the Ancient Mariner alone. Among Wordsworth’s contributions were The Female Vagrant, We are Seven, Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman, The Last of the Flock, The Idiot Boy, The Mad Mother (“Her eyes are wild ”), The Thorn, Goody Blake and Harry Gill, The Reverie of Poor Susan, Simon Lee, Expostulation and Reply, The Tables Turned, Lines left upon a Yew-tree Seat, An Old Man Travelling (“Animal Tranquillity and Decay”), Lines above Tintern Abbey. The volume was published by Cottle of Bristol in September, 1798.

It is necessary to enumerate the contents of this volume in fairness to the contemporaries of Wordsworth, whom it is the fashion to reproach for their cold or scoffing reception of his first distinctive work. Those Wordsworthians who give up The Idiot Boy, Goody Blake, and The Thorn as mistaken experiments have no right to triumph over the first derisive critics of the Lyrical Ballads, or to wonder at the dulness that failed to see at once in this humble issue from an obscure provincial press the advent of a great master in literature. The poems that have not yet won general acceptance even among the most devoted Wordsworthians formed a large part of the whole revelation, and attention was specially drawn to them by the title. While the taste for The Idiot Boy is still uncreated, still far from general, while critics of authority can still so completely miss the poet’s intention as to suggest that the poem might have been enjoyable if Betty Foy’s imbecile son had been described as beautiful and the word “idiot” had not been left to convey uncorrected its repulsive associations, while intimate disciples acknowledge themselves unable to understand the “glee” with which Wordsworth told the simple story, and wonder whether he intended it as a “comic poem,” it may be doubted whether now, after nearly a century of discipleship and exposition, the Lyrical Ballads would receive a much more cordial or much wider welcome than they did in 1798. It is true that Tintern Abbey was in the volume, and that all the highest qualities of Wordsworth’s imagination and of his verse could be illustrated now from the lyrical ballads proper in this first publication; but before we accuse our predecessors of purblindness, corrupt taste, and critical malignity, as is the sweet and reasonable custom of too many professing Wordsworthians, we should remember that clear vision is easier for us than it was for them when the revelation was fragmentary and incomplete.

Although Wordsworth was not received at first with the respect to which we now see that he was entitled, his power was not entirely without recognition. There is a curious commercial evidence of this, which ought to be noted, because a perversion of the fact is sometimes used to exaggerate the supposed neglect of Wordsworth at the outset of his career. When the Longmans took over Cottle’s publishing business in 1799, the value of the copyright of the Lyrical Ballads, for which Cottle had paid thirty guineas, was assessed at nil. Cottle therefore begged that it might be excluded altogether from the bargain, and presented it to the authors. But in 1800, when the first edition was exhausted, the Longmans offered Wordsworth £100 for two issues of a new edition with an additional volume and an explanatory preface. The sum was small compared with what Scott and Byron soon afterwards received, but it shows that the public neglect was not quite so complete as is sometimes represented. Another edition was called for in 1802, and a fourth in 1805. The new volume in the 1800 edition was made up of poems composed during his residence at Goslar in the winter of 1798-99, and after his settlement at Grasmere in December 1799. It contained a large portion of poems now universally accepted :— Ruth, Nutting, Three Years She Grew, Α Poet's Epitaph, Hartleap Well, L·ucy Gray, The Brothers, Michael, The Old Cumberland Beggar, Poems on the Naming of Places. But it contained also the famous Preface, in which he infuriated critics by presuming to defend his eccentricities in an elaborate theory of poetry and poetic diction.

Comparatively few in the present day have actually read and studied this famous document, although it is constantly referred to as a sort of revolutionary proclamation against the established taste of the eighteenth century. For one that has read Wordsworth’s original, hundreds have read Coleridge’s brilliant criticism, and the fixed conception of the doctrines actually put forth by Wordsworth is taken from this. Now, although the Preface and the extensive and bitter discussion provoked by it had not a tithe of the influence on poetry ascribed to it by a natural liking for sudden changes and simple personal agencies, although the result on literary practice was little more than the banishment of a few overdriven phrases and figures of speech from poetic diction, it is desirable, considering the celebrity of the affair, that Wordsworth’s exact position should be made clear. To do this is to contradict several· “vulgar errors” on the subject, probably too vulgar and deeply rooted to be affected by any exposure. Coleridge’s criticism of his friend’s theory proceeded avowedly “on the assumption that his words had been rightly interpreted, as purporting that the proper diction for poetry in general consists altogether in a language taken, with due exceptions, from the mouths of men in real life, a language which actually constitutes the natural conversation of men under the influence of natural feelings.” Coleridge assumed further that, when Wordsworth spoke of there being “no essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition,” he meant by language not the mere words but the style, the structure, and the order of the sentences; on this assumption he argued as if Wordsworth had held that the metrical order should always be the same as the prose order. Given these assumptions, which formed the popular interpretation of the theory by its opponents, it was easy to demonstrate its absurdity, and Coleridge is very generally supposed to have given Wordsworth’s theory in its bare and naked extravagance the coup de grdce. But the truth is that neither of the two assumptions is warranted; not only so, but both were expressly disclaimed by Wordsworth in the Preface itself. There is not a single qualification introduced by Coleridge in correction of the theory that was not made by Wordsworth himself in the original statement. In the first place, it was not put forward as a theory of poetry in general, though from the vigour with which he carried the war into the enemy’s country it was naturally enough for polemic purposes taken as such; it was a statement and defence of the principles on which his own poems of humbler life were composed, undertaken at the instance of friends interested in “a class of poetry well adapted to interest mankind permanently, and not unimportant in the quality and in the multiplicity of its moral relations.” He assailed the public taste as “depraved,” first and mainly in so far as it was adverse to simple incidents simply treated, being accustomed to "gross and violent stimulants,” “craving after extraordinary incident,” possessed with a “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation,” “frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.” This, and not adherence to the classical rule of Pope, which had really suffered deposition a good half century before, was the first count in Wordsworth’s defensive indictment of the taste of his age. To make it perfectly clear that he was pleading only for his own maligned and misunderstood poems, he repeated at the close of the Preface that, “if his purpose were fulfilled, a species of poetry would be produced which is genuine poetry, in its nature well adapted to interest mankind, &c.” It is true that he said also that, “in order entirely to enjoy the poetry which I am recommending, it would be necessary to give up much of what is ordinarily enjoyed but the context makes it plain that in so saying he referred to startling incident and gaudy ornament, his own purpose being to make “the feeling give importance to the action and situation, not the action and situation to the feeling,” and to use language as near as possible to the language of real life. In the second place, as regards this language of real life, and the “poetic diction,” the liking for which was the second count in his indictment of the public taste, it is most explicitly clear that, when he said that there was no essential difference between the...