he felt himself too young for a curacy, disliked the law, abandoned thoughts of the army from fear of being sent to the West Indies and contracting yellow fever; meditated journalism, but found no one willing to join in the enterprise; and finally went to France, where he stayed fifteen months and had a rude and sad awakening from the fond dreams he had cherished for the French Revolution.

No wonder that the long-suffering guardians came to regard him as both lazy and obstinate, and that the Cooksons, his mother's relatives who had his beloved sister Dorothy in charge, actually forbade him to visit her, for fear of his contaminating influence. It was in order to show that he had abilities of some sort that he now (1792) resolved to publish two poems which he had on hand," An Evening Walk," addressed to Dorothy, and "Descriptive Sketches,” a poetic memorial of a walking tour through France, Switzerland, and the north of Italy, two years before.

The critics were almost unanimous in their disparagement; the reading public paid them almost no attention. One young man, however, an undergraduate who had entered Cambridge the month after Wordsworth had taken his degree, had the insight to perceive that these were no common verses, and to recognize in them germs of a new order of poetry. This man was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and later, when he himself commanded the public ear, he wrote Seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original

66

poetic genius above the literary horizon more evidently announced."

The following Summer (1793) was also important for his poetry, for it was then that he first visited the south of England, spending one month of "calm and glassy days" in the delightful Isle of Wight, and making the acquaintance of the brothers William and Raisley Calvert. Later he left for a solitary expedition, mostly on foot, to the north of Wales. He crossed the desolate expanse of Salisbury Plain, proceeded to Bath and Bristol, and thence up the Wye to Tintern. All of these places were afterwards used as settings or furnished incidents for poems. It was at Goodrich Castle that he met the little girl of " We are Seven"; and this was his first sight of the Abbey at Tintern which later was to become the theme of the poem which we could perhaps least well spare of any, the one of which it has been truly said, "The essential thought of‘Tintern Abbey' was as new to the world as the thought of the Sermon on the Mount."