While the still morn went out with sandals gray;
He touched the tender stops of various quills,
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay:
And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropt into the western bay.
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue :
To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.

190

ON HIS BLINDNESS

WHEN I consider how my light is spent

Ere half my days in this dark world and wide, And that one talent which is death to hide Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present

My true account, lest He returning chide; "Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?'

His state

I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
Either man's work, or His own gifts. Who best
Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best.
Is kingly; thousands at His bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait."

CHAPTER XXIII

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1770-1850

"Thou wert as a lone star whose light did shine
On some frail bark in winter's midnight roar;
Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude;

In honored poverty thy voice did weave

Songs consecrate to truth and liberty."-SHELLEY.

"Whatever the world may think of me or my poetry, is now of little consequence; but one thing is a comfort of my old age, that none of my works written since the days of my early youth, contains a line which I should wish to blot out because panders to the baser passions of our nature. This is a comfort to me; I can do no mischief by my works when I am gone." - WILLIAM Wordsworth.

WORDSWORTH was the great master of the Lake School, in which Coleridge and Southey were, after him, the most prominent members. The poets of that school took their subjects often from among the commonest things, and wrote their poems in the simplest style, choosing the ordinary speech of educated people as the vehicle of their thoughts. They probably went too far in their disdain for the conventional subjects and ornaments of poetry; but their principles were sound and healthful, and their labors made a deep and lasting impression on English thought.

William Wordsworth was born on the 7th of April, 1770, at Cockermouth, in Cumberland, England, where his

father was a law agent. Both father and mother died while the poet was yet a boy; and when his school education was considered to be sufficiently advanced, he was sent, in 1787, to Cambridge University. There, during the four years of his undergraduate course, he read many books, and wrote poetry; but he thought and felt the course of study to be narrow and irksome. Right welcome, therefore, were the va

his delight to go on tours on the Continent. In 1790 he spent some time in Switzerland and France, although the tempest of Revolution was then raging with great fury. In the following year, having graduated, he went again to France, with a soul on fire in her cause. There he stayed for fifteen months; and there he might have perished by the guillotine had not his return to England, in 1792, changed the current of his life.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

His friends wished him to enter the Church; but he was born to be a poet and nothing else. The love of poetry was the grand passion of his heart, which grew and strengthened with the coming of more mature years. He made his first public appearance as a poet in 1793, when he published a modest volume entitled "Descriptive Sketches." This was followed in the same year by "An Evening Walk." These poems revealed to thoughtful

minds the rise of a new star in the poetical heavens, which was destined to shed a brilliant luster on the land.

The need of earning a livelihood had turned Wordsworth's thoughts to the study of law and to journalism. Before he had settled anything, a young friend died, in 1795, leaving him nine hundred pounds, with a pressing request that he would devote himself to poetry. That Wordsworth resolved to do. Settling down in Dorsetshire with his sister Dora, he wrote "Salisbury Plain," and a tragedy called "The Borderers," which he failed to get put on the stage. Soon afterward he made the acquaintance of Coleridge, and removed to Alfoxden, in order to be near his new friend. The result of this alliance was the publication of a joint volume of "Lyrical Ballads” in 1798, to which Wordsworth contributed twenty-two poems, and Coleridge one; -"The Ancient Mariner." The vol

ume was not a success.

After a tour in Germany, Wordsworth settled with his sister in a cottage at Grasmere, in Cumberland, where he spent the next nine years. There he married Mary Hutchinson in 1802, the "phantom of delight"; and there he began his great philosophical poem, "The Excursion." His mind was relieved from anxiety about money matters by the payment to his family of a debt due to their father by the late Earl of Lonsdale. This settlement yielded eighteen hundred pounds each to Wordsworth and his sister. The young earl became the faithful friend of the poet, who afterward dedicated to him his masterpiece, "The Excursion."

In 1813 Wordsworth removed to Rydal Mount, in sight of those beautiful lakes and under the shadow of those old hills which have become inseparably associated with

his name. In that well-known "cottage-like building, almost hidden by a profusion of roses and ivy," from whose grassy lawn a silver gleam of Windermere could be caught, the poet spent the greater part of his long life. About the same time he received, through the influence of his friend, Lord Lonsdale, the office of Distributor of Stamps for the County of Westmoreland, with a salary of five hundred pounds, and no very heavy duties attached to it.

In 1814 "The Excursion" was published. It brought its author very little money, and a good deal of abuse. This grand poem is only a fragment, a part of a vast moral epic to have been called "The Recluse," in which the poet intended to discuss the human soul in its deepest workings and its loftiest relations. Its original unpopularity must be ascribed in part to the absence of dramatic life and the want of human interest, and in part to the novelty of embodying metaphysical reasoning in blank verse.

Even now, though Wordsworth's popularity has grown immensely, "The Excursion" is read by few. Yet it is not all a web of subtile reasoning, for there are rich studies from nature and from life scattered plentifully over its more thoughtful groundwork. The chief remaining works of this great writer are, "The White Doe of Rylstone," a tragic tale founded on the ruin of a Northern family in the Civil War; "Peter Bell," a remarkable specimen of the style of the Lake School, which he dedicated to Southey; "Sonnets on the River Duddon;" "The Wagoner," dedicated to Charles Lamb; "Memorials of a Tour on the Continent;""Ecclesiastical Sonnets; "Yarrow Revisited;" and "The Prelude," a fragment of autobiography, describing the growth of a poet's mind.