A History of English Literature

from eighteenth century tradition by greatly varying the number of
syllables in the lines, while keeping a regular number of stresses. Though
this practice, as we have seen, was customary in Old English poetry and in
the popular ballads, it was supposed by Coleridge and his contemporaries to
be a new discovery, and it proved highly suggestive to other romantic
poets. From hearing 'Christabel' read (from manuscript) Scott caught the
idea for the free-and-easy meter of his poetical romances.
With a better body and will Coleridge might have been one of the supreme
English poets; as it is, he has left a small number of very great poems and
has proved one of the most powerful influences on later English poetry.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1770-1850. William Wordsworth [Footnote: The first
syllable is pronounced like the common noun 'words'] was born in 1770 in
Cumberland, in the 'Lake Region,' which, with its bold and varied mountains
as well as its group of charming lakes, is the most picturesque part of
England proper. He had the benefit of all the available formal education,
partly at home, partly at a 'grammar' school a few miles away, but his
genius was formed chiefly by the influence of Nature, and, in a qualified
degree, by that of the simple peasant people of the region. Already as a
boy, though normal and active, he began to be sensitive to the Divine Power
in Nature which in his mature years he was to express with deeper sympathy
than any poet before him. Early left an orphan, at seventeen he was sent by
his uncles to Cambridge University. Here also the things which most
appealed to him were rather the new revelations of men and life than the
formal studies, and indeed the torpid instruction of the time offered
little to any thoughtful student. On leaving Cambridge he was uncertain as
to his life-work. He said that he did not feel himself 'good enough' for
the Church, he was not drawn toward law, and though he fancied that he had
capacity for a military career, he felt that 'if he were ordered to the
West Indies his talents would not save him from the yellow fever.' At
first, therefore, he spent nearly a year in London in apparent idleness, an
intensely interested though detached spectator of the city life, but more
especially absorbed in his mystical consciousness of its underlying current
of spiritual being. After this he crossed to France to learn the language.
The Revolution was then (1792) in its early stages, and in his 'Prelude'
Wordsworth has left the finest existing statement of the exultant
anticipations of a new world of social justice which the movement aroused
in himself and other young English liberals. When the Revolution past into
the period of violent bloodshed he determined, with more enthusiasm than
judgment, to put himself forward as a leader of the moderate Girondins.
From the wholesale slaughter of this party a few months later he was saved
through the stopping of his allowance by his more cautious uncles, which
compelled him, after a year's absence, to return to England.
For several years longer Wordsworth lived uncertainly. When, soon after his
return, England, in horror at the execution of the French king, joined the
coalition of European powers against France, Wordsworth experienced a great
shock--the first, he tells us, that his moral nature had ever suffered--at
seeing his own country arrayed with corrupt despotisms against what seemed
to him the cause of humanity. The complete degeneration of the Revolution
into anarchy and tyranny further served to plunge him into a chaos of moral
bewilderment, from which he was gradually rescued partly by renewed
communion with Nature and partly by the influence of his sister Dorothy, a
woman of the most sensitive nature but of strong character and admirable
good sense. From this time for the rest of her life she continued to live
with him, and by her unstinted and unselfish devotion contributed very
largely to his poetic success. He had now begun to write poetry (though
thus far rather stiffly and in the rimed couplet), and the receipt of a