A History of English Literature

small legacy from a friend enabled him to devote his life to the art. Six
or seven years later his resources were several times multiplied by an
honorable act of the new Lord Lonsdale, who voluntarily repaid a sum of
money owed by his predecessor to Wordsworth's father.
In 1795 Wordsworth and his sister moved from the Lake Region to
Dorsetshire, at the other end of England, likewise a country of great
natural beauty. Two years later came their change (of a few miles) to
Alfoxden, the association with Coleridge, and 'Lyrical Ballads,' containing
nineteen of Wordsworth's poems (above, page 267). After their winter in
Germany the Wordsworths settled permanently in their native Lake Region, at
first in 'Dove Cottage,' in the village of Grasmere. This simple little
stone house, buried, like all the others in the Lake Region, in brilliant
flowers, and opening from its second story onto the hillside garden where
Wordsworth composed much of his greatest poetry, is now the annual center
of pilgrimage for thousands of visitors, one of the chief literary shrines
of England and the world. Here Wordsworth lived frugally for several years;
then after intermediate changes he took up his final residence in a larger
house, Rydal Mount, a few miles away. In 1802 he married Mary Hutchinson,
who had been one of his childish schoolmates, a woman of a spirit as fine
as that of his sister, whom she now joined without a thought of jealousy in
a life of self-effacing devotion to the poet.
Wordsworth's poetic inspiration, less fickle than that of Coleridge,
continued with little abatement for a dozen years; but about 1815, as he
himself states in his fine but pathetic poem 'Composed upon an Evening of
Extraordinary Splendour,' it for the most part abandoned him. He continued,
however, to produce a great deal of verse, most of which his admirers would
much prefer to have had unwritten. The plain Anglo-Saxon yeoman strain
which was really the basis of his nature now asserted itself in the growing
conservatism of ideas which marked the last forty years of his life. His
early love of simplicity hardened into a rigid opposition not only to the
materialistic modern industrial system but to all change--the Reform Bill,
the reform of education, and in general all progressive political and
social movements. It was on this abandonment of his early liberal
principles that Browning based his spirited lyric 'The Lost Leader.'
During the first half or more of his mature life, until long after he had
ceased to be a significant creative force, Wordsworth's poetry, for reasons
which will shortly appear, had been met chiefly with ridicule or
indifference, and he had been obliged to wait in patience while the
slighter work first of Scott and then of Byron took the public by storm.
Little by little, however, he came to his own, and by about 1830 he enjoyed
with discerning readers that enthusiastic appreciation of which he is
certain for all the future. The crowning mark of recognition came in 1843
when on the death of his friend Southey he was made Poet Laureate. The
honor, however, had been so long delayed that it was largely barren. Ten
years earlier his life had been darkened by the mental decay of his sister
and the death of Coleridge; and other personal sorrows now came upon him.
He died in 1850 at the age of eighty.
Wordsworth, as we have said, is the chief representative of some
(especially one) of the most important principles in the Romantic Movement;
but he is far more than a member of any movement; through his supreme
poetic expression of some of the greatest spiritual ideals he belongs among
the five or six greatest English poets. First, he is the profoundest
interpreter of Nature in all poetry. His feeling for Nature has two
aspects. He is keenly sensitive, and in a more delicately discriminating
way than any of his predecessors, to all the external beauty and glory of