anticipated Wordsworth’s choice of themes from rural life, while treating them with a sterner realism, was virtually his contemporary, having been born in 1754, and dying in 1832.  The two great names of his own date were Scott and Coleridge, the first born in 1771, and the second a year afterwards.  Then a generation later came another new and illustrious group.  Byron was born in 1788, Shelley in 1792, and Keats in 1795.  Wordsworth was destined to see one more orb of the first purity and brilliance rise to its place in the poetic firmament.  Tennyson’s earliest volume of poems was published in 1830, and In Memoriam, one of his two masterpieces, in 1830.  Any one who realises for how much these famous names will always stand in the history of human genius, may measure the great transition that Wordsworth’s eighty years witnessed in some of men’s deepest feelings about art and life and “the speaking face of earth and heaven.”

Here, too, Wordsworth stood isolated and apart.  Scott and Southey were valued friends, but, as has been truly said, he thought little of Scott’s poetry, and less of Southey’s.  Of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience he said, “There is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott.”  Coleridge was the only member of the shining company with whom he ever had any real intimacy of mind, for whom he ever nourished real deference and admiration as one “unrelentingly possessed by thirst of greatness, love, and beauty,” and in whose intellectual power, as the noble lines in the Sixth Book of the Prelude so gorgeously attest, he took the passionate interest of a man at once master, disciple, and friend.  It is true to say, as Emerson says, that Wordsworth’s genius was the great exceptional fact of the literature of his period.  But he had no teachers nor inspirers save nature and solitude.

Wordsworth was the son of a solicitor, and all his early circumstances were homely, unpretentious, and rather straitened.  His mother died when he was eight years old, and when his father followed her five years later, two of his uncles provided means for continuing at Cambridge the education which had been begun in the rural grammar-school of Hawkshead.  It was in 1787 that he went up to St. John’s College.  He took his Bachelor’s degree at the beginning of 1791, and there his connection with the university ended.

For some years after leaving Cambridge, Wordsworth let himself drift.  He did not feel good enough for the Church; he shrank from the law; fancying that he had talents for command, he thought of being a soldier.  Meanwhile, he passed a short time desultorily in London.  Towards the end of 1791, through Paris, he passed on to Orleans and Blois, where he made some friends and spent most of a year.  He returned to Paris in October 1792.  France was no longer standing on the top of golden hours.  The September massacres filled the sky with a lurid flame.