thought, and to have transmitted the reader's mind immediately forward, becomes an exceeding complex combination of thought, almost a dissertation in miniature, and thus our journey to the assigned end (if, indeed, we are carried so far, which is not always the case) becomes nothing less than a visit of inspection to every garden, manufactory, museum, and antiquity situated near the road throughout its whole length. . . . Or if we might compare the series of ideas in a composition to a military line, we should say that many of the author's images are supernumerarily attended by so many related but secondary and subordinate ideas, that the array of thought has some resemblance to what that military line would be if many of the men, veritable and brave soldiers, stood in the ranks surrounded by their wives and children. . His are the most extraordinary faculties I have ever yet seen resident in a form of flesh and blood.” -John Forster. "Samuel Taylor Coleridge was like the Rhine, that exulting and abounding river;' he was full of words, full of thoughts; yielding both in an unfailing flow that delighted many and perplexed a few of his hearers. He was a man of prodigious and miscellaneous reading, always willing to communicate all he knew. was familiar to him.. From Alpha to Omega all He went from flower to flower throughout the whole garden of learning, like the butterfly or the bee-most like the bee. . He was so full of information that it was a relief to him to part with some of it to others. I imagine that no man had ever read so many books and at the same time had digested so much." -B. W. Procter. "The ardor, delicacy, energy of his intellect, his resolute desire to get at the roots of things and deeper yet, if deeper might be, will always enchant and attract all spirits of like mould and temper."-A. C. Swinburne. "The molten material of his mind, too abundant for the capacity of the mould, overflowed it in fiery gushes of fiery They [his associates] all thought of him excess. what Scott said of him, 'No man has all the resources of poetry in such profusion.'"-Lowell. ILLUSTRATION. "As ere from Lieule-Oaive's vapory head Dance sportively."-The Destiny of Nations. WORDSWORTH, 1770-1850 Biographical Outline.-William Wordsworth, born at Cockermouth, England, April 7, 1770; father an attorney and agent to Sir James Lowther, afterward Lord Lonsdale ; mother the daughter of a mercer of Westmoreland; Wordsworth's boyhood is passed partly at Cockermouth and partly with his mother's parents at Penrith; he records of himself that, as a child, he was of "a stiff, moody, and violent temper," and that he once seriously contemplated suicide on being checked for some boyish error; during his early boyhood he read "all of Fielding's works, Don Quixote,' 'Gil Blas,' and any part of Swift that I liked- Gulliver's Travels' and The Tale of a Tub' being both much to my taste; in his ninth year Wordsworth is sent to a school at Hawkshead; his first verses are written as school task-work, and are entitled "Summer Vacation; " to these he adds voluntarily other verses on "The Return to School;" in his fifteenth year he wins the admiration of his fellow-pupils by writing verses in honor of the second centenary of the Hawkshead school, which was founded in 1585 by Archbishop Sandys; Wordsworth afterward called these youthful verses "a tame imitation of Pope's versification and a little in his style;" during his school-days he is profoundly impressed by the majestic scenery about him in the vicinity of Hawkshead; after his father's death, in 1783, Wordsworth is placed under the care of two uncles, who enable him to continue his education; an estate of £5,000, which belonged to his father, had been seized by Lord Lonsdale, and it was not till that nobleman's death, in 1801, after most of the remaining fortune of the family had been spent in litigation over the matter, that it was recovered; meantime the poet's uncles recognize the talent of the young man and his brother Christopher (afterward master of Trinity College, Cambridge), and give to each a course at the University of Cambridge. Wordsworth enters St. John's College, Cambridge, in October, 1787, thus becoming a successor of Spenser, Dryden, Ben Jonson, Milton, and Gray, and a predecessor of Carlyle and Byron-all Cambridge men; the tranquil atmosphere and the noble associations of Cambridge deeply affect the young poet; he spends his first long college vacation at Hawkshead, where he develops a somewhat closer interest in the joys and sorrows of the villagers; "his second long vacation is spent at Penrith with that sister who was to be his lifelong companion, critic, and friend; his third college summer is spent with his friend Jones in a walking tour through Switzerland-an experience narrated later in his "Prelude" and then as rare as it is now common among young collegians; he is graduated, B.A., from Cambridge in June, 1791, and leaves the university with no fixed plans for the future; he first goes to London, and spends some time in walking about the streets of the metropolis, studying the types of humanity found there; from this London sojourn result the "Reverie of Poor Susan" and the "Sonnet on Westminster Bridge; " in November, 1791, Wordsworth lands in France, passes through Paris (then in the throes of the French Revolution), and settles at Orleans to study the French language; he spends nearly a year at Orleans and at Blois; he returns as far as Paris in October, 1792, and thinks seriously of entering the struggle as a leader of the Girondists, but his uncles compel him, by stopping his supply of funds, to return to England late in 1792; during 1792 he publishes two poems, "The Evening Walk" and "Descriptive Essays," and thus attracts the attention of Coleridge, though the poems are not otherwise noticed; being at heart a democrat, Wordsworth is seriously disturbed when England declares war against the French republic; in 1795 his gifted sister becomes his permanent companion, and the poet finds in her society much solace; during this year, on the death of Raisley Calvert, a friend whom Wordsworth had tenderly nursed while he was dying of consumption, the poet receives a bequest of £900. In the autumn of 1795 he settles with his sister in a snug cottage at Racedown, near Crewkerne, in Dorsetshire; he records afterward that he and his sister lived for seven or eight years on the interest of the £900 plus a legacy of £100 that his sister had received and about 100 that he had received from his "Lyrical Ballads;" while at Racedown Wordsworth completes his "Guilt and Sorrow," and writes his tragedy, "The Borderers" and also "The Ruined Cottage,” afterward embodied in the "Excursion;" the poem last named is warmly praised by Coleridge, who visits the Wordsworths at Racedown in June, 1797; in July, 1797, they remove to Alfoxden, a large house in Somersetshire, near Netherstowey, where Coleridge was then living; here Wordsworth increases his income by taking as a pupil a young son of Basil Montagu, and here he writes many of his shorter poems; during a brief excursion among the Cumberland hills, in the autumn of 1797, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and his sister collaborate in planning "The Ancient Mariner," which Coleridge afterward puts into form; Wordsworth is said to have suggested the well-known incident of the albatross and the navigation of the ship by dead men; in the autumn of 1797 was published the volume of poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge called "Lyrical Ballads;' besides the trivial poems of Wordsworth that have been so severely and justly criticised, this volume contained "Lines Written above Tintern Abbey," a poem written at Tintern Abbey in a single day during 1798, and now generally recognized as the author's greatest short poem. Soon after the publication of the "Lyrical Ballads' Wordsworth and his sister sail for Germany, and spend four months at Goslar, near the Hartz forest, for the purpose of |