resumed it on the 1st of January 1802 for another twelve months, closing on the 11th of January 1803. These were printed first in 1889. She composed Recollections of a Tour in Scotland, in 1803, with her brother and Coleridge; this was first published in 1874. Her next contribution to the family history was her Journal of a Mountain Ramble, in November 1805, an account of a walking tour in the Lake district with her brother. In July 1820 the Wordsworths made a tour on the continent of Europe, of which Dorothy preserved a very careful record, portions of which were given to the world in 1884, the writer having refused to publish it in 1824 on the ground that her “object was not to make a book, but to leave to her niece a neatly-penned memorial of those few interesting months of our lives.” Meanwhile, without her brother, but in the company of Joanna Hutchinson, Dorothy Wordsworth had travelled over Scotland in 1822, and had composed a Journal of that tour. Other MSS. exist and have been examined carefully by the editors and biographers of the poets, but the records which we have mentioned and her letters form the principal literary relics of Dorothy Wordsworth. In 1829 she was attacked by very serious illness, and was never again in good health. After 1836 she could not be considered to be in possession of her mental faculties, and became a pathetic member of the interesting household at Grasmere. She outlived the poet, however, by several years, dying at Grasmere on the 25th of January 1855.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of Dorothy Wordsworth’s companionship to her illustrious brother. He has left numerous tributes to it, and to the sympathetic originality of her perceptions. “She,” he said,
“gave me eyes, she gave me ears,
And humble cares, and delicate fears,
A heart the fountain of sweet tears,
And love, and thought, and joy.”
The value of the records preserved by Dorothy Wordsworth, especially in earlier years, is hardly to be over-estimated by those who desire to form an exact impression of the revival of English poetry. When Wordsworth and Coleridge refashioned imaginative literature at the close of the 18th century, they were daily and hourly accompanied by a feminine presence exquisitely attuned to sympathize with their efforts, and by an intelligence which was able and anxious to move in step with theirs. “S.T.C. and my beloved sister,” William Wordsworth wrote in 1832, “are the two beings to whom my intellect is most indebted.” In her pages we can put our finger on the very pulse of the machine; we are present while the New Poetry is evolved, and the sensitive descriptions in her prose lack nothing but the accomplishment of verse. Moreover, it is certain that the sharpness and fineness of Dorothy’s observation, “the shooting lights of her wild eyes,” actually afforded material to the poets. Coleridge, for instance, when he wrote his famous lines about “The one red leaf, the last of its clan,” used almost the very words in which, on the 7th of March 1798, Dorothy Wordsworth had recorded “One only leaf upon the top of a tree . . . danced round and round like a rag blown by the wind.”
It is not merely by the biographical value of her notes that Dorothy Wordsworth lives. She claims an independent place in the history of English prose as one of the very earliest writers who noted, in language delicately chosen, and with no other object than to preserve their fugitive beauty, the little picturesque phenomena of homely country life. When we speak with very high praise of her art in this direction, it is only fair to add that it is called forth almost entirely by what she wrote between 1798 and 1803, for a decline similar to that which fell upon her brother’s poetry early invaded her prose; and her later journals, like her Letters, are less interesting because less inspired. A Life by E. Lee was published in 1886; but it is only since 1897, when Professor Knight collected and edited her scattered MSS., that Dorothy Wordsworth has taken her independent place in literary history. (E. G.)
WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM (1770–1850), English poet, was born at Cockermouth, on the Derwent, in Cumberland, on the 7th of April 1770, He was the son of John Wordsworth (1741–1783), an attorney, law agent to the first earl of Lonsdale, a prosperous man in his profession, descended from an old Yorkshire family of landed gentry. On the mother’s side also Wordsworth was connected with the middle territorial class: his mother, Anne Cookson, was the daughter of a well-to-do mercer in Penrith, but her mother was Dorothy Crackanthorpe, whose ancestors had been lords of the manor of Newbiggin, near Penrith, from the time of Edward III. He thus came of “gentle” kin, and was proud of it. The country squires and farmers whose blood flowed in Wordsworth’s veins were not far enough above local life to be out of sympathy with it, and the poet’s interest in the common scenes and common folk of the North country hills and dales had a traceable hereditary bias. William Wordsworth was one of a family of five, the others being Richard (1768–1816), Dorothy (q.v.), John (1772–1805), and Christopher {q.v.).
Though his parents were of sturdy stock, both died prematurely, his mother when he was eight years old, his father when he was thirteen. At the age of eight Wordsworth was sent to school at Hawkshead, in the Esthwaite valley in Lancashire. His father died while he was there, and at the age of seventeen he was sent to St. John’s College, Cambridge. He did not distinguish himself in the studies of the university, and for some time after taking his degree of B.A., in January 1791, he showed what seemed to his relatives a most perverse reluctance to adopt any regular profession. His mother had noted his “stiff, moody and violent temper” in childhood, and it seemed as if this family judgment was to be confirmed in his manhood. After taking his degree, he was pressed to take holy orders, but would not; he had no taste for the law; he idled a few months aimlessly in London, a few months more with a Welsh college friend, with whom he had made a pedestrian tour in France and Switzerland during his last Cambridge vacation; then in the November of 1791 he crossed to France, ostensibly to learn the language, made the acquaintance of revolutionaries, sympathized with them vehemently, and was within an ace of throwing in his lot with the Girondins. When it came to this, his relatives cut off his supplies, and he was obliged to return to London towards the close of 1792. But still he resisted all pressure to enter any of the regular professions, published his poems An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches in 1793, and in 1794, still moving about to all appearance in stubborn aimlessness among his friends and relatives, had no more rational purpose of livelihood than drawing up the prospectus of a periodical of strictly republican principles to be called “The Philanthropist.”
But all the time from his boyhood upwards a great purpose had been growing and maturing in his mind. The Prelude expounds in lofty impassioned strain how his sensibility for nature was “augmented and sustained,” and how it never, except for a brief interval, ceased to be “creative” in the special sense of his subsequent theory. But it is with his feelings towards nature that The Prelude mainly deals; it says little regarding the history of his ambition to express those feelings in verse. It is the autobiography, not of the poet of nature, but of the worshipper and priest. The salient incidents in the history of the poet he communicated in prose notes and in familiar discourses. Commenting on the couplet in the Evening Walk—
“And, fronting the bright west, yon oak entwines
Its darkening boughs and leaves in stronger lines—”
he said:
“This is feebly and imperfectly exprest; but I recollect distinctly the very spot where this first struck me. It was on the way between Hawkshead and Ambleside, and gave me extreme pleasure. The moment was important in my poetical history; for I date from it my consciousness of the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country, so far as I was acquainted with them; and I made a resolution to supply in some degree the deficiency. I could not at that time have been above fourteen years of age.”
About the same time he wrote, as a school task at Hawkshead, verses that show considerable acquaintance with the poets of his own country at least, as well as some previous practice in the art of verse-making.[1] The fragment that stands at the
- ↑ Memoirs of William Wordsworth, by Canon Wordsworth, vol. i. pp. 10, II. According to his own statement in the memoranda dictated to his biographer, it was the success of this exercise that “put it into his head to compose verses from the impulse of his own
