It was in 1797 that the new romantic movement in our literature assumed definite form.  Wordsworth and Coleridge retired to the Quantock Hills, Somerset, and there formed the deliberate purpose to make literature “adapted to interest mankind permanently,” which, they declared, classic poetry could never do.  Helping the two poets was Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy, with a woman’s love for flowers and all beautiful things; and a woman’s divine sympathy for human life even in its lowliest forms.  Though a silent partner, she furnished perhaps the largest share of the inspiration which resulted in the famous Lyrical Ballads of 1798.  In their partnership Coleridge was to take up the “supernatural, or at least romantic”; while Wordsworth was “to give the charm of novelty to things of everyday ... by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.”  The whole spirit of their work is reflected in two poems of this remarkable little volume, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which is Coleridge’s masterpiece, and “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” which expresses Wordsworth’s poetical creed, and which is one of the noblest and most significant of our poems.  That the Lyrical Ballads attracted no attention,[220] and was practically ignored by a public that would soon go into raptures over Byron’s Childe Harold and Don Juan, is of small consequence.  Many men will hurry a mile to see skyrockets, who never notice Orion and the Pleiades from their own doorstep.  Had Wordsworth and Coleridge written only this one little book, they would still be among the representative writers of an age that proclaimed the final triumph of Romanticism.

LIFE OF WORDSWORTH.  To understand the life of him who, in Tennyson’s words, “uttered nothing base,” it is well to read first The Prelude, which records the impressions made upon Wordsworth’s mind from his earliest recollection until his full manhood, in 1805, when the poem was completed.[221] Outwardly his long and uneventful life divides itself naturally into four periods:  (1) his childhood and youth, in the Cumberland Hills, from 1770 to 1787; (2) a period of uncertainty, of storm and stress, including his university life at Cambridge, his travels abroad, and his revolutionary experience, from 1787 to 1797; (3) a short but significant period of finding himself and his work, from 1797 to 1799; (4) a long period of retirement in the northern lake region, where he was born, and where for a full half century he lived so close to nature that her influence is reflected in all his poetry.  When one has outlined these four periods he has told almost all that can be told of a life which is marked, not by events, but largely by spiritual experiences.

Wordsworth was born in 1770 at Cockermouth, Cumberland, where the Derwent,

          Fairest of all rivers, loved
    To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song,
    And from his alder shades and rocky falls,
    And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice
    That flowed along my dreams.