The second period of Wordsworth’s life begins with his university course at Cambridge, in 1787.  In the third book of The Prelude we find a dispassionate account of student life, with its trivial occupations, its pleasures and general aimlessness.  Wordsworth proved to be a very ordinary scholar, following his own genius rather than the curriculum, and looking forward more eagerly to his vacation among the hills than to his examinations.  Perhaps the most interesting thing in his life at Cambridge was his fellowship with the young political enthusiasts, whose spirit is expressed in his remarkable poem on the French Revolution,—­a poem which is better than a volume of history to show the hopes and ambitions that stirred all Europe in the first days of that mighty upheaval.  Wordsworth made two trips to France, in 1790 and 1791, seeing things chiefly through the rosy spectacles of the young Oxford Republicans.  On his second visit he joined the Girondists, or the moderate Republicans, and only the decision of his relatives, who cut off his allowance and hurried him back to England, prevented his going headlong to the guillotine with the leaders of his party.  Two things rapidly cooled Wordsworth’s revolutionary enthusiasm, and ended the only dramatic interest of his placid life.  One was the excesses of the Revolution itself, and especially the execution of Louis XVI; the other was the rise of Napoleon, and the slavish adulation accorded by France to this most vulgar and dangerous of tyrants.  His coolness soon grew to disgust and opposition, as shown by his subsequent poems; and this brought upon him the censure of Shelley, Byron, and other extremists, though it gained the friendship of Scott, who from the first had no sympathy with the Revolution or with the young English enthusiasts.

Of the decisive period of Wordsworth’s life, when he was living with his sister Dorothy and with Coleridge at Alfoxden, we have already spoken.  The importance of this decision to give himself to poetry is evident when we remember that, at thirty years of age, he was without money or any definite aim or occupation in life.  He considered the law, but confessed he had no sympathy for its contradictory precepts and practices; he considered the ministry, but though strongly inclined to the Church, he felt himself not good enough for the sacred office; once he had wanted to be a soldier and serve his country, but had wavered at the prospect of dying of disease in a foreign land and throwing away his life without glory or profit to anybody.  An apparent accident, which looks more to us like a special Providence, determined his course.  He had taken care of a young friend, Raisley Calvert, who died of consumption and left Wordsworth heir to a few hundred pounds, and to the request that he should give his life to poetry.  It was this unexpected gift which enabled Wordsworth to retire from the world and follow his genius.  All his life he was poor, and lived in