WORDSWORTH.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Originally published as an Introduction to the new edition of Wordsworth’s Complete Poetical Works (1888).]

The poet whose works are contained in the present volume was born in the little town of Cockermouth, in Cumberland, on April 7, 1770.  He died at Rydal Mount, in the neighbouring county of Westmoreland, on April 23, 1850.  In this long span of mortal years, events of vast and enduring moment shook the world.  A handful of scattered and dependent colonies in the northern continent of America made themselves into one of the most powerful and beneficent of states.  The ancient monarchy of France, and all the old ordering of which the monarchy had been the keystone, was overthrown, and it was not until after many a violent shock of arms, after terrible slaughter of men, after strange diplomatic combinations, after many social convulsions, after many portentous mutations of empire, that Europe once more settled down for a season into established order and system.  In England almost alone, after the loss of her great possessions across the Atlantic Ocean, the fabric of the State stood fast and firm.  Yet here, too, in these eighty years, an old order slowly gave place to new.  The restoration of peace, after a war conducted with extraordinary tenacity and fortitude, led to a still more wonderful display of ingenuity, industry, and enterprise, in the more fruitful field of commerce and of manufactures.  Wealth, in spite of occasional vicissitudes, increased with amazing rapidity.  The population of England and Wales grew from being seven and a half millions in 1770, to nearly eighteen millions in 1850.  Political power was partially transferred from a territorial aristocracy to the middle and trading classes.  Laws were made at once more equal and more humane.  During all the tumult of the great war which for so many years bathed Europe in fire, through all the throes and agitations in which peace brought forth the new time, Wordsworth for half a century (1799-1850) dwelt sequestered in unbroken composure and steadfastness in his chosen home amid the mountains and lakes of his native region, working out his own ideal of the high office of the Poet.

The interpretation of life in books and the development of imagination underwent changes of its own.  Most of the great lights of the eighteenth century were still burning, though burning low, when Wordsworth came into the world.  Pope, indeed, had been dead for six and twenty years, and all the rest of the Queen Anne men had gone.  But Gray only died in 1771, and Goldsmith in 1774.  Ten years later Johnson’s pious and manly heart ceased to beat.  Voltaire and Rousseau, those two diverse oracles of their age, both died in 1778.  Hume had passed away two years before.  Cowper was forty years older than Wordsworth, but Cowper’s most delightful work was not produced until 1783.  Crabbe, who