enabled them to live in the frugal and simple manner which suited them.  Two years later W.’s circumstances enabled him to marry his cousin, Mary Hutchinson, to whom he had been long attached.  In 1804 he made a tour in Scotland, and began his friendship with Scott.  The year 1807 saw the publication of Poems in Two Volumes, which contains much of his best work, including the “Ode to Duty,” “Intimations of Immortality,” “Yarrow Unvisited,” and the “Solitary Reaper.”  In 1813 he migrated to Rydal Mount, his home for the rest of his life; and in the same year he received, through the influence of Lord Lonsdale, the appointment of Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland, with a salary of L400.  The next year he made another Scottish tour, when he wrote Yarrow Visited, and he also pub. The Excursion, “being a portion of The Recluse, a Poem.”  W. had now come to his own, and was regarded by the great majority of the lovers of poetry as, notwithstanding certain limitations and flaws, a truly great and original poet.  The rest of his life has few events beyond the publication of his remaining works (which, however, did not materially advance his fame), and tokens of the growing honour in which he was held. The White Doe of Rylstone appeared in 1815, in which year also he made a collection of his poems; Peter Bell and The Waggoner in 1819; The River Duddon and Memorials of a Tour on the Continent in 1820; Ecclesiastical Sonnets 1822; and Yarrow Revisited in 1835.  In 1831 he paid his last visit to Scott; in 1838 he received the degree of D.C.L. from Durham, and in 1839 the same from Oxf.  Three years later he resigned his office of Distributor of Stamps in favour of his s., and received a civil list pension of L300.  The following year, 1843, he succeeded Southey as Poet Laureate.  His long, tranquil, and fruitful life ended in 1850.  He lies buried in the churchyard of Grasmere.  After his death the Prelude, finished in 1805, was pub. It had been kept back because the great projected poem of which it was to have been the preface, and of which The Excursion is a part, was never completed.

The work of W. is singularly unequal.  When at his best, as in the “Intimations of Immortality,” “Laodamia,” some passages in The Excursion, and some of his short pieces, and especially his sonnets, he rises to heights of noble inspiration and splendour of language rarely equalled by any of our poets.  But it required his poetic fire to be at fusing point to enable him to burst through his natural tendency to prolixity and even dulness.  His extraordinary lack of humour and the, perhaps consequent, imperfect power of self-criticism by which it was accompanied, together with the theory of poetic theme and diction with which he hampered himself, led him into a frequent choice of trivial subjects and childish language which excited not unjust ridicule, and long delayed the