If thou indeed derive thy light from Heaven,
    Then to the measure of that Heaven-born light,
    Shine, Poet! in thy place, and be content.

He was not distinguished at college; the record of his days there may be found in The Prelude, which he calls The Growth of a Poet’s Mind.  He was graduated in 1791, with the degree of B.A., and went over to France, where he, among others, was carried away with enthusiasm for the French Revolution, and became a thorough Radical.  That he afterwards changed his political views, should not be advanced in his disfavor; for many ardent and virtuous minds were hoping to see the fulfilment of recent predictions in greater freedom to man.  Wordsworth erred in a great company, and from noble sympathies.  He returned to England in 1792, with his illusions thoroughly dissipated.  The workings of his mind are presented in The Prelude.

In the same year he published Descriptive Sketches, and An Evening Walk, which attracted little attention.  A legacy of L900 left him by his friend Calvert, in 1795, enabled the frugal poet to devote his life to poetry, and particularly to what he deemed the emancipation of poetry from the fetters of the mythic and from the smothering ornaments of rhetoric.

In Nov., 1797, he went to London, taking with him a play called The Borderers:  it was rejected by the manager.  In the autumn of 1798, he published his Lyrical Ballads, which contained, besides his own verses, a poem by an anonymous friend.  The poem was The Ancient Mariner; the friend, Coleridge.  In the joint operation, Wordsworth took the part based on nature; Coleridge illustrated the supernatural.  The Ballads were received with undisguised contempt; nor, by reason of its company, did The Ancient Mariner have a much better hearing.  Wordsworth preserved his equanimity, and an implicit faith in himself.

After a visit to Germany, he settled in 1799 at Grasmere, in the Lake country, and the next year republished the Lyrical Ballads with a new volume, both of which passed to another edition in 1802.  With this edition, Wordsworth ran up his revolutionary flag and nailed it to the mast.

POETICAL CANONS.—­It would be impossible as well as unnecessary to attempt an analysis of even the principal poems of so voluminous a writer; but it is important to state in substance the poetical canons he laid down.  They may be found in the prefaces to the various editions of his Ballads, and may be thus epitomized: 

I. He purposely chose his incidents and situations from common life, because in it our elementary feelings coexist in a state of simplicity.

II.  He adopts the language of common life, because men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and because, being less under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions.