His last scene comported with the whole tenor of his life.  Although in extreme pain, not a sigh, not a groan, escaped him; and with undisturbed serenity he closed his well-spent life.  Such was the man America has lost!  Such was the man for whom our nation mourns!

Notes.—­At Brandywine Creek, in Pennsylvania, 18,000 British, under Howe, defeated 13,000 Americans under Washington.

Germantown, near Philadelphia, was the scene of an American defeat by the British, the same generals commanding as at Brandywine.

The battle of Monmouth, in New Jersey, resulted in victory for the Americans.

The hero of Saratoga was General Gates, who there compelled the surrender of General Burgoyne.

At Eutaw Springs, General Greene defeated a superior force of British.

Cornwallis, Charles, second earl and first marquis (b. 1738, d. 1805), surrendered his forces to a combined American and French army and French fleet at Yorktown, in 1781, virtually ending the war.

CXXXII.  THE SOLITARY REAPER. (446)

William Wordsworth, 1770-1850, the founder of the “Lake School” of poets, was born at Cockermouth, Cumberland, England.  From his boyhood he was a great lover and student of nature, and it is to his beautiful descriptions of landscape, largely, that he owes his fame.  He was a graduate of Cambridge University, and while there commenced the study of Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and Shakespeare, as models for his own writings.  Two legacies having been bequeathed him, Wordsworth determined to make poetry the aim of his life, and in 1795 located at Racedown with his sister Dorothy, where he commenced the tragedy of “The Borderers.”  A visit from Coleridge at this period made the two poets friends for life.  In 1802 Wordsworth married Miss Mary Hutchinson, and in 1813 he settled at Rydal Mount, on Lake Windermere, where he passed the remainder of his life.

Wordsworth’s poetry is remarkable for its extreme simplicity of language.  At first his efforts were almost universally ridiculed, and in 1819 his entire income from literary work had not amounted to 140 Pounds.  In 1830 his merit began to be recognized; in 1839 Oxford University conferred upon him the degree of D. C. L.; and in 1843 he was made poet laureate.

“The Excursion” is by far the most beautiful and the most important of Wordsworth’s productions.  “Salisbury Plain,” “The White Doe of Rylstone,” “Yarrow Revisited,” and many of his sonnets and minor poems are also much admired. ###

Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland lass! 
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass! 
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
Oh listen! for the vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.

No nightingale did ever chant
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travelers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands: 
A voice so thrilling ne’er was heard
In springtime from the cuckoo bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.