pent a college vacation in tramping through France, landing
at Calais on the eve of the very day (July 14, 1790) on which Louis XVI.
signalized the anniversary of the fall of the Bastile by taking the oath
of fidelity to the new Constitution. In the following year Wordsworth
revisited France, where he spent thirteen months, forming an intimacy
with the republican general, Beaupuis, at Orleans, and reaching Paris not
long after the September massacres of 1792. Those were the days, too, in
which young Southey and young Coleridge, having married sisters at
Bristol, were planning a "Pantisocracy," or ideal community, on the banks
of the Susquehannah, and denouncing the British government for going to
war with the French Republic. This group of poets, who had met one
another first in the south of England, came afterward to be called the
Lake Poets, from their residence in the mountainous lake country of
Westmoreland and Cumberland, with which their names, and that of
Wordsworth, especially, are forever associated. The so-called "Lakers"
{227} did not, properly speaking, constitute a school of poetry. They
differed greatly from one another in mind and art. But they were
connected by social ties and by religious and political sympathies. The
excesses of the French Revolution, and the usurpation of Napoleon
disappointed them, as it did many other English liberals, and drove them
into the ranks of the reactionaries. Advancing years brought
conservatism, and they became in time loyal Tories and orthodox Churchmen.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), the chief of the three, and, perhaps, on
the whole, the greatest English poet since Milton, published his _Lyrical
Ballads_ in 1798. The volume contained a few pieces by his friend
Coleridge--among them the _Ancient Mariner_--and its appearance may
fairly be said to mark an epoch in the history of English poetry.
Wordsworth regarded himself as a reformer of poetry; and in the preface
to the second volume of _Lyrical Ballads_, he defended the theory on
which they were composed. His innovations were twofold, in
subject-matter, and in diction. "The principal object which I proposed
to myself in these poems," he said, "was to choose incidents and
situations from common life. Low and rustic life was generally chosen,
because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a
better soil in which they can attain their maturity . . . and are
incorporated with the beautifu