Wordsworth's eighty years witnessed in some of men's deepest feelings
about art and life and "the speaking face of earth and heaven."

Here, too, Wordsworth stood isolated and apart. Scott and Southey were
valued friends, but, as has been truly said, he thought little of
Scott's poetry, and less of Southey's. Of Blake's _Songs of Innocence
and Experience_ he said, "There is something in the madness of this
man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter
Scott." Coleridge was the only member of the shining company with whom
he ever had any real intimacy of mind, for whom he ever nourished real
deference and admiration as one "unrelentingly possessed by thirst of
greatness, love, and beauty," and in whose intellectual power, as the
noble lines in the Sixth Book of the _Prelude_ so gorgeously attest,
he took the passionate interest of a man at once master, disciple, and
friend. It is true to say, as Emerson says, that Wordsworth's genius
was the great exceptional fact of the literature of his period. But he
had no teachers nor inspirers save nature and solitude.

Wordsworth was the son of a solicitor, and all his early circumstances
were homely, unpretentious, and rather straitened. His mother died
when he was eight years old, and when his father followed her five
years later, two of his uncles provided means for continuing
at Cambridge the education which had been begun in the rural
grammar-school of Hawkshead. It was in 1787 that he went up to St.
John's College. He took his Bachelor's degree at the beginning of
1791, and there his connection with the university ended.

For some years after leaving Cambridge, Wordsworth let himself drift.
He did not feel good enough for the Church; he shrank from the law;
fancying that he had talents for command, he thought of being a
soldier. Meanwhile, he passed a short time desultorily in London.
Towards the end of 1791, through Paris, he passed on to Orleans
and Blois, where he made some friends and spent most of a year. He
returned to Paris in October 1792. France was no longer standing on
the top of golden hours. The September massacres filled the sky with
a lurid flame. Wordsworth still retained his ardent faith in the
Revolution, and was even ready, though no better than "a landsman on
the deck of a ship struggling with a hideous storm," to make common
cause with the Girondists. But the prudence of friends at home forced
him back to England before the begi