There came from me a sigh of pair I looked at her, and looked again : Matthew is in his grave, yet now, As at that moment, with a bough NOTES. This poem was written in 1799, and published the following year. 1. Matthew. This old schoolmaster is described elsewhere by Wordsworth as being "made up of several, both of his class and men of other occupations." 2. wilding. A twig from a wild apple tree. Ten ruddy wildings in the wood I found." - Dryden. THE SOLITARY REAPER. BEHOLD her, single in the field, No nightingale did ever chaunt A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard Will no one tell me what she sings? Or is it some more humble lay, Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, Whate'er the theme, the maiden sang BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH was born at Cockermouth, a town in Cumberland, England, April 7, 1770. He went to school at Hawkshead, Lancashire, whence in his seventeenth year he was sent to St. John's College, Cambridge. In January, 1791, he took his degree at the University, but without having distinguished himself in any way. The next fifteen or sixteen months were spent in France, just then in the first wild hopes of the Revolution. "In the aspirations and hopes of the revolutionists he was an ardent sharer; he thought that the world's great age was beginning anew; and with all his soul he hailed so splendid an era. The ultimate degradation of that great movement by wild lawlessness, and then by most selfish ambition, alienated his sympathy for it." Towards the close of 1792 he returned to England, and passed the subsequent time among his friends in London and elsewhere till he settled with his sister at Racedown, Dorsetshire, in 1796. In the following year they removed to Alfoxden. It was during this period that he made the acquaintance of Coleridge. Wordsworth had already published (1793) two little volumes of poetry, entitled Descriptive Sketches and The Evening Walk; but they showed little promise of the triumphs which were to crown his later life. In 1798 the first volume of the Lyrical Ballads was published at Bristol, which purported to be the joint work of himself and Mr. Coleridge, but to which the latter contributed only "The Ancient Mariner" and two or three shorter poems. After some months spent in Germany, Wordsworth and his sister established themselves at Grasmere, in the lake country. In 1800 he published the second volume of the Lyrical Ballads, and in 1802 he married Mary Hutchinson. From 1799 to 1814 he was mainly busy with his great philosophical poem, to be called “The Recluse,” “containing views of Man, Nature, and Society," of which "The Prelude " was to be the introduction and "The Excursion" the Second and main Part. He designed that his minor pieces should be so arranged in connection with this work as to "give them claim to be likened to the little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses, ordinarily included in Gothic churches." This plan, however, was never carried out, as of the First and Third Parts only one book was written, and it has never been published. From 1814 until his death Wordsworth lived serenely and quietly at Rydal Mount, making occasional excursions into Scotland and Wales, and a tour upon the continent. In 1843, upon the death of Southey, he was appointed Poet-Laureate. His life was a long one, of steady work and much happiness. He died April 23, 1850. The distinguishing feature of Wordsworth's poetry is well set forth in his own words: "Every great poet," he said, "is a teacher; I wish either to be considered as a teacher or as nothing." And he avowed that the purpose of his poetry was "to console the afflicted; to add sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier; to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think and feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous." "Love had he found in huts where poor men lie, His daily teachings had been woods and rills, The sleep that is among the lonely hills." "Wordsworth," says John Campbell Shairp, "was the first who, both in theory and practice, shook off the trammels of the so-called poetic diction which had tyrannized over English poetry for more than a century. This diction of course exactly represented the half-courtly, half-classical mode of thinking and feeling. As Wordsworth rebelled against this conventionality of spirit, so against the outward expression of it. The whole of the stock phrases and used-up metaphors he discarded, and returned to living language of natural feeling, as it is used by men, instead of the dead form of it which had got stereotyped in books. And just as in his subjects he had taken in from the waste much virgin soil, so in his diction he appropriated for poetic use a large amount of words, idioms, metaphors, till then by the poets disallowed. His shorter poems, both the earlier and the later, are, for the most part, very models of natural, powerful, and yet sensitive English; the language being, like a garment, woven out of, and transparent with, the thought." Other Poems to be Read: We are Seven; The Pet Lamb; To a Highland Girl; Laodamia; Matthew; The Fountain; The Wishing Gate; To the Small Celandine; "Three Years She Grew"; "She was a Phantom of Delight"; At the Grave of Burns. REFERENCES: Shairp's Studies in Poetry and Philosophy; Hazlitt's English Poets; De Quincey's Miscellaneous Works; Literature and Life, by E. P. Whipple; Wordsworth (English Men of Letters), by Goldwin Smith; Yesterdays with Authors, by James T. Fields; Among My Books, Second Series, by J. R. Lowell; Matthew Arnold's Introduction to the Poems of William Wordsworth. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. CHRISTABEL. PART I. 'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock, And the owls have awaken'd the crowing cock, Tu whit! Tu- whoo! And hark, again! the crowing cock, How drowsily it crew. Sir Leoline, the Baron rich, Hath a toothless mastiff bitch; From her kennel beneath the rock She maketh answer to the clock, Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour; Is the night chilly and dark? |