Meanwhile Wordsworth and his sister, having, been supplied with by the Wedgwood s. had aceompanied Coleridge to Germany (1798 99). Coleridge went to (1;Ittingen to study phi losophy; Wordsworth and his sister settled down in Goslar for the winter. The poet hardly knew a word of German, but his genius throve at Goslar. There he began his Prelude and his first song of "Lucy." On returning to England, William and Dorothy settled in Dove Cottage at Grasmere, the loveliest spot among the English Lakes (1799). After occupying other houses, the Wordsworths finally made their home at Ilydal Mount (1813). In 1802 the Earl of Lonsdale died, and his successor paid over to the Wordswortbs a debt of £8500 and afterwards further helped them. Having thus a competency, Wordsworth married (October 4. 1802) Miss Mary Hutchinson (born August 16, 1770), a friend from youth. portrayed in "She was a phantom of delight." For nearly fifty years Wordsworth's life flowed on tranquilly, a noble illustration of his own phrase "plain living and high thinking." Coleridge for a time lived near him and with him. but eventually the poets were estranged, never to be wholly reconciled. Friends and admirers gathered around Wordsworth. among whom were John Wilson, De Quineey, Henry Crabb Robinson. and Sir George Beau mont, the landscape painter. Southey. too, lived near at Keswick, In London Wordsworth asso ciated with Rogers. Haydon. Hunt, Keats, and others. He continued to take many tours, of which those into Scotland, to the Highlands, fur nished him with exquisite poetic material. In 1S13 Wordsworth was appointed distributor of stamps for Westmoreland, a post that brought him £400 a year. in 1820 he spent four months in Switzerland and in Italy, visited Belgium in 1823 and 1828, and made his last Continental tour in l537. In 1842 he received a Government pen sion of £300 a year; and in IS43 be succeeded Southey in the laureateship. He died at Ilydal Mount, April 23, 1850, and was buried in the Grasmere churchyard. Dorothy survived her brother till January 25, 1S55. Mrs. 'Wordsworth died January 17, 1859. A favorite child, Dor othy, who had married Edward Quillinan (q.v.), died in 1847. Two sons survived.
Wordsworth consecrated his life to poetry. is suing volume after volume, and for a long time meeting with little favor. The attitude of the orthodox critics was summed up in Jeffrey's "This will never do!" (Edinburgh Review. No
vember, 1814). Wordsworth nevertheless had strong defenders in Wilson, De Quincey. Lamb, Coleridge. and the younger generation: and his serene belief in himself was finally justified by full recognition. Poems (2 vols.. 1807) con tained much of his finest verse. as "To a High land Girl," "The Solitary Reaper," "T wandered lonely as a cloud," and the odes to Duty and on Immortality. In _ The Excursion. 'a didactic epic in blank verse. ridiculed by Byron, hut now regarded as the best of Wordsworth's longer poems. in IS15 Words worth republished his poems in two volumes. ranging them on philosophical principles. Later he published The White Doe of Rylstone ; Thu n k.cgi ring (hie (181G); Peter Bell (15191; The Waggoner. with Sonnets (1819) : 7'he River Duddon (1520). a series of noble sonnets, the best since Milton: Ecclesiastical Sketches (1522), an unfortunate attempt to shape the history of the Chureh in Britain to a sonnet sequence; Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems (1835) ; Poems, chiefly of early and late years (1842) ; The Prelude, a highly interesting autobiographi cal poem (posthumous, 1850) ; and The Recluse, a fragment (1888). Wordsworth also issued col leeted editions; of his work, containing revisions and additions, in 1820, 1827, 1832, 1830-37, 1843, IS-16, and 1849-50. It was We•dswrorth's aim to depict the elemental passions in unaffected Ian. guage, and in his best work he succeeded—though his simplicity sometimes overreaches itself and becomes mere tedious childishness. In his in spired moments, "Nature herself," said Matthew Arnold, "seemed to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with he• own bare, slicer, penetrating power." Wordsworth's passion for nature and his insistence on the brotherhood of man passed into the thought of the nineteenth century, and in course of time permeated it. Though Burns and Cowper and Crabbe bad de scribed nature before him, it was his to take up what Arnold has called the office of modern poetry, the moral interpretation of nature. Be held a sort of Neo-Platonic, almost pantheistic, view of the existence of a soul, something con scious and all but divine, in nature. In his choice of subjects, too, he vindicated the possi bility of treating the lives and emotions of the humblest classes in a strain of deep poetry.