WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM: Poet-philoso pher; b. at Cockermouth (24 m. s.w. of Carlisle), England, Apr. 7, 1770; d. at Rydal Mount (31 m. s. of Carlisle) Apr. 23, 1850. He was second son of John Wordsworth, attorney-at-law, and law agent for Sir James Lowther, afterward Earl of Lonsdale. His mother died in 1778, his father in 1783. He graduated from St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1791. He traveled extensively, making frequent visits to France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Hol land, and Belgium, as well as Scotland and Wales, but made his home at Grasmere, 1799-1813, whither he brought his bride in 1802-and at Rydal Mount, 1813-50. By severe simplicity of life, by frugal husbanding of slender resources derived from leg acies, later from additional income from a govern-, mental office requiring but little personal attention (1813-43), recipient of a government annuity of £300 for literary distinction (1843-50), he was en abled to devote himself unremittingly to the voca tion of poet to which he had early consecrated him self. At the Oxford Commemoration in 1839 the degree of LL.D. was .conferred upon him. On the death of Southey iu 1843 he became poet laureate. Near him dwelling in the Lake District there were at different periods Southey, Coleridge, Thomas
Arnold, De Quincy, and Prof. John Wilson (Christopher North). His sister Dorothy, a woman of rare insight and beauty of spirit, was his constant companion until her death. With the single exception of the "Ode composed on an evening of extraordinary splendor and beauty" (1818), all of his most memorable work was done between 1798 and 1808. He became the most illustrious representative of the Romantic movement in English poetry of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. This was an extension of the wave of Romanticism (q.v.) in Germany and France, in which the spirit, revolting from the reign of reason in the Enlightenment and of classical form in literature, set out to vindicate the right and glory of feeling, imagination, art, and the spontaneous revelations of mystical consciousness. In Great Britain this phenomenon was rather an atmosphere, a reactionary attitude, characterized by a self-unconscious creative freedom, a new sense of the meaning of nature and of the mind of man in relation to nature, in which there was added to the feeling of beauty that of strangeness and mystery (cf. W. Pater, Appreciationa, pp. 243 ff., London, 1889; W. L. Phelps, The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement, Boston, 1893; A. Symons, The Romantic Movement in English Poetry, New York, 1909). In Wordsworth reappeared all the signs which have marked the mystics of all ages, from whatever angle they have approached reality-reliance on instinct, trust in emotion, confidence in the "inner light," and surrender to all the deepest impulses quickened by selfrenunciation and silence. His relation to the mystics is evinced (1) in his austerity of life, his aloofness from the world, his purposed and unbroken freedom from distraction; (2) in his uninterrupted meditation on nature and human life, through concentration and absorption of attention attaining the rational vision of truth in which feeling becomes a direct source of illumination; (3) in the " beatific vision " which crowns his self-purification and all the intellectual and emotional stages of his experience (cf. The Excursion, bk. I., 197-218). Not Plotinus nor Bernard of Clairvaux was more truly detached from the cares and contaminations of the world, nor were these men surrounded by friends and conditions better suited to self-discipline, contemplation, and ecstasy. Like all mystics his attitude toward the world was pantheistic. He found divinity in all natural objects and in the mind of man. Man and nature formed a unity in which the mood of each-what was fairest and most interesting in each-was reflected in the other. Ecstasy was born of quietness and silence, and poetry, the spontaneous expression of concentrated and highly wrought feeling, originated from "emotion recollected in tranquillity." (Cf. Wordsworth's Works, "Preface to `Lyrical Ballads,'" " Expostulation and Reply," " The Prelude," bk. II., " Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey.") See MrsTicism.
Bibliography: Much of the literature under Religion and Literature deals with the subject, notably Brooke's The ology in the English Poets. Consult: C. Wordsworth, Memoirs of William Wordsworth, 2 vols., London, 1851 (by his nephew); A. S. Patterson, Poets and Preachers of the Nineteenth Century, Glasgow, 1882; S. T. Coleridge,
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