Wordsworth was a Cumberland man by birth, and from the very first opened his young eyes {338} upon such scenes as lay along the Derwent. His father was an attorney-at-law and agent for the Lonsdale estates; nor does the poet fail to assure us in his autobiographic notes--with a pride that is only half veiled--of the gentle blood that flowed in his mother's veins. But the family purse was not plethoric; and--his father dying, when Wordsworth was only fourteen--it was through the kindness of his uncles that he had his "innings" at Trinity College, Cambridge, and felt his poetic pulses stirred by the memory of such old Cambridge men as Milton, and Waller, and Gray. The flat meadows bordering the Cam were doubtless tame to his Cumberland eyes, nor do University memories count for much in irradiating his future work; perhaps the brightest gleam that comes from those cloistered sources upon his verse is that which is reflected from the wondrous vaulted ceiling of King's College Chapel:-- "That branching roof Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells Where light and shade repose, where music dwells, Lingering and wandering on as loth to die." {339} A vacation passed in the mountains of Switzerland sharpened an appetite for travel upon the Continent; and thither he went shortly after taking his degree (1791); was in Orleans and in Paris the succeeding year; caught the fever of those revolutionary times, and for a while seriously entertained the purpose of throwing himself into the swirl of that tide of Girondism which was to fall away so shortly after, leaving tracks of blood. There was a short stay in London on his return--counting for very little in the story of his life. _Westminster Bridge_ and _A Farmer of Tilsbury Vale_ are all that bring a glimmer of remembrance to the lover of his books, out of the tumult and roar of "Lothbury" and Cheapside. Thereafter came the quiet life in Dorsetshire with his good sister Dora--where his poetic moods first came to print--and where Coleridge found him (1796) and cemented that friendship which drew him next year into Somersetshire--a friendship, which, with one brief interruption, that promised a bitter quarrel--lasted throughout their lives. There--at Alfoxden, in Somersetshire--was forged that little book of _Lyrical Ballads_, containing the _Ancient {340} Mariner_ and _Tintern Abbey_--the best possible types of the respective powers of the two poets.