She was, indeed, a great realist, and it seems strange that she and Scott, the great romanticist, should have been contemporaries. Scott was both broad and big-hearted enough to sum up her chief characteristics as follows:-- "That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements of feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big bow-wow strain I can do myself, like any one going; but the exquisite touch which renders commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me." She died in 1817 at the age of forty-one and was buried in Winchester Cathedral, fourteen miles from her birthplace. The merit of her work was apparent to only a very few at the time of her death. Later years have slowly brought a just recognition of the important position that she holds in the history of the realistic novel of daily life. Of still greater significance to the majority is the fact that the subtle charm of her stories continues to win for her an enlarged circle of readers. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1770-1850 [Illustration: WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. _After the portrait by B.R. Haydon_.] Early Life and Training.--William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in 1770. He went to school in his ninth year at Hawkshead, a village on the banks of Esthwaite Water, in the heart of the Lake Country. The traveler who takes the pleasant journey on foot or coach from Windermere to Coniston, passes through Hawkshead, where he may see Wordsworth's name cut in a desk of the school which he attended. Of greater interest is the scenery which contributed so much to his education and aided his development into England's greatest nature poet. We learn from his autobiographical poem, _The Prelude_, what experiences molded him in boyhood. He says that the-- "...common face of Nature spake to me Rememberable things." In this poem he relates how he absorbed into his inmost being the orange sky of evening, the curling mist, the last autumnal crocus, the "souls of lonely places," and the huge peak, which terrified him at nightfall by seeming to stride after him and which awoke in him a-- "...dim and undermined sense Of unknown modes of being." [Illustration: BOY OF WINANDER. _From mural painting by H.O. Walker, Congressional Library, Washington, D.C._] In his famous lines on the "Boy of Winander," Wordsworth tells how-- "...the voice Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received Into the bosom of the steady lake."