William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth, in Cumberland, on the 7th of April, 1770, and educated at Hawkeshead Grammar School, and at St. John's College, Cambridge. He was designed by his parents for the Church--but poetry and new prospects turned him into another path. His pursuit through life was poetry, and his profession that of Stamp Distributor for the Government in the counties of Cumberland and Westmoreland: to which office he was appointed by the joint interest, as we have heard, of his friend, Sir George Beaumont, and his patron, Lord Lonsdale. Mr. Wordsworth made his first appearance as a poet in the year 1793, by the publication of a thin quarto volume entitled "An Evening Walk--an Epistle in Verse, addressed to a young Lady from the Lakes of the North of England, by W. Wordsworth, B.A., of St. John's College, Cambridge." Printed at London, and published by Johnson in St. Paul's Church-yard from whose shop seven years before had appeared "The Task" of Cowper. In the same year he published "Descriptive Sketches in Verse, taken during a Pedestrian Tour in the Italian, Grison, Swiss and Savoyard Alps." What was thought of these poems by a few youthful admirers may be gathered from the account given by Coleridge in his "Biographia Literaria." "During the last year of my residence at Cambridge, 1794, I became acquainted with Mr. Wordsworth's first publication, entitled 'Descriptive Sketches;' and seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon more evidently announced." The two poets, then personally unknown to each other, first became acquainted in the summer of 1796, at Nether Stowey, in Somersetshire. Coleridge was then in his twenty-fourth year, and Wordsworth in his twenty-sixth. A congeniality of pursuit soon ripened into intimacy; and in September, 1798, the two poets, accompanied by Miss Wordsworth, made a tour in Germany. Wordsworth's next publication was the first volume of his "Lyrical Ballads," published in the summer of 1798 by Mr. Joseph Cottle, of Bristol, who purchased the copyright for thirty guineas. It made no way with the public, and Cottle was a loser by the bargain. So little, indeed, was thought of the volume, that when Cottle's copyrights were transferred to the Messrs. Longman, the "Lyrical Ballads" was thrown in as a valueless volume, in the mercantile idea of the term. The copyright was afterward returned to Cottle; and by him transferred to the great poet, who lived to see it of real money value in the market of successful publications.