William Wordsworth was born in 1770, his father being lawyer to a noble earl who robbed him of five thousand pounds. That may possibly have accounted for some of the early rebellious emotions of the poet. He was graduated from Cambridge at the age of twenty-one, and went to France at the height of the revolutionary fervor. He has told us in his verse of the stirrings which then possessed him; to be young at such a time “was very heaven.” But the poet, in telling us about his experiences in France, left out a vital part thereof. The story had to wait a century and a quarter before a professor of Princeton University dug it out. While Wordsworth was abroad he carried on an affair with a young French girl of good family. She bore him a daughter, but he did not marry her; instead, he came back to England, and lived most piously with his sister, and became a preacher of the proprieties. We can understand how, looking back on France, it seemed to him a land of license, meriting stern rebuke from a British moralist. His first book of poems, “Lyrical Ballads,” was published in 1798. He had by then become a reactionary in religion and politics, but in poetry he was an innovator, because he dealt with the simple, every-day feelings of his own heart, and with the peasant people of his neighborhood. He was mercilessly ridiculed by the critics, and retired into himself, to live a frugal life upon an income of a hundred pounds a year, bequeathed to him by a well-to-do friend. In the course of time the British ruling class realized that there was no real harm in this nature-mystic, and at the age of forty-three he received a salary as a distributor of stamps; nine years later an annuity was allowed him, and a year after that he became poet laureate. He passionately opposed every political reform, and composed a series of “Ecclesiastical Sonnets,” dealing with the church rigmarole of England; also a pamphlet bitterly attacking the proposition to run a railroad into the country of his dreams. At the age of seventy-five we find him, white-haired and venerable, kneeling, in the presence of a large assembly, to kiss the hand of an extremely dull young girl by the name of Victoria. Wordsworth was one of the teachers of my youth, and I do not want to be unjust to him because he turned Tory before thirty. What we have to do is to understand him, and to draw a moral from him. The worship of Nature is like the worship of God; as a rule it is a reactionary influence, cutting one off from real life; but here and there it may be a source of inner energy, enabling a man to stand for his own convictions against the world. To Wordsworth in his early days Nature was that, and no poet has uttered in more noble and beautiful language this sense of oneness with the great mother of all life. His writing at its best is as beautiful, and also as sound, as anything in English.