The Wordsworth Epoch (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from The Wordsworth Epoch

This terrifying experience cured him of the revolutionary spirit, and henceforth, though his love of liberty, equality, and fraternity remain, Wordsworth is, for practical politics, to be reckoned among the Conservatives. Men like Shelley and Byron regarded him as a traitor. About this period he made several walking tours with his friend Jones. During one of these in Switzerland he formed the materials for his first publication, in 1793, of a slender book of poems, including The Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. It attracted little attention.

The problem was now how to live. Two years passed? Pleasantly enough in rambles with his sister Dorothy, always the faithful companion of his life, to whom he owed most of his happiness and much of his inspiration. But at the critical moment, when it appeared that he would have to turn to journalism for his daily bread, the first of several windfalls befel him in the shape of a legacy of £900 from a young friend who admired his genius and wished to leave him free to exercise it for the good of mankind. On this sum Words worth and his sister lived for eight years, and then, just when poverty threatened them again, Lord Lonsdale died, and his successor discharged a large debt to the Wordsworth family, which left them independent for many years more. The same Earl of Lonsdale, in 1813, secured for him a sinecure - the office of distributor of stamps-which yielded about £500 a year. Finally, in 1842, Sir Robert Peel granted him a Crown pension of £300 a year. I have brought these facts together to show that, although Wordsworth had to face the fiercest opposition, this was a period when poetry had the sincerest of all values - a money value. In the last epoch Chatterton starved on poetry in this, Wordsworth grew rich on it. We have already, in a previous volume, had occasion to remark that, wherever there are patrons, there will be poets.

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