coolness soon
grew to disgust and opposition, as shown by his subsequent poems; and this
brought upon him the censure of Shelley, Byron, and other extremists,
though it gained the friendship of Scott, who from the first had no
sympathy with the Revolution or with the young English enthusiasts.

Of the decisive period of Wordsworth's life, when he was living with his
sister Dorothy and with Coleridge at Alfoxden, we have already spoken. The
importance of this decision to give himself to poetry is evident when we
remember that, at thirty years of age, he was without money or any definite
aim or occupation in life. He considered the law, but confessed he had no
sympathy for its contradictory precepts and practices; he considered the
ministry, but though strongly inclined to the Church, he felt himself not
good enough for the sacred office; once he had wanted to be a soldier and
serve his country, but had wavered at the prospect of dying of disease in a
foreign land and throwing away his life without glory or profit to anybody.
An apparent accident, which looks more to us like a special Providence,
determined his course. He had taken care of a young friend, Raisley
Calvert, who died of consumption and left Wordsworth heir to a few hundred
pounds, and to the request that he should give his life to poetry. It was
this unexpected gift which enabled Wordsworth to retire from the world and
follow his genius. All his life he was poor, and lived in an atmosphere of
plain living and high thinking. His poetry brought him almost nothing in
the way of money rewards, and it was only by a series of happy accidents
that he was enabled to continue his work. One of these accidents was that
he became a Tory, and soon accepted the office of a distributor of stamps,
and was later appointed poet laureate by the government,--which occasioned
Browning's famous but ill-considered poem of "The Lost Leader":

Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a riband to stick in his coat.

The last half century of Wordsworth's life, in which he retired to his
beloved lake district and lived successively at Grasmere and Rydal Mount,
remind one strongly of Browning's long struggle for literary recognition.
It was marked by the same steadfast purpose, the same trusted ideal, the
same continuous work, and the same tardy recognition by the public. His
poetry was mercilessly ridiculed by nearly all the magazine critics, who
seized upon the wors