of peace, after a war conducted with extraordinary tenacity and
fortitude, led to a still more wonderful display of ingenuity,
industry, and enterprise, in the more fruitful field of commerce
and of manufactures. Wealth, in spite of occasional vicissitudes,
increased with amazing rapidity. The population of England and Wales
grew from being seven and a half millions in 1770, to nearly eighteen
millions in 1850. Political power was partially transferred from a
territorial aristocracy to the middle and trading classes. Laws were
made at once more equal and more humane. During all the tumult of the
great war which for so many years bathed Europe in fire, through all
the throes and agitations in which peace brought forth the new time,
Wordsworth for half a century (1799-1850) dwelt sequestered in
unbroken composure and steadfastness in his chosen home amid the
mountains and lakes of his native region, working out his own ideal of
the high office of the Poet.

The interpretation of life in books and the development of imagination
underwent changes of its own. Most of the great lights of the
eighteenth century were still burning, though burning low, when
Wordsworth came into the world. Pope, indeed, had been dead for six
and twenty years, and all the rest of the Queen Anne men had gone.
But Gray only died in 1771, and Goldsmith in 1774. Ten years later
Johnson's pious and manly heart ceased to beat. Voltaire and Rousseau,
those two diverse oracles of their age, both died in 1778. Hume had
passed away two years before. Cowper was forty years older than
Wordsworth, but Cowper's most delightful work was not produced until
1783. Crabbe, who anticipated Wordsworth's choice of themes from rural
life, while treating them with a sterner realism, was virtually his
contemporary, having been born in 1754, and dying in 1832. The two
great names of his own date were Scott and Coleridge, the first born
in 1771, and the second a year afterwards. Then a generation later
came another new and illustrious group. Byron was born in 1788,
Shelley in 1792, and Keats in 1795. Wordsworth was destined to see one
more orb of the first purity and brilliance rise to its place in the
poetic firmament. Tennyson's earliest volume of poems was published in
1830, and _In Memoriam_, one of his two masterpieces, in 1830. Any one
who realises for how much these famous names will always stand in
the history of human genius, may measure the great transition that