[Born at Cockermouth, 1770. Died at Rydal Mount, 1850. Aged 80.]
The most original of the poetical thinkers whom his day gave to his
country. Her verse, notwithstanding one or two better voices uplifted,
had too long and too patiently worn the character of an imitative
literature. He undertook the championship of a conflict, which was to
reseat legitimate powers on the throne. Born and bred in the northern,
mountain region of England, his first study of men was amongst the
simple-minded, vigorous, independent, and intelligent peasantry of the
dales. The earth, which his young feet explored, lay embosoming its
lakes, rearing crag and steep, as though yet freshly robed in
loveliness, or charged with power, by the Creator’s hand. His instinct
already drew him, even unconsciously, to gather, in _that_ contemplation
of Man and of Nature, and not in books, the materials of his appointed
Art. Solitary, self-communing, self-sufficing, he soon stood in presence
with an educated world, the prophet of a new poetical revelation. He
found, at the first encounter, a prophet’s reward--belief in the few:
from the multitude, mockery and persecution. He lived long enough to be
understood; to see health and strength of his infusing reanimate the too
languid veins of our English poesy. An extreme trust in the worth
inhering in every phase of humanity may have sometimes descended too
low, in the choice of the theme; an excessive zeal of simplicity may
occasionally have stripped the style a little too bare. But his writings
remain distinguished, amongst the lays of his own just elapsed age, as
the most soothing and instructive to the heart of the reader; and for
the generations of poets, rising and to rise, the most warning and
oracular. His strains have been remarkably various in length and weight,
in manner and style. As a portrayer of human nature, he ranks amongst
those who have the most deeply and critically explored the workings of
our mysterious heart and intellectual being. His especial vocation
amongst poets was, in his own view, the disclosure of the affinities
which attract, by feeling, the human soul to the natural world: It
supplying intellectual forms, and We, passion--an intercourse, blending,
if it may be so said, two lives into one. He entered upon his work of
reforming our poetical spirit, in two volumes of Lyrical Ballads and
Other Poems, in the years 1798 and 1807. His life was one long day of
brooding calm--his sunset, lucid and serene.
[Presented to the Crystal Palace by the sculptor, F. Thrupp, and
modelled by him from a cast after death by Chantrey.]