Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 7.djvu/193

 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 137 he had made a pedestrian tour in France and Switzerland, during his last Cam- bridge vacation ; then, in November of 1791, he crossed to France, ostensibly to learn the language, made the acquaintance of revolutionaries, sympathized with them vehemently, and was within an ace of throwing in his lot with the Brissotins, to give them the steady direction that they needed. When it came to this his relatives cut off his supplies, and he was obliged to return to London toward the close of 1 792. But still he resisted all pressure to enter any of the regular professions, published "An Evening Walk "and "Descriptive Sketches," in 1 793, and in 1 794, still moving about to all appearance in stubborn aimless- ness among his friends and relatives, had no more rational purpose of livelihood than drawing up the prospectus of a periodical of strictly republican principles, to be called The Philanthropist. At this stage, at the age of twenty-four, Words- worth seemed to his friends a very hopeless and impracticable young man. But all the time from his boyhood upward a great purpose had been growing and maturing in his mind. Nature was little more than a picture-gallery to him - , the pleasures of the eye had all but absolute dominion ; and he " Roamed from hill to hill, from rock to rock, Still craving combinations of new forms, New pleasures, wide empire for the sight, Proud of her own endowments, and rejoiced To lay the inner faculties asleep." But, though he had not yet found his distinctive aim as a poet, he was inwardly bent, all the time that his relatives saw in him only a wayward and unpromising aversion to work in any regular line, upon poetry as "his office upon earth." In this determination he was strengthened by his sister Dorothy, who with rare devotion consecrated her life henceforward to his service. A timely legacy enabled them to carry their purpose into effect. A friend of his, whom he had nursed in a last illness, Raisley Calvert, son of the steward of the Duke of Nor- folk, who had large estates in Cumberland, died early in 1 795, leaving him a leg- agy of ^900. And here it may be well to notice how opportunely, as De Quincey half-ruefully remarked, money always fell in to Wordsworth, enabling him to pursue his poetic career without distraction. Calvert's bequest came to him when he was on the point of concluding an engagement as a journalist in London. On it and other small resources he and his sister, thanks to her frugal manage- ment, contrived to live for nearly eight years. By the end of that time Lord Lonsdale, who owed Wordsworth's father a large sum for professional services, and had steadily refused to pay it, died, and his successor paid the debt with in- terest. His wife, Mary Hutchinson, whom he married in 1802, brought him some fortune ; and in 18 13, when, in spite of his plain living, his family began to press upon his income, he was appointed stamp-distributor for Westmoreland, with an income of ^"500, afterward nearly doubled by the increase of his district By this succession of timely godsends, Wordsworth, though he did not escape some periods of sharp anxiety, was saved from the necessity of turning aside from his vocation.