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Rh seems to be going on too rapidly. "I recoil from the very idea of a revolution. I am a determined enemy to every species of violence."

During the summer of 1793, Wordsworth paid a visit to a friend, Mr. W. Calvert, in the Isle of Wight, and after this walked over Salisbury Plain, where he commenced his poem of "The Female Vagrant," and he then proceeded to Bristol, and thence to Tintern on the Wye, and so on to North Wales.

He was now twenty-three years of age. It was time that he should wake up from the dreams of his youth, and abandon the pleasant vagrant life he had hitherto led. His friends were disappointed that he had not distinguished himself at the University. They now called on him to adopt the profession for which he had been intended, and to take orders in the English Church. This Wordsworth resolutely refused to do; and inasmuch as his objections to that course were conscientious, we must honour them, and believe that he was ultimately enabled to do more good than if he had entered the holy calling to which he had previously looked forward. He appears to have entertained a very strong dislike to any profession. He tells his friend Matthews, in a letter: "I have been doing nothing, and still continue to do nothing. What is to become of me, I know not. * * As for the law, I have neither strength of mind, purse, or constitution to engage in that pursuit."

In this state of perplexity, he turned his thoughts to literature; and, as all clever young men do, thought he could start a new periodical. It was to be called "The Philanthropist," a political and literary monthly miscellany. Wordsworth drew up a prospectus. "He would," he writes to his friend Matthews from his uncle's at Whitehaven, "communicate critical remarks on