Wordsworth was the son of a solicitor, and all his early circumstances
were homely, unpretentious, and rather straitened. His mother died
when he was eight years old, and when his father followed her five
years later, two of his uncles provided means for continuing
at Cambridge the education which had been begun in the rural
grammar-school of Hawkshead. It was in 1787 that he went up to St.
John's College. He took his Bachelor's degree at the beginning of
1791, and there his connection with the university ended.

For some years after leaving Cambridge, Wordsworth let himself drift.
He did not feel good enough for the Church; he shrank from the law;
fancying that he had talents for command, he thought of being a
soldier. Meanwhile, he passed a short time desultorily in London.
Towards the end of 1791, through Paris, he passed on to Orleans
and Blois, where he made some friends and spent most of a year. He
returned to Paris in October 1792. France was no longer standing on
the top of golden hours. The September massacres filled the sky with
a lurid flame. Wordsworth still retained his ardent faith in the
Revolution, and was even ready, though no better than "a landsman on
the deck of a ship struggling with a hideous storm," to make common
cause with the Girondists. But the prudence of friends at home forced
him back to England before the beginning of the terrible year of '93.
With his return closed that first survey of its inheritance, which
most serious souls are wont to make in the fervid prime of early
manhood.

It would be idle to attempt any commentary on the bare facts that we
have just recapitulated; for Wordsworth himself has clothed them with
their full force and meaning in the _Prelude_. This record of the