THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
the interpretation of Holy Scripture in Oxford University (1883-85), at the same time being fellow of Oriel College and canon of Rochester; in 1885 he was consecrated bishop of Salisbury. In 1872 he attended the Old Catholic Congress at Cologne, and from 1878 to 1883 spent much time in Italy, France, and Spain, collating manuscripts for an edition of the Vulgate New Testament. He did much to secure the practical settlement of the status of readers in the Anglican Church, and it was he who prepared the Latin draft of the Responsio Archiepiscoporum Anglie (published in 1897) in reply to the papal bull of Sept. 13, 1896, denying the validity of Anglican orders. He wrote Keble College and the Present University Crisis (London, 1869); Lectures Introductory to a Study of Latin Literature (Oxford, 1870); Fragments and Specimens of Early Latin (1874); University Sermons on Gospel Subjects (1878); The One Religion, Truth, Holiness, and Peace, Desired by the Nations and Revealed by Jesus Christ (Bampton lectures; 1881); Old Latin Biblical Texts (in collaboration with W. Sanday and H. J. White; 2 vols., 1883-86); Novum Testamentum Latine ad codicum manuscriptorum fidem (in collaboration with H. J. White; 5 parts, comprising the Gospels and Acts, 1889-1905); The Holy Communion (London, 1891); De validitate ordinum Anglicanorum (Salisbury, 1894); Trois lettres sur la position de V église anglicane (1894); The Church of England and the Eastern Patriarchs (Oxford, 1892); On the Rite of Consecration of Churches (with the Sarum form; London, 1899); The Episcopate of Charles Wordsworth, Bishop of St. Andrews (1899); Bishop Sarapion’s Prayer Book (1899; rev. ed., 1910); The Ministry of Grace (1891; new ed., 1903); The Baptismal Confession and the Creed (London, 1904); The Law of the Church and Marriage with a Deceased Wife's Sister (1908); The Invocation of Saints and the 22d Article (1908); Ordination Problems (1909); and Unity and Fellowship (1910).
WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM: Poet-philosopher; b. at Cockermouth (24 m. s.w. of Carlisle), England, Apr. 7, 1770; d. at Rydal Mount (31 m. s. of Carlisle) Apr. 23, 1850. He was second son of John Wordsworth, attorney-at-law, and law agent for Sir James Lowther, afterward Earl of Lonsdale. His mother died in 1778, his father in 1783. He graduated from St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1791. He traveled extensively, making frequent visits to France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Holland, and Belgium, as well as Scotland and Wales, but made his home at Grasmere, 1799-1813, whither he brought his bride in 1802—and at Rydal Mount, 1813-50. By severe simplicity of life, by frugal husbanding of slender resources derived from legacies, later from additional income from a governmental office requiring but little personal attention (1813-43), recipient of a government annuity of £300 for literary distinction (1843-50), he was enabled to devote himself unremittingly to the vocation of poet to which he had early consecrated himself. At the Oxford Commemoration in 1839 the degree of LL.D. was conferred upon him. On the death of Southey in 18438 he became poet laureate. Near him dwelling in the Lake District there were at different periods Southey, Coleridge, Thomas
Arnold, De Quincy, and Prof. John Wilson (Christopher North). His sister. Dorothy, a woman of rare insight and beauty of spirit, was his constant companion until her death. With thesingle exception of the ‘‘Ode composed on an evening of extraordinary splendor and beauty ” (1818), all of his most memorable work was done between 1798 and 1808. He became the most illustrious representative of the Romantic movement in English poetry of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. This was an extension of the wave of Romanticism (q.v.) in Germany and France, in which the spirit, revolting from the reign of reason in the Enlightenment and of classical form in literature, set out to vindicate the right and glory of feeling, imagination, art, and the spontaneous revelations of mystical consciousness. In Great Britain this phenomenon was rather an atmosphere, a reactionary attitude, characterized by a self-unconscious creative freedom, a new sense of the meaning of nature and of the mind of man in relation to nature, in which there was added to the feeling of beauty that of strangeness and mystery (cf. W. Pater, Appreciations, pp. 243 ff., London, 1889; W. L. Phelps, The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement, Boston, 1893; A. Symons, The Romantic Movement in English Poetry, New York, 1909). In Wordsworth reappeared all the signs which have marked the mystics of all ages, from whatever angle they have approached reality—reliance on instinct, trust in emotion, confidence in the “ inner light,” and surrender to all the deepest impulses quickened by selfrenunciation and silence. His relation to the mystics is evinced (1) in his austerity of life, his aloofness from the world, his purposed and unbroken freedom from distraction; (2) in his uninterrupted meditation on nature and human life, through concentration and absorption of attention attaining the rational vision of truth in which feeling becomes a direct source of illumination; (3) in the “ beatific vision ’’ which crowns his self-purification and all the intellectual and emotional stages of his experience (cf. The Excursion, bk. I., 197-218). Not Plotinus nor Bernard of Clairvaux was more truly detached from the cares and contaminations of the world, nor were these men surrounded by friends and conditions better suited to self-discipline, contemplation, and ecstasy. Like all mystics his attitude toward the world was pantheistic. He found divinity in all natural objects and in the mind of man. Man and nature formed a unity in which the mood of each—what was fairest and most interesting in each—was reflected in the other. Kestasy was born of quietness and silence, and poetry, the spontaneous expression of concentrated and highly wrought feeling, originated from “‘ emotion recollected in tranquillity.”” (Cf. Wordsworth’s Works, “‘ Preface to ‘Lyrical Ballads,’” ‘ Expostulation and Reply,” ‘“ The Prelude,” bk. IL., “Lines composed a few miles above ‘Tintern Abbey.”’) See Mysticism. C. A. BEcKWITH. BrstiograpHy: Much of the literature under RELIGION AND LireRATuRE deals with the subject, notably Brooke’s Theology in the English Poets. Consult: C. Wordsworth, Memoirs of William Wordsworth, 2 vols., London, 1851
(by his nephew); A. S. Patterson, Poets and Preachers of the Nineteenth Century, Glasgow, 1862; S. T. Coleridge,