英国文学史_复习资料大二英语专业必考(9)

Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey ...," namely,"that Nature never did betray the heart that loved her." [...] Wordsworth moved on in 1787 to St.John's College,Cambridge.Repelled by the competitive pressures there,he elected to idle his way through the university,persuaded that he "was not for that hour,nor for that place." The most important thing he did in his college years was to devote his summer vacation in 1790 to a long walking tour through revolutionary France.There he was caught up in the passionate enthusiasm that followed the fall of the Bastille,and became an ardent republican sympathizer. [...] The three or four years that followed his return to England were the darkest of Wordsworth's life.Unprepared for any profession,rootless, virtually penniless,bitterly hostile to his own country's opposition to the French,he knocked about London in the company of radicals like William Godwin and learned to feel a profound sympathy for the abandoned mothers,beggars,children,vagrants,and victims of England's wars who began to march through the sombre poems he began writing at this time. This dark period ended in 1795,when a friend's legacy made possible Wordsworth's reunion with his beloved sister Dorothy--the two were never again to live apart--and their move in 1797 to Alfoxden House,near Bristol.There Wordsworth became friends with a fellow poet,Samuel Taylor Coleridge,and they formed a partnership that would change both poets'