Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 249, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 October 1918 — WORDSWORTH’S EARLY HOME [ARTICLE]

WORDSWORTH’S EARLY HOME

House in English Village of Cockermouth, Where Poet Was Born, Is Still Standing. Cockermouth is ope of those English villages of the lake region where you feel that you would like to spetad your declining years in a cottage with the inevitable English ivy and a garden decorated with borders of periwinkle and other old-fashioned flowers. A river following a twisted course through Cockermouth completes the peaceful, back-to-nature atmosphere of the village. You might easily spend some. time in Cockermouth before you discovered that It was Wordsworth’s birthplace. The historic home is still standing, the same stolid, substantial British residence where the poet spent the greater part of his boyhood. The house is decidedly a home for a student of books and not at all the sort which Wordsworth, the nature devotee, would have chosen in which to grow up. The yard and garden, however, make up for the unpoetic gray stone walls. It is a shady yard, surrounded by a low stone fence. The Wordsworth house is not a shrine for the literati to inspect and write verses of appreciation on the wails, or sign their names in a ledger along with the autographs of famous visitors and tourists. It is a quiet home, as in the poet’s day, a home which you would pass a dozen times without suspecting it had been the birthplace of such a famous person.— Chicago Daily News. , ■