Wordsworth country, on which an Archbishop and two Bishops (I
doubt whether the poet was really episcopophile), Lord Beveridge and Professor Basil Willey and Dr. Helen Darbishire descended at the week-end, may claim to have provided the stage for the centenary celebrations par excellence ; but the ceremony at Wordsworth's college, St. John's, Cambridge, on Saturday was in its different way not unworthy to be placed on the same level. The lines from " The Prelude " are familiar: " St. John the Evangelist my patron was.
Three Gothic courts are his ; within the first Was my abiding-place, a nook obscure."
The rooms have disappeared in reconstruction, except the window, inscribed now with the last five words of the quotation. On Saturday the Master of St. John's read a paper on Wordsworth's Cambridge and Wordsworth at Cambridge, and the Master of Trinity, Dr. G. M. Trevelyan, came from next door to talk of the poet more generally. He referred incidentally to Edward Grey as one of the greatest of Wordsworth-lovers and quoted one of his comments: " Nobody but Daddy Wordsworth would have talked of the solemn bleat of a sheep." Peculiarly attractive was the admirable antiphonal discussion and reading of some of the poems by two undergraduates.
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