At the beginning of the nineteenth century two earnest young men set out to write a book of poetry. The world stared back down the alley of the 1790's shivering. Napoleon was squinting in the sunlight as the nations stacked their guns before him. A handsome Austrian with a hooked nose sat devising a system founded upon those grievances against which Robespierre had hurled a reign of terror. The past lay in the burying ground of dead ideas. The present was a battlefield. There was no future.

With this bleak world before them Wordsworth and Coleridge began the Lyrical Ballads. To case the bitterness in their hearts one wrote about romantic things in a wordly way, and the other wrote upon wordly things in a romantic way. The Romantic movement gave birth to famous men, great verse, a few ideas. It has become now, not a literary study, but a psychological corpse, an era whose only refuge was a "romantic escape."

Now the Vagabond is not interested in psychology, it is a dismal subject at best. So it is with great pleasure that he goes today at 12 to Emerson D to hear Professor Lowes talk on Wordsworth, the precursor of the Romanticists. Wordsworth himself, the Vagabond firmly believes, only wrote five poems that can be read without the aid of a bromo-seltzer, but he was the primary influence in one of the greatest literary periods the modern world has ever known.