In the same year he composed ‘Resolution and Independence’, and began his ode on ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’, both of which appeared in Poems in Two Volumes (1807), along with many of his most celebrated lyrics. In 1802 Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson. In 1799 he and Dorothy settled in Dove Cottage, Grasmere to the next year belong ‘The Recluse’, Book I (later The Excursion), ‘The Brothers’, ‘Michael’, and many of the poems included in the 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads (which, with its provocative preface on poetic diction, aroused much criticism). (See Ancient Mariner, Idiot Boy, Tintern Abbey.) The winter of 1798–9 was spent in Goslar in Germany, where Wordsworth wrote the enigmatic ‘Lucy’ poems. This was a period of intense creativity for both poets, which produced the Lyrical Ballads (1798), a landmark in the history of English Romanticism.
In 1795 he received a legacy of £900 from his friend Raisley Calvert, which allowed him to pursue his vocation as a poet, and to be reunited with his sister Dorothy Wordsworth they settled first at Racedown in Dorset, then at Alfoxden in Somerset, to be near Coleridge, then living at Nether Stowey, whom Wordsworth had met in 1795. England's declaration of war against France shocked him deeply, but the institution of the Terror marked the beginning of his disillusion with the French Revolution, a period of depression reflected in his verse drama The Borderers (composed 1796–7, pub. In this year he also wrote (but did not publish) a Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff (see Watson, R.) in support of the French Republic. 1820.) After his return to England he published in 1793 two poems in heroic couplets, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, both conventional attempts at the picturesque and the sublime.
(This love affair is reflected in ‘Vaudracour and Julia’, composed ?1804, pub. In 1790 he went on a walking tour of France, the Alps, and Italy, and returned to France late in 1791, to spend a year there during this period he fell in love with the daughter of a surgeon at Blois, Annette Vallon, who bore him a daughter. He attended St John's College, Cambridge, but disliked the academic course. His mother died in 1778, his father in 1783, losses recorded in The Prelude.