There was bound to be something paradoxical about a celebration of the centenary of the death of Wordsworth in a university; however much pleasure and profit he may have derived from his career at St John's—and we have his own testimony that he did in fact derive from it much of both—no one could claim that his was an academic spirit, even in the widest sense of that word, or that for him the world of Cambridge was endowed with anything like the vitality or significance of the mountains of Switzerland or the Lakes. We were celebrating a man who is almost unanimously regarded as the greatest of Johnians, but whose latent genius was never apparent during the course of his university career. So the College, in celebrating the occasion, made no attempt to steal the thunder of those who were appropriately gathered at Grasmere and elsewhere in Lakeland to honour him in his own home, and did not set out to make the occasion anything more than a purely domestic one. Attention was concentrated on Wordsworth's Cambridge career, and it was frankly recognized that the greatest of his work and the most significant part of his career lay outside our scope.

The Master and Fellows of the College were present with their wives, and they had invited several distinguished members of other colleges as well as some old Johnians and some present scholars and research students of the College.