CAMBRIDGE.

“Thus from the precincts of the westThe sun, while sinking down to rest,Though his departing radiance failTo illuminate the hollow vale,A lingering lustre fondly throwsOn the dear mountain-tops where first he rose.”

The muse had now fairly possessed him, and he was destined to have a triumphant career as the high priest of song. Among his earliest sonnets is the following, which is the last quotation I shall give from these boyish effusions.

“Calm is all nature as a resting wheel:The kine are couched upon the dewy grass;The horse alone, seen dimly as I pass,Is cropping audibly his later meal:Dark is the ground; a slumber seems to stealO’er vale and mountain and the starless sky.Now in this blank of things a harmony,Home-felt and home-created, comes to healThat grief for which the senses will supplyFresh food, for only then while memoryIs hushed am I at rest. My friends! restrainThose busy cares that would allay my pain;Oh, leave me to myself, nor let me feelThe officious touch that makes me droop again!”

His school-days at Hawkshead were nowdrawing to a close, but before we leave this part of his life, this genial seed-time from which he subsequently reaped so glorious a harvest, it will be well to add a few more particulars respecting the locality of Hawkshead, and the general discipline of its old Elizabethan grammar school, as a sort of supplement to the previous history. And, first of all, a word about Esthwaite.[C]“Esthwaite, though a lovely scene in its summer garniture of woods, has no features of permanent grandeur to rely on. A wet or gloomy day, even in summer, reduces it to little more than a wildish pond, surrounded by miniature hills; and the sole circumstances which restore the sense of a romantic region, and an Alpine character, are the knowledge (but not the sense) of endless sylvan scenery, stretching for twenty miles to the sea-side, and the towering groups of Langdale and Grasmere fells, which look over the little pasture barrier of Esthwaite, from distances of eight, ten, and fourteen miles.”

“Esthwaite, therefore, being no object foritself, and the sublime head of Coniston being accessible by a road which evades Hawkshead, few tourists ever trouble the repose of this little village town.... Wordsworth, therefore, enjoyed this labyrinth of valleys in a perfection that no one can have experienced since the opening of the present century. The whole was one paradise of virgin beauty; and even the rare works of man, all over the land, were hoar with the grey tints of an antique picturesque; nothing was new, nothing was raw and uncicatrized. Hawkshead, in particular, though tamely seated in itself and its immediate purlieus, has a most fortunate and central locality, as regards the best (at least the most interesting) scene for a pedestrian rambler. The gorgeous scenery of Borrowdale, the austere sublimities of Wastdalehead, of Langdalehead, or Mardale,—these are too oppressive in their colossal proportions, and their utter solitudes, for encouraging a perfectly human interest. Now, taking Hawkshead as a centre, with a radius of about eight miles, we might describe a little circular tract which embosoms a perfect net-work of little valleys—separate wards or cells, as it were, of one large valley,walled in by the great primary mountains of the region. Grasmere, Easdale, Little Langdale, Tilberthwaite, Yewdale, Elterwater, Loughrigg Tarn, Skelwith, and many other little quiet nooks, lie within a single division of this labyrinthine district. All these are within one summer afternoon’s ramble. And amongst these, for the years of his boyhood, lay the daily excursions of Wordsworth.

“I do not conceive that Wordsworth could have been an amiable boy; he was austere and unsocial, I have reason to think, in his habits; not generous; and above all, not self-denying.... Meantime, we are not to suppose that Wordsworth, the boy, expressly sought for solitary scenes of nature amongst woods and mountains, with a direct conscious anticipation of imaginative pleasure, or loving them with a pure, disinterested love, on their own separate account. These are feelings beyond boyish nature, or, at all events, beyond boyish nature trained amidst the necessities of social intercourse. Wordsworth, like his companions, haunted the hills and the vales for the sake of angling, snaring birds, swimming, and sometimes of hunting, according to the Westmorland fashion, on foot: for riding to the chace is often quite impossible, from the precipitous nature of the ground. It was in the course of these pursuits, by an indirect effect growing gradually upon him, that Wordsworth became a passionate lover of Nature, at the time when the growth of his intellectual faculties made it possible that he should combine those thoughtful passions with the experience of the eye and ear.”

De Quincey then continues to relate, as an illustration of the sudden, silent manner in which Nature makes herself felt by the observer, even when he is paying no attention to her operations, but is occupied with nearer and more secondary matters—how he and Wordsworth were walking one midnight, during the Peninsular war, from Grasmere to Dunmail Raise, to meet the mail, in order that they might obtain the newspaper Coleridge was in the habit of sending them, and thus learn the earliest intelligence of the state of affairs on the Continent. “At intervals, Wordsworth had stretched himself at length on the high road, applying his ear to the ground, so as to catch any sound of wheels that might be going alongat a distance. Once, when he was slowly rising from this effort, his eye caught a bright star that was glittering between the brow of Seat Sandal and the mighty Helvellyn. He gazed upon it for a minute or so; and then, upon turning away to descend into Grasmere, he made the following explanation:—‘I have remarked, from my earliest days, that if, under any circumstances, the attention is perfectly braced up to a steady act of observation, or of steady expectation, then, if this intense condition of vigilance should suddenly relax, at that moment any beautiful, any impressive visual object, or collection of objects, falling upon the eye, is carried to the heart with a power not known under other circumstances. Just now my ear was placed upon the stretch, in order to catch any sound of wheels that might come down upon the lake of Wythburn, from the Keswick road; at the very instant when I raised my head from the ground, in final abandonment of hope for this night, at the very instant when the organs of attention were all at once relaxing from their tension, the bright star hanging in the air above those outlines of massy blackness fell suddenly upon my eye, andpenetrated my capacity of apprehension, with a pathos and a sense of the Infinite, that would not have arrested me under other circumstances.’”

And it was precisely in this manner, according to De Quincy, and indeed according to the known laws by which Nature educates the faculties of the poet, that Wordsworth was educated in his boyhood. All this hunting, fishing, and rambling, were but the means by which Nature allured him to the woods and waters, that she might silently impress him with her manifold forms and influences. There are evidences, however, of something likecommunionwith Nature in the early poems of Wordsworth, even before he left Hawkshead; and his solitary wanderings, his roamings round the lake of Esthwaite—five miles before breakfast—were not without a purpose, and could not have been undertaken unless an unquenchable, though perhaps not a fully developed love, had possessed his heart, for natural scenery, and the mystic lore which it teaches. His own confession, that though Nature was at first a dumb perplexing riddle to him, and merely affected him by her beauty and grandeur,—I say hisown confession, that in spite of this, he subsequently felt the coming of the “auxiliar light” from his own soul, which penetrated her forms, and made them instinct with sublime intelligence—will illustrate the idea with sufficient force and clearness.

Enough, however, has been said upon this subject, for it is impossible to trace in any direct manner, the subtle and delicate influences of Nature upon the human mind, or to determine even, in the instance of Wordsworth, the precise time when he first sought “the woods and mountains, with a direct conscious anticipation of imaginative pleasure.” We will leave all this, therefore, and direct the reader to the “Prelude,” as the best exposition of the poet’s mental development at this early period. A few words respecting the government of the Hawkshead grammar school, as an influence affecting the character of the poet, and we will then follow him to Cambridge.

“Taking into consideration the peculiar tastes of the person,” says De Quincy, “and the peculiar advantages of the place, I conceive that no pupil of a public school can ever have passed a more luxurious boyhood than Wordsworth. The school discipline was not, I believe, very strict; the mode of living out of school very much resembled that of Eton for Oppidans,—less elegant perhaps, and less costly in its provisions for accommodation, but not less comfortable; and in that part of the arrangement which was chiefly Etonian, even more so; for in both places the boys, instead of being gathered into one fold, and at night into one or two huge dormitories, were distributed amongst motherly old “dames,” technically so called at Eton, but not at Hawkshead.” In the latter place, agreeably to the inferior scale of the whole establishment, the houses were smaller and more college like, consequently more like private households; and the old lady of themenagewas more constantly amongst them, providing with maternal tenderness, and with a professional pride, for the comfort of her young flock, and protecting the weak from oppression. The humble cares to which those poor matrons dedicated themselves, may be collected from several allusions scattered through the poems of Wordsworth; that entitled “Nutting” for instance, in which his early Spinosistic feeling is introduced of amysterious power diffused through the solitudes of woods, a presence that was disturbed by the intrusion of careless and noisy outrage, and which is brought into a strong relief by the previous homely picture of the old housewife equipping her young charge with beggar’s weeds in order to prepare him for a struggle with thorns and brambles. Indeed not only the moderate rank of the boys, and the peculiar kind of relation assumed by these matrons, equally suggested this humble class of motherly attentions, but the whole spirit of the place and neighbourhood was favourable to an old English homeliness of domestic and personal economy.”

It will thus be seen that Wordsworth was early inducted into those thriftful and economical habits which marked his character through life, and enabled him during his young days to bear the temporary loss of his paternal fortune without much inconvenience. And the above facts are worthy to be remembered, not only as illustrating much for us in the history of Wordsworth, but as another instance of the power of a wise and early training.

The poet thus alludes to the cottages of the “Danes:”—

“Ye lowly cottages wherein we dweltA ministration of your own was yours;Can I forget you, being, as you were,So beautiful among the pleasant fieldsIn which ye stood? or can I here forgetThe plain and seemly countenance, with whichYe dealt out your plain comforts? Yet had yeDelights and exultations of your own.Eager, and never weary, we pursuedOur home-amusements, by the warm peat-fire,At evening; when, with pencil and smooth slate,In square divisions parcelled out, and allWith crosses and with cyphers scribbled o’er,We schemed and puzzled, head opposed to head,In strife too humble to be named in verse;Or round the naked table, snow white deal,Cherry or maple, sate in close array,And to the combat, loo or whist,[D]led onA thick-ribbed army; not, as in the world,Neglected, or ungratefully thrown by,Even for the very service they had wrought,But husbanded thro’ many a long campaign.Uncouth assemblage was it, where no fearHad changed their functions; some plebeian cardsWhich fate, beyond the promise of their birth,Had dignified, and called to representThe persons of departed potentates.Oh, with what echos on the board they fell!Ironic diamonds,—clubs, hearts, diamonds, spades,—A congregation piteously akin!Cheap matter offered they for boyish wit,Those sooty knaves, precipitated down,With scoffs and taunts, like Vulcan out of heaven:The paramount ace, a moon in her eclipse,Queens gleaming thro’ their splendour’s last decay,And monarchs surly at the wrongs sustainedBy royal-visages. Meanwhile, abroadIncessant rain was falling, or the frostRaged bitterly, with keen and silent work;And, interrupting oft that eager game,From under Esthwaits’ splitting scenes of iceThe pent up air, struggling to free itself,Gave out, to meadow grounds and hills, a loudProtracted yelling; like the noise of wolves,Howling, in troops, along the Bothnic main.”

And, then, as a specimen of the out-door sports, and exercises of his youth, whilst dwelling with his good old dame, he says:

“And in the frosty season, when the sunWas set, and visible for many a mileThe cottage windows blazed thro’ twilight gloom,I heeded not their summons; happy timeIt was, indeed, for all of us—for me,It was a time of rapture! Clear and loud,The village clock struck six—I wheeled about,Proud and exulting, like an untired horse,That cares not for his home. All shod with steelWe hissed along the polished ice in gamesConfederate, imitative of the chase,And woodland pleasures—the resounding horn,The pack loud chiming, and the hunted hare.So thro’ the darkness and the cold we flew,And not a voice was idle; with the dinSmitten, the precipices rang aloud;The leafless trees, and every icy crag,Tinkled like iron; while far distant hillsInto the tumult sent an awful soundOf melancholy not unnoticed, while the starsEastward were sparkling clear, and in the westThe orange sky of evening died away.Not seldom from the uproar I retiredInto a silent bay, or sportivelyGlanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throngTo cut across the reflex of a star,That fled, and flying still before me, gleamedUpon the glassy plain; and oftentimes,When we had given our bodies to the wind,And all the shadowy banks on either sideCame sweeping through the darkness, spinning stillThe rapid line of motion, then at onceHave I, reclining back upon my heelsStopped short; yet still the solitary cliffsWheeled by me, even as if the earth had rolled,With visible motion, her diurnal round!Behind me did they stretch in solemn train,Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched,Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.”

And with this famous skating passage—the finest realization of the kind in poetry, I will conclude this outline of the poet’s school-days and mental history.

Itwas in October, 1787, that Wordsworth was sent to St. John’s College, Cambridge, by his uncles, Richard Wordsworth, and Christopher Crackanthorpe, under whose care his three brothers and his sister were placed on the death of their father, in 1795. The orphans were at this time nearly, if not entirely, dependent upon their relatives, in consequence of the stubborn refusal of the wilful, if not mad, Sir James Lowther, to settle the claims of their father upon his estate.

The impressions which Wordsworth received of Cambridge, on his arrival, and during his subsequent residence in that university, are vividly pictured in the “Prelude.” The “long-roofed chapel of King’s College,” lifting its “turrets and pinnacles in answering files,” high above thedusky grove of trees which surrounded it, was the first object which met his eye, as he approached the town. Then came the students, “eager of air and exercise,” taking their constitution walks; and the old Castle, built in the time of the Conqueror; and finally Magdalene bridge, and the glimpse of the Cam caught in passing over it, and the far-famed and much-loved Hoop Hotel.

“My spirit was up, my thoughts were full of hope;Some friends I had, acquaintances who thereSeemed friends, poor simple school-boys, now hung roundWith honour and importance; in a worldOf welcome faces up and down I roved;Questions, directions, warnings, and adviceFlowed in upon me from all sides; fresh dayOf pride and pleasure, to myself I seemedA man of business and expense, and wentFrom shop to shop about my own affairs,To tutor or to tailor, as befel,From street to street, with loose and careless mind.”

The University seemed like a dream to him:

“I was the dreamer, they the dream; I roamedDelighted thro’ the motley spectacle;Gowns—grave or gaudy—doctors, students, streets,Courts, cloisters, flocks of churches, gateways, towers;Migration strange for stripling of the hills—A northern villager.”

And then he goes on to describe his personal appearance and habits; how suddenly he was changed amidst these scenes, as if by some fairy’s wand; rich in monies, and attired—

“In splendid garb, with hose of silk, and hairPowdered, like rimy trees when frost is keen;My lordly dressing-gown, I pass it by,With other signs of manhood, that suppliedThe lack of beard.—The weeks went roundly on;With invitations, suppers, wine, and fruit;Smooth housekeeping within—and all withoutLiberal, and suiting gentlemen’s array.”

The contrast is picturesque and striking enough of Wordsworth, the Hawkshead schoolboy, clad in rustic garb, and placed under the control of his good dame, in her little whitewashed cottage, with its warm peat-fire; to Wordsworth, the collegian, dressed in silk-stockings, with his powdered hair, plentiful monies, troops of wine-drinking, and sight-loving friends. Perhaps, it was natural that Wordsworth should be proud of his butterfly-wings, after having escaped from the shell ofthe chrysallis—but no one could have imagined, from the grave, high, and austere character he afterwards sustained, that he had, at any previous time of his life, given way to the weakness of dandyism. Youth, however, is not to be measured by severe standards; and even if it were to be so measured, Wordsworth has not many sins to answer for, and certainly none of a venial cast. He was, nevertheless, what would be called a gay young fellow, during the first year of his college life; and he himself attributes a good deal of this to the fact that he was before the freshmen of his year in Latin and mathematics, and had, therefore, no pressing inducement to study. Pleasure called him with her syren voice, and he, nothing loath, obeyed her behests. Still he did not neglect his studies; although French and Italian, with the literature of his own country, seem to be the staple of the scholarship he acquired at Cambridge. “It is true,” says De Quincy, “that he took the regular degree of B.A., and in the regular course; but this was won in those days by a mere nominal examination, unless where the mathematical attainments of the student prompted his ambition to contest thehonourable distinction of Senior Wrangler. This, in common with all other honours of the university, is won, in our days, with far severer effort than in that age of relaxed discipline; but at no period could it have been won, let the malicious and the scornful say what they will, without an amount of mathematical skill very much beyond what has ever been exacted of itsalumniby any other European university. Wordsworth was a professed admirer of the mathematics; at least of the higher geometry. The secret of this admiration for geometry lay in the antagonism between this world of bodiless abstraction and the world of passion.”

Leaving this subject of his attainments, however, and returning to his college life, it may farther be stated, as a proof of Wordsworth’s love of good fellowship at this time, that during a visit to a friend who occupied the rooms which John Milton, the blind old Homer of the Commonwealth occupied, during his residence in Cambridge, he drank so copiously in his enthusiasm and reverence for the place, and its grand and golden memories, that he was fairly carried away on the other side of the rational barriers, and in short got gloriouslydrunk; not so drunk, however, that he could not attend the chapel service, and behave there with due decorum. Speaking of the great men who had trod the streets of Cambridge and worn an university gown before him, and of his great reverence for them, he has occasion to introduce Milton, and alludes to this excess at the close of the passage. I will quote it entire.

“Beside the pleasant mill of Trumpington,I laughed with Chaucer in the hawthorn shade;Heard him, while birds were warbling, tell his talesOf amorous passion. And that gentle bard,Chosen by the muses for their page of state!—Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heavenWith the moon’s beauty, and the moon’s soft pace,I called him brother, Englishman, and friend.Yea our blind poet, who in his later day,Stood almost single, uttering odious truth—Darkness before, and danger’s voice behind.Soul awful,—if the earth has ever lodgedAn awful soul—I seem’d to see him hereFamiliarly, and in his scholar’s dress,Bounding before me, yet a stripling youth—A boy, no better, with his rosy cheekAngelical, keen eye, courageous look,And conscious step of purity and pride.Among the band of my compeers was oneWhom chance had stationed in the very roomHonoured by Milton’s name. O temperate bard!Be it confest, that for the first time, seatedWithin thy innocent lodge and oratory,One of a festive circle, I poured outLibations to thy memory, drank, till prideAnd gratitude grew dizzy in a brainNever excited by the fumes of wineBefore that hour, or since. Then forth I ranFrom the assembly; through a length of streetsRan, ostrich like, to reach our chapel doorIn not a desperate or opprobrious time,Albeit long after the importunate bellHad stopped, with wearisome Cassandra voiceNo longer haunting the dark winter night.Call back, O friend! a moment to thy mind,The place itself, and fashion of the rites.With careless ostentation shouldering upMy surplice, through the inferior throng I cloveOf the plain Burghers, who, in audience stoodOn the last skirts of their permitted ground,Under the pealing organ. Empty thoughts!I am asham’d of them; and that great bardAnd thou, my friend! who in thy ample mindHast placed me high above my best deserts,Ye will forgive the weakness of that hour,In some of its unworthy vanities,Brother to many more.”

It is interesting to know all this—to be assured that although Wordsworth was in afterlife as temperate as Milton—drinking nothing but water, and requiring, indeed, no stimulants but that which healthy and robust exercise afforded—I say it is pleasant to be assured that once in his life our poet did really link himself with the imperfections of man, and by an excess of sympathy got drunk—or as De Quincy calls it, “boozy,”—to the honour and glory of Milton. It is a thing to be pardoned, and is almost the only anecdote of Wordsworth which possesses a really human interest.

The rooms which Wordsworth occupied at St. John’s were so situated, that had he been a hard student instead of a gay gownsman, the circumstances which environed them might very materially have affected his studies; for immediately below him ran the great college kitchen, which was continually in an uproar of dissonance with the voices of cooks, and their preparations for the eating necessities of the college members. To atone, however, for this animal riot, the poet could look forth from his pillow by the light

“Of moon or favouring stars,”

and there behold through the majestic windows of Trinity Chapel, the pale statue

“Of Newton with his prism and silent face,The marble index of a mind for everVoyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.”

It must not be supposed, however, from what has now been stated respecting thegaylife of Wordsworth, that he committed any of those excesses which are so common to the undergraduates of Cambridge. He was not a Barnwell-man, nor a Newmarket jockey, nor a gambler, nor gay, indeed, at all, in the gross meaning of that word. He was more idle and genial than this; and a lover of generous society. It was not in his nature, which was always high and pure, and which had been strengthened and solemnised by his converse with the majestic scenery of his childhood,—to descend to the low forms of vice; on the contrary, he had always a dread, horror, and loathing for vice, and vicious society. And, perhaps, one primal cause of his carelessness at Cambridge, lay in his contempt for its scholastic discipline, and for the character and conductof its chiefs and professors. He felt that Cambridge could teach him but little—that he was “not for that hour, or that place,” as he himself expresses it; but for quite another hour and another place. The dead, cold formality of its religious services,—the absence from chapel of those who “ate the bread of the founders of the colleges, and had sworn to administer faithfully their statutes;” whilst the students were required, under penalties, to attend the senseless mummery;—all these things, and others, revolted Wordsworth’s mind against them, and made him regard the whole system, of which they were part, with distrust and abhorrence. He thus alludes to these matters in the “Prelude:”—

“—— Spare the house of God. Was ever knownThe witless shepherd who persists to driveA flock that thirsts not to a pool disliked?A weight must surely hang on days begunAnd ended with such mockery. Be wise,Ye Presidents and Deans, and, till the spiritOf ancient times revive, and truth be trainedAt home in pious service, to your bellsGive seasonable rest, for ’tis a soundHollow as ever vexed the tranquil air;And your officious doings bring disgraceOn the plain steeples of our English church,Whose worship, ’mid remotest village trees,Suffers for this.”

Wordsworth felt this, at the time, very keenly, and saw what a grist it afforded for the grinding ridicule of the scoffer and the atheist. Turning from these melancholy reflections, to the dear old times, when men of learning were really pious, and devoted to their scholarly functions, when

“Bacon, Erasmus, or Melancthon readBefore the doors or windows of their cells,By moonshine, thro’ mere lack of taper-light,”

he conjures up a vision of scholastic life—a vision of the future—which however, he says, “fell to ruin round him,” and was all in vain.

Notwithstanding the confusion of his outer circumstances, and the general aimless tenor of his life, Wordsworth did not entirely neglect his own culture—and in the silence of the academic groves, by the sweetly remembered Cam, or in his own rooms in the Gothic court of St. John’s, he brooded over the problems of life,death, and immortality. The ghosts of the mighty dead haunted him likewise, as he walked through the familiar places, where they were wont to walk whilst dwelling in their earthly tenements, and roused him, at times, to commence anew the race of learning and distinction.

“I could not always passThro’ the same gateways, sleep where they had slept,Wake where they waked, range that enclosure old,That garden of great intellects, undisturbed.”

And yet, with the exception of “Lines written whilst sailing up the Cam,” Wordsworth does not seem to have composed a line at Cambridge. He was learning, however, the first lessons of worldly wisdom all this time; was initiated into the ways of life, and the characters of men; and such discipline could not have been spared the poet, without loss to him. He does not regret, he says, any experience in his college life, and thinks the gowned youth who only misses what he missed, and fell no lower than he fell, is not a very hopeless character.

Atlength the long vacation, which the good Alma Mater allows for the refreshment of the minds and bodies of her dear children, came to set Wordsworth at liberty; and, in the summer of 1788, he revisited his native scenes at Esthwaite. The old cramp of University life, with its dissipations, and frivolous pleasures, fell from him like an evil enchantment, the first moment when he beheld the bed of Windermere,

“Like a vast river stretching in the sun.With exultation at my feet I sawLake, islands, promontories, gleaming bays,A universe of Nature’s finest forms,Proudly revealed with instantaneous burst,Magnificent, and beautiful, and gay.I bounded down the hill, shouting amainFor the old ferryman; to the shout the rocksReplied; and when the Charon of the floodHad stay’d his oars, and touched the jutting pier,I did not step into the well-known boatWithout a cordial greeting.”

There is something very delightful and refreshing in this burst of enthusiasm, and it shews clearly enough, which was the University Wordsworth loved best. At Cambridge he was a prisoner, with his dark heart yearning for the sunshine of his native hills; but here he was free, his heart no longer dark nor sad, but flooding with light and joy, and exulting in the delicious beauty of Nature.

And what strikes me as very touching and beautiful in the poet’s relation of this visit to his birthplace, is the fact that he did not forget his old dame,—although certain critics have of late declared that he had no heart,—but that on the contrary he went straight to her cottage, and so closed his journey from Cambridge. Hear how he speaks of her and her reception of him:

“Glad welcome had I, with some tears, perhaps,From my old dame, so kind and motherly,While she perused me with a parent’s pride.The thoughts of gratitude shall fall like dewUpon thy grave, good creature! While my heartCan beat, never will I forget thy name.Heaven’s blessings be upon thee where thou liestAfter thy innocent and busy stirIn narrow cares, thy little daily growthOf calm enjoyment, after eighty years,And more than eighty of untroubled life,Childless; yet, by the strangers to thy bloodHonoured with little less than filial love.”

Such is the affectionate tribute which Wordsworth pays to her memory. And if the reader be anxious to know all the small and large delights which the poet felt in renewing his acquaintance with the scenes of his childhood, I must refer him to the “Prelude.” He will there read how the old dame led him—he “willing, nay, wishing to be led,” through the village and its neighbourhood. How each face of the ancient neighbours was like a volume to him; how he hailed the labourers at their work “with half the length of a long field between,” how he shook hands with his quondam schoolfellows; proud and yet ashamed of his fine Cambridge clothes, doing everything in the way of recognition, in short, which a kind generous, and loving heart could dictate. The brook in the garden, which had beenimprisoned there until it had lost its voice—he hailed also, with the delight of many remembrances, and much present pleasure. And then how his heart overflows at the sight of his favourite dog—the rough terrier of the hills—an inmate of the dame’s cottage by ancient right!—a brave fellow, that could hunt the badger, or unearth the fox—making no bones about either business. The poet slept, too, during this visit, in his old sleeping room;

“That lowly bed, where I had heard the windRoar, and the rain beat hard, where I so oftHad lain awake on summer nights to watchThe moon in splendour couched among the leavesOf a tall ash that near our cottage stood;Had watch’d her with fixed eyes, while to and froIn the dark summit of the waving treeShe rock’d with every impulse of the breeze.”

The poet then describes the refreshing influence which Nature spread, like a new element of life, over his spirit, and quotes even the time and place—viz., one evening at sunset, when taking his first walk, these long months, round the lake of Esthwaite, when his soul

“Put off her veil, and self-transmuted, stoodNaked in the presence of her God;”

whilst a comfort seemed to “touch a heart that had not been disconsolate;” and “strength came where weakness was not known to be—at least not felt.” Then he took the balance, and weighed himself:

“Conversed with promises, had glimmering viewsHow life pervades the undecaying mind;How the immortal soul, with godlike powerInforms, creates, and thaws the deepest sleepThat time can lay upon her; how on earthMan, if he do but live within the lightOf high endeavours, daily spreads abroad,His being armed with strength that cannot fail.”

Here was evidence that the soul of the poet was settling down, if we may say so, to something like repose, preparatory to the grand aim and purpose of his life. He begins to see that idleness and pleasure will not last—will not serve any end in the world; and that man must be a worker, with high endeavours, if he is indeed to be or do anything worthy of a man.—And this light breaking in upon him, through the twilight of Nature and his own soul, is soothing, consolatory, and hopeful to him. He begins, likewise, to take a fresh interest in thedaily occupations of the people around him; read the opinions and thoughts of these plain living people, “now observed with clearer knowledge;” and saw “with another eye” “the quiet woodman in the woods,” and the shepherd roaming over the hills. His love for the grey-headed old dame returns to him again and again in these latter pages of the “Prelude,” and he pictures her as a dear object in the landscape, as she goes to church,

——“Equipped in monumental trim;Short velvet cloak, (her bonnet of the like,)A mantle, such as cavaliersWore in old time.”

And then her

——“smooth domestic life,Affectionate, without disquietude,Her talk, her business pleased me, and no lessHer clear, though shallow stream of piety,That ran on Sabbath days a fresher course;With thoughts unfelt till now, I saw her readHer Bible on hot Sunday afternoons,And loved the book, when she had dropped asleep,And made of it a pillow for her head.”

It would be impossible to follow the poet inall those minute relations of incident and feeling which run throughout the “Prelude,” during this first vacation amongst the hills.—One anecdote, however, must be told, for it is an inlet into the poet’s nature, and shewed that he had a heart, and deep sympathies also for suffering and poverty, let the critics say what they will.

During the autumn, while Wordsworth was wandering amidst the hills round Windermere,—with no living thing in sight, and breathless silence over all,—he was suddenly startled by the appearance of an uncouth shape, in a turning of the road. At first he was a little timid, and perhaps alarmed, for it was close to him, and he knew not what to make of it. The dusky light of the evening increased the mystery, and Wordsworth retreated noiselessly under the shadow of a thick hawthorn, that he might watch it unobserved. It turned out to be a poor wanderer, of tall stature,

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