MEMOIRS
OF
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


LONDON,
PARTRIDGE & OAKEY.

MEMOIRS

OF

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH,

COMPILED FROM AUTHENTIC SOURCES;

WITH

NUMEROUS QUOTATIONS FROM HIS POEMS,
ILLUSTRATIVE OF HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER.

BY JANUARY SEARLE,

AUTHOR OF “LIFE, CHARACTER, AND GENIUS OF EBENEZER ELLIOTT,”
“LEAVES FROM SHERWOOD FOREST,” ETC.

——
LONDON:
PARTRIDGE & OAKEY, PATERNOSTER ROW.
——
MDCCCLII.

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.

William Wordsworth is the father of a new school of Poetry, and his name marks an era in the literature of England, which is full of deep interest to the philosophical inquirer. He began his career with profound convictions respecting the nature and functions of poetry; its dignity as an art, and the immense capabilities it afforded for the utterance of sublime and ennobling truths, and for the furtherance of human liberty and happiness. He saw, too, that the old Harp of the Bards was profaned by the touch of uninspired, and even frivolous hands; and he determined, if possible, to rescue it from their keeping, and restore it once again to its divine uses, and ancient melody. To accomplish this grand object, he devoted all his faculties and culture, and was so deeply impressed with the idea that this was his especial mission upon earth, that he retired amongst the mountains and lakes of Westmoreland—a solemn and lonely man—holding converse with the Invisible through the Visible forms of Nature, and thus fitting himself for the priestly office to which he aspired. And in all the years of his noviciate—through all the time when, by universal acclamation, he stood crowned with the sacred laurels of the Bard—and his mission was accredited by all men—he never for a moment flagged in his purpose, or stooped to the garlands of fame,—but gathering his prophet’s mantle around him, he pursued his undeviating course, alike regardless of applause, condemnation, and persecution. He had looked well into his own heart, before he set out on his perilous enterprise; had measured well his own strength of purpose, and capability of performance; knew, in short, what he had to do, and did it.

To appreciate fully, however, the historical position of William Wordsworth, and the value of his labours, it will be necessary to take a retrospective view of the literature which preceded him, or at least to state its leading characteristics. The grand old era of Shakspeare and his cotemporaries had long since passed away, and the noble music of Milton’s song had ceased to thrill the hearts and souls of men. The brilliant, half-inspired writers in the reign of Queen Anne, who came to represent the national mind at the close of our Augustan epoch, had formed a school of Poetry in England,—at once witty and sententious, profound and hollow; without heart or genius; and with nothing but talent and culture to recommend it. Pope, who may be considered the head of this school, set the seal of his intellect upon the cotemporary and subsequent literature of that era. He had rivals whom he stung to silence, and covered with contempt by his satires, and imitators whom he fondled and despised. Pope and his compeers were, however, kings and priests of song, compared with the herd of twangsters who succeeded them. The fancy and wit, the philosophy and refinement of Pope, were sunk and lost in the barrel-grinding of these imitators of his style; and Poetry was stripped of its subjective attributes, and lived only as a mechanical form.—This at all events is true of the writers professedly of the Pope school; and the few exceptions, for upwards of fifty years after his death, owe what little fame they possess to their own little originality.

In all the departments of literature, the same lifelessness and uniformity were manifest. The deadest materialism prevailed both in science and philosophy, and the national soul seemed paralyzed beneath the weight of a dire, unknown, unseen incubus of death. In the meanwhile, however, there were influences at work both in England and Europe, which were silently preparing the way for a revolution in the thoughts and opinions of men. The spiritual element awoke in Germany and France, and like a mighty, but half-blind god, began to react upon the materialism of the age. Then, for the first time since the close of the Commonwealth, did the pulse of England begin, also, to beat with the music of life and health. The importations of German sentimentality—mawkish and imbecile as they often were—touched the right chords in the English heart, and roused it to consciousness. Men saw that there was new life struggling under this ghastly utterance, and began to lose their faith in the dead formalism, which they had so long hugged in their idolatry. Their minds were gradually turned to the old grandees of Elizabeth’s reign: to Shakspeare and rare Ben Jonson, and to Spenser, Beaumont and Fletcher, until, at last, the reactionary currents had fairly set in, which were to cleanse the national mind of its disease, and restore it to health. Add to this, that the higher minds of England were already immersed in those metaphysical speculations which, whilst they confirmed the increasing spiritual tendency, gave earnestness to their aim and character. And when, at last, after Rouseau and Voltaire—the two poles of the great revolutionary idea of Europe—had flung their works into the cauldron of this vast, seething, reactionary fermentation—the wonderous phenomenon, which we call the French Revolution, burst upon the world—the reaction was complete, and a new epoch dawned upon man—the epoch, viz., of progress and humanity—which will never close until its mission is sealed with the liberty and happiness of mankind.

Such, then, is a slight sketch of the characteristics of the age into which Wordsworth was born. He came in time to catch the full surges of its influence, and his spirit was one of the few destined to aid the onward tide of events, and mould their flowing forms into a fixed and plastic beauty. Not, however, by any active mingling with the affairs of men, for this was clearly no part of his vocation, but by silent watching and contemplative thought, and the faithful exercise of his poetic faculties. The political arena was open to more daring, and less costly men, who could do their temporary work and disappear without farther loss to the nation: but the poet had a greater and more enduring work to accomplish; he was to become the architect of a new literature and the singer of a new gospel of life to the world. The growing earnestness of his age demanded a voice to speak for it—many voices, indeed, each in its proper province of feeling and of thought. And in no province was this voice more loudly called for than in that of poetry, for death reigned in all the courts of the poetic temple, and every priest was a corpse which the muse had stuck about with flowers, that she might conceal even from herself the sorrowful fact of her desertion and utter misery.[A] Wordsworth came to tear away the mask, and spurn the dead from her temple.

The great object of Wordsworth’s life was to win men back, by his poetic example, to an admiration and love of the natural in all its aspects. To him nature is not only divine and glorious as a whole, but equally so in all her parts. In the meanest worm that crawls, in the tinyest flower and the rankest weed; in the summer foliage, and in the brown skeleton leaves of autumn; in the lonely mountain, and the silent stream—he recognizes the spirit of beauty, and she passes through his spirit into song, and becomes at once a poem, and a grand moral gospel. All things in heaven and earth are consecrated existences to him, no matter how profanely and lowly they may rank with common observers.

And this view of Nature he carries into the presence of man. It is not kings and the mighty ones in the dream-play of Life whom he thinks to be the only worthy subjects for poetry. If these people come in his way, he is Catholic enough to admit them through his imagination, into the immortality which awaits his books. But he does not seek them. He thinks they have already had their full share of poetic honour, and perhaps more than their due share; that so much dwelling upon such people, with their unrealities and false glares of splendour, has diseased the holy faculty of the poet, and turned his visions into morbid night-mares. It seems in short to be his opinion, that the higher we advance in the social scale, the further we are off from the sanities and truths of human life. He consequently looks for these in ruder and humbler ranks: in the dwellings of the poor, in the hearts of the peasantry, and the intuitions of uncorrupted childhood. He delights to sing of the commonest things, and is ever happy in his delineations of the hopes and fears, the loves, inquietudes, and disappointments of rustic existence. He has the minute anatomical power of Crabbe, combined with a still higher physiological and creative faculty, by which he not only lays bare the hidden meaning and laws of natural objects, but transforms the objects themselves into new beauty and significance. The grey light of morning breaking over the hill tops of his chosen retreat—the hot sunshine burning in white molten silver upon the bosom of his enchanted lakes—the lonely fisherman upon their shores—look truer and more affecting objects, as we gaze upon them, through the medium of his musical sorcery of words. His picture of the poor wandering leech gatherer, over the deep black pools of the wild moor, with the profound moral which he has attached to it, is an instance of his skill as a painter, and of his divine insight as a man of genius. “The Idiot Boy,” is another specimen of his consummate ability to render the most inert and painful nature alive and glorious by the spiritual appliances of his art. This boy, detached from the poet’s mind, is a gloomy and sorrowful spectacle; but when he enters the shattered temple in which the Idiot dwells, and unites him, by the magic of his presence, to the great universal temple of Nature, he is no longer a gloomy insanity, but a poetically created existence. We see that this Idiot also has a soul; a subject soul certainly, and bound to what we might call hard conditions of capability and action, but a soul nevertheless: vital with its own vagarious life, and rejoicing in it. Wordsworth’s revelations of the inner workings of this Idiot’s mind—of the dark moon glimmerings which break impulsively through the ruins of his intellect, and make him wild with joy or ghastly with terror—are unsurpassable achievements.

And yet Wordsworth is abused for his tameness and want of inspiration! Dead asses and idiots, Peter Bells and Waggoners, it is said, are not elevated facts enough for poetry! The foolish objectors do not understand how all poetry is based upon facts, and how the most obscure things become purified and poetic, when they are raised by imagination, and placed in new connections of thought. It is the province of the Poet to elevate the homely, and to beautify the mean. To him, indeed, nothing is mean, nothing worthless. What God has made, he, the exponent of God, shall love and honour.

It is our acknowledged want of sympathy with the common, which induced Wordsworth to devote his life and attention to the awakening of it. He knew that whatever is touched by genius is converted into gold, and stamped thenceforth as sacred, by the impress of its image. The Betty Foys of human existence, although they, too, are “encompassed by eternity,” and destined to the same futurity as the Queens Elizabeth and Mary, have never, before Wordsworth’s time, had a poetic priest high enough to make them religious by his love and fidelity to them. It required immense faith and majesty of mind to hazard the experiment; so plebeian are all Betsies that wear red cloaks and black bonnets, instead of ermines and crowns. Wordsworth, however, did not care for names and orders, but saw and worshipped humanity alone. He has dared, therefore, to say and to maintain, through a long and honourable life, that Elizabeth Foy was as much of a man as Elizabeth Queen. He has linked together the throne and the cottage through all their manifold gradations. He has, of course, had his full share of abuse for this heroic and triumphant effort; but the good old Skiddaw-granite-rock of a man was not to be moved by abuse, but continued to sing and preach in his solitude, with the solemnity and witchery of a Memnon statue.

It should be remembered, also, that Wordsworth purposely avoids the florid style in the architecture of his verse. His ideal model is the plain severity of the Saxon temple, in which the grand and the simple were united.—He aims at clear and unmistakeable utterance. His chaste simplicity is the work of an artist, and by no means the necessity of a limited intellect. If this fact were borne in mind by his detractors, it is not unlikely that they would be less furious when they speak of him. For an author should always be read, measured, and judged by his own standard, and not by ours.—Nothing can be more absurd than the subjection of a poet to any critical canon or authority. Knowing his position as an expounder of the hidden truths of the universe—as an oracle of the Infinite, and a revealer of the beauty and mystery of nature and human life—he stands in our presence like the Hebrew law-giver, covered with the golden glory and lightning of the Highest, whom he has seen upon the summits of Sinai. Henceforth we are to accept his law, not he ours.

It is useless to question and criticise in our foolish manner the new bard of God, whoever he may be, or under what circumstances soever he may appear among us. He does not live by questionings and logical inductions, but by faith and inspiration. Entranced in the miracle of his own existence, with all these vast orbs of immensity pressing upon his brain, and the silent creatures of the fair earth stealing like noiseless musical shadows into the temple of his soul, he has no time to consult the critics whether this or that mode of reproducing them is the orthodox one. He will speak in any way he can; and if the old grey-beard world will be startled or shocked at his speech, he has no other answer for it but this: “My utterance is the birth-cry of my thoughts.”

Every new poet—every genius indeed that is divine—is a notification to us that the world of things is about to be classified anew, and to assume a deeper meaning. And certainly one would think that so great an announcement might gladden the hearts of men, instead of making them savage and ferocious at it. For of all men the poet is highest and noblest. He is the awful Seer, who unveils the spirit of Nature and looks with solemn and unscathed eyes upon her naked loveliness and terror. The Beloved of God, he is admitted into the very presence of the Invisible, and reports, in such wild and strange words as he can find, the sights he has beheld there. He is the renovator of man and Nature. He lifts the human soul upon his daring wings, and carries it into light and immortality. In his words we behold the re-creation of the universe. We see Orion, like the starry skeleton of a mighty giant, go forth into the solitudes of unfathomable space; we witness the planting of the solar stars, and hear the everlasting roar of the vast sun, as it wheels, seething from God’s hands, upon its fiery axis; and these unspeakable sights are heightened in their magnificence and terrific grandeur by the poet, who holds us fast to their symbolical meaning, and chains them to the being of God, as the expressions in appearance of His thoughts and will.

By virtue, therefore, of his mission, the poet is Antinomian. He is master of all law, and no critic can trammel him. Let him try that, and the poet, like the war-horse who snuffs the far-off battle, will say to the little man—“Ha! ha!”

It is necessary that we here make a few extracts from Wordsworth’s defence, if we may call it so, of his manner of writing, in order that the reader may be prepared for a right appreciation of his poetry. In speaking of his poems as a whole, he says:—

“The principal object proposed was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting, by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature; chiefly as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement. Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak in plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from these feelings, and from the necessary character of rural occupations, are more easily comprehended and are more durable; and lastly, because in that condition, the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of Nature. The language, too, of these men has been adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust), because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and, because, from their rank in society, and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expression. Accordingly, such a language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for it by poets, who think that they are conferring honour upon themselves and their art in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, in order to furnish food for fickle tastes, and fickle appetites, of their own creation.”

It will be seen from this extract, that Wordsworth has no sympathy with the inflammations of Literature. His mission is with the ordinary, the beauty and philosophy of which he has devoted his life to expound. He has flung a charm over existences which Nature did not seem before him to love as her children; and we honour him for the great work which he has accomplished.

MEMOIR OF

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth, in Cumberland, on the 7th of April, 1770. His father, John Wordsworth, was an attorney, and law-agent to Sir James Lowther, who was afterwards raised to the peerage, and created Earl of Lonsdale. His mother’s name was Anne Cookson, only daughter of William Cookson, a mercer of Penrith, and of “Dorothy, born at Crackenthorpe, of the ancient family of that name, who, from the time of Edward the Third, had lived in Newbiggen Hall, Westmorland.”[B] His grandfather was the first of the name of Wordsworth who came into Westmorland, where he purchased the small estate of Stockbridge. His ancestors had lived at Peniston, in Yorkshire, probably before the time of the Norman Conquest. “Their names,” says Wordsworth, in his Autobiographic Memoranda, “appear on different occasions in all the transactions, personal and public, connected with that parish; and I possess, through the kindness of Colonel Beaumont, an almery made in 1525, at the expense of a William Wordsworth, as is expressed in a Latin inscription carved upon it, which carries the pedigree of the family back four generations from himself.”

The poet was second son of his father, and spent most of his early days at Cockermouth. He was subsequently removed to Hawkshead grammar school. And here, properly speaking, his true history begins. In the “Prelude,” a poem but lately published, we have a full account of his boyish ways, and experiences, and a complete record of the development of his mind.

This poem is, therefore, doubly valuable, both as a psychological and literary performance. True it is that, like all Wordsworth’s poems, on their first appearance, it has been exceedingly well abused, and that too by men who have eyes to see, and understandings wherewith to understand; which is singular; but the poem is not the less a great vestibule, or outer porch to a great poetic temple for all that. In reading it, I seem to be walking up through the long dim avenues of eternity with the young soul of the poet, and listening to its half remembered ideas of the unspeakable glory from which it has come—itself radiant with immortal lustres—and bursting out, ever and anon, in an ecstacy of rapturous wonder at the mystic and beautiful revelations of Time—the grand and everflowing pageantry of nature,—its woods, mountains, streams, and heavenly hosts of stars. For it is certain that this, or something like this, is the impression one receives, whilst following the poet, in the manifold disclosures which he makes of his own spiritual and mental development: he will not let go the glory of his birth, but cleaves to it, as to the title of some grand heritage, which he shall one day possess. And it is this, and its kindred spiritual ideas, which give the mystic tinge and colouring to all Wordsworth’s higher poetry, as if it had been baptised in an element altogether alien to sensuous experience, and to the common world of man.

It was a long time, however, before Wordsworth could understand Nature,—before he could make out what she would be at, in dodging him in his ordinary paths, and haunting him in his solitary hours. True, he was always very fond of the beautiful and terrible Mother; loved her storm-wrath, and wind-wrath; her golden and voluptuous sunshine; her rivers and brooklets; her mountains, lakes, dells, and the flowery bespanglement of her green and rustling kirtle. But this was all. He did not know that this love was merely initial,—the basework of a deeper passion—the basement of a divine wisdom. And although he was always a wayward and lonely boy, yet he was a boy, and his roots did not strike up precociously, and burst him into a man at once; but took time to grow; so that the boy was father to the man. Neither would Nature allow him to brood too intently over her wonders and loveliness, but took him gently captive, in a sort of side-winds, or brief revelations of herself, in his rambles and hunting sports; for he was made of too good stuff to be spoilt by any over-doings—and she was jealous of her favourite.

It was very fortunate for Wordsworth that his early life was cast in the midst of such magnificent scenery, as that of Cumberland, for it acted powerfully upon his mind, and helped to mould his character, and develope his genius. School did very little for him, nor College, nor even books, until a comparatively late period of his life. But both nature and poetry had always a great and transcendent charm for him. As a boy, at Cockermouth he obtained the rudiments of learning from the Rev. W. Gillbanks; and his father, who was a man of vigorous character, and considerable culture and scholarship, initiated him into the pantheon of poetry, by repeating to him the finest passages of Shakspeare, Milton, and Spenser, which the boy subsequently committed to memory. But he was frequently refractory in his conduct, and peevish in his temper. His mother, whom he loved much, and who died before he was eight years of age, had at times terrible misgivings about her darling son, on these accounts, although I find no record to justify her in her forebodings. He was certainly a wild little fellow, full of animal spirits, which never flagged, with a little of the dare-devil in him: but this is natural enough in a healthy boy. Wordsworth, in alluding to his mother’s dread of the “evil chance” of his life, gives us an anecdote, with the intention of justifying her, which seems to me very comical in such connection.

“I remember going once,” he says, “into the attics of my grandfather’s house at Penrith, upon some indignity having been put upon me, with an intention of destroying myself with one of the foils which I knew was kept there. I took the foil in my hand, but my heart failed me.

“Upon another occasion, while I was at the same house, along with my eldest brother, Richard, we were whipping tops together in the large drawing-room, on which the carpet was only laid down upon particular occasions.—The walls were humg round with family pictures, and I said to my elder brother: ‘Dare you strike your whip through that old lady’s petticoat?’ ‘No,’ he replied, ‘I won’t.’ ‘Then,’ said I, ‘here goes!’—and I struck my lash through her hooped petticoat; for which, no doubt, I was properly punished, although I have forgotten it. But, possibly from some want of judgment in punishments inflicted, I was perverse and obstinate in defying chastisement, and rather proud of it than otherwise.”

Perhaps the real truth of Mrs. Wordsworth’s anxiety is, after all, to be found in the fact that she had anticipated an extraordinary career for her son. There does not appear, however, to have been much ground for the supposition that the “evil chance” would prevail; and considering the wise teaching of this dear mother, and the apt though erratic nature of her son, I think there was good reason for a more cheering augury of his fate. Speaking of his mother’s mode of education, in the “Prelude,” he says, that it was founded upon

That there are evidences of this healthful and pious faith, this holy and beneficent teaching, in Wordsworth’s writings, every one acquainted with them will admit; and the passage just quoted is more than ordinarily interesting on this account, as an illustration of the force of early training. His mother’s love haunts him in later years, although he is altogether silent about his father, and only speaks of his mother twice in all his poems. The hearth-stone, and its gods, seem to have been too sacred with him for parade. When he appears before the vicar, with a trembling, earnest company of boys about his own age, to say the catechism, at Easter, as the custom was, the mother watches him with beating heart; and here is the second tribute of affection to her beloved memory:

With such a mother as this, it is no wonder that Wordsworth—in spite of his occasional devilry—was a happy and joyous boy. He looks back, indeed, in after life, upon the home and scenes of his childhood, as upon some enchanted region. He has no withering recollections of poverty or distress; all is sunshine and delight. The sweet, melodious, and romantic Derwent is the syren of these dreams, and it sings with wondrous music in his verse. All his memories are associated with the fine scenery of his birth-place—are fused into it—and become, at last the real foundation of his life: and here is a description of his native scenery, which I find ready made to my hand:

“The whole district may be said to stand single in the world, and to have in the peculiar character of its beauty no parallel elsewhere. It is in the concentration of every variety of loveliness into a compass which in extent does not greatly tax the powers of the pedestrian, that it fairly defies rivalry, and affords the richest pabulum to the poetical faculty. There, every form of mountain, rock, lake, stream, wood, and plain, from the conformation of the country, is crowded with the most prodigal abundance into a few square miles. Coleridge characterises it as a ‘cabinet of beauties.’ ‘Each thing,’ says he, ‘is beautiful in itself; and the very passage from one lake, mountain, or valley to another, is itself a beautiful thing again.’ Wordsworth, in his own ‘Description of the Country of the Lakes,’ dwells with the zest and minuteness of idolatry upon every feature of that treasury of landscape. The idea he gives of the locality is very perfect and graphic. If the tourist were seated on a cloud midway between Great Gavel and Scafell, and only a few yards above their highest elevation, he would look down to the westward on no fewer than nine different valleys, diverging away from that point, like spokes from the nave of a wheel, towards the vast rim formed by the sands of the Irish Sea. These vales—Langdale, Coniston, Duddon, Eskdale, Wastdale, Ennerdale, Buttermere, Borrowdale, and Keswick—are of every variety of character; some with, and some without lakes; some richly fertile, and some awfully desolate. Shifting from the cloud, if the tourist were to fly a few miles eastward, to the ridge of old Helvellyn, he would find the wheel completed by the vales of Wytheburn, Ulswater, Haweswater, Grasmere, Rydal, and Ambleside, which bring the eye round again to Winandermere, in the vale of Langdale, from which it set out. From the sea or plain country all round the circumference of this fairy-land, along the gradually-swelling uplands, to the mighty mountains that group themselves in the centre, the infinite varieties of view may be imagined—varieties made still more luxuriant by the different position of each valley towards the rising or setting sun. Thus a spectator in the vale of Winandermere will in summer see its golden orb going down over the mountains, while the spectator in Keswick will at the same moment mark it diffusing its glories over the low grounds. In this delicious land, dyed in a splendour of ever-shifting colours, the old customs and manners of England still lingered in the youth of Wordsworth, and took a firm hold of his heart, modifying all his habits and opinions. Though a deluge of strangers had begun to set in towards this retreat, and even the spirit of the factory threatened to invade it, still the dalesmen were impressed with that character of steadiness, repose, and rustic dignity, which has always possessed irresistible charms for the poet. Their cottages, which, from the numerous irregular additions made to them, seemed rather to have grown than to have been built, were covered over with lichens and mosses, and blended insensibly into the landscape, as if they were not human creations, but constituent parts of its own loveliness. In this old English Eden, all his schoolboy days, Wordsworth wandered restlessly, drawn hither and thither by his irresistible passion for nature, and receiving into his soul those remarkable photographs which were afterwards to delight his countrymen. There can be no doubt that the charms of this lake scenery added still more strength to the poet’s peculiar tendencies, and developed a conservative sentiment, which, though temporarily overcome, afterwards reared itself up in haughtier majesty than before. The poet was naturally led to indulge much in out-of-door wanderings and pastimes, such as skating, of which he has left a picture unapproachable in its vividness and precision.”

In such scenery then, and with such occupations, did the boy spend his time, until it became necessary to send him to a higher school than Cockermouth afforded. He was accordingly dispatched to Hawkshead Grammar School, near the lake of Esthwaite, where he was not crammed with overmuch learning. He speaks of these larger school days with enthusiasm, in his “Prelude;”—not, however, because the little Latin and mathematics which he learned were so tasteful to his mind; but because his leisure hours and holidays were rendered sweeter by the restraints of the school, and gave a greater zest to his field-sports, and the secular books which he loved. He mentions his amusements—such as birds’ nesting, in the warm moist mornings of Spring,—springing woodcocks, in the brown and mellow days of Autumn,—bathing in the Derwent, that “tempting playmate” of his, into which, even when five years old, he would plunge again and again, “making one long bathing of a Summer’s day,”—rowing, on sunny half-holidays with his boisterous schoolmates, on the great “plain of Windermere,”—or skating, by day and night, upon the frozen bosom of Esthwaite. His beloved books, too, at this time, find a record in his verse. They are Fielding—that mighty creator, so full of the “play-impulse,” like an old god who makes worlds, and amuses himself with the story of their various fortunes; Cervantes, who laughed Christendom out of its chivalry, because chivalry was dead as an institution, and had become laughable; Le Sage, with his Shaksperian knowledge of life, and his inimitable artistic power; and Swift, with his sharp wit, learning, and satire, glittering amid continents of mud. “Gulliver’s Travels,” and the “Tale of a Tub,” were the things which stuck to him fastest, however, of all the works of these writers.

In the meanwhile the poet was awakening within him, and the poetic pabulum was becoming, every day, more and more necessary to his existence. His fine receptive spirit stored up all the forms and influences of nature; revivified them, and reproduced them by its power. The strong individuality, which marks his poetry, manifested itself at this early period; for he loved solitude better than his playmates; although he loved them too, and speaks of them with affection; but the dells, mountains, and lakes, were his most beloved companions.—Often would he lie down upon the grass or the heather, and wait for the gentle voices which had so frequently whispered the secrets of nature in his ears, and by their inspiration had enabled him to catch a glimpse of the divine glory behind the veil of things; or looking upwards into the blue unfathomable depths of heaven, he has asked questions which those depths could not answer, and has thus tasted of the sorrow which makes life holy. His own mind had begun to react upon Nature, and to make her more beautiful or terrible, according to his mood. He began to feel the auxiliar light, which comes from the soul, and diffuses its glory over all things, making the common noble, and investing the grandest forms of the material world, with the still grander attributes of imagination. He hints at the process of all this; at the “plastic power” and the creative power,—the outer and the inner modus of his culture. “A plastic power,” he says—

And all this was much better than school-learning—although school learning is not to be despised. But Wordsworth, as before remarked, learned very little at school, although he took honours in the great Alma Mater, out of doors. And it is singular that nearly every one who has made a figure, and left a mark in the world’s page, has been equally unindebted to school for his success. Genius hates to be put in harness, and yet without discipline of some sort or other, there can be no stability of character—no steady aim, purpose, or achievement. Nature always takes care to exaggerate the natural tendency of her favourites, that the balance may be restored by discipline, and that the work which she requires of the peculiar faculties may be done. And to this discipline genius itself must, in the end, submit, or fail in the high purpose of its existence. We can afford that it should be a little erratic, and wild in its ways, especially in youth; that it should even like the song of the birds better than the concords of grammar. But it must learn grammar after all, and many other things beside, if it is really to do any great work in the world. And this was the case with Wordsworth, who alternated his book studies with those of Nature. For although he acquired nothing more than the mechanical forms of learning at Hawkshead—and these were limited to Latin and mathematics—yet the discipline was good for his health, and the acquirements themselves were not to be despised. In the meanwhile, he had written verses too remarkable to be passed over without notice, although the poet himself says, “they are but a tame imitation of Pope’s versification, and a little in his style.” They were written upon the completion of the second centenary of the foundation of the Hawkshead grammar school (in 1585, by Archbishop Sandys,) as a school exercise, when Wordsworth was only fourteen years old; and as the poetry is not included in his works, although Dr. Wordsworth has preserved it in the autobiographical memoranda of his “Memoir,” lately published, I will make a quotation from it, that the reader may see how the genius of Wordsworth first adapted itself to the laws and formulary of poetic art. It is Education that speaks in the following lines.

Now, it must be acknowledged, that this writing, imitative as it is, is very remarkable as the production of a boy of fourteen; and that it displays an uncommon degree of artistic skill in its construction, with much command of language, and a moral culture one does not often meet with in boys. This, however, was not Wordsworth’s first attempt at composition. “It may be, perhaps, as well to mention,” says the poet, in his brief autobiographical notes, appended to the Memoir, “that the first verses I wrote, were a task imposed by my master; the subject ‘The Summer Vacation;’ and of my own accord I added others upon ‘Return to School.’ These exercises, however,” he continues, “put it into my head to compose verses from the impulse of my own mind; and I wrote, while yet a schoolboy, a long poem running upon my own adventures, and the scenery of the country in which I was brought up. The only part of that poem which has been preserved is the conclusion of it, which stands at the beginning of my collected poems. It commences ‘Dear native regions.’” This poem was the archetype of the “Prelude,” and was a good preparatory discipline to the structure of that nobly musical poem.

In 1786, in anticipation of leaving school, he wrote some sweet verses, in which he speaks, with a sad fondness, of the old region round about Hawkshead, and vows, with a lover’s heart, never to forget its beauty, but to turn towards it wherever he may be, as to the shrine of his idolatry.