GENERAL INTRODUCTION. LIFE. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH was born on April 7th, 1770, at Wordsworth's Cockermouth, on the Derwent, in an agricultural district of Cumberland, about six miles from the sea-coast, ten miles to the west of Skiddaw, and fifteen miles northwest of Helvellyn. Thus he lived from his infancy in the immediate neighbourhood of that romantic lake scenery which will evermore be associated with, as it was consecrated by, his genius. On both his father's and mother's side he came of an Childhood. old north-country stock of good social standing. His mother died when he was eight years old; and five years later he lost his father. As a child he was stubborn, moody, and of a violent temper; the only one of his family for whom the mother had ever felt any anxious forebodings. On one occasion, when he was staying with his mother's father at Penrith, having as he thought been unfairly treated, he went up into an attic determined to kill himself with one of the foils kept there; but, as he says, "his heart failed him." At eight years old he was sent to school at Hawks- School-days. head, on Esthwaite Lake, a few miles west of Winder mere. b Here he was allowed to read whatever books he University career. liked, Fielding's novels, Don Quixote, Gulliver's Travels, and the Tale of A Tub being among his favourites. But Wordsworth's real education, from his earliest childhood, was received in Dame Nature's open-air school, among river-side meadows, and wooded hills, or, later, amid the solemn silences of mountain and lake. In the Prelude (i. 274 et seq.) he has given us his inner autobiography: "For this, didst thou, O Derwent, winding among grassy holms Make ceaseless music that composed my thoughts Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm That Nature breathes among the hills and groves? Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up Even his moral nature was disciplined by the same silent teacher. It was not by learning the Decalogue in the class room; it was in lonely midnight wanderings over the frost-bound heights of Esthwaite in search of snared woodcocks, when he had unfairly taken a schoolfellow's bird, that "low breathings" from the "solitary hills came after him, and "steps almost as silent as the turf they trod" taught him the lesson Thou shalt not steal. In 1787 he entered the University of Cambridge, as a student at St. John's College. He troubled himself but little with the University curriculum; his education was chiefly carried on by self-chosen reading-by communing with Nature-by the conscious equality of brotherhood in the free social life of University men, which matured that sense of man's innate dignity and worth learned in childhood among the sturdy self-respecting peasant proprietors of Cumberland. In his first summer long vacation he found himself again among his boyish haunts at Esthwaite Lake; a centre of admiring interest to his former schoolfellows and friends, above all to the kindly dame who had been as a mother to him during his school-boy days. His self-wrapt contemplative love of Nature now began to grow more "human-hearted." He mixed freely in the rustic society of his Cumberland friends, and took a kindly pleasure in the light-hearted talk of their dancing parties, with "Here and there Slight shocks of young love-liking interspersed, Whose transient pleasure mounted to the head, And tingled through the veins." (Prelude, iv. 316-319.) Returning to his lodging on one occasion, after a night spent in these innocent gaieties, he was confronted with the calm splendour of sunrise: "The sea lay laughing at a distance; near, The solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds, (Ib. iv. 326-332.) At that hour the mystic hand of Nature was laid upon him in consecration; and he felt himself to be thenceforward " a dedicated Spirit," the Poet Priest of Nature and of Man. |