Breathed immortality, revolving life,
And greatness still revolving; infinite;
There littleness was not; the least of things
Seemed infinite; and there his spirit shaped
Her prospects, nor did he believe, he saw.
What wonder if his being thus became
Sublime and comprehensive! Low desires,
Low thoughts had there no place; yet was his heart
Lowly; for he was meek in gratitude,
Oft as he called those ecstasies to mind,
And whence they flowed; and from them he acquired
Wisdom, which works thro' patience; thence he learned
In oft-recurring hours of sober thought 1
To look on Nature with a humble heart,
Self-questioned where it did not understand,
And with a superstitious eye of love.
So passed the time; yet to the nearest town 2
He duly went with what small overplus
His earnings might supply, and brought away
The book that 3 most had tempted his desires
While at the stall he read. Among the hills
He gazed upon that mighty orb of song,
The divine Milton.* Lore of different kind,
The annual savings of a toilsome life,
His School-master supplied;1 books that explain
The purer elements of truth involved
In lines and numbers, and, by charm severe,
(Especially perceived where nature droops
And feeling is suppressed) preserve the mind
Busy in solitude and poverty.
These occupations oftentimes deceived
The listless hours, while in the hollow vale,
Hollow and green, he lay on the green turf
In pensive idleness. What could he do,
Thus daily thirsting, in that lonesome life,
With blind endeavours? 2 Yet, still uppermost,
Nature was at his heart as if he felt,
Though yet he knew not how, a wasting power
In all things that from her sweet influence
Might tend to wean him. Therefore with her hues,
Her forms, and with the spirit of her forms,
He clothed the nakedness of austere truth.
While yet he lingered in the rudiments
Of science, and among her simplest laws,
His triangles-they were the stars of heaven,
The silent stars! Oft did he take delight
To measure the altitude of some tall crag
That is the eagle's birth-place, or some peak
With blind endeavours; in that lonesome life,
Thus thirsting daily?
Familiar with forgotten years, that shows
Inscribed upon its visionary sides,1
The history of many a winter storm,
Or obscure records of the path of fire.*
And thus before his eighteenth year was told,
Accumulated feelings pressed his heart
With still increasing weight;2 he was o'erpowered
By Nature; by the turbulence subdued
Of his own mind; by mystery and hope,
And the first virgin passion of a soul
Communing with the glorious universe.†
Full often wished he that the winds might rage
When they were silent: far more fondly now
Than in his earlier season did he love
Tempestuous nights the conflict and the sounds.
* In this description of the eagle's birth-place, and the peak “familiar with forgotten years,' Wordsworth probably wandered in imagination from the Athole district to Westmoreland, as this part of the poem was in all likelihood written in 1801-2. He visited the Athole country, with his sister, in 1803; going up as far as Blair, and returning: but there is no peak in that district (at least none that he would see) that shows
"Inscribed upon its visionary sides
The history of many a winter storm,
Or obscure records of the path of fire,"
as, for example, the Stob Dearg in the Buchaile Etive Mor group in Argyll does, a peak which he saw in the course of his Scottish tour in that year. -ED.
And from the stillness of abstracted thought
He asked repose; and, failing oft to win
The peace required,1 he scanned the laws of light
Amid the roar of torrents, where they send
From hollow clefts up to the clearer air
A cloud of mist, that smitten by the sun
Varies its rainbow hues. But vainly thus,
And vainly by all other means, he strove
To mitigate the fever of his heart.
In dreams, in study, and in ardent thought,
Thus was he reared; much wanting to assist
The growth of intellect, yet gaining more,3
And every moral feeling of his soul
Strengthened and braced, by breathing in content
The keen, the wholesome, air of poverty,
And drinking from the well of homely life.
-But, from past liberty, and tried restraints,
He now was summoned to select the course
Of humble industry that promised best
To yield him no unworthy maintenance.
Urged by his Mother, he essayed to teach
Thus, even from Childhood upward, was he reared ;
For intellectual progress wanting much,
Doubtless, of needful help—yet gaining more;
A village-school-but wandering thoughts were then
A misery to him; and the Youth resigned 1
A task he was unable to perform.
That stern yet kindly Spirit,* who constrains
The Savoyard to quit his naked rocks,
The free-born Swiss to leave his narrow vales,
(Spirit attached to regions mountainous
Like their own stedfast clouds) did now impel
His restless mind to look abroad with hope.
-An irksome drudgery seems it to plod on,
Through hot and dusty ways, or pelting storm,
A vagrant Merchant under a heavy load,
Bent as he moves, and needing frequent rest; 2
Yet do such travellers find their own delight;
And their hard service, deemed debasing now,
Gained merited respect in simpler times;
When squire, and priest, and they who round them dwelt
In rustic sequestration-all dependent
Upon the PEDLAR'S toil-supplied their wants,
Or pleased their fancies, with the wares he brought.
The Mother strove to make her Son perceive
With what advantage he might teach a School
In the adjoining Village; but the Youth,
Who of this service made a short essay,
Found that the wanderings of his thought were then
A misery to him; that he must resign
Through dusty ways, in storm, from door to door,
A vagrant Merchant bent beneath his load!
Through hot and dusty ways, or pelting storm,
* Enterprise. Compare the poem To Enterprise, in Vol. VI., which, Wordsworth says, 66 arose out of the Italian Itinerant and the Swiss Goatherd.'" Compare also the latter poem, No. XXIII. of the Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, 1820.-Ed.
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