were, called upon the hills to cover him, would have been a different Wordsworth, a Wordsworth more illustrious than even now he is.

Another element that I think did not work for good during these hermit-like and self-centred years, was the hardness and loneliness of his own character. At the beginning of his career, whilst his mind was yet unformed and unset, this masculine, and somewhat cold indifference to others was possibly an advantage and a help. But afterwards, it is to be doubted whether a more genial temper, more power of entering into the merits and feelings of his contemporaries, might not have enlivened and strengthened his mind. There is a story told of his visiting Abbotsford: at the moment of his arrival Walter Scott was engaged, and sent down an apology for not welcoming him on the instant; when he did make his appearance he found that the Bard of Rydal had taken a book from the shelf. It was a volume of his own poems, out of which he was reading verses of his own, to his own sister to wile away the time. He might, perhaps, in that new place, full of other associations, have recollected with advantage, in reference, I will not say to the volume, but to the woman at any rate, this well-known scriptural text, 'The poor you have always with you.'

A third reason, perhaps, why he did not soar so high as the glorious promises of his youth warranted him in anticipating, was not so much his own fault as the fault of other men. He was at first a somewhat unsuccessful and unpopular poet; that being so, what Sir Henry Taylor so well calls 'the leaden spirit of defeat' may have weighed him down, and depressed him below himself. Proud as he was, and likely to resent the suggestion of such a possibility as an insult, no man can escape from what Porson once called, on a celebrated occasion, the 'Nature of Things.'

'Porson is reported to have said, on having his attention called to the

Lastly, the death of that unknown Lucy, of whom he never spoke, and about whom none of his friends ventured to question him, inflicted, perhaps, a wound, skinned over and healed at the surface, but ever bleeding inwardly, so as to dull the elasticity, and tarnish the gloss and splendour of his early strength.

That there was an element of some sort or other interfering with, and rebelling against, his pre-conceived plan of self-education, we learn from the first book of 'The Prelude.'

It is shaken off,

That burthen of my own unnatural self,
The heavy weight of many a weary day
Not mine, and such as were not made for me.

That hope hath been discouraged, welcome light
Dawns from the East, but dawns to disappear,
And mock me with a sky that ripens not
Into a steady morning : if my mind,
Remembering the bold promise of its past,
Would gladly grapple with some noble theme,
Vain is her wish: where'er she turns she finds
Impediments from day to day renewed.

Whatever impediments, however, may have arisen in France or London, after this he was again at liberty-perhaps too much at liberty. He could sit down in his native vale, and meditate on his future achievements after this fashion:

Sometimes, the ambitious power of choice, mistaking
Proud spring-tide swellings for a regular sea,
Will settle on some British theme, some old
Romantic tale by Milton left unsung.

Sometimes, more sternly moved, I would relate
How vanquished Mithridates northward passed,
And, hidden in the cloud of years, became
Odin, the Father of a race, by whom
Perished the Roman empire

fact that it was impossible to light his candle so long as the extinguisher remained upon it, Curse the Nature of Things.'

How Gustavus sought

Help at his need in Dalecarlia's mines;

How Wallace fought for Scotland; left the name

Of Wallace to be found, like a wild flower,

All over his dear country, left the deeds
Of Wallace, like a family of ghosts,
To people the steep rocks, and river banks.

Then a wish

My last and favourite aspiration, mounts
With yearning towards some philosophic song
Of Truth, that cherishes our daily life;
With meditations passionate from deep
Recesses in man's heart, immortal verse
Thoughtfully fitted to the Orphean lyre.

Prelude, Book i., between lines 164-231.

His dreams of ambition varied, as we see, with his varying moods of mind. Before, however, undertaking any one of these noble tasks, he was determined to plunge into the past; and, as another great poet has expressed himself, to trace

Home to its cloud, the lightning of the mind.

I have hinted that Wordsworth perhaps weakened the life of that vital soul on which, in this very poem, he prides himself, by cherished habits of self-isolation; I had almost said, of selfworship. At the same time it cannot be denied that the mischief, if mischief there were, grew out of this after his character had been fixed and hardened, not whilst it was in the process of fixing itself. We all know that a love, or I would rather say a habit, of solitude, and solitary thoughts, is one of the common, if not one of the necessary conditions combining to make up the poetic temper.

There are men, with powers to have gained distinction in other ways, who seem to be cradled into poetry by some peculiarities of character or position, which separate them from contemporaries and equals during the docile period of their youth. The lameness and early ill-health of Scott; the lameness and wounded pride of Byron, a man of high rank crippled

C

by poverty; splendid talents, marred by inherited vice and a freakish perversity of disposition; splendid personal beauty, darkened by one incurable physical defect, descended from an ancient and noble family, with yet a cloud and a taint hanging over it; the illused and unsocial childhood of Shelley; but why finish the sentence? Why multiply instances when there is really no question before us?

We must all remember that a boy, who obtruded poetic reveries and aspirations into the cricket and football of his companions at a public school, was very apt to be laughed at and to be christened Mad Jones, or Mad Tompkins, or Mad Shelley as the case might be. Now there is no Jones who desires to be laughed at, no Tompkins who likes to be called Mad Tompkins, in the little world, which, for the time, is a great one to him; and, therefore, in proportion as his impulses to poetry are strong, in that proportion is he driven back upon himself, and lifted away into solitude. Accordingly, Wordsworth's early education seems to have been, for him, in these respects most fortunate. He was sent to a rough public school, where the boys, dotted about in cottages, appeared to have done pretty much what they liked. These cottages were kept each of them by some aged dame, and the boyish inmates of these little homes enjoyed, if Wordsworth's recollections were accurate, a degree of independence not approached even in those famous schools with which we are more familiar: schools certainly not erring on the side of over-watchfulness or priggish restrictions.

There do not seem to have been any bounds, any vexatious limitations to amusement or exercise; any enquiry, in a word, as to how the scholars employed or wasted their time when out of school. The dames and tutors, relying, I daresay, on the remoteness of the place, and the absence of all ordinary temptations, left everything to fate and chance. For Wordsworth's peculiar genius and disposition nothing could have

been better-at the time. Though a man of earnest mind, he never was a student, in the common-I might say, in any sense of the word; but he felt and thought deeply, and his passion for all natural objects was such that Nature impressed herself upon him instantly and irresistibly. A school, therefore, which allowed him to wander at will, in communion with Nature, his nurse and mistress, suited him far better than any place where, cooped up in a narrow playground, he might have received the soundest instruction about Dawes's Canons, or the dogmas of Porson as to the fifth foot of an iambic trimeter. Even before he left home for the first time, his delight in his own thoughts and his own company had begun to show itself.

Oh! many a time have I, a five years' child,
In a small mill-race severed from the stream,
Made one long bathing of a summer's day;
Basked in the sun, and plunged and basked again
Alternate, all a summer's day, or scoured
The sandy fields, leaping through flowery groves
Of yellow ragwort, or where rock and hill,
The woods, and distant Skiddaw's lofty height
Was bronzed with deepest radiance, stood alone
Beneath the sky, as if I had been born

On Indian plains, and from my mother's hut
Had run abroad in wantonness, to sport

A naked savage in the thunder shower.

Prelude, Book i.

Even at this early age, therefore, when most children are under the care of nurses, to be slapped and shaken, if, as real children are bound to do, they hide themselves away from grown-up people, spoil their clothes, and transact the proper amount of mischief, he seems to have been left unshaken and unslapped; and thus to have tasted, in a most unusual degree, the joys of solitary enterprise and unchartered freedom. To his school, where, out of school at least, there seems to have been but little more discipline, he carried with him this semibarbaric spirit of independence.

Moreover, as, of course, so young a creature must often,