when unguarded and far away, have been stricken by vague terror, or at any rate touched with awe from presences of Nature in the sky, or on the earth; from 'visions of the hills,' and 'souls of lonely places,' his imagination was not left uninfluenced by the two great stimulants of reverence and fear; by emotions which, to use his own words,

Impressed upon all forms the characters

Of danger and desire,

And thus did make

The surface of the universal earth,

With triumph and delight, with hope and fear,
Work like a sea.

There is a magnificent description of the feelings engendered in his mind by the life he led, and the imaginative loneliness of spirit in which he indulged himself, without having, as would have been the case at Eton, to stay afterwards:—

'One summer evening' (Book I. line 355, down to 'and were a trouble to my dreams'). I refer you to this passage without quoting it at length here, because I shall want to do that on a future occasion.

This was the manner in which Cumberland educated her poet-child for Cambridge, with small promise of a Senior Wranglership or a Chancellor's medal, I must admit. Not a good education, certainly, for these days of competitive examination; for average boys, possibly, not a good education at any time. Though I daresay Wordsworth's companions grew up into a resolute and stalwart manhood enough; and may, with time given them, have played their parts reasonably well in an England that then ooked to something else than a stall-fed memory as the one infallible preparation for life. At any rate, whatever may be the value of our existing Chinese system for the rank and file of each generation, that Wordsworth escaped it altogether, God be praised! That future Wordsworths may also escape it, when their time comes, let us devoutly hope! This is a prayer in which the Civil Service examiners themselves will not, I am sure, refuse to join.

LECTURE II.

THE PRELUDE' ETC.-continued.

WORDSWORTH the Cantab presents himself to us as quite a different person from Wordsworth the Hawkshead schoolboy. He describes the change that has taken place with some humour, and with a sincerity as if he were in a confessional. Among other quaint instances of his amusement and perplexity under this new aspect of life, which might be given if it were worth while, we learn how his introduction to the University affected him from the following lines:

Questions, directions, warnings, and advice,
Flowed in upon me from all sides, fresh day
Of pride and pleasure. To myself, I seemed
A man of business and expense, and went
From shop to shop about my own affairs,
To tutor, or to tailor, as befel.

As if the change

Had waited on some fairy's wand, at once
Behold me rich in monies, and attired

In splendid garb, with hose of silk-and hair
Powdered like rimy trees when frost is keen.

There were many things certain to interest Wordsworth in Cambridge, and upon such topics he touches with all his usual power. The window through which

When from my pillow, looking forth by light

Of moon and favouring stars, I could behold

The ante-chapel where the statue stood

Of Newton, with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind, for ever

Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.

The reminiscences of Chaucer in 'The Hawthorn Shade, beside the pleasant mill of Trumpington,' also came back to him, though not exactly the same in kind. I think Wordsworth was quite right in 'laughing with Chaucer.' A poet who has to deal with the whole of human nature ought not to be prudish. At the same time, to call the story to which he refers 'A Tale of Amorous Passion,' is certainly making the best of things. It would have given the admirable Bowdler no end of trouble to file down the narrative in question into a fitness for lying upon a drawing-room table.

Again, he dwells with proper zeal on the memory

Of that gentle bard,

Chosen by the Muses for their page of state-
Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven
With the moon's beauty, and the moon's soft pace ;-
Of our blind poet, who in his later day

Stood almost single, uttering odious truth-
Darkness before, and danger's voice behind.

Such associations worked with their full effect on the fresh and untarnished mind of the boy-poet. Nay, even setting these shadowy impressions aside, the general spirit of his new home, the traditional glories hanging over every corner of that venerable place, and breathing forth influences scarcely to be resisted by anyone within their reach, could not fail to arrest his attention and touch his heart :

He could not print

Ground, where the grass had yielded to the steps

Of generations of illustrious men,

Unmoved, he could not always lightly pass

Through the same gateways, sleep where they had slept,

Wake where they waked, range that enclosure old,

The garden of great intellects, undisturbed.

Still, after making every allowance for what he thus gained,

after admitting freely that he could not behold with undelighted mind

So many happy youths, so wide and fair
A congregation in its budding time

Of health and beauty; could not see unmoved
That miscellaneous garland of wild flowers,
Decking the matron temples of a place

So famous through the world.

We feel that in spite of these tributes to its memory, Wordsworth did not like Cambridge. Directly, at any rate, he profited little by it, as we can judge; nor did he look back in after years upon his residence there with any special tenderness or affection. He felt

A strangeness in the mind,

A feeling that he was not for that hour,
Nor for that place.

No high emotion, derived from a thirst for living praise, and from a fit reverence for the noble dead, ever touched him at all —at least, so as to act upon his character materially. No enthusiasm was awakened strong enough to shake the stability of those foundations on which his original genius was beginning to build itself up.

Indeed, if we content ourselves with plain fact—with the unadorned truth of the case, in sonorous blank verse, extending over many pages, he tells us little else than this, that he was not a reading man. There is, I may say, no great reason to wish that he had been. Mountain torrents have other work in the world than to supply manufactories or fill kettles; reservoirs and pumps are good enough for these ordinary transactions. Medallists and wranglers are, no doubt, eminent and valuable men. Still, medallists and wranglers you can have for the asking year after year. But a ruined Wordsworth is a loss not to be repaired. Such a loss would have left a gap in Nature, and if Cambridge had been powerful enough to dwarf or distort the pre-ordained growth of his faculties, Wordsworth might thus have been ruined.

The youth who from Nature and her overflowing sources had

received so much, that 'all his thoughts were steeped in feeling,'

A track pursuing, not untrod before.

To every natural form, fruit, rock, and flower,

I gave a moral life, I saw them feel,

Or linked them to some feeling; the great mass

Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all

That I beheld respired with inward meaning.

A young man such as this, it is obvious, was not fitted to fight hard for University prizes, or to make a high place upon the Tripos, with a fellowship to follow, the engrossing hope of his life. We all remember, I make no doubt, Mazeppa's horse

In the full foam of wrath and dread,

To me the desert-born was led ;

In truth he was a matchless steed,

A Tartar of the Ukraine breed,

Who looked as though the speed of thought
Were in his limbs; but he was wild,
Wild as the wild deer and untaught.
'Twas but a day since he was caught.

Such an untamed and untameable courser would have been as much at home among the sleek well-groomed animals of Rotten Row, as Wordsworth was among the public school ambitions and conventional anticipations of the future, urging on every right-minded undergraduate whom he met. He hated everything artificial, still more everything like restraint, rightly perhaps, for he was no hot-house plant, and as the ballad sings:

For the tender beech and the sapling oak,
That grow by the shadowy rill,

You may cut down both at a single stroke,
You may cut down which you will;