classes principally, of the town of Penrith and its neighbourhood.

"After our marriage we dwelt, together with our sister, at Townend, where three of our children were born. In the spring of 1808 the increase of our family caused us to remove to a larger house, then just built, Allan Bank, in the same vale, where our two younger children were born, and who died at the Rectory, the house we afterwards occupied for two years. They died in 1812, and in 1813 we came to Rydal Mount, where we have since lived with no further sorrow till 1836,* when my sister became a confirmed invalid, and our sister Sarah Hutchinson died. alternately with her brother and with us."

She lived

We should like to know more of the poet's mother, but— as is seldom the case with men of marked originality-in his case it was from the father's side that the larger gift descended. It was to the Wordsworths, rather than to the Cooksons or the Crackanthorps, that he owed his inheritance of genius. The allusions to his mother in the poems are very tender. In the Ecclesiastical Sonnets † he recalls her act, already referred to, of pinning a nosegay to his breast when he was going to church to say his catechism before Easter, and mentions her presence there to hear how he said it. It is not one of his best sonnets, but its reference to his mother gives it interest.

"Beloved Mother! Thou whose happy hand

Had bound the flowers I wore with faithful tie;
Sweet flower, at whose inaudible command
Her countenance, phantom-like, doth reappear;
O lost too early for the frequent tear,

And ill requited by this heartfelt sigh."

More significant are the allusions to her in The Prelude. In

* It was in 1835.

+ Part iii. 22.

the second book he traces, with subtle power, the blessings of the babe,

"Who with his soul

Drinks in the feelings of his Mother's eye,
For him, in one dear Presence, there exists
A virtue which irradiates and exalts

Objects through widest intercourse of sense."

He speaks of the "poetic spirit of our human life" as due

to a maternal inheritance; and he tells us how,

"By intercourse of touch

He held mute dialogues with his Mother's heart,

Whereby this infant sensibility,

Great birthright of our being, was in him
Augmented and sustained."

In the fifth book he tells us :

"Early died

My honoured Mother, she who was the heart
And hinge of all our learnings and our loves.
Nor would I praise her but in perfect love."

Nowhere is there a finer or more discriminative description of a mother's influence. He pictures her as fetching her goodness from times past, and as full of trust in the guiding of filial instincts. She had no dread of the future, but lived in the present, without either unnatural fears or unwarrantable hopes, a serenely placid and a very patient spirit, unselfishly devoted to her children. But, as Mrs Wordsworth died when her son was little more than eight years old, her personal influence in the development of his character was but slight. For a couple of years before her death his education had been carried on partly at Cockermouth and partly at Penrith. When at Cockermouth the Rev. Mr Eillbanks was his teacher; when at Penrith he lived with the Cooksons, and was taught in a dame's school by Mrs Anne Birkett. Of her he wrote, in 1828, to his friend Hugh James Rose: "The old dame taught us to read,

and practised the memory, often no doubt by rote, but still the faculty was improved."

The chief interest connected with these years, spent by the boy Wordsworth at Penrith school, is the fact that there at the same time, was another pupil, Mary Hutchinson, a school girl of his own age, his cousin, and afterwards his wife. Neither at Cockermouth, nor at Penrith, however, did he learn much. The work his father set him to,-viz., the committing to memory large passages of Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser, was of immeasurably greater use to him than any teaching he received at school.

The house in which Wordsworth was born at Cocker-scenemy mouth remains very much as it was in his boyhood. It is a somewhat heavy but comfortable two-storied mansion, unpicturesque as it faces the main street of the town; but, viewed from the north side of the river Derwent, it gains in attractiveness. The chief feature connected with it is the terrace-walk at the foot of the garden, with the river below it, whence the tower of the old castle of Cockermouth-" a shattered monument of feudal sway"-can be seen to the east. In The Prelude Wordsworth tells us that

66 One, the fairest of all rivers, loved

To blend his murmurs with my nurse's song,
And from his alder shades and rocky falls,
And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice
That flowed along my dreams."

The ceaseless music of the stream composed his thoughts,

he says, "to more than infant softness."

Even then, while

the voice of the Derwent lulled him, he had

"A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm

That Nature breathes among the hills and groves."

He describes the "bright blue river," passing along "the margin of their terrace walk,"

"A tempting playmate, whom we dearly loved.
Oh! many a time have I, a five years' child,
In a small mill-race severed from his 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."

This "mill-race" may be guessed, and the "sandy fields"
are at hand; but it is in the garden, and on the terrace
walk, that we can best realise the "five years' child," with
his sister Dorothy-not a year his junior-in their favourite
playground, visiting the "sparrow's nest" in the privet
hedge, and the clematis bower, with roses intermingled—
"She looked at it and seemed to fear it;
Dreading, though wishing to be near it :
Such heart was in her, being then

A little Prattler among men.
The Blessing of my later years
Was with me when a boy :

She gave me eyes, she gave me ears;
And humble cares, and delicate fears;
A heart, the fountain of sweet tears;
And love, and thought, and joy."*

Again he writes, in his fragment To a Butterfly, composed

in the orchard at Grasmere

"Oh! pleasant, pleasant were the days,
The time, when, in our childish plays,

My sister Emmeline and I

Together chased the butterfly!

A very hunter did I rush

Upon the prey-with leaps and springs

I followed on from brake to bush ;

But she, God love her! feared to brush
The dust from off its wings."+

Let anyone go down the main street in Cockermouth, and passing Wordsworth's house to the west, cross the river a few hundred yards lower, by the two-arched Derwent

Bridge, and walk up by the meads-the "grassy holms "-
to the smaller (new) bridge, and he will have a view of
the back of the old house, with its terrace-walk at the foot
of the garden, very much as Wordsworth would see it in his
childhood. The sound of the lapsing river combines with the
sight of the shattered castle towers, and the associations of
a vanished past, to give a tinge of melancholy to the scene.
In 1833 Wordsworth wrote two sonnets on his birth-place:
one, Suggested in sight of the Town of Cockermouth where the
Author was born, and his Father's remains are laid, and
the other, The Address to the Spirit of Cockermouth Castle.

Though a child, the boy Wordsworth had his occasional expeditions to the country round his birthplace. In the Fenwick note to the sixth of his Evening Voluntaries,' written in 1833, and entitled On a High Part of the Coast of Cumberland, he tells us: "With this coast I have been familiar from my earliest childhood, and remember being struck for the first time by the town and port of Whitehaven, and the white waves breaking against its quays and piers, as the whole came into view from the top of the high ground, down which the road then descended abruptly. My sister, when she first heard the voice of the sea from this point, and beheld the scene before her, burst into tears. Our family then lived at Cockermouth."

The last sentence makes it clear that the household went down to Whitehaven and St Bees in their childhood.

The boys would doubtless wander up Lorton Vale; and, adventure

in a very characteristic passage of The Prelude, Wordsworth
tells us that the mere sight of the windings of a public
way, crossing the naked summit of a hill, farther off than
he had wandered, and there daily beheld by him as a dis-
appearing and vanishing point, wrought upon his imagina-
tion, and,

"Was like an invitation into space
Boundless, or guide into eternity."