This was the high road to the hamlet of Isel, over the Hay or Watch Hill, about three and a half miles from Cockermouth. Again in The Prelude, we have the record of a ride. which the boy took over the hills, when he could scarcely hold a bridle, accompanied by an old servant of his father's. He parted from his guide, dismounted through fear, and led his horse over a rough and stony moor, till he came to a place where in former times a murderer had been hung in chains, and where the letters of his name were still visible, carved in the turf. He fled at once, and describes in memorable words the "visionary dreariness" that invested the moorland waste, and all its accompanying sights. These are all the incidents he has himself recorded of his childhood, and no other family traditions regarding his early years survive. CHAPTER III. HAWKSHEAD: SCHOOL-DAYS. IN 1788, the boy William Wordsworth-now nine years of age was sent, with his elder brother Richard, to the grammar-school at Hawkshead, in Lancashire. The younger brothers, John and Christopher, followed to the same school subsequently. This school, one of the oldest and best of its kind in the North of England, was founded by Archbishop Sandys, of York, in the year 1588. His statutes ordained, amongst other things," that there shall be a perpetual free school, to be called the free grammar school of Edwyne Sandys,' for teaching grammar and the principles of the Greek tongue, with other sciences necessary to be taught in a grammar school; the same to be taught in the school freely, without taking any stipend, wage, or other exactions from the scholars resorting to the said school for learning; that there shall be a head-master, and an usher; that between the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary and St Michael the Archangel, the school shall begin at six in the morning, or at least half-past six, and continue till eleven, and begin again at one, and continue till five; and that for the remainder of the year it begin at seven, continue till eleven, be resumed at one, and continue till four; during all which time the schoolmaster and usher shall be present." * Archbishop Sandys, the pious founder of this school, was a native of the district; and, to his far-seeing wisdom it is due, that for three centuries the boys of the Hawkshead Report of Tercentenary Commemoration of Hawkshead School, 1885. village and neighbourhood have had an excellent education free. As many as one hundred scholars have been in attendance at one time. The original constitution of the school remained unaltered till 1832. The antique simplicity and primitive usages of the Hawkshead village, its seclusion and old-world air, have had something to do with the development of the pupils at its school. The teaching in Wordsworth's time was good, and during the nine years of his residence he had experience of no less than four masters. * For one of them, William Taylor, who taught him for four years (1782 to 1786), he felt the warmest regard. In his Address to the Scholars of a Village School, he speaks of him as "our common Friend and Father;" and it was the farewell which this Master took of his pupils on his deathbed (of whom Wordsworth was one) that suggested the Address. Other poems, written at Goslar in 1799, Mathew, The Two April Mornings, and The Fountain-refer to Taylor.t But far more important than the teaching Wordsworth received at school, was the teaching of the place where he was taught, the influence of his schoolmates, and, above all, the influence of Nature and the country round about Hawkshead. The sense of freedom and equality amongst the boys developed in him the seeds of an almost republican feeling. As compared with Christ's Hospital,—where his friend Coleridge endured the irrational floggings of the headmaster, and the bullyings of his comrades,-at Hawkshead School there was neither tyranny, nor rowdyism. It is probable that this had something to do with the calm tenor of Wordsworth's * Their names were James Peake, who died in 1781; Edward Christian, master for one year (1781); William Taylor (1782 to 1786); and Thomas Bowman (1786 to 1821). +He is alluded to in The Prelude more than once; and his grave, in Cartmell Churchyard, which Wordsworth visited eight years after his death, is described in the tenth book. after life, as compared with that of Coleridge. At Hawks head, the boys boarded in the houses of the village dames, a kindly, simple-hearted race. As will be seen by reference to the notes to The Prelude, Wordsworth lived in the cottage of Anne Tyson, whom he has immortalized in that poem. There it was that, in his ninth year, "the foundations of his mind were laid," by direct and daily intercourse with Nature. Physically robust, full of life and vivacity, in abounding health, ready for every kind of sport which the seasons brought him, and for expeditions far or near in all sorts of weather, living on a very simple frugal even "Sabine fare," his school work over in the early afternoon, and with no evening pressure for "examinations" next day, the boy was free to "range the open heights," to walk round the little lake, and row across it, or saunter in the woods, and listen to their voices. He tells us how he would sometimes "set springes to catch woodcocks," and pursue them through half the autumn night; how with his schoolmates in spring he would climb to high places to harry the raven's nest, and when he hung, by knots of grass And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock He tells us how he would rise stealthily, long before a smokewreath was visible in the village, to watch the first gleams of dawn, "alone upon some jutting eminence." Again, he would stroll with a companion round Esthwaite water, the two repeating favourite verses of some poet "with one voice,"-as happy as the birds that carolled around them. He would go angling by lonely brooks on rainy days, and bewildered in the mist, see suddenly a shepherd, like a giant, glorified by the radiance of the sunset.* At nights he would take his boat, and row alone in the moonlight across the lake; and, while his elfin pinnace went heaving through the water like a swan, the huge peak of Wetherlam would rise up behind the horizon, "as if with voluntary power instinct." Such a spectacle would for many days work in his brain, "with a dim and undetermined sense Of unknown modes of being." On winter evenings, skating on the lake, he would with his comrades imitate a woodland chase, and then part from them into a silent bay, and try to cut across the reflection of a star in the clear ice, that "flying still before him, gleamed upon the glassy plain," till--suddenly stopping— the whole moving panorama would seem to sweep by him on either side, as he stood motionless and still. On half-holidays the boys went to more distant places. They had rival contests in rowing on Windermere, or visited Furness Abbey on horseback, and explored "The sands of Westmoreland, the creeks and bays Of Cumbria's rocky limits." They were a "noisy crew," and it was "a tempestuous time:" but he records how, even in his tenth year, while "He held unconscious intercourse with Beauty Old as creation, drinking in a pure Organic pleasure. even then I felt Gleams like the flashings of a shield ;—the earth And common face of Nature, spake to me Rememberable things." Addressing the "Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe," he says that from the first dawn of his childhood, the Soul of Nature intertwined for him the "passions that build up our * See The Prelude, vol. viii., p. 291. |