another passage back into the village. No doubt the garden has been reduced in size by the use of that part of it fronting the lane for building purposes. The stream, before it enters the area of buildings and garden, is open by the lane side, and seemingly comes from the hills to the westward. The large flags are extremely hard and durable, and it is probable that the very flags which paved the channel in Wordsworth's time may be doing the same duty still."

There is another spot a few hundred yards above this one, in the course of the brook, at a place now called Walker Ground, where the streamlet is also "boxed within a garden" and "stripped of its voice" for some distance; and it is said that boys attending the school in the end of the last century used to board there. But it seems more probable that the "garden" with its "crowd of things about its narrow precincts all beloved," was near Dame Tyson's house.

Wordsworth's school holidays were spent either at Penrith, with his mother's family the Cooksons, or at Cockermouth. He gives us a most graphic picture of one holiday at Cockermouth, and of his joy at finding a "golden store" of books in his father's house; how he took out one bookthe "Arabian Nights"—with his rod when he went a-fishing; and how, though the soft west wind was ruffling the water to the angler's heart, he lay amid the hot stones of the Derwent, and in the glaring sun, the whole long-live day, devouring these tales of delightful fiction.

When the school holidays were at Penrith, there was to William the great delight of occasional meetings with his sister Dorothy, and doubtless of seeing his old schoolfellow and cousin, Mary Hutchinson. Dorothy's childhood with her relations at Penrith seems to have been an unhappy one, and she poured out her sorrows in frequent letters to her friend Jane Pollard, afterwards Mrs John Marshall of Leeds and Hallsteads. In these letters, which have not been

*

published, there are the signs of a deep, strong, affectionate, lonely nature, longing for a fellowship that was denied to it. The Penrith relatives were ungenial people. The grandfather had not the best of tempers, and the grandmother had little affection to spare; cold unsympathetic natures, both of them. Dorothy writes, at the age of sixteen, how bitterly she laments the loss of her parents, (she was an orphan at thirteen). She lived as a stranger in the house, and grew up grave and silent, wearied with the triviality of the work she was set to do, and with the stock topics of conversation in the house. Incessantly lectured as to the duty of sedateness by a very artificial old lady, she took it meekly, but poured out her spirit the more earnestly in these letters to her friend. A subsequent chapter will contain many of them. The following may now be given, as it contains the earliest hint of Wordsworth's thoughts as to a profession in life, and shews that he at first wished to follow his father's. It was written from Penrith in 1787, but is undated:

I do not now pass half my time alone. I can bear the ill-nature of all my relations, for the affection of my brothers consoles me in all my griefs; but how soon shall I be deprived of this consolation. They are so affectionate. . . William and Christopher are very clever. . . . John, who is to be the sailor, has a most affectionate heart. He is not so bright as either William or Christopher, but he has very good common sense. . . . Richard, the eldest, is equally affectionate and good, but he is far from being as clever as William. . . . Many a time have W., J., C., and myself shed tears together, tears of the bitterest sorrow. We all of us feel each day the loss we sustained when we were deprived

* One or two extracts are given in Mr Myers' volume on Wordsworth, in the English Men of Letters series.

of our parents; and each day do we receive fresh insults of the most mortifying kind, the insults of servants.” [The uncle would not send horses to bring the boys from school after the holidays had begun, but kept them a week at Hawkshead till W. hired a horse and rode over to Penrith. In the Penrith house they had evidently much to endure.] "Uncle Kit (who is our guardian) cares little for us. . . . We have been told a thousand of times that we were liars. Mortifications to which we are continually subject. . . . W. has a wish to be a lawyer, if his health will permit."

...

Another characteristic incident of the Hawkshead days is mentioned in The Prelude. Immediately before the Christmas holidays in 1783, and shortly before his father's death, William and his brothers went out from the village to watch for the horses that were to be sent to take them over to Penrith. There was a crag that rose from "the meetingpoint of two highways," and overlooked them both. Thither the boy went," scout-like, and gained the summit,” and he watched, on a dark tempestuous day, beside a naked wall and a blasted hawthorn tree, in an anxiety of hope, strainirg his eyes intensely for the first sight of the horses. Soon after they got to Penrith the father died, and the four orphan boys followed him to his grave at Cockermouth; and then he tells us that the memory of that day of expectation on the crag came back to him. He bowed low

in submission, but,

"afterwards, the wind and sleety rain,
And all the business of the elements;
The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,
And the bleak music from that old stone wall,
The noise of wind and water, and the mist
That on the line of each of these two roads
Advanced in such indisputable shapes;

All these were kindred spectacles and sounds,
To which I oft repaired, and thence would drink,
As at a fountain."

There is no doubt that, in these joyous Hawkshead days, the continuity of the life of the world, and the reciprocal influence of one object on another-all things being knit together in one vast hierarchy-was realised by Wordsworth. But it must be remembered that his vision of Nature was in one sense the vision of a "light that never was on sea or land," that the radiance which "bestowed new splendour" on external Nature "came from within;" and, on the other hand, that it also really existed in the objects that surround us, while by the majority of men it is unperceived. We must connect the Ode on Immortality with these Hawkshead years, as well as with Cockermouth. The hour of the first "splendour in the grass," and "glory in the flower"-which had vanished when he wrote this Ode at Grasmere-survived at Hawkshead; but it was being slowly changed, from the mere organic pleasure and delight of the earlier years, to a delight in Nature for what it taught or revealed of Man. When the boy went out to

watch the light of dawn from some "jutting eminence" near Hawkshead, he tells us that in these moments

"such a holy calm

Would overspread his soul, that bodily eyes
Were utterly forgotten, and what he saw,
Appeared like something in himself, a dream
A prospect in the mind."

This by degrees ripened still further into

"these obstinate questionings

Of sense, and outward things,
Falling from us, vanishings," &c.,

The process of

of which the great Ode is the record. idealisation-begun in early childhood-was matured only when he detached himself from Nature, and realised the separateness and the kindredness together.

In all this experience at Hawkshead, however, he was

in a real sense, alone. He had companions, with whom he walked, and rode, and played, but none of them-neither Raincock, "the boy of Windermere," nor Greenwood, "the minstrel of the troop," nor Fleming, the companion of his walks round Esthwaite-really understood him.

Of verses written by Wordsworth during his Hawkshead days, we have (perhaps fortunately) no surviving trace, except the extract "From the conclusion of a Poem, composed in anticipation of leaving school," and the other fragment (of greater promise) entitled, Written in very early Youth, and beginning

"Calm is all Nature as a resting wheel.” *

That he did write verses was known to all his schoolfellows; and I am indebted to a nephew of Southey's, the Rev. Mr Hill of Warwick, for the fact, told him by the poet, that one of his very prosaic schoolfellows at Hawkshead once addressed him thus: "I say, Bill, when you write poems, do you always invoke the Muse?"+

* It is worthy of note that this earliest fragment is in irregular sonnet form.

+ I may here mention, though out of their chronological place, two other little anecdotes derived from the same source. One of the peasantry near Rydal hearing him often talking aloud and humming over his verses in all weathers out of doors, replied to the question of a stranger: "What sort of a man is Mr Wordsworth?" "Oh, sir, he goes bumming, and muffling, and talking to his sen; but whiles he's as sensible as you or I!"

Once in the later years of his life (see vol. ii.) Wordsworth met with an accident in driving from Keswick to Ambleside. Just beyond Naddle Bridge, in the vale of St John, the coach from Grasmere to Keswick, through great carelessness on the part of the driver, came into violent collision with Wordsworth's carriage, and upset it. The vehicle was smashed, but Wordsworth was not injured. In after years the driver seemed rather elated with the honour of having smashed the carriage of so distinguished a man, and used to say to the passengers on descending that hill, “Now here, here's the place where we spilt the Powet." My informant asked him, "And what did he say to you?" "Well, sir," was the reply, "he got up, sir, and shook himself, and said, 'I intend, sir, I intend to make a thorough investigation into this here business!'"