human soul," with "high objects and enduring things;" and this it was that purified in him the very elements of feeling and of thought.

The whole of Wordsworth's subsequent work-as poetic teacher and interpreter of Nature and of human lifearose out of these experiences of his boyhood at Hawkshead. He "loved whate'er he saw," welcomed what Nature gave him, and craved no more. He notes the difficulty, in after life, of going back to our youthful consciousness, and analysing our inheritances-the familiar difficulty of determining what "portion of the river of our minds came from what fountain. But he believed that, as the child holds a mute unconscious dialogue with its mother's heart, so does the unsophisticated soul of man with Nature,-whether under the quiet stars, or while listening in storm to "notes, that are the ghostly language of the ancient earth.” In all this he was mainly, and at first entirely, passive-receiving influence from sources that were inexhaustible; nevertheless, all the while, he says, a "plastic power abode within him,” a local spirit of his own that was "at war with general tendency." He says that

“An auxiliar light

Came from my mind, which, on the setting sun,
Bestowed new splendour; fountains that run on,
Murmuring so sweetly in themselves, obeyed

Alike dominion, and the midnight storm
Grew darker in the presence of my eye :

Hence my obeisance, my devotion hence,
And hence my transport."

It was not that what he saw in Nature was illusively thrown into it by himself. He half perceived it, and half created it; but he was only able to create, because of the pre-existing harmony between man and Nature. His interpretation was ideal, because it came from within, and necessitated his construing the universal life as quasi-human. And

so he took less interest in the passive "analystic industry that splits up Nature into sections, and deals with each section apart, than in the active synthetic grasp that combines what seems remote, and detects affinities in "objects where no brotherhood exists to passive minds." Subsequently he traced all the blessings of his after-life, his contentment with "modest pleasures," the absence of “little enmities and low desires," his continued faith in man and in his destiny,—to this gift received from Nature, from the mountains, the lakes, the cataracts, the mists, and winds, that dwelt among the hills where he was born."

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The passage in which this gift of nature is most definitely and grandly expressed is the following from The Prelude:"From Nature and her overflowing soul,

I had received so much, that all my thoughts
Were steeped in feeling; I was only then
Contented, when with bliss ineffable

I felt the sentiment of Being spread

O'er all that moves and all that seemeth still;
O'er all that, lost beyond the reach of thought
And human knowledge, to the human eye
Invisible, yet liveth to the heart ;

O'er all that leaps and runs, and shouts and sings,
Or beats the gladsome air; o'er all that glides
Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself,
And mighty depth of waters. Wonder not
If high the transport, great the joy I felt,
Communing in this sort through earth and heaven
With every form of creature, as it looked
Towards the Uncreated with a countenance

Of adoration, with an eye of love.

One song they sang, and it was audible,

Most audible then when the fleshly ear,

O'ercome by humblest prelude of that strain,

Forgot her functions, and slept undisturbed."

One other paragraph from The Excursion, unfolding the joy of the growing youth in the presence of Nature amongst the hills of Athole, may be put alongside of this, as it is, without doubt, descriptive of his own life.

“Such was the Boy-but for the growing Youth
What soul was his, when, from the naked top
Of some bold headland, he beheld the sun

Rise up, and bathe the world in light! He looked-
Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth
And ocean's liquid mass, in gladness lay

Beneath him:-Far and wide the clouds were touched,
And in their silent faces could he read
Unutterable love. Sound needed none,
Nor any voice of joy; his spirit drank
The spectacle: sensation, soul, and form,
All melted into him: they swallowed up
His animal being; in them did he live,
And by them did he live; they were his life.
In such access of mind, in such high hour
Of visitation from the living God,

Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired.

No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request ;
Rapt into still communion that transcends
The imperfect offices of prayer and praise,
His mind was a thanksgiving to the power

That made him; it was blessedness and love!"

The Hawkshead school is a small two-storied building, and it remains at present very much what it was in the end of last century. The main schoolroom is on the ground floor; one small chamber above was used by the headmaster, in Wordsworth's time, for the advanced pupils. In another there is a library, formed for the most part by the donations of former pupils. Wordsworth's last teacher, Bowman, established a custom, which lasted for some time, that each scholar should pay five shillings per annum to the library, and on leaving school should present any book or t. books he chose. It may be interesting to know that, on leaving for Cambridge, Wordsworth and Robert H. Greenwood together presented to the library Gillies's "History of Greece," in four volumes 8vo. In another school custom the boy Wordsworth joined, viz., in carving his name with a penknife on one of the oaken desks. This memorial of his boyhood has been recently protected from injury by a piece

of glass let into the bench, through which the name—W. Wordsworth-may be easily read. Quite lately the following sentences from his poems have been drawn on scrolls, and

put up around the walls of the chief class-room :—

"Small service is true service while it lasts.”

"The child is father to the man,

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety."

We live by admiration, hope, and love.”

"Books we know

Are a substantial world, both pure and good.”

*

Like the school-house, Anne Tyson's cottage is externally very much as it was, in 1778; and it is little changed in the interior, although its surroundings are much altered. It is a humble dwelling of two storeys. The floor of the basement flat, paved with the blue flags of Coniston slate, is probably just as it was in Wordsworth's time. On the second flat there are two bedrooms to the front, one of which must have been Wordsworth's. The cottage faces. south-west, and Wordsworth's room was probably that on the proper left, with the smaller of the two windows. He speaks of it thus:

Again:

"Ye lowly cottages wherein we dwelt,
A ministration of your own was yours;
Can I forget you, being as you were
So beautiful among the pleasant fields

In which ye stood? or can I here forget

The plain and seemly countenance with which
Ye dealt out your plain comforts? Yet had ye
Delights and exultations of your own." +

"That lowly bed whence I had heard the wind
Roar, and the rain beat hard; where I so oft
Had lain awake on summer nights to watch

The moon in splendour couched among the leaves

* The suggestion was due to Mr Rawnsley, then Vicar of Wray, now of Crosthwaite, Keswick, and the scrolls are the work of Mrs Rawnsley. + See The Prelude, book i., vol. iii., p. 147.

Of a tall ash, that near our cottage stood;
Had watched her with fixed eyes while to and fro
In the dark summit of the waving tree

She rocked with every impulse of the breeze.” *

This ash tree is gone, but its locality is not difficult to trace. It grew on the proper right front of the cottage, where an outhouse is now built. Tyson's house has special interest in connection with the "fair seed-time of his soul"; and it is perhaps easier for us to realise the boy Wordsworth at Hawkshead as it is now, than it is to imagine the man Wordsworth at Dove Cottage or at Rydal, as they now are.

Wordsworth's reference to Anne Tyson, the "old dame, so kind and motherly," her cottage, and the garden, are familiar to every reader of The Prelude. Perhaps the most in

teresting is his allusion to

That unruly child of mountain birth,
The famous brook, who soon as he was boxed
Within our garden, found himself at once,
As if by trick insidious and unkind,

Stripped of his voice and left to dimple down
(Without an effort and without a will)

A channel framed by man's officious care.

There has been doubt, and there still is controversy, as to the identity of this brook. Dr Cradock wrote thus of it; Persons have visited the cottage without discovering it: and yet it is not forty yards distant, and is still exactly as described. On the opposite side of the lane already referred to, a few steps above the cottage, is a narrow passage through some new stone buildings. On emerging from this, you meet a garden, the farther side of which is bounded by the brook, confined on both sides by large flags, and also covered by flags of the same Coniston formation, through the interstices of which you may see and hear the stream running freely. The upper flags are now used as a footpath, and lead by

* See The Prelude, book iv., vol. iii. p. 194.