Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

CAMBRIDGE:

CHAPTER IV.

UNIVERSITY LIFE AND SUMMER HOLIDAYS:

DOROTHY WORDSWORTH AT FORNCETT.

IN October 1787 Wordsworth went up from Westmoreland to Cambridge by York (where he spent four days), and began life as an undergraduate at John's College. In The Prelude he has described his first view of Cambridge from the top of the coach, whence he saw "the long-roofed chapel of King's College," its turrets and pinnacles; his alighting at the Hoop Inn; his earliest impression of the streets, the colleges and cloisters; and the strange contrast in it all to what he had been accustomed to amongst the hills of the north. His rooms were in the first of the three courts of St John's, above the college kitchens. The clock of Trinity hung near him, and from the window of his bedroom he could look into the ante-chapel of that college.

He received little influence from the teaching of the college tutors or lecturers. Their prelections were eminently dull, and so he read the poets and the novelists more than the classics, and studied Italian. It will surprise no one that his name did not appear on the list of wranglers. Other boys from Hawkshead school eclipsed him easily in mathematical honours (see vol. ii. p. 38). In fact he was out of his natural element during all the three years at Cambridge. He tells us that he felt

"a strangeness in the mind,

A feeling that I was not for that hour,

Nor for that place."

He would have felt the very same in boyhood had he

ઃઃ

Even in the

stones that

Sensitive to

been sent to one of the larger English public schools instead of to the primitive simplicities of Hawkshead. At Cambridge he was most at his ease when he left his comrades and the college grounds, and went out to the level fields around the city. There he solaced himself as he "perused the common countenance of earth and sky," or turned inwards upon the mysteries of his own nature. level flats of the fen country, to "the loose covered the highway" he "gave a moral life.” every changing mood of Nature, as the surface of the water to the influence of the sky, all that he beheld, he tells us, respired with inward meaning.” His comrades thought him an eccentric youth, but he had his own world to live in. And so, as an undergraduate, he made few friends. It was a lonely, yet a joyous time. A spell seemed on him when he was alone; and yet he was a social youth, and loved not merely companionship, but mirth. During these Cambridge years he boated in the river, rode into the country, read novels, and went to parties with the rest of his collegians. Once, he tells us, in the college room which had been Milton's, at a wine party, he poured out libations to the memory of the Bard till his brain grew dizzy. He left the room, and rushing out found he was too late for chapel. He adds, what we can well believe, that never before or since had he been excited by wine.

Cambridge, however, did more for Wordsworth than he himself knew. It gave him little scholarship, but it disciplined his character. Instead of the free hand of Nature, the equally powerful hand of the Past was now upon him. It awakened a new, though almost unconscious, reverence for antiquity. He tells us that he

"Could not print

Ground where the grass had yielded to the steps
Of generations of illustrious men,

Unmoved."

The simple fact that Milton and Newton had passed through the gateways, lived in the college, and were familiar with the quadrangles that he knew, stirred him—while it brought these great intellects nearer to him. He sauntered out to the village of Trompington with his Chaucer, and read the "Reve's Tale" under the hawthorns. So, too, with the other Poets. And the months passed on, in a somewhat desultory manner. Imagination slept, the heart reposed, the pulse of contemplation almost failed to beat. It was his own fault, he says; but the free and open Hawkshead life had ill tutored him for the comparative stagnation and the “indoor study" of Cambridge. He regrets, and with good reason, that he did not study harder; but, at the same time, he notes the passions, and academic jealousies, to which hard study and fierce competitions give rise. He tells us that he spent most of the first eight months at Cambridge in studying the characters of the College tutors, men somewhat grotesque in character, bookworms, and humourists of a type now obsolete.

Wordsworth's first summer vacation from Cambridge, in 1788, was memorable to him in many ways. He went back to Westmoreland and Lancashire. Readers of The Prelude know well his description of his return to Hawkshead, his meeting with Dame Tyson, his return to his old room in her house, his saluting every familiar person and place the tall ash tree, the garden, the brook, his old companion dog, his wanderings up the Vale, and round the Lake, to the old haunts of his boyhood. Everything was the same, and yet all was changed. There was now—partly the effect of temporary absence, and partly due to the enlargement of his own nature—a "human-heartedness about his love for the objects of external nature. Trees, mountains, brooks, even the stars of heaven were now regarded, not with awe, but with a deep and an enthusiastic

human love. He thinks he wasted some time by the pursnit of trivial pleasures during this first summer holiday. He would occasionally join his old companions in a rustic dance and he records one of these, at a small mountain farm. Every one knows the memorable lines in which he describes his return in the morning to Hawkshead, when in the calm brightness of that new-born day, he "made no vows, but vows were made for him," and he realised that he must henceforward dedicate himself to the office of a Poet solely. The first fruits of this dedication was the Evening Walk, which he began to write during this first holiday in the north.*

Before returning to Cambridge, he seems to have gone up to London for a few days, and

"Paced her endless streets

A transient visitant.”

He went, apparently, in some travelling cart or showman's waggon,† "with vulgar men about him;" but, as soon as he had passed through the long labyrinth of suburban villages, it was almost as when first he saw the Alps, the weight of ages" descended upon him, a sense of power in the vast city. He afterwards compared his experience of London to that of the curious traveller, in the grotto of Antiparos or the cave of Yordas, bewildered with the gloom, but gradually realizing the vastness and the many-sided interest of the place.

When he returned to Cambridge, in October 1789, he seems first to have realised that he might be able to leave behind him some work, which "pure hearts would reverence."

Over and over again he expresses his thankfulness that

* Fragmentary passages, written at Hawkshead, were inwoven into the Evening Walk, when it was finally prepared for the press in 1793. + See Prelude, book viii., vol. iii. p. 301.

he was not compelled to read, in the formal lines of classical or mathematical scholarship, that he was left as free to range the "happy pastures" of Literature as in boyhood to range the woods and heights at Hawkshead. And it was well for him-although it would be the worst thing possible for the majority of us—that the academic "guides and wardens of our faculties " did not confine him to the work of reading for honours in any tripos. Left very much to himself, the awe of mighty names in past Literature, which had possessed him hitherto, was softened down, and the place of these Teachers of mankind seemed approachable.

All that winter at Cambridge, he tells us, he used to frequent the College grove and walks by night-usually alone -till the porter's bell summoned him to his room at nine. He used to be spell-bound by one particular tree, an ivy-clad ash, which, with its lightsome twigs, and sprays, and seeds, that hung in yellow tassels, fascinated him, especially as seen beneath a frosty moon. This ash tree is now gone. He did not entirely neglect his mathematical studies, and he has written in The Prelude, with rare appreciation, of geometric science, “and its high privilege of lasting life." He even felt the charms of mathematical synthesis, to a mind “beset with images, and haunted by itself."

He

His next summer vacation was even more important to him than that of 1788, for it brought him again into contact with his sister Dorothy and Mary Hutchinson. went north by Dovedale in Derbyshire, and, by the wilder Yorkshire dales, to Penrith. With his sister he wandered over the whole Penrith district, climbed the Border Beacon, explored the banks of the Emont, and lingered about the towers of Brougham Castle. They would go up the Emcnt to Sockbridge, the old home of their grandfather, down the same stream past Brougham Castle to the Countess' Pillar, possibly out to the great druidical circle of Long Meg, and

« AnteriorContinuar »