She smiled and I essayed to speak, and she approached, and made With lip and finger signs that said, The silence, till my strength should be And gently oped the door, and spake But those she called were not awake, And she went forth; but, ere she passed, Another sign she made, to say, 1225 1230 1235 1240 That I had nought to fear, that all Were near, at my command or call, And she would not delay Her due return: while she was gone, 1245 Me one day o'er their realm to reign! Thus the vain fool who strove to glut His rage, refining on my pain, Sent me forth to the wilderness, Bound naked — bleeding — and alone, What mortal his own doom may guess? Let none despond, let none despair! May see our coursers graze at ease Had I such welcome for a river As I shall yield when safely there. Comrades, good night "- The Hetman threw A bed nor comfortless nor new To him, who took his rest whene'er 1255 1260 1265 1270 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH I. LIFE WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, Lake Poet and Laureate of England, has told his own story, and described the growth of his mind, in the poem called The Prelude. If you have read this, you know pretty thoroughly what kind of man he was, what sort of life he led, where he went, and what he did, and saw, and felt, and thought. The remaining facts in his biography are few and simple. Some of these he has recorded for us in the memoirs which he dictated to his nephew, a former bishop of Lincoln. "I was born," he said, "at Cockermouth, in Cumberland, on April 7th, 1770, the second son of John Wordsworth, attorney-at-law. . . . My mother was Anne, only daughter of William Cookson, mercer, of Penrith.... My grandfather was the first of the name of Wordsworth who came into Westmoreland. . . . He was descended from a family who had been settled at Peniston, in Yorkshire, . . . probably before the Norman Conquest. . . . The time of my infancy and early boyhood was passed partly at Cockermouth, and partly with my mother's parents at Penrith, where my mother, in the year 1778, died of a decline. . . . My father never recovered his usual cheerfulness of mind after this loss, and died when I was in my fourteenth year, a school-boy, just returned from Hawkshead, whither I had been sent with my elder brother Richard, in my ninth year. "I remember my mother only in some few situations, one of which was her pinning a nosegay to my breast, when I was going to say the catechism in the church. ... She once said . . . that the only one of her five children about whose future life she was anxious was William; and he, she said, would be remarkable, either for good or for evil. The cause of this was, that I was of a stiff, moody, and violent temper; so much so that I remember going into the attics of my grandfather's house at Penrith, upon some indignity having been put upon me, with the intention of destroying myself with one of the foils, which I knew was kept there. I took the foil in my hand, but my heart failed me." In spite of this anecdote, it is certain that Wordsworth, as a boy, was not at all morose or given to brooding. Of his early days at school he had "little to say, but that they were very happy ones"; he would have us believe that his happiness lay in being free to read whatever books he liked; but we know, better than he could have told us, that he was not the sort of boy who stays apart, by himself, with his head in a book. Some poets, like Thomas Gray, have been of that sort, and sickly boys at school, writing Latin verses instead of playing cricket. Wordsworth, however, played all the games and had all the fun with the other boys. -shy Don Quixote, Gil Blas, Gulliver's Travels, and the many books he read were not what set his young spirit alight and alive. The boy who was father to this man, could skate, and handle a boat, and climb trees with the best of his schoolmates. A passage in The Prelude tells how, when skating on winter nights with his companions, playing at hare and hounds over the ice, Wordsworth sometimes glanced aside, alone, left the shouting racers, tried to cut across the flying reflection of a star, and chased its gleam along the glassy surface; or how, when he had let the wind carry him along, “the solitary cliffs wheeled by" in shadow, spinning past ". . . as if the earth had rolled With visible motion her diurnal round! The joy and excitement of such active play, of running about the fields or woods by day and night, first woke and stirred the deep impulses of genius. After this boyhood of happy liberty among the lakes, Wordsworth went up, in October, 1787, to St. John's College, Cambridge. Spenser, Ben Jonson, Marlowe, Dryden, Milton, and Gray had preceded him in that university of the English poets; Coleridge and Byron were to succeed him; but though not least among these shining names, as an undergraduate Wordsworth did not distinguish himself. He entered, a rustic and backward youth of seventeen, and four years later, taking his B.A. degree, left Cambridge with no definite plans for his future career. He now lived for a short time, and on a small allow |