| “Alone upon some jutting eminence, At the first gleam of dawn-light, when the Vale, Yet slumbering, lay in utter solitude.” |
In winter-time “a noisy crew” made merry upon the icy surface of the lake.
| “All shod with steel, We hissed along the polished ice in games Confederate, imitative of the chase And woodland pleasures,—the resounding horn, The pack loud chiming, and the hunted hare. So through the darkness and the cold we flew, And not a voice was idle.” |
Nor were the pleasures of social life lacking. Dances, feasts, public revelry, and
| “A swarm Of heady schemes, jostling each other,” |
all seemed for a time to conspire to lure his mind away from the paths of “books and nature,” which he would have preferred. But, curiously enough, it was after one of these nights of revelry that, on his way home, Wordsworth was so much impressed with the beauties of the dawn that he felt the impulse, previously mentioned, to devote himself to poetry.
No other poet ever gave such an account of the development of his own mind as Wordsworth gives in the “Prelude.” And while he recounts enough incidents like the snaring of woodcock, the fishing for trout in the quiet pools and the cascades of the mountain brooks, the flying of kites on the hilltops, the nutting expeditions, the rowing on the lake, and in the winter-time the skating and dancing, to convince us that he was really a boy, yet he continually shows that beneath it all there was a deeper feeling—a prophecy of the man who was even then developing. No ordinary boy would have been conscious of “a sense of pain” at beholding the mutilated hazel boughs which he had broken in his search for nuts. No ordinary lad of ten would be able to hold
| “Unconscious intercourse with beauty Old as creation, drinking in a pure Organic pleasure from the silver wreaths Of curling mist, or from the level plain Of waters colored by impending clouds.” |