The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye ... a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
Wordsworth (that lost soul) felt those things and described them in authentic terms. He could do this because he was not an ordinary, but a very extraordinary, child of the mountains. How many shepherd boys sallying forth at dawn with their flocks up the Stye or along the Little Langdale are haunted "like a passion" by the natural beauties they see? They do not share the poet's emotions because they know nothing of the lovely words and pictures and ideas that can invest poor Nature with romance.
In any case, I was neither a romantic nor a learned little boy, but a very ignorant and unromantic little girl. It was only when I became suddenly a little less ignorant of books, history and ideas, that I came to see—where before there was at most a vague unconscious sense of pleasure—that Torribridge town seen from the hills was a fair prospect.
This is how it happened.
I was leaning on a stile, idly looking down towards the far-away bridge and trying to count the arches.
"Fine!" said a quiet voice behind me.
I started, turned round, and beheld a stranger looking down at me. He was a tall young man of perhaps twenty; his face pale and rather thin. His eyes peered. A proud mouth contrasted with earnest eyes. He wore breeches and carried a gun. Half squire, half scholar; something of the studious, the aristocratic and sporting all combined. All I was sure of just then was a pair of kind brown eyes which I immediately and favourably contrasted with the steel-blue glitter of Uncle Simeon's, and something exquisite and somehow superior to myself in their owner. I had an unerring instinct of class inferiority: I knew my betters.
"Fine, isn't it?" repeated the Stranger.
"Ye-es," I said. I thought him a bit silly, and felt sillier myself.
"It's a fine sight," he said, leaning against the stile by my side. "Isn't it, little girl? Come, say Yes."