De Quincey then continues to relate, as an illustration of the sudden, silent manner in which Nature makes herself felt by the observer, even when he is paying no attention to her operations, but is occupied with nearer and more secondary matters—how he and Wordsworth were walking one midnight, during the Peninsular war, from Grasmere to Dunmail Raise, to meet the mail, in order that they might obtain the newspaper Coleridge was in the habit of sending them, and thus learn the earliest intelligence of the state of affairs on the Continent. “At intervals, Wordsworth had stretched himself at length on the high road, applying his ear to the ground, so as to catch any sound of wheels that might be going along at a distance. Once, when he was slowly rising from this effort, his eye caught a bright star that was glittering between the brow of Seat Sandal and the mighty Helvellyn. He gazed upon it for a minute or so; and then, upon turning away to descend into Grasmere, he made the following explanation:—‘I have remarked, from my earliest days, that if, under any circumstances, the attention is perfectly braced up to a steady act of observation, or of steady expectation, then, if this intense condition of vigilance should suddenly relax, at that moment any beautiful, any impressive visual object, or collection of objects, falling upon the eye, is carried to the heart with a power not known under other circumstances. Just now my ear was placed upon the stretch, in order to catch any sound of wheels that might come down upon the lake of Wythburn, from the Keswick road; at the very instant when I raised my head from the ground, in final abandonment of hope for this night, at the very instant when the organs of attention were all at once relaxing from their tension, the bright star hanging in the air above those outlines of massy blackness fell suddenly upon my eye, and penetrated my capacity of apprehension, with a pathos and a sense of the Infinite, that would not have arrested me under other circumstances.’”
And it was precisely in this manner, according to De Quincy, and indeed according to the known laws by which Nature educates the faculties of the poet, that Wordsworth was educated in his boyhood. All this hunting, fishing, and rambling, were but the means by which Nature allured him to the woods and waters, that she might silently impress him with her manifold forms and influences. There are evidences, however, of something like communion with Nature in the early poems of Wordsworth, even before he left Hawkshead; and his solitary wanderings, his roamings round the lake of Esthwaite—five miles before breakfast—were not without a purpose, and could not have been undertaken unless an unquenchable, though perhaps not a fully developed love, had possessed his heart, for natural scenery, and the mystic lore which it teaches. His own confession, that though Nature was at first a dumb perplexing riddle to him, and merely affected him by her beauty and grandeur,—I say his own confession, that in spite of this, he subsequently felt the coming of the “auxiliar light” from his own soul, which penetrated her forms, and made them instinct with sublime intelligence—will illustrate the idea with sufficient force and clearness.
Enough, however, has been said upon this subject, for it is impossible to trace in any direct manner, the subtle and delicate influences of Nature upon the human mind, or to determine even, in the instance of Wordsworth, the precise time when he first sought “the woods and mountains, with a direct conscious anticipation of imaginative pleasure.” We will leave all this, therefore, and direct the reader to the “Prelude,” as the best exposition of the poet’s mental development at this early period. A few words respecting the government of the Hawkshead grammar school, as an influence affecting the character of the poet, and we will then follow him to Cambridge.
“Taking into consideration the peculiar tastes of the person,” says De Quincy, “and the peculiar advantages of the place, I conceive that no pupil of a public school can ever have passed a more luxurious boyhood than Wordsworth. The school discipline was not, I believe, very strict; the mode of living out of school very much resembled that of Eton for Oppidans,—less elegant perhaps, and less costly in its provisions for accommodation, but not less comfortable; and in that part of the arrangement which was chiefly Etonian, even more so; for in both places the boys, instead of being gathered into one fold, and at night into one or two huge dormitories, were distributed amongst motherly old “dames,” technically so called at Eton, but not at Hawkshead.” In the latter place, agreeably to the inferior scale of the whole establishment, the houses were smaller and more college like, consequently more like private households; and the old lady of the menage was more constantly amongst them, providing with maternal tenderness, and with a professional pride, for the comfort of her young flock, and protecting the weak from oppression. The humble cares to which those poor matrons dedicated themselves, may be collected from several allusions scattered through the poems of Wordsworth; that entitled “Nutting” for instance, in which his early Spinosistic feeling is introduced of a mysterious power diffused through the solitudes of woods, a presence that was disturbed by the intrusion of careless and noisy outrage, and which is brought into a strong relief by the previous homely picture of the old housewife equipping her young charge with beggar’s weeds in order to prepare him for a struggle with thorns and brambles. Indeed not only the moderate rank of the boys, and the peculiar kind of relation assumed by these matrons, equally suggested this humble class of motherly attentions, but the whole spirit of the place and neighbourhood was favourable to an old English homeliness of domestic and personal economy.”
It will thus be seen that Wordsworth was early inducted into those thriftful and economical habits which marked his character through life, and enabled him during his young days to bear the temporary loss of his paternal fortune without much inconvenience. And the above facts are worthy to be remembered, not only as illustrating much for us in the history of Wordsworth, but as another instance of the power of a wise and early training.
The poet thus alludes to the cottages of the “Danes:”—
“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.
Eager, and never weary, we pursued
Our home-amusements, by the warm peat-fire,
At evening; when, with pencil and smooth slate,
In square divisions parcelled out, and all
With crosses and with cyphers scribbled o’er,
We schemed and puzzled, head opposed to head,
In strife too humble to be named in verse;
Or round the naked table, snow white deal,
Cherry or maple, sate in close array,
And to the combat, loo or whist,[D] led on
A thick-ribbed army; not, as in the world,
Neglected, or ungratefully thrown by,
Even for the very service they had wrought,
But husbanded thro’ many a long campaign.
Uncouth assemblage was it, where no fear
Had changed their functions; some plebeian cards
Which fate, beyond the promise of their birth,
Had dignified, and called to represent
The persons of departed potentates.
Oh, with what echos on the board they fell!
Ironic diamonds,—clubs, hearts, diamonds, spades,—
A congregation piteously akin!
Cheap matter offered they for boyish wit,
Those sooty knaves, precipitated down,
With scoffs and taunts, like Vulcan out of heaven:
The paramount ace, a moon in her eclipse,
Queens gleaming thro’ their splendour’s last decay,
And monarchs surly at the wrongs sustained
By royal-visages. Meanwhile, abroad
Incessant rain was falling, or the frost
Raged bitterly, with keen and silent work;
And, interrupting oft that eager game,
From under Esthwaits’ splitting scenes of ice
The pent up air, struggling to free itself,
Gave out, to meadow grounds and hills, a loud
Protracted yelling; like the noise of wolves,
Howling, in troops, along the Bothnic main.”
And, then, as a specimen of the out-door sports, and exercises of his youth, whilst dwelling with his good old dame, he says:
“And in the frosty season, when the sun
Was set, and visible for many a mile
The cottage windows blazed thro’ twilight gloom,
I heeded not their summons; happy time
It was, indeed, for all of us—for me,
It was a time of rapture! Clear and loud,
The village clock struck six—I wheeled about,
Proud and exulting, like an untired horse,
That cares not for his home. 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 thro’ the darkness and the cold we flew,
And not a voice was idle; with the din
Smitten, the precipices rang aloud;
The leafless trees, and every icy crag,
Tinkled like iron; while far distant hills
Into the tumult sent an awful sound
Of melancholy not unnoticed, while the stars
Eastward were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.
Not seldom from the uproar I retired
Into a silent bay, or sportively
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng
To cut across the reflex of a star,
That fled, and flying still before me, gleamed
Upon the glassy plain; and oftentimes,
When we had given our bodies to the wind,
And all the shadowy banks on either side
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion, then at once
Have I, reclining back upon my heels
Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs
Wheeled by me, even as if the earth had rolled,
With visible motion, her diurnal round!
Behind me did they stretch in solemn train,
Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched,
Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.”
And with this famous skating passage—the finest realization of the kind in poetry, I will conclude this outline of the poet’s school-days and mental history.