CAMBRIDGE.
It was in October, 1787, that Wordsworth was sent to St. John’s College, Cambridge, by his uncles, Richard Wordsworth, and Christopher Crackanthorpe, under whose care his three brothers and his sister were placed on the death of their father, in 1795. The orphans were at this time nearly, if not entirely, dependent upon their relatives, in consequence of the stubborn refusal of the wilful, if not mad, Sir James Lowther, to settle the claims of their father upon his estate.
The impressions which Wordsworth received of Cambridge, on his arrival, and during his subsequent residence in that university, are vividly pictured in the “Prelude.” The “long-roofed chapel of King’s College,” lifting its “turrets and pinnacles in answering files,” high above the dusky grove of trees which surrounded it, was the first object which met his eye, as he approached the town. Then came the students, “eager of air and exercise,” taking their constitution walks; and the old Castle, built in the time of the Conqueror; and finally Magdalene bridge, and the glimpse of the Cam caught in passing over it, and the far-famed and much-loved Hoop Hotel.
“My spirit was up, my thoughts were full of hope;
Some friends I had, acquaintances who there
Seemed friends, poor simple school-boys, now hung round
With honour and importance; in a world
Of welcome faces up and down I roved;
Questions, directions, warnings, and advice
Flowed in upon me from all sides; fresh day
Of pride and pleasure, to myself I seemed
A man of business and expense, and went
From shop to shop about my own affairs,
To tutor or to tailor, as befel,
From street to street, with loose and careless mind.”
The University seemed like a dream to him:
“I was the dreamer, they the dream; I roamed
Delighted thro’ the motley spectacle;
Gowns—grave or gaudy—doctors, students, streets,
Courts, cloisters, flocks of churches, gateways, towers;
Migration strange for stripling of the hills—
A northern villager.”
And then he goes on to describe his personal appearance and habits; how suddenly he was changed amidst these scenes, as if by some fairy’s wand; rich in monies, and attired—
“In splendid garb, with hose of silk, and hair
Powdered, like rimy trees when frost is keen;
My lordly dressing-gown, I pass it by,
With other signs of manhood, that supplied
The lack of beard.—The weeks went roundly on;
With invitations, suppers, wine, and fruit;
Smooth housekeeping within—and all without
Liberal, and suiting gentlemen’s array.”
The contrast is picturesque and striking enough of Wordsworth, the Hawkshead schoolboy, clad in rustic garb, and placed under the control of his good dame, in her little whitewashed cottage, with its warm peat-fire; to Wordsworth, the collegian, dressed in silk-stockings, with his powdered hair, plentiful monies, troops of wine-drinking, and sight-loving friends. Perhaps, it was natural that Wordsworth should be proud of his butterfly-wings, after having escaped from the shell of the chrysallis—but no one could have imagined, from the grave, high, and austere character he afterwards sustained, that he had, at any previous time of his life, given way to the weakness of dandyism. Youth, however, is not to be measured by severe standards; and even if it were to be so measured, Wordsworth has not many sins to answer for, and certainly none of a venial cast. He was, nevertheless, what would be called a gay young fellow, during the first year of his college life; and he himself attributes a good deal of this to the fact that he was before the freshmen of his year in Latin and mathematics, and had, therefore, no pressing inducement to study. Pleasure called him with her syren voice, and he, nothing loath, obeyed her behests. Still he did not neglect his studies; although French and Italian, with the literature of his own country, seem to be the staple of the scholarship he acquired at Cambridge. “It is true,” says De Quincy, “that he took the regular degree of B.A., and in the regular course; but this was won in those days by a mere nominal examination, unless where the mathematical attainments of the student prompted his ambition to contest the honourable distinction of Senior Wrangler. This, in common with all other honours of the university, is won, in our days, with far severer effort than in that age of relaxed discipline; but at no period could it have been won, let the malicious and the scornful say what they will, without an amount of mathematical skill very much beyond what has ever been exacted of its alumni by any other European university. Wordsworth was a professed admirer of the mathematics; at least of the higher geometry. The secret of this admiration for geometry lay in the antagonism between this world of bodiless abstraction and the world of passion.”
Leaving this subject of his attainments, however, and returning to his college life, it may farther be stated, as a proof of Wordsworth’s love of good fellowship at this time, that during a visit to a friend who occupied the rooms which John Milton, the blind old Homer of the Commonwealth occupied, during his residence in Cambridge, he drank so copiously in his enthusiasm and reverence for the place, and its grand and golden memories, that he was fairly carried away on the other side of the rational barriers, and in short got gloriously drunk; not so drunk, however, that he could not attend the chapel service, and behave there with due decorum. Speaking of the great men who had trod the streets of Cambridge and worn an university gown before him, and of his great reverence for them, he has occasion to introduce Milton, and alludes to this excess at the close of the passage. I will quote it entire.