“Three years she grew in sun and shower,”
and
“Wisdom and Spirit of the universe!”
He drew images from his children and painted a deliberate portrait of his daughter Catharine, solemnly entitled, Characteristics of a Child Three Years Old.
Yet, though Wordsworth drew many suggestions from his own children and from those whom he saw in his walks, it is remarkable how little he regards children in their relation to parents in comparison of their individual and isolated existence. Before Wordsworth, the child, in literature, was almost wholly considered as one of a group, as a part of a family, and only those phases of childhood were treated which were obvious to the most careless observer. Wordsworth—and here is the notable fact—was the first deliberately to conceive of childhood as a distinct, individual element of human life. He first, to use a truer phrase, apprehended the personality of childhood. He did this and gave it expression in artistic form in some of the poems already named; he did it methodically and with philosophic intent in his autobiographic poem The Prelude, and also in The Excursion. Listen how he speaks of his infancy even, giving it by anticipation a life separate from mother and nurse. “Was it for this?” he asks,—
“Was it for this
That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved
To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song,