“An Orphic song indeed,
A song divine, of high and passionate thoughts,
To their own music chanted.”
This poem, read to Coleridge in 1805, was not given to the world till July, 1850, a few months after the author’s death. The reason why I shall now dwell on it at some length is because no other production of Wordsworth’s gives us so deep and sustained a view of his feeling about Nature, and of the relation which he believed to exist between Nature and the soul of man.
In Wordsworth’s mental history two periods are especially prominent. The first was his school-time at Hawkshead, by Esthwaite Lake, eight years in all. The second was the mental crisis through which he passed after his return from France till he settled with his sister in the south of England, and ultimately at Grasmere. The first was the spring-time of his soul—a fair spring-time, in which all the young impulses and intuitions were first awakened, when the colors were laid in and deeply engrained into every fibre of his being. The second was the trial time, the crisis of his spirit, in which all his early impulses, impressions, intuitions, were brought out into distinct consciousness, questioned and tested—vindicated by reason, and embraced by will as his guiding principles for life—in which, as one may say, all that had hitherto existed inwardly in fluid vapor was gathered up, condensed, solidified into deliberate substance and permanent purpose.
A healthful, happy, blissful school-time was that which Wordsworth spent by Esthwaite Lake—natural, blameless, pure, as ever boy spent. School rules were few, discipline was light, school hours were short, and, these over, the boys were free to roam where they willed, far or near, high and low, early and late, sometimes far into the frosty starlight. Then it was that Nature first
“Peopled his mind with forms sublime and fair,”
came to him like instincts unawares, as he went about his usual sports with his companions. Rowing on the lake, snaring woodcocks among the hill copses by night, skating by starlight on the frozen lake, climbing crags to harry the raven’s nest, scudding on horseback over Furness Sands:—
“From week to week, from month to month, we lived
A round of tumult.”