And of some other being.”
The Prelude contains nothing more beautiful Of instructive than the whole account of that Hawkshead school-time. It portrays the wonderful boyhood of a wonderful boy, though neither he himself nor others then thought him the least wonderful. Reflecting on it long afterwards, Wordsworth saw, and every student of his poetry will see, that in that time lay the secret of his power, by the impulses then received his whole philosophy of life and of poetry was determined. Natural objects, he tells us, then came home to him primarily through the human affections and associations of which they are the outward framework,—just as the infant when he first comes to know sensible objects, learns to associate them with the interventions of the touch, the look, the tenderness of its mother. Gradually, even before school-time was past, Nature had come to have a meaning and an attraction for him, by herself, without the need of such intervening agents.
Further, he tells us, that while for him at that time each individual rock, tree, and flower, had an interest of its own, he came deeply to feel the great living whole which Nature is. All his thoughts, he says, were steeped in feeling.
“I was only then
Contented, when with bliss ineffable
I felt the sentiment of being spread
O’er all that moves, and all that seemeth still;
O’er all that lost beyond the reach of thought
And human knowledge, to the human eye
Invisible, yet liveth to the heart;