[Illustration: WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. After the portrait by B.R.
Haydon.]
Early Life and Training.—William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in 1770. He went to school in his ninth year at Hawkshead, a village on the banks of Esthwaite Water, in the heart of the Lake Country. The traveler who takes the pleasant journey on foot or coach from Windermere to Coniston, passes through Hawkshead, where he may see Wordsworth's name cut in a desk of the school which he attended. Of greater interest is the scenery which contributed so much to his education and aided his development into England's greatest nature poet.
We learn from his autobiographical poem, The Prelude, what experiences molded him in boyhood. He says that the—
"…common face of Nature spake to me
Rememberable things."
In this poem he relates how he absorbed into his inmost being the orange sky of evening, the curling mist, the last autumnal crocus, the "souls of lonely places," and the huge peak, which terrified him at nightfall by seeming to stride after him and which awoke in him a—
"…dim and undermined sense
Of unknown modes of being."
[Illustration: BOY OF WINANDER. From mural painting by H.O. Walker,
Congressional Library, Washington, D.C.]
In his famous lines on the "Boy of Winander," Wordsworth tells how—
"…the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady lake."
At the age of seventeen he entered Cambridge University, from which he was graduated after a four years' course. He speaks of himself there as a dreamer passing through a dream. There came to him the strange feeling that he "was not for that hour nor for that place;" and yet he says that he was not unmoved by his daily association with the haunts of his illustrious predecessors, or of—