the school in 1785 led him to the composition of a long poem on the surrounding district and his own schoolboy adventures, of which a revised fragment is preserved among the "Poems written in Youth."

In the winter of 1783 his father died. Mr. Wordsworth's property consisted mainly of a considerable sum of money which Sir James Lowther, afterwards Lord Lonsdale, whose agent he was, had borrowed and refused to repay. Strenuous efforts failed to recover the sum, and it was not available for the use of the family until eighteen years later, when Lord Lonsdale's successor handed it over with the interest that had accrued. The boys, upon their father's death, were placed under the care of uncles, and in 1787 William Wordsworth was sent by them as a student to St. John's College, Cambridge.

For steadfast and regulated toil among books, though he highly honoured great books as sources of power, Wordsworth had no gift. At Cambridge his best self felt somewhat of an alien. Among the level fields and roads he missed the inspiration and sustaining influence of his northern vales and mountains; he fell back upon the native forces of the soul itself, but in this there was an effort; it was rowing against the tide. His heart was social "and loved idleness and joy," and so, lapsing from his mood of aspiration and resolve, he gave himself away for a time to the chance pleasures of the place. Not indeed that he was insensible to its ancient grandeurs and venerable associations. From his chamber he looked upon the statue of Newton; he thought of Spenser in these halls as a predecessor and as

a friend; in Milton's rooms he toasted the memory of the water-drinking bard, and for the sole occasion in his life felt his brain dizzy with the fumes of wine. But his highest spirit often slumbered, and, while he yielded himself to this casual influence or to that, there sprang up

"A treasonable growth

Of indecisive judgments, that impaired
And shook the mind's simplicity.

Yet Cambridge served him as mediating between his life of solitude and the life of the great world; it was, as he says, a living part of a live whole, a creek in the vast sea. And if he did not labour after scholarship, he read for his own enjoyment both in the Latin poets and in Italian literature. Wordsworth was never, like Southey, a vast accumulator and arranger of knowledge; but he knew well our elder English poets and the poets of ancient Rome; and there was a time when in company with Coleridge he studied for his pleasure the writings of Plato in the original; he gained some skill in French and attempted to acquire a knowledge of Spanish; nor was he insensible to the powerful charm for an imaginative mind of the bare abstractions of science. In January, 1791, he took his B.A. degree and quitted the University.

In these college years the memorable epochs were the summer vacations. The first-that of 1788-was spent among the English Lakes, and there his truer self returned to Wordsworth, his joy of heart, his hope, his strength of aspiration, his power of contemplation, his ardour, and his calm. He found all that he had left behind him to be the same and yet not the

same, changed as it were with humorous effect, for what had been large now seemed small, and what had been accepted as ordinary now appeared quaint or grotesque; and notwithstanding this, all was dearer than it had ever been before, and in his love there was less of egoistic appropriation and more of humanhearted sympathy. One sunrise, seen as he walked home after a night of rural dance and revelry, left an ineffaceable impression; his soul seemed like the vale itself to be flooded with the glory of light:

"I made no vows, but vows

Were then made for me; bond unknown to me Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly, A dedicated Spirit."

During the vacation of 1789 he wandered through Dovedale, the dales of Yorkshire, the Penrith district of the Lakes, and by the banks of the Emont. His companions were his sister Dorothy, whose eye for natural beauty was as quick and sure as his own, and his cousin, Mary Hutchinson, a friend of both brother and sister since childhood, and afterwards to become Wordsworth's wife. The vacation of 1790 was the most memorable of the three. Together with his fellow-student Robert Jones, afterwards a fellow of St. John's, he accomplished on foot a continental tour-in those days a rare achievement which included France, Switzerland, the Italian Lakes and the Rhine.' A record of the exquisite or profound impres

1 The character of Robert Jones is presented by Wordsworth in the lines beginning "I marvel how Nature could ever find space, &c."; his Oxfordshire parsonage is described in the sonnet Where holy ground begins, &c."

sions made upon Wordsworth by the vine-clad hills of Burgundy, the solitude of the Convent of Chartreuse, the glaciers and torrents of Chamouni, the serene loveliness of Como, and above all by the passage of the Simplon, will be found in the sixth book of "The Prelude." It was a marvellous moment in the history of Europe; the pair of students reached Calais on July 13th, the eve of the fête in the Champ de Mars, when the National Federation celebrated the anniversary of the capture of the Bastille, and the king as patriot swore fidelity to the new constitution:

"France standing on the top of golden hours,
And human nature seeming born again."

The great events affected Wordsworth, and yet affected him as if from a distance. Reared with a republican plainness and somewhat stern of character, he felt no shock of surprise at the course of things in France; all seemed natural, and he moved along with what was happening "as a bird moves through the air."

Soon after he had taken his degree, Wordsworth, with vague views as to his mode of earning a livelihood, journeyed to London (February, 1791), and there spent the months of spring. The lighter and more superficial aspects of the vast city interested him not a little, and he read their meanings with quick intelligence and pleasure. But he also felt that London is a grave and stern preceptress; it brought a sense of awe upon his heart, a feeling of weight and power-"power growing under weight." Amid all the motley shows which distracted and diverted him he thought of this throbbing heart of England as the living

residence of mighty passions-"fount of my country's destiny and the world's." He heard Burke declaim in the Senate; he saw Siddons glorify the stage; he "conversed with majesty and power like independent natures.” Nor amid the vices and sorrows of the great town did he ever lose his faith in man, or his sense that humanity is no incoherent assemblage of atoms but a living unity. During the summer he explored North Wales with his companion of the continental tour, Robert Jones. For a short time, towards the close of the vacation, he was in Cambridge, and then, alleging to himself the advantage of thoroughly acquiring the French language with a view to a private tutorship, but really "lured forth" by the attraction of France in her renovated life, he left England (November, 1791) for a twelvemonths' residence abroad.

Orleans had been chosen as his place of abode. Passing through Paris he visited the Legislative Assembly and the Jacobin Club, and as a pilgrim gathered up a stone to be his relic from the ruins of the Bastille. But the events of the day had not yet really seized his passions or his intellect. In Orleans he remained for a time tranquil, associating chiefly with military men of royalist sympathies. It was through the agitating hopes and fears of these companions that Wordsworth first felt indeed the shocks, the strife, the universal ferment of the Revolution. With his ardent faith in man, his temper joyous yet austere, and all the hopes of youth, he naturally inclined to the party of movement and of promise. And among his soldier associates was one who, though highly-born, had espoused the popular cause, a