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WILLIAM WORDSWORTH:

SKETCH OF HIS LIFE.

THE birth-place of William Wordsworth is in Cumberland, a county lying in the north-west corner of England, and separated from Scotland by Solway Frith. That region is specially distinguished in having numerous small lakes cradled among its hills and mountains, all of which have now been crowned with classic honours by the poet's hand. His father, John Wordsworth, was an attorney, and, having been engaged as law-agent by the Earl of Lonsdale, was set over the western portion of the wide domain of Lowther, and lived at Cockermouth, in a manorhouse belonging to that family. There William was born on the 7th of April, 1770, the second of four sons. There was only one daughter in the family, Dorothy, who came next after the poet. Cockermouth stands on the Derwent, called by the poet "the fairest of all rivers," and looks back to the Borrowdale mountains, among which that river is born. The voice of that stream, he tells us, flowed along his dreams while he was a child.

His mother, a wise and pious woman, told a friend that William was the only one of her children about whom she felt anxious, and that he would be "remarkable either for good or evil." This was probably from what he himself calls his "stiff, moody, and violent temper." Of this, which made him a wayward and headstrong boy, all that he seems afterwards to have retained was that resoluteness of character which stood him in good stead when he became a man.

Of his mother, who died when he was eight years old, the poet retained a faint but tender recollection. At the age of nine, he, along with his elder brother Richard, left home for school. It would be hard to conceive a better school-life for a future poet than that in which Wordsworth was reared at Hawkshead. High-pressure was then unknown; nature and freedom had full swing. Bounds and locking-up hours they had none. The boys lived in the cottages of the village dames, in a natural, friendly way, like their own children. Their play-gounds were the fields, the lake, the woods, the hillsides, far as their feet could carry them. Their games were crag-climbing for ravens' nests, skating on Esthwaite Lake, setting springes for woodcocks.

In Wordsworth's fourteenth year, when he and his brother were at home for the Christmas holidays, their father, who had never recovered heart after the death of his wife, followed her to the grave. The old home at Cockermouth was broken up, and the orphans were but poorly provided for. Large arrears were indeed due to their father from the strange, self-willed Earl of Lonsdale; but these his lordship never chose to make good. Nevertheless the boys returned to school, and William remained there till his eighteenth year, when he left for Cambridge. From Hawkshead Wordsworth took several good things with him. In booklearning, there was Latin enough to enable him to read the Roman poets with pleasure in after-years; of mathematics, more than enough to start him on equality with the average of Cambridge freshmen; of Greek, probably not much,— at least we never heard of it afterwards. It was here that he began that intimacy with the English poets which he afterwards perfected: but neither at school nor in after-life was he a devourer of books.

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