Gents Mag 1850 part 2 p.462
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Gentleman's Magazine 1850 part 2 p.462
Shouldering the naked crag. Oh! at that time, While on the perilous ridge I hung alone, With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind Blow through my ear! The sky seemed no a sky Of earth - and with what motion moved the clouds! Nor was Wordsworth, as a school-boy, less fortunate in the scene or the character of his education. The first great revulsion in life is generally the exchange of spontaneity and gentleness of home for the restraint and roughness of school life. It is often a needful, not always a salutary change. It may tame and discipline the stubborn and the selfish; but it as frequently hardens the susceptible and discourages the timid neophyte. But Wordsworth, according to the Prelude, seems to have led a luxurious schoolboy life, if we take into consideration his peculiar tastes. As regarded diet, it had somthing indeed of Spartan strictness. But the dsicipline which permitted so much robust and healthy exercise cannot, we surmise, have been very strict. Neither "longs nor shorts," neither Cocker nor Euclid, interfered with boating, riding, or skating; and the future poet, like his own Michael, was in the heart of many thousand mists, and suffered to disport himself at earliest dawn, and in the long summer noon when the sun bronzed the mountain sides, and when the stars came forth behind the black peaks and ridges of the mountains. he tells us of his co-mates and himself:- We were a noisy crew; the sun in heaven Beheld not vales more beautiful than ours; Nor saw a band in happiness and joy Richer, or worthier of the ground they trod. I could record, with no reluctant voice, The woods of autumn, and their hazel bowers With milk-white clusters hung; the rod and line, True symbol of hope's foolishsness, whose strong And unreproved enchantment led us on By rocks and pools shut out from every star, All the green summer, to forlorn cascades, Among the windings hid of mountain brooks. Unfading recollections! at this hour The heart is almost mine with which I felt, From some hill-top on sunny afternoons, The paper kite, high among fleecy clouds, Pull at her rein, like an impertuous courser; Or, from the meadows sent on gusty days, Behold her breast the wind, then suddenly Dashed headlong, and rejected by the storm. But we pass from this robust and healthy boyhood - not unmindful that Cowper, at Westminster, "dared not look above the knee-strings of the tyrant who bullied and tortured him" - to the description of Wordsorth's life at Cambridge. The change of home for school is often a yearning sorrow: that of school for college is frequently a vague surprise. The freedom of manhood is at once realised, its responsibilities are remotely apprehended. There is a touch of humour as well as of deep melancholy in the account of Wordsworth's university career. The hardy and uncouth lad became at once what in those days was called, we believe, "a maccaroni." But Wordsworth could not even be "dandified" without an allusion to nature. He describes himself after visiting "tutor and tailor," as --- atired In splendid garb, with hose of silk, and hair Powdered like rimy trees, when frost is keen. It is remarkable too that for the first and only time in his life Wordsworth got "bouzy" at Cambridge. Nor was the occasion less strange than the fact itself. He sacrificed to Bacchus in honour of John Milton the water- |
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