THE COLLEGE DAYS OF WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. "Die Stätte die ein guter Mensch betrat Goethe. every abode of a great soul remains hallowed to those who come after, how full of consecration is a College such as ours, the fostering-place of Burleigh and Ben Jonson, of Falkland and Strafford, of Wilberforce and Henry Martyn! And yet among all the memories which hover about our staircases, none is more holy than that of the young Northcountryman who took his degree and left us in this Lent Term a hundred years ago. He had competed for no University honours he had received none, his friends were already disappointed in him and feared he would never come to good. Yet even at that moment he had an unspoken message for mankind, so deep, so true, so full of pure joy that the utterance of it gave a new meaning to the world! To us who know what lay within him, Wordsworth as he was on leaving College is a far more interesting character than he could have been to his contemporaries. And now that this centenary has come, we may well find a pleasure in reviewing those years of half-conscious preparation in which he wore our gown* and trod our courts. Johnians at that time (except scholars on certain foundations) wore in common with the undergraduates of seven other colleges a sleeveless gown called a curtain. Our present distinctive gowns date from 1835. Chr. Wordsworth, Social Life (1874), pp. 524, 693. VOL. XVI. KKK For such an attempt we get abundant aid from the Prelude, that 'song divine of high and passionate thoughts, to their own music chanted,' in which Wordsworth analyses the history of his own mind with that absolute sincerity which is so rare in others and in him so inevitable. If we add to the spiritual revelations of the Prelude a few records of a more everyday kind from other sources, we shall have a tolerably complete picture of our poet's undergraduate life. In order, however, to understand what Wordsworth was when he entered St John's, it is necessary to touch very lightly on his earlier years. He was born at Cockermouth in Cumberland on April 7th 1770, the second son of an attorney-at-law. Of his three brothers we need only mention here that the youngest, Christopher, afterwards became Master of Trinity. Dorothy Wordsworth, his only sister, plays a much larger part in the life of the future poet. Richly endowed with ardour and imagination, from childish days onwards she was the beloved companion of her brother, and it was from her that the rather intractable boy first caught that spirit of gentleness, which at last transformed him to itself. "Oh! pleasant, pleasant were the days, Together chased the Butterfly! A very hunter did I rush Upon the prey with leaps and springs I followed on from brake to bush; Wordsworth's parents both died during his boyhood, his mother in 1778, his father five years later. On his mother's death he was sent at the age of eight to school at Hawkshead, a village lying between Coniston and Windermere-close to Esthwaite Water. The school, which had been founded two centuries before by Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of York, was in Wordsworth's time one of the most frequented in the Northern counties. It had one feature which to us seems strange enough: the boys were generally boarded out in the cottages of the villagers. But in Wordsworth's case this custom bore rich fruit: for it was in his cottage home at Hawkshead that he learnt to love the simple folk around him, the race of self-reliant pious 'statesmen' whose memory lives in Michael as indeed in all the poet's works. It may be imagined that in such circumstances the school-years were a time of great freedom. When lessons were over, magisterial supervision ceased: and everyone was free to climb, fish, skate-as the season allowed-or to beguile the indoor hours with such reading as fell in his way. Wordsworth, rudely but vigorously formed, entered with eagerness into every sport and every adventure: and with a strong understanding still unsatisfied, turned with equal eagerness to the world of books. "I read," he says, "all Fielding's works, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and any part of Swift that I liked,-Gulliver's Travels and the Tale of a Tub being both much to my taste." The hours spent in school, though we hear little of them, seem in his case not to have been wasted, and to one of his schoolmasters, the Rev William Taylor M.A., he was warmly attached. He recalls in after days how he had been summoned by his master to take farewell of him upon his death-bed: "I kissed his cheek before he died," and the poem of Matthew enshrines the same affection. Still one must conclude that it was not amid the 'murmurs of the village school' that William Wordsworth received the most precious influences of his boyhood, but rather in his idler hours among the solemn hills and shining lakes. In such surroundings, whatever was the excitement of the moment, rock-climbing-the snaring of woodcock-skating-it mattered not-now and again in some sudden pause the very spirit of the scene around was borne in upon his soul, its weird terror, its glorious beauty, its ineffable calm. "Oh at that time While on the perilous ridge I hung alone With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind "Thus oft amid those scenes of vulgar joy Gleams like the flashing of a shield, the earth It is just those moments of initiation which fixed the destiny of the Hawkshead schoolboy. The strong, untameable, half-instructed lad had already heard the still small voice of Nature whispering to his heart, already with a strange awe he had seen the beauty of the world. Happily for him and for us he was 'not disobedient unto the heavenly vision': for his eyes it never faded into the 'light of common day.' Rather, let us hold, it stayed with him as a seal of consecration until the boy who had been of 'a stiff, moody, and violent temper' grew into the divinely softened man who could say in all simplicity— "To me the meanest flower that blows can give We can now imagine the youth, ordinary enough to the common gaze, but already beckoned to by powers invisible, who in October 1787 left his native region in the north to be enrolled as a member of our College and University. He had visited York on his way hither, "It seemed to suck us in with an eddy's force. The rooms which were assigned him at St John's and which remained his, it would seem, during his whole residence are described in the Prelude in lines familiar to all Johnians. "The Evangelist St John my patron was: Of Newton with his prism and silent face, Voyaging through strange seas of Thought alone." This passage gives us almost all we need for determining which particular set of rooms was Wordsworth's. It was approached from the First Court, it was 'right' over the kitchen, it had an outlook towards |