It is almost a shock to one who knows Wordsworth only by his calm and noble poetry to read that he was of a moody and violent temper, and that his mother despaired of him alone among her five children.  She died when he was but eight years old, but not till she had exerted an influence which lasted all his life, so that he could remember her as “the heart of all our learnings and our loves.”  The father died some six years later, and the orphan was taken in charge by relatives, who sent him to school at Hawkshead, in the beautiful lake region.  Here, apparently, the unroofed school of nature attracted him more than the discipline of the classics, and he learned more eagerly from the flowers and hills and stars than from his books; but one must read Wordsworth’s own record, in The Prelude, to appreciate this.  Three things in this poem must impress even the casual reader:  first, Wordsworth loves to be alone, and is never lonely, with nature; second, like every other child who spends much time alone in the woods and fields, he feels the presence of some living spirit, real though unseen, and companionable though silent; third, his impressions are exactly like our own, and delightfully familiar.  When he tells of the long summer day spent in swimming, basking in the sun, and questing over the hills; or of the winter night when, on his skates, he chased the reflection of a star in the black ice; or of his exploring the lake in a boat, and getting suddenly frightened when the world grew big and strange,—­in all this he is simply recalling a multitude of our own vague, happy memories of childhood.  He goes out into the woods at night to tend his woodcock snares; he runs across another boy’s snares, follows them, finds a woodcock caught, takes it, hurries away through the night.  And then,

I heard among the solitary hills
Low breathings coming after me, and sounds
Of undistinguishable motion.

That is like a mental photograph.  Any boy who has come home through the woods at night will recognize it instantly.  Again he tells as of going bird’s-nesting on the cliffs: 

            Oh, when I have hung
    Above the raven’s nest, by knots of grass
    And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock
    But ill-sustained, and almost (so it seemed)
    Suspended by the blast that blew amain,
    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 not a sky
    Of earth,—­and with what motion moved the clouds!

No man can read such records without finding his own boyhood again, and his own abounding joy of life, in the poet’s early impressions.