Early Life and Training.—­William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in 1770.  He went to school in his ninth year at Hawkshead, a village on the banks of Esthwaite Water, in the heart of the Lake Country.  The traveler who takes the pleasant journey on foot or coach from Windermere to Coniston, passes through Hawkshead, where he may see Wordsworth’s name cut in a desk of the school which he attended.  Of greater interest is the scenery which contributed so much to his education and aided his development into England’s greatest nature poet.

We learn from his autobiographical poem, The Prelude, what experiences molded him in boyhood.  He says that the—­

  “...common face of Nature spake to me
  Rememberable things.”

In this poem he relates how he absorbed into his inmost being the orange sky of evening, the curling mist, the last autumnal crocus, the “souls of lonely places,” and the huge peak, which terrified him at nightfall by seeming to stride after him and which awoke in him a—­

  “...dim and undermined sense
  Of unknown modes of being.”

[Illustration:  BOY OF WINANDER. From mural painting by H.O.  Walker, Congressional Library, Washington, D.C.]

In his famous lines on the “Boy of Winander,” Wordsworth tells how—­

“...the voice Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received Into the bosom of the steady lake.”

At the age of seventeen he entered Cambridge University, from which he was graduated after a four years’ course.  He speaks of himself there as a dreamer passing through a dream.  There came to him the strange feeling that he “was not for that hour nor for that place;” and yet he says that he was not unmoved by his daily association with the haunts of his illustrious predecessors, or of—­

  “Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven
  With the moon’s beauty and the moon’s soft pace,”

and of Milton whose soul seemed to Wordsworth “like a star.”

Influence of the French Revolution.—­His travels on the continent in his last vacation and after his graduation brought him in contact with the French Revolution, of which he felt the inspiring influence.  He was fond of children, and the sight of a poor little French peasant girl seems to have been one of the main causes leading him to become an ardent revolutionist. The Prelude tells in concrete fullness how he walked along the banks of the Loire with his friend, a French patriot:—­