but I never heard of his success.  On the wall of the room containing the library is a tablet, recording the names of several masters.  There also, in an old oak chest, is kept the original charter of the school.  The oak benches downstairs are covered with the names or initials of the boys, deeply cut; and, amongst them, the name of William Wordsworth—­but not those of his brothers Richard, John, or Christopher—­may be seen.  For further details as to the Hawkshead School, see the ‘Life’ of the Poet in this edition.  Towards the close of last century, when Wordsworth and his three brothers were educated there, the school was one of the best educational institutions in the north of England.—­Ed.]

[Footnote N:  Compare in the lines beginning “She was a Phantom of delight” p. 2: 

  ’Creature not too bright or good
  For human nature’s daily food.’

Ed.]

[Footnote O:  Compare book iv. ll. 50 and 383, with relative notes—­Ed.]

[Footnote P:  Compare in ‘Fidelity’, p. 45: 

  ’There sometimes doth a leaping fish
  Send through the tarn a lonely cheer.’

Ed.]

[Footnote Q:  Compare the ‘Ode, Intimations of Immortality’, stanza v.—­Ed.]

[Footnote R:  Compare, in ‘Tintern Abbey’, vol. ii. p.54: 

                      ’That time is past,
  And all its aching joys are now no more,
  And all its dizzy raptures.’

And in the ‘Ode, Intimations of Immortality’, vol. viii.: 

’What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight.’

Ed.]

[Footnote S:  This friend of his boyhood, with whom Wordsworth spent these “delightful hours,” is as unknown as is the immortal Boy of Windermere, who blew “mimic hootings to the silent owls,” and who sleeps in the churchyard “above the village school” of Hawkshead, and the Lucy of the Goslar poems.  Compare, however, p. 163.  Wordsworth may refer to John Fleming of Rayrigg, with whom he used to take morning walks round Esthwaite: 

    ’... five miles
  Of pleasant wandering ...’

Ed.]

[Footnote T:  Esthwaite.—­Ed.]

[Footnote U:  Probably they were passages from Goldsmith, or Pope, or writers of their school.  The verses which he wrote upon the completion of the second century of the foundation of the school were, as he himself tells us, “a tame imitation of Pope’s versification, and a little in his style.”—­Ed.]

* * * * *

SUB-FOOTNOTE ON THE TEXT

[Sub-Footnote a:  Wordsworth studied Spanish during the winter he spent at Orleans (1792).  Don Quixote was one of the books he had read when at the Hawkshead school.—­Ed.]

* * * * *

BOOK SIXTH

CAMBRIDGE AND THE ALPS