wheeled about,
   Proud and exulting like an untired horse
   That cares not for his home, and, shod with steel,
   Had hissed along the polished ice,

was continued, Mr. Rawnsley tells us, into manhood’s later day; and Mr. Rawnsley found many proofs that the skill the poet had gained, when

   Not seldom from the uproar he retired,
   Into a silent bay, or sportively
   Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng
   To cut across the reflex of a star,

was of such a kind as to astonish the natives among whom he dwelt.  The recollection of a fall he once had, when his skate caught on a stone, still lingers in the district.  A boy had been sent to sweep the snow from the White Moss Tarn for him.  ‘Did Mr. Wudsworth gie ye owt?’ he was asked, when he returned from his labour.  ’Na, but I seed him tumlle, though!’ was the answer.  ’He was a ter’ble girt skater, was Wudsworth now,’ says one of Mr. Rawnsley’s informants; ‘he would put one hand i’ his breast (he wore a frill shirt i’ them days), and t’other hand i’ his waistband, same as shepherds does to keep their hands warm, and he would stand up straight and sway and swing away grandly.’

Of his poetry they did not think much, and whatever was good in it they ascribed to his wife, his sister, and Hartley Coleridge.  He wrote poetry, they said, ’because he couldn’t help it—­because it was his hobby’—­for sheer love, and not for money.  They could not understand his doing work ‘for nowt,’ and held his occupation in somewhat light esteem because it did not bring in ‘a deal o’ brass to the pocket.’  ’Did you ever read his poetry, or see any books about in the farmhouses?’ asked Mr. Rawnsley.  The answer was curious:  ’Ay, ay, time or two.  But ya’re weel aware there’s potry and potry.  There’s potry wi’ a li’le bit pleasant in it, and potry sic as a man can laugh at or the childer understand, and some as takes a deal of mastery to make out what’s said, and a deal of Wudsworth’s was this sort, ye kna.  You could tell fra the man’s faace his potry would niver have no laugh in it.  His potry was quite different work from li’le Hartley.  Hartley ’ud goa running along beside o’ the brooks and mak his, and goa in the first oppen door and write what he had got upo’ paper.  But Wudsworth’s potry was real hard stuff, and bided a deal of makking, and he’d keep it in his head for long enough.  Eh, but it’s queer, mon, different ways folks hes of making potry now . . .  Not but what Mr. Wudsworth didn’t stand very high, and was a well-spoken man enough.’  The best criticism on Wordsworth that Mr. Rawnsley heard was this:  ’He was an open-air man, and a great critic of trees.’

There are many useful and well-written essays in Professor Knight’s volume, but Mr. Rawnsley’s is far the most interesting of all.  It gives us a graphic picture of the poet as he appeared in outward semblance and manner to those about whom he wrote.