And sweet sensations that throw back our life, And almost make remotest infancy

A visible scene, on which the sun is shining.1

The islands in Windermere, which were visited on summer half-holidays, are easily identified. The two last referred to in the following extract are certainly the Lily of the Valley Island and Lady Holme respectively. The first may have been House Holme or Thomson's Holme. It is less likely to have been Belle Isle, from the greater size of the latter, and from its hardly being a "sister isle" to the one where the lily of the valley still grows "beneath the oaks' umbrageous covert." The "ruins of the shrine" have now disappeared as completely from Lady Holme in Windermere as from St. Herbert's Island in Derwentwater.

When summer came,

Our pastime was, on bright half-holidays,
To sweep along the plain of Windermere
With rival oars; and the selected bourne
Was now an Island musical with birds
That sang and ceased not; now a Sister Isle
Beneath the oaks' umbrageous covert, sown
With lilies of the valley like a field;

And now a third small Island, where survived
In solitude the ruins of a shrine

Once to Our Lady dedicate, and served
Daily with chaunted rites.2

The description of the inn,

Midway on long Winander's eastern shore,
Within the crescent of a pleasant bay,3

1 The Prelude, book i. p. 29. 2 Ibid. book ii. p. 35. 3 Ibid. book ii. p. 39.

calls for no special remark; but one of the incidents in the return home of the youthful party, with its allusion to Robert Greenwood, the 66 minstrel of the troop," afterwards Senior Fellow of Trinity, Cambridge, is too characteristic to be passed over.

But, ere nightfall,

When in our pinnace we returned at leisure
Over the shadowy lake, and to the beach
Of some small island steered our course with one,
The Minstrel of the Troop, and left him there,
And rowed off gently, while he blew his fute
Alone upon the rock-oh, then, the calm
And dead still water lay upon my mind
Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky,
Never before so beautiful, sank down
Into my heart, and held me like a dream!
Thus were my sympathies enlarged, and thus
Daily the common range of visible things
Grew dear to me: already I began

To love the sun; a boy I loved the sun,
Not as I since have loved him, as a pledge
And surety of our earthly life, a light
Which we behold and feel we are alive;
Nor for his bounty to so many worlds-
But for this cause, that I had seen him lay
His beauty on the morning hills, had seen
The western mountain touch his setting orb,
In many a thoughtless hour, when, from excess
Of happiness, my blood appeared to flow
For its own pleasure, and I breathed with joy.1

For his teacher in the Hawkshead school, the Reverend William Taylor, Wordsworth cherished the warmest affection. It was the farewell which this master took of his pupils on his deathbed (of

1 The Prelude, p. 40.

whom the poet was one) that suggested the lines addressed to the scholars of Hawkshead, which are inseparably associated with that village school. The following lines occur in the poem.

Here did he sit confined for hours;

But he could see the woods and plains,
Could hear the wind and mark the showers
Come streaming down the streaming panes.
Now stretched beneath his grass-green mound
He rests a prisoner of the ground.

He loved the breathing air,

He loved the sun, but if it rise
Or set, to him where now he lies,
Brings not a moment's care.

The three poems, respectively entitled, Matthew, The Two April Mornings, and The Fountain, are full of allusions to Hawkshead, and his teachers; though Wordsworth tells us that the "schoolmaster was made up of several, like the wanderer in The Excursion" (I. F. MS.) I have found no tradition of a "Leonard's Rock."

There are many streams in the neighbourhood to which the following stanza may refer which is finer than the refrain of Tennyson's Brook—

Men may come, and men may go,
But I go on for ever.

The particular stream has not been identified. It is most likely, however, that it is the "famous brook" of The Prelude at a point higher up amongst the fells.

No check, no stay, this streamlet fears;
How merrily it goes!

'Twill murmur on a thousand years,
And flow as now it flows.

The following sonnet, composed in 1806, is a reminiscence of the Vale of Hawkshead, and its brooks :

"Beloved Vale !" I said, "When I shall con Those many records of my childish years, Remembrance of myself and of my peers Will press me down to think of what is gone Will be an awful thought, if life have one.” But, when into the Vale I came, no fears Distressed me; from mine eyes escaped no tears; Deep thought, or dread remembrance, had I none. By doubts and thousand petty fancies crost I stood, of simple shame the blushing Thrall; So narrow seemed the brooks, the fields so small! A Juggler's balls old Time about him tossed; I looked, I stared, I smiled, I laughed; and all The weight of sadness was in wonder lost.

Those who have tried to realise Wordsworth's life at Hawkshead will remember that his

morning walks

Were early. Oft before the hour of school
I travelled round our little lake, five miles
Of pleasant wandering.1

He also tells us

I would walk alone,

Under the quiet stars, and at that time,
Have felt whate'er there is of power in sound
To breathe an elevated mood, by form
Or image unprofaned; and I would stand,
If the night blackened with a coming storm,
Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are
The ghostly language of the ancient earth,
Or make their dim abode in distant winds.
Thence did I drink the visionary power; 2

Nor seldom did I lift our cottage latch
Far earlier, ere one smoke-wreath had risen
From human dwelling, or the vernal thrusħ
Was audible; and sate among the woods
Alone upon some jutting eminence,

At the first gleam of dawn-light, when the Vale,
Yet slumbering, lay in utter solitude.

How shall I seek the origin! where find
Faith in the marvellous things which then I felt?
Oft in these moments such a holy calm
Would overspread my soul, that bodily eyes
Were utterly forgotten, and what I saw
Appeared like something in myself, a dream,
A prospect in the mind.

A passage follows this in The Prelude which refers to the way in which, even in his seventeenth year, he received the influences of Nature, and dealt with them. It gives us a key to all that is most distinctive in Wordsworth's poetry, and is so superior to the vagueness of Goethe's sentence about the Poet, and

The stream of song that out of his bosom springs, And to his heart the world back coiling brings,

that I may quote it also.

An auxiliar light
Came from my mind, which on the setting sun
Bestowed new splendour; the melodious birds,
The fluttering breezes, fountains that run on
Murmuring so sweetly in themselves, obeyed
A like dominion, and the midnight storm
Grew darker in the presence of my eye : 2

From Nature and her overflowing soul,
I had received so much, that all my thoughts

1 The Prelude, book ii. p. 47. 2 Ibid. book ii. p. 48.