Sent to school at Hawkshead at eight
years old, Wordsworth's scene was transferred to the other extremity
of the lake district. It was in this quaint old town, on the banks
of Esthwaite Water, that the "fair seed-time of his soul" was passed;
it was here that his boyish delight in exercise and adventure grew,
and melted in its turn into a more impersonal yearning, a deeper
absorption into the beauty and the wonder of the world. And even the
records of his boyish amusements come to us each on a background of
Nature's majesty and calm. Setting springs for woodcock on the
grassy moors at night, at nine years old, he feels himself "a
trouble to the peace" that dwells among the moon and stars overhead;
and when he has appropriated a woodcock caught by somebody else,
"sounds of undistinguishable motion" embody the viewless pursuit of
Nemesis among the solitary hills. In the perilous search for the
raven's nest, as he hangs on the face of the naked crags of Yewdale,
he feels for the first time that sense of detachment from external
things which a position of strange unreality will often force on the
mind.
Oh, at that time
When 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!
The innocent rapine of _nutting_ taught him to feel that there is a
spirit in the woods--a presence which too rude a touch of ours will
desecrate and destroy.
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