ercer in Penrith. His paternal ancestors had been
settled immemorially at Penistone in Yorkshire, whence his grandfather
had emigrated to Westmorland. His mother, a woman of piety and wisdom,
died in March 1778, being then in her thirty-second year. His father,
who never entirely cast off the depression occasioned by her death,
survived her but five years, dying in December 1783, when William was
not quite fourteen years old.

The poet's early childhood was passed partly at Cockermouth, and
partly with his maternal grandfather at Penrith. His first teacher
appears to have been Mrs. Anne Birkett, a kind of Shenstone's
Schoolmistress, who practised the memory of her pupils, teaching them
chiefly by rote, and not endeavouring to cultivate their reasoning
faculties, a process by which children are apt to be converted from
natural logicians into impertinent sophists. Among his schoolmates
here was Mary Hutchinson, who afterwards became his wife.

In 1778 he was sent to a school founded by Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of
York, in the year 1585, at Hawkshead in Lancashire. Hawkshead is a
small market-town in the vale of Esthwaite, about a third of a mile
north-west of the lake. Here Wordsworth passed nine years, among a
people of simple habits and scenery of a sweet and pastoral dignity.
His earliest intimacies were with the mountains, lakes, and streams of
his native district, and the associations with which his mind was
stored during its most impressible period were noble and pure. The
boys were boarded among the dames of the village, thus enjoying a
freedom from scholastic restraints, which could be nothing but
beneficial in a place where the temptations were only to sports that
hardened the body, while they fostered a love of nature in the spirit
and habits of observation in the mind. Wordsworth's ordinary
amusements here were hunting and fishing, rowing, skating, and long
walks around the lake and among the hills, with an occasional scamper
on horseback.[42] His life as a schoolboy was favourable also to his
poetic development, in being identified with that of the people among
whom he lived. Among men of simple habits, and where there are small
diversities of condition, the feelings and passions are displayed with
less restraint, and the young poet grew acquainted with that primal
human basis of character where the Muse finds firm foothold, and to
which he ever afterward cleared his way through all the overlying
drift of co