nventionalism. The dalesmen were a primitive and hardy race
who kept alive the traditions and often the habits of a more
picturesque time. A common level of interests and social standing
fostered unconventional ways of thought and speech, and friendly human
sympathies. Solitude induced reflection, a reliance of the mind on its
own resources, and individuality of character. Where everybody knew
everybody, and everybody's father had known everybody's father, the
interest of man in man was not likely to become a matter of cold
hearsay and distant report. When death knocked at any door in the
hamlet, there was an echo from every fireside, and a wedding dropped
its white flowers at every threshold. There was not a grave in the
churchyard but had its story; not a crag or glen or aged tree
untouched with some ideal hue of legend. It was here that Wordsworth
learned that homely humanity which gives such depth and sincerity to
his poems. Travel, society, culture, nothing could obliterate the deep
trace of that early training which enables him to speak directly to
the primitive instincts of man. He was apprenticed early to the
difficult art of being himself.

[42] _Prelude_, Book II.

At school he wrote some task-verses on subjects imposed by the master,
and also some voluntaries of his own, equally undistinguished by any
peculiar merit. But he seems to have made up his mind as early as in
his fourteenth year to become a poet.[43] 'It is recorded', says his
biographer vaguely, 'that the poet's father set him very early to
learn portions of the best English poets by heart, so that at an early
age he could repeat large portions of Shakespeare, Milton, and
Spenser.'

[43]

I to the muses have been bound,
These fourteen years, by strong indentures.

_Idiot Boy_ (1798).]

The great event of Wordsworth's schooldays was the death of his
father, who left what may be called a hypothetical estate, consisting
chiefly of claims upon the first Earl of Lonsdale, the payment of
which, though their justice was acknowledged, that nobleman contrived
in some unexplained way to elude so long as he lived. In October 1787
he left school for St. John's College, Cambridge. He was already, we
are told, a fair Latin scholar, and had made some progress in
mathematics. The earliest books we hear of his reading were _Don
Quixote_, _Gil Blas_, _Gulliver's Travels_, and the _Tale of a Tub_;
but