nt in punishments inflicted, I had
become perverse and obstinate in defying chastisement, and rather
proud of it than otherwise.' This last anecdote is as happily typical
as a bit of Greek mythology which always prefigured the lives of
heroes in the stories of their childhood. Just so do we find him
afterward striking his defiant lash through the hooped petticoat of
the artificial style of poetry, and proudly unsubdued by the
punishment of the Reviewers.

Of his college life the chief record is to be found in _The Prelude_.
He did not distinguish himself as a scholar, and if his life had any
incidents, they were of that interior kind which rarely appear in
biography, though they may be of controlling influence upon the life.
He speaks of reading Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton while at
Cambridge,[44] but no reflection from them is visible in his earliest
published poems. The greater part of his vacations was spent in his
native Lake-country, where his only sister, Dorothy, was the companion
of his rambles. She was a woman of large natural endowments, chiefly
of the receptive kind, and had much to do with the formation and
tendency of the poet's mind. It was she who called forth the shyer
sensibilities of his nature, and taught an originally harsh and
austere imagination to surround itself with fancy and feeling, as the
rock fringes itself with a sun-spray of ferns. She was his first
public, and belonged to that class of prophetically appreciative
temperaments whose apparent office it is to cheer the early solitude
of original minds with messages from the future. Through the greater
part of his life she continued to be a kind of poetical conscience to
him.

[44] _Prelude_, Book III.

Wordsworth's last college vacation was spent in a foot journey upon
the Continent (1790). In January 1791 he took his degree of B.A., and
left Cambridge. During the summer of this year he visited Wales, and,
after declining to enter upon holy orders under the plea that he was
not of age for ordination, went over to France in November, and
remained during the winter at Orleans. Here he became intimate with
the republican General Beaupuis, with whose hopes and aspirations he
ardently sympathized. In the spring of 1792 he was at Blois, and
returned thence to Orleans, which he finally quitted in October for
Paris. He remained here as long as he could with safety, and at the
close of the year went back to England, thus, perhaps, escaping the