s away through the night. And then,

I heard among the solitary hills
Low breathings coming after me, and sounds
Of undistinguishable motion.

That is like a mental photograph. Any boy who has come home through the
woods at night will recognize it instantly. Again he tells as of going
bird's-nesting on the cliffs:

Oh, when I have hung
Above the raven's nest, by knots of grass
And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock
But ill-sustained, and almost (so it seemed)
Suspended by the blast that blew amain,
Shouldering the naked crag,--oh, at that time,
While 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!

No man can read such records without finding his own boyhood again, and his
own abounding joy of life, in the poet's early impressions.

The second period of Wordsworth's life begins with his university course at
Cambridge, in 1787. In the third book of _The Prelude_ we find a
dispassionate account of student life, with its trivial occupations, its
pleasures and general aimlessness. Wordsworth proved to be a very ordinary
scholar, following his own genius rather than the curriculum, and looking
forward more eagerly to his vacation among the hills than to his
examinations. Perhaps the most interesting thing in his life at Cambridge
was his fellowship with the young political enthusiasts, whose spirit is
expressed in his remarkable poem on the French Revolution,--a poem which is
better than a volume of history to show the hopes and ambitions that
stirred all Europe in the first days of that mighty upheaval. Wordsworth
made two trips to France, in 1790 and 1791, seeing things chiefly through
the rosy spectacles of the young Oxford Republicans. On his second visit he
joined the Girondists, or the moderate Republicans, and only the decision
of his relatives, who cut off his allowance and hurried him back to
England, prevented his going headlong to the guillotine with the leaders of
his party. Two things rapidly cooled Wordsworth's revolutionary enthusiasm,
and ended the only dramatic interest of his placid life. One was the
excesses of the Revolution itself, and especially the execution of Louis
XVI; the other was the rise of Napoleon, and the slavish adulation accorded
by France to this most vulgar and dangerous of tyrants. His