nd soul, and a tender heart. It will not be said
that nature keeps these her noblest gifts for human beings born in this
or that condition of life: she gives them to her favourites--for so, in
the highest sense, they are to whom such gifts befall; and not
unfrequently, in an obscure place, of one of the FORTUNATI

"The fulgent head
Star-bright appears."

Wordsworth appropriately places the birth of such a being in a humble
dwelling in the Highlands of Scotland.

"Among the hills of Atholl he was born;
Where on a small hereditary farm,
An unproductive slip of barren ground,
His parents, with their numerous offspring, dwelt;
A virtuous household, though exceeding poor."

His childhood was nurtured at home in Christian love and truth--and
acquired other knowledge at a winter school; for in summer he "tended
cattle on the hill,"--

"that stood
Sole building on a mountain's dreary edge."

And the influence of such education and occupation among such natural
objects, Wordsworth expounds in some as fine poetry as ever issued from
the cells of philosophic thought.

"So the foundations of his mind were laid."

The boy had small need of books--

"For many a tale
Traditionary, round the mountains hung,
And many a legend, peopling the dark woods,
Nourish'd Imagination in her growth,
And gave the mind that apprehensive power
By which she is made quick to recognise
The moral properties and scope of things."

But in the Manse there were books--and he read

"Whate'er the minister's old shelf supplied,
The life and death of martyrs, who sustain'd,
With will inflexible, those fearful pangs,
Triumphantly display'd in records left
Of persecution and the Covenant."

Can you not believe that by the time he was as old as you were when you
used to ride to the races on a pony, by the side of your sire the
Squire, this boy was your equal in knowledge, though you had a private
tutor all to yourself, and were then a promising lad, as indeed you are
now after the lapse of a quarter of a century? True, as yet he "had
small Latin, and no Greek;" but the elements of these languages may be
learned--trust us--by slow degrees--by the mind rejoicing in the
consciousness of its growing faculties--during leisure hours from other
studies--as they were by the Atholl adolescent. A Scholar--i