n your sense
of the word--he might not be called, even when he had reached his
seventeenth year, though probably he would have puzzled you in Livy and
Virgil; nor of English poetry had he read much--the less the better for
such a mind--at that age, and in that condition--for

"Accumulated feelings press'd his heart
With still increasing weight; he was o'erpower'd
By nature, by the turbulence subdued
Of his own mind, by mystery and hope,
And the first virgin passion of a soul
Communing with the glorious Universe."

But he had read Poetry--ay, the same Poetry that Wordsworth's self read
at the same age--and

"Among the hills
He gazed upon that mighty Orb of Song,
The divine Milton."

Thus endowed, and thus instructed,

"By Nature, that did never yet betray
The heart that loved her,"

the youth was "greater than he knew;" yet that there was something great
in, as well as about him, he felt--

"Thus daily thirsting in that lonesome life,"

for some diviner communication than had yet been vouchsafed to him by
the Giver and Inspirer of his restless Being.

"In dreams, in study, and in ardent thought,
Thus was he rear'd; much wanting to assist
The growth of intellect, yet gaining more,
And every moral feeling of his soul
Strengthen'd and braced, by breathing in content
The keen, the wholesome air of poverty,
And drinking from the well of homely life."

But he is in his eighteenth year, and

"Is summon'd to select the course
Of humble industry that promised best
To yield him no unworthy maintenance."

For a season he taught a village school, which many a fine, high, and
noble spirit has done and is doing; but he was impatient of the hills he
loved, and

"That stern yet kindly spirit, who constrains
The Savoyard to quit his native rocks,
The free-born Swiss to leave his narrow vales
(Spirit attach'd to regions mountainous
Like their own steadfast clouds), did now impel
His restless mind to look abroad with hope."

It had become his duty to choose a profession--a trade--a calling. He
was not a gentleman, mind ye, and had probably never so much as heard a
rumour of the existence of a silver fork: he had been born with a wooden
spoon in his mouth--and had lived, partly from choice and partly from
necessity, on a vegetable diet. He had not ten pounds in the world he
could cal