To understand what Wordsworth did as an interpreter of Nature, we must bear in mind the experience through which he passed, the natural gifts and the mental discipline which fitted him to be so. He was sprung from a hardy North of England stock that had lived for generations in Yorkshire, afterwards in Cumberland, in a social place intermediate between the squires and the yeomen, and from both his parents he had received the inheritance of a moral nature that was healthy, frugal, and robust. Early left an orphan, with three brothers and one sole sister, his childish recollections attached themselves rather to school than to home. At the age of eight he went with his brothers to Hawkshead, “an antique village, standing a little way to the west of Windermere, on its own lake of Esthwaite, and possessing an ancient and once famous grammar school.” There he boarded with a humble village dame, and attended the school by day; but it was a school in which our modern high-pressure system was unknown, and which left the boys ample leisure to wander late and early by the lake-margins, through the copses, and on the mountain-sides. Of the village dame under whose roof he lodged he has left a pleasing portrait in “The Prelude.” The early and not the least beautiful part of that poem, and many of his most delightful shorter poems, refer to things seen and felt at that time. For, as the late Arthur Clough has truly said, “it was then and there beyond a doubt, that the substantive Wordsworth was formed; it was then and there that the tall rock and sounding cataract haunted him like a passion, and that his genius and whole being united and identified itself with external Nature.” From this primitive village school, he passed like other north-country lads, to Cambridge, where he spent three years, the least profitable years of his life, if any years are unprofitable to a man like him. More profit he got from summer visits to his own country, Hawkshead, and his mother’s relations, and especially from a walking tour through France, Switzerland, and the Italian lakes,—regions then but little trod by Englishmen. After graduating at Cambridge he gladly left it in 1791 to plunge headlong into the first fervor of the French Revolution.