In Wordsworth’s mental history two periods are especially prominent. The first was his school-time at Hawkshead, by Esthwaite Lake, eight years in all. The second was the mental crisis through which he passed after his return from France till he settled with his sister in the south of England, and ultimately at Grasmere. The first was the spring-time of his soul—a fair spring-time, in which all the young impulses and intuitions were first awakened, when the colors were laid in and deeply engrained into every fibre of his being. The second was the trial time, the crisis of his spirit, in which all his early impulses, impressions, intuitions, were brought out into distinct consciousness, questioned and tested—vindicated by reason, and embraced by will as his guiding principles for life—in which, as one may say, all that had hitherto existed inwardly in fluid vapor was gathered up, condensed, solidified into deliberate substance and permanent purpose. A healthful, happy, blissful school-time was that which Wordsworth spent by Esthwaite Lake—natural, blameless, pure, as ever boy spent. School rules were few, discipline was light, school hours were short, and, these over, the boys were free to roam where they willed, far or near, high and low, early and late, sometimes far into the frosty starlight. Then it was that Nature first “Peopled his mind with forms sublime and fair,” came to him like instincts unawares, as he went about his usual sports with his companions. Rowing on the lake, snaring woodcocks among the hill copses by night, skating by starlight on the frozen lake, climbing crags to harry the raven’s nest, scudding on horseback over Furness Sands:— “From week to week, from month to month, we lived A round of tumult.” In all this there was not anything lackadaisical, nor any maundering about Nature, but only the life you might expect in a hardy mountain-bred boy, with robust body and strong animal spirits. These things he shared with other boys. There was nothing special in them. But what was peculiar, eminently his own, was this—the feelings that sometimes came to him in the very midst of the wild hill sports—in the pauses of the boisterous games. There were times when, detached from his companions, alone in lonely places, he felt from within “Gleams like the flashing of a shield, the earth And common face of Nature spake to him Rememberable things.” During his later school years he tells us that he would walk alone under the quiet stars, and “Feel whate’er there is of power in sound To breathe an elevated mood, by form Or image unprofaned, and I would stand, In the night blackened with a coming storm, Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are The ghostly language of the ancient earth, Or make their dim abode in distant winds, Thence did I drink the visionary power.” He speaks, too, of a morning when he had stolen forth before even the birds were astir,