=Wordsworth’s Recognition of his Opportunities.=—Wordsworth tells us of a much more rough-and-tumble bringing up. When he was nine, he was sent to the Grammar School in the little village of Hawkshead and lodged with Dame Tyson in the cottage many of us know; and found most things, at home and abroad, congenial to his soul. He had no lessons in riding and skating, hockey and tennis; but no doubt the other boys made it plain to the little chap that he must do as they did or be thought a fool. But then he went to school a hardy youngster; his mother had let her little boy _live_:— “Oh, many a time have I, a five years’ child, In a small mill-race severed from his stream, Made one long bathing of a summer’s day; Basked in the sun, and plunged, and basked again.” Of his childhood, he says:— “Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up Fostered alike by beauty and by fear.” Ere he had told ten birthdays, he was transplanted to that ‘belovèd Vale’ of which he says:— “There were we let loose For sports of wider range.” What was there those Hawkshead boys did not do! He tells us of times,— “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.” The boys skated:— “All shod with steel, We hissed along the polished ice in games Confederate, imitative of the chase And woodland pleasures,—the resounding horn, The pack loud chiming, and the hunted hare.” They played:— “From week to week, from month to month, we lived A round of tumult. Duly were our games Prolonged in summer till the daylight failed.” They boated:— “When summer came, Our pastime was, on bright half-holidays, To sweep along the plain of Windermere With rival oars.... In such a race So ended disappointment could be none, Uneasiness, or pain, or jealousy: We rested in the shade, all pleased alike, Conquered and conqueror.” The young Wordsworth, too, had his essays on horseback when he and his schoolmates came back rich from the half-yearly holidays and hired horses from ‘the courteous innkeeper,’ and off they went, ‘proud to curb, and eager to spur on, the galloping steed’; and then, the home-coming:— “Through the walls we flew And down the valley, and, a circuit made In wantonness of heart, through rough and smooth We scampered homewards.” CHAPTER XVIII WE ARE EDUCATED BY OUR INTIMACIES PART II.—_FURTHER AFFINITIES_ =Affinity for Material: Ruskin’s Opportunities.=—Of the _Affinity for Material_, the joy of handling and making, Wordsworth says little, but Ruskin sent out feelers in this direction which began with ‘two boxes of well-cut wooden bricks’ and culminated, perhaps, in the road-making of the Oxford days:—