In 1807 it was, at the beginning of winter, that I first saw William Wordsworth. I have already mentioned[89] that I had introduced myself to his notice by letter as early as the spring of 1803. To this hour it has continued, I believe, a mystery to Wordsworth why it was that I suffered an interval of four and a half years to slip away before availing myself of the standing invitation with which I had been honoured to the poet's house. Very probably he accounted for this delay by supposing that the new-born liberty of an Oxford life, with its multiplied enjoyments, acting upon a boy just emancipated from the restraints of a school, and, in one hour, elevated into what we Oxonians so proudly and so exclusively denominate "a man,"[90] might have tempted me into pursuits alien from the pure intellectual passions which had so powerfully mastered my youthful heart some years before. Extinguished such a passion could not be; nor could he think so, if remembering the fervour with which I had expressed it, the sort of "nympholepsy" which had seized upon me, and which, in some imperfect way, I had avowed with reference to the very lakes and mountains amongst which the scenery of this most original poetry had chiefly grown up and moved. The very names of the ancient hills--Fairfield, Seat Sandal, Helvellyn, Blencathara, Glaramara; the names of the sequestered glens--such as Borrowdale, Martindale, Mardale, Wasdale, and Ennerdale; but, above all, the shy pastoral recesses, not garishly in the world's eye, like Windermere or Derwentwater, but lurking half unknown to the traveller of that day--Grasmere, for instance, the lovely abode of the poet himself, solitary, and yet sowed, as it were, with a thin diffusion of humble dwellings--here a scattering, and there a clustering, as in the starry heavens--sufficient to afford, at every turn and angle, human remembrances and memorials of time-honoured affections, or of passions (as the "Churchyard amongst the Mountains" will amply demonstrate) not wanting even in scenic and tragical interest: these were so many local spells upon me, equally poetic and elevating with the Miltonic names of Valdarno and Vallombrosa. [89] _Ante_, p. 59.--M. [90] At the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where the town is viewed as a mere ministerial appendage to the numerous colleges--the civic Oxford, for instance, existing for the sake of the academic Oxford, and not _vice versâ_--it has naturally happened that the students honour with the name of "_a man_" him only who wears a cap and gown. Deep are the voices which seem to call, deep is the lesson which would be taught, even to the most thoughtless of men, "Could field, or grove, or any spot of earth, Show to his eye an image of the pangs Which it hath witnessed; render back an echo Of the sad steps by which it hath been trod."[91] [91] See the divine passage (in the Sixth Book of "The Excursion") beginning--