His mother, a woman, of piety and wisdom, died in March,
1778, being then in her thirty-second year. His father, who never
entirely cast off the depression occasioned by her death, survived her
but five years, dying in December, 1783, when William was not quite
fourteen years old.
The poet's early childhood was passed partly at Cockermouth, and partly
with his maternal grandfather at Penrith. His first teacher appears to
have been Mrs. Anne Birkett, a kind of Shenstone's Schoolmistress, who
practised the memory of her pupils, teaching them chiefly by rote, and
not endeavoring to cultivate their reasoning faculties, a process by
which children are apt to be converted from natural logicians into
impertinent sophists. Among his schoolmates here was Mary Hutchinson, who
afterwards became his wife.
In 1778 he was sent to a school founded by Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of
York, in the year 1585, at Hawkshead in Lancashire. Hawkshead is a small
market-town in the vale of Esthwaite, about a third of a mile northwest
of the lake. Here Wordsworth passed nine years, among a people of simple
habits and scenery of a sweet and pastoral dignity. His earliest
intimacies were with the mountains, lakes, and streams of his native
district, and the associations with which his mind was stored during its
most impressible period were noble and pure.
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