Where everybody knew everybody, and
everybody's father had known everybody's father, the interest of man in
man was not likely to become a matter of cold hearsay and distant report
When death knocked at any door in the hamlet, there was an echo from
every fireside, and a wedding dropt its white flowers at every threshold.
There was not a grave in the churchyard but had its story, not a crag or
glen or aged tree untouched with some ideal hue of legend It was here
that Wordsworth learned that homely humanity which gives such depth and
sincerity to his poems. Travel, society, culture, nothing could
obliterate the deep trace of that early training which enables him to
speak directly to the primitive instincts of man. He was apprenticed
early to the difficult art of being himself.
At school he wrote some task-verses on subjects imposed by the master,
and also some voluntaries of his own, equally undistinguished by any
peculiar merit. But he seems to have made up his mind as early as in his
fourteenth year to become a poet.[326] "It is recorded," says his
biographer vaguely, "that the poet's father set him very early to learn
portions of the best English poets by heart, so that at an early age he
could repeat large portions of Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser."[327]
The great event of Wordsworth's school days was the death of his father,
who left what may be called a hypothetical estate, consisting chiefly of
claims upon the first Earl of Lonsdale, the payment of which, though
their justice was acknowledged, that nobleman contrived in some
unexplained way to elude so long as he lived.
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