But, possibly from some want of judgment in
punishments inflicted, I had become perverse and obstinate in defying
chastisement, and rather proud of it than otherwise." This last anecdote
is as happily typical as a bit of Greek mythology which always prefigured
the lives of heroes in the stories of their childhood. Just so do we find
him afterward striking his defiant lash through the hooped petticoat of
the artificial style of poetry, and proudly unsubdued by the punishment
of the Reviewers.
Of his college life the chief record is to be found in "The Prelude." He
did not distinguish himself as a scholar, and if his life had any
incidents, they were of that interior kind which rarely appear in
biography, though they may be of controlling influence upon the life. He
speaks of reading Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton while at Cambridge,[328]
but no reflection from them is visible in his earliest published poems.
The greater part of his vacations was spent in his native Lake-country,
where his only sister, Dorothy, was the companion of his rambles. She was
a woman of large natural endowments, chiefly of the receptive kind, and
had much to do with the formation and tendency of the poet's mind. It was
she who called forth the shyer sensibilities of his nature, and taught an
originally harsh and austere imagination to surround itself with fancy
and feeling, as the rock fringes itself with a sun-spray of ferns.
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