EARLY SELF CONSCIOUSNESS. Not seldom from the uproar I retired Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed When we had given our bodies to the wind, Wheeled by me-Even as if the Earth had rolled Behind me did they stretch in solemn train, Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.* 17 We have quoted these passages principally as illustrating how from his first years Wordsworth was followed by the Sense of his own Consciousness. Even at that early period his own shadow fell on every object. Nothing was contemplated alone and in itself; mere animal pleasure and excitement we find invariably yielding to mental, and the enthusiasm of the boy speedily melts in an anticipation and fore-colouring of the character of the man. This, as nearly as we can make it out, is his boyhood. In tracing the history of those who have been most remarkable for their mental wealth, and the elaborate structure of their mental characters, it has always been most interesting to note the years, the occupations, and amusements of their Boyhood. We shall usually find * Prelude. 18 FAREWELL TO HAWKSHEAD. how influential those years were in forming and laying the foundation of the character of the man. Hawkshead was the school of the mind of Wordsworth; we find no unhealthy evidences of precocious maturity—he was a boy, not a man; his genius was too hardy and noble to develope itself too early; he was no Chatterton; images of beauty and power; the playmates he met there; the men who spoke to him in the casual intercourse of daily life; all tended to form him. Here he played with that boy whose delight it was to blow "Mimic hootings to the silent owls;" Here he met those two stately champions of the Hanoverian and Non-jurist politics, whose portraits have been so affectingly sketched in the Excursion. His tutor supplied him at an after period with that most exquisite series of paintings associated together with the name of "Matthew." The imagery of that most stirring and healthful neighbourhood lay ever after on his mind, and a passionate tenderness poured itself forth in prophecy when at the age of seventeen he left school, in lines well known to most English readers, Dear native regions, I foretell Survive of local sympathy, My soul will cast the backward view, CHILDHOOD OF JEAN PAUL. 19 Thus while the sun sinks down to rest On the dear hills, where first he rose. While reverting to these early records of our poet's life, we have not been able to forbear some comparison. with two other Autobiographies. We have regretted the very scanty materials we have for knowing the mind life of our author at that day. The history of the child related by the man we turn to and read with avidity, when it is written as it usually must be with intense delight and love. One of those ineffable gems of egotistic beauty is the fragment we have of the early life of JEAN PAUL, who preceded Wordsworth in his entrance into the world only by six years. His picture of his child life in the mountains of the Fichtelberge is one of the most sweetly natural paintings the fancy can conceive. With the humour and truth of Hogarth, and the homeliness of Wilkie, it unites the spiritual fancy of Maclise. It is impossible to read the first pages without feeling how much that is said of the Pine Mountain was true of Hawkshead, when the schoolboy days of Wordsworth were spent there, but it did not come in our poet's design to paint these. Richter has given to us a perfect German Idyl, interesting us exceedingly in the delineation of his good father's character, who was of so excellent a nature as to be able "to carve a haven out of an iceberg." We cannot avoid remembering the 20 CHILDHOOD OF GOETHE. comparative sameness of the boys in their solitude-in their education for the service and priesthood of thought, though in Richter there was this great difference, that he had a home; and well and deeply does he interest us in that home, with its summer and winter evenings, while the vesper bell was devoutly chaunting "Die finstre Nacht bricht stark herein," (The gloomy night is gathering in) how touchingly and truthfully does he describe that home, when the shutters were closed and bolted, and Knecht Ruprecht was howling and grumbling without. Richter describes home a focus of love-the superstitions of that mountain region,-the amusements of that primitive household-all these stand out so beautiful and real; we are reminded of them only in Wordsworth's Prelude by their oppositeness to it, for Richter was but little of an artist, and he contemplated those subjects of his memoirs less through the eye of philosophy, than that of love. Another autobiography of which Wordsworth's Prelude reminds us is GOETHE's. He also may be regarded as a contemporary, but the point of likeness here is only in the strongly marked Individuality of the portrait. An education and early life passed in an old imperial city of Germany would invest the young associations with very different ideas to those induced by a residence among simple villagers and mountains, But again we are compelled to see that as compared with Goethe's autobiography Wordsworth's Prelude is only a record of emotions, stripped of that narrative dress which gives interest to the story of the mind. The mind of Goethe CHILDHOOD OF GOETHE. 21 was so constituted as to regard man in his relation to art more fully and completely than Wordsworth. And we shall turn aside to notice from time to time how he contrasts with our author in this particular. In the Prelude, "the history of the growth and developement of an individual mind," the influences which work around are few, all influences work from within. Goethe drew all nature into his nature, he attracted all things to himself. Not so Wordsworth, he had not those universal sympathies which would impel to all societies, and find a home in all. The medium through which both regarded objects was remarkably and wonderfully clear; but the mind of Wordsworth magnified and made sublime all subjects on which he gazed, Goethe, on the contrary saw things mostly with the eye of sense, beheld them in their mediocrity and simplicity. The following is one of many of these traces of the same spirit as that we meet in Wordsworth's Prelude characterising Goethe's childhood. "In the second floor (in his father's house) was a room which was called the garden-room, because they had there endeavoured to supply the want of a garden by means of a few plants placed before the window. As I grew older, it was there that I made my favourite, not melancholy but somewhat sentimental retreat. Over these gardens, beyond the city's walls and ramparts, might be seen a beautiful and fertile plain; the same which stretches towards Höchst. In the summer season I commonly learned my lessons there, and watched the thunder-storms, but could never |