HOME EDUCATION.

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sity are lost, but still the idea remains the same. Seclusion, thought, reading, holy preparation, with the advantage of a secular life rolling on every hand its turbulent waves, thus all things conspire to rend the young spirit to whom serious thought addresses itself. All things are saying to it, Watch, Wait, but Aspire.

Home Education is very beautiful; it is a lovely theory; the perpetual inter-ministration of brother and sister; the unvarying tenderness of the mother; and for ever may there be throughout the halls and cottages of our land, hearts to reciprocate and prize each other's tenderness, and to feel, and yield to the blessed influences and chastenings of moral power. But lovely the thing looks in theory, it is not good in practice. No, let that young fellow who will by and by have to breast the ocean, begin at once to learn to swim. You fear to trust him alone. Alas, and yet you must trust him alone; he will most likely have to enter and go through the world alone. The Family is a place where you should give your children high and sound principles; the World is the place where your son has to work them; and the University is an exercising school where meditation mingles with exercise, and both in turn salute and call on the youth to energy.

William Wordsworth had no home education, or next to none, but he is now brought to the world's great ante-room from his meditations by brook, and pool, and lake, by lonely glen and cliff; now he will enter upon another course amidst cloisters, and echoing aisles; among crowds of fellow-students of every shade of character,

and amidst scenes where the holiness of antiquity and religion, supplant the holiness of nature.

Cambridge, more than its great rival, Oxford, has been famous for the great names and natures it has fostered; mighty Poets, and mighty Statesmen-Milton, Bacon, Newton, Dryden, Cromwell, Marvell, Taylor.

He entered St. John's College, Cambridge, in October 1787, then in the eighteenth year of his age; but the University does not appear to have done much for him; whatever may be the condition of Cambridge now, certainly it was far inferior then, and our youthful student entered its walls ill prepared for the cramping fetters, the cold, and formal, and needless restraints imposed then on the under-graduates. He had not been prepared either by the previous discipline of Eton, or any other of the great public schools for the life he was to encounter; moreover, we can see that he became less and less disposed to yield himself to the study of books; Man, and Nature, and Human life, were calling him even then, and the university presented to him for the most part a wide and echoing hollowness. The institutions and the studies did not appear to be venerable to his eyes; at a subsequent period he narrated his impressions in the poem published after his death, the Prelude; we conceive him walking through those crowded halls, and courts, and aisles, and temples, a very lonely and friendless being; there was nothing either in nature to awaken within him these responsive echoes. Every spot of earth he visited before or after, yielded him some subject of thought, but Cambridge lies as it were a blank on his

LIFE OF CAMBRIDGE.

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life, to the reader almost unknown, to himself probably almost unsuggestive, although his college walks had been made venerable by the feet of Burleigh, and Strafford, Ben Johnson, Matthew Prior, and Otway.

Unsuggestive we have said, but we must revoke that word, or only use it with considerable limitation; he has introduced us in some measure to his musings in the university, though we can conceive from the outline of them that they were very desultory; life took no shape to him; he was impressed he says with

"fears

About future worldly maintenance,

And more than all a strangeness in the mind
A feeling that I was not for that hour,

Nor for that place."

He was still pursuing too his wonted course of dressing the dead world in a spiritual vesture; even to the loose stones that covered the highway he gave a moral life; he saw them feel or linked them to some feeling. More and more the feeling of his independence came to him; he longed to stand unpropped, yet his mind he assures us had within, both the Cavern and the Arbour; the place for thought and the place for pleasure. The great men who had trodden the aisles and fields of Cambridge before him were to him an inspiration-Chaucer-SpenserMilton. He has enwoven too with his history of those hours, the recollection of one solitary departure from the strict temperance of a lifetime. He began life a water drinker, and he confesses himself in several places of his writings a water drinker; only on one occasion does

he appear to have swerved, and the instance is mentioned with so much shame in his Prelude, that we are compelled to believe that the sin must have been trifling.

What surprises us most is that he gives us to understand he was something of a dandy at this time. So did he pass through these years of discipline-he did not devote himself much to books, either of the dead or living languages; he tells us he was a better judge of thoughts than words; he loved a few books, and those he then most loved, he loved till the close of life. Varying the hours of study in Cambridge with long pedestrian excursions, and now for the first time it would seem with his sister. As he prepared to leave the university, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was preparing to enter; how nearly were they related in their hours of study, separated only by a few months from that converse which might have changed the destiny of both. Doubtless, it was for the best; it is difficult to say what influence the one might have exerted on the other when we remember how they met.

In 1791 our poct took his degree of Bachelor of Arts and quitted Cambridge; the whole of the week before he was engaged in reading Clarissa Harlowe. At this time of his life his character was unformed, but it was soon to receive impulses and thoughts tending to form it; its state at present may be described as desultory individuality; a tendency to identify a life and being and meaning with every object, but not the power, the character, which starts up and assumes its own identity

and individuality in the midst of all. The character of his mind developes itself in the course especially of two poems written at this time, which we shall refer to by and by, descriptive, and in the style and measure of Pope.