Oh, at that time When on the perilous ridge I hung alone, With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind Blow through my ear! The sky seemed not a sky Of earth--and with what motion moved the clouds!
The innocent rapine of _nutting_ taught him to feel that there is a spirit in the woods--a presence which too rude a touch of ours will desecrate and destroy.
The neighbouring lakes of Coniston, Esthwaite, Windermere, have left similar traces of the gradual upbuilding of his spirit. It was on a promontory on Coniston that the sun's last rays, gilding the eastern hills above which he had first appeared, suggested the boy's first impulse of spontaneous poetry, in the resolve that, wherever life should lead him, his last thoughts should fall on the scenes where his childhood was passing now. It was on Esthwaite that the "huge peak" of Wetherlam, following him (as it seemed) as he rowed across the starlit water, suggested the dim conception of "unknown modes of being," and a life that is not ours. It was round Esthwaite that the boy used to wander with a friend at early dawn, rejoicing in the charm of words in tuneful order, and repeating together their favourite verses, till "sounds of exultation echoed through the groves." It was on Esthwaite that the band of skaters "hissed along the polished ice in games confederate," from which Wordsworth would sometimes withdraw himself and pause suddenly in full career, to feel in that dizzy silence the mystery of a rolling world.
A passage, less frequently quoted, in describing a boating excursion on Windermere illustrates the effect of some small point of human interest in concentrating and realising the diffused emotion which radiates from a scene of beauty:
But, ere nightfall, When in our pinnace we returned at leisure Over the shadowy lake, and to the beach Of some small island steered our course with one, The minstrel of the troop, and left him there, And rowed off gently, while he blew his flute Alone upon the rock--oh, then the calm And dead still water lay upon my mind Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky, Never before so beautiful, sank down Into my heart, and held me like a dream!
The passage which describes the schoolboy's call to the owls--the lines of which Coleridge said that he should have exclaimed "Wordsworth!" if he had met them running wild in the deserts of Arabia,--paint a somewhat similar rush of feeling with a still deeper charm. The "gentle shock of mild surprise" which in the pauses of the birds' jocund din _carries far into his heart the sound of mountain torrents_--the very mingling of the grotesque and the majestic--brings home the contrast between our transitory energies and the mystery around us which returns ever the same to the moments when we pause and are at peace.