e show
that it is not the portrait of a child. It was through her that a large
proportion of the last generation of readers first had any definite
associations with Coniston.

Wordsworth had, however, been in that church many a time, above twenty
years before, when at Hawkeshead school. He used to tell that his mother
had praised him for going into the church, one week-day, to see a woman
do penance in a white sheet. She considered it good for his morals. But
when he declared himself disappointed that nobody had given him a penny
for his attendance, as he had somehow expected, his mother told him he
was served right for going to church from such an inducement. He spoke
with gratitude of an usher at that school, who put him in the way
of learning the Latin, which had been a sore trouble at his native
Cockermouth, from unskilful teaching. Our interest in him at that
school, however, is from his having there first conceived the idea of
writing verse. His master set the boys, as a task, to write a poetical
theme,--"The Summer Vacation"; and Master William chose to add to it
"The Return to School." He was then fourteen; and he was to be double
that age before he returned to the District and took up his abode there.

He had meantime gone through his college course, as described in his
Memoirs, and undergone strange conditions of opinion and feeling in
Paris during the Revolution; had lived in Dorsetshire, with his faithful
sister; had there first seen Coleridge, and had been so impressed by the
mind and discourse of that wonderful young philosopher as to remove to
Somersetshire to be near him; had seen Klopstock in Germany, and lived
there for a time; and had passed through other changes of residence and
places, when we find him again among the Lakes in 1779, still with his
sister by his side, and their brother John, and Coleridge, who had never
been in the District before.

As they stood on the margin of Grasmere, the scene was more like what
Gray saw than what is seen at this day. The churchyard was bare of the
yews which now distinguish it,--for Sir George Beaumont had them planted
at a later time; and where the group of kindred and friends--the
Wordsworths and their relatives--now lie, the turf was level and
untouched. The iron rails and indefensible monuments, which Wordsworth
so reprobated half a century later, did not exist. The villas which stud
the slopes, the great inns which bring a great public, were uncreated;