Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. f.ARLY MANHOOD AND EARL Y TRAVELS. We must now turn from Cambridge to Westmoreland, and from the bustling scenes of academic life to influences of a loftier and calmer kind. The journal already quoted contains an account of a reading-party at Bowness in 1827, and is chiefly valuable for its occasional notices of the Rydal household. So much of it was, however, embodied by its author in his Memoir of William Wordsworth that it need not be reproduced here. It is easy, however, to see how much of the real education of the young and successful Trinity prizeman was carried on by the shores of Windermere, and among the green slopes of Loughrigg and Nab Scar; and it is impossible to over-estimate the gain for such a mind at so critical a period of its development of coming under the influence of one " not of an age but for all time," who, though a fastidious and even severe critic of himself and others, yet soared high above, and dived far below, the mere technicalities of literary art. The grand, broad, simple way of looking at life which, to the last, characterized the subject of this memoir, was no faint reflection of the character of the author of the " Excursion." It was a happy thing also for Christopher Wordsworth that at Rydal he came into the society of the poet's wife, sister, and daughter, all of whom felt a warm affection for him, and brought an element into his life of womanly tenderness. His cousin Dora especially, as many bright and playful letters show, was almost like an elder sister to him, and throughout the correspondence there is something very piquant in the contrast between her liveliness and the unbroken seriousness of " Daddy," as she called the good old poet, who hung upon her with all a father's love for an only daughter. One or t...