Excerpt from A Primer of Wordsworth: With a Critical Essay He changed from the pioneer of revolution to the prophet of freedom. There was more of the revolutionary than of the prophet in William Wordsworth, the child. "Fair seed-time had my soul," he writes, and he tells us how from babyhood itself he enjoyed the licence of the open air. Derwent, the river on which Cockermouth, his birthplace, stands, murmured his lullabies even in his nurse's arms, "giving me, Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind, A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm That Nature breathes among the hills and groves" (i. 278). And when he arrived at the discretion of walking, the wise young parents respected the savagery of childhood: "Oh, many a time have I, a five years' child, In a small mill-race severed from his stream, Made one long bathing of a summer's day; Basked in the sun, and plunged and basked again Alternate, all a summer's day, or scoured The sandy fields, leaping through flowery groves Of yellow ragwort; or, when rock and hill, The woods, and distant Skiddaw's lofty height, Were bronzed with deepest radiance, stood alone Beneath the sky, as if I had been born On Indian plains, and from my mother's hut Had run abroad in wantonness, to sport A naked savage, in the thunder shower" (i. 288). He was not always alone. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."