Wordsworth's poetical career by the mere re-reading of some Latin
authors in 1814-16 with a view to preparing his eldest son for the
University. Among the poets whom he thus studied was one in whom he
might seem to discern his own spirit endowed with grander proportions,
and meditating on sadder fates. Among the poets of the battlefield,
of the study, of the boudoir, he encountered the first Priest of
Nature, the first poet in Europe who had deliberately shunned the
life of courts and cities for the mere joy in Nature's presence, for
"sweet Parthenope and the fields beside Vesevus' hill."

There are, indeed, passages in the _Georgics_ so Wordsworthian, as
we now call it, in tone, that it is hard to realize what centuries
separated them from the _Sonnet to Lady Beaumont or from Ruth_. Such,
for instance, is the picture of the Corycian old man, who had made
himself independent of the seasons by his gardening skill, so that
"when gloomy winter was still rending the stones with frost, still
curbing with ice the rivers' onward flow, he even then was plucking
the soft hyacinth's bloom, and chid the tardy summer and delaying
airs of spring." Such, again, is the passage where the poet breaks
from the glories of successful industry into the delight of watching
the great processes which nature accomplishes untutored and alone,
"the joy of gazing on Cytorus waving with boxwood, and on forests of
Narycian pine, on tracts that never felt the harrow, nor knew the
care of man."

Such thoughts as these the Roman and the English poet had in common;--
the heritage of untarnished souls.

I asked; 'twas whispered; The device
To each and all might well belong: