Chapter IV (12)

What these sins were he never confessed--nor, as far as man may judge of man, had he ever committed any act that needed to lie heavy on his conscience. But his whole being, he said, was one black sin--and a spirit had been sent to tell him, that his doom was to be with the wicked through all the ages of eternity. That spirit, without form or shadow--only a voice--seldom left his side day or night, go where he would; but its most dreadful haunt was under a steep rock called Blakerigg-scaur; and thither, in whatever direction he turned his face on leaving his own door, he was led by an irresistible impulse, even as a child is led by the hand. Tenderly and truly had he once loved his wife and daughter, nor less because that love had been of few words, and with a shade of sorrow. But now he looked on them almost as if they had been strangers--except at times, when he started up, kissed them, and wept. His whole soul was possessed by horrid fantasies, of which it was itself object and victim; and it is probable that had he seen them both lying dead, he would have left their corpses in the house, and taken his way to the mountains. At last one night passed away and he came not. His wife and daughter, who had not gone to bed, went to the nearest house and told their tale. In an hour a hundred feet were traversing all the loneliest places--till a hat was seen floating on Loughrigg-tarn, and then all knew that the search was near an end. Drags were soon got from the fishermen on Windermere, and a boat crossed and recrossed the tarn on its miserable quest, till in an hour, during which wife and daughter sat without speaking on a stone by the water-edge, the body came floating to the surface, with its long silver hair. One single shriek only, it is said, was heard, and from that shriek till three years afterwards, his widow knew not that her husband was with the dead. On the brink of that small sandy bay the body was laid down and cleansed of the muddy weeds--his daughter's own hands assisting in the rueful work--and she walked among the mourners, the day before the Sabbath, when the funeral entered the little burial-ground of Langdale chapel, and the congregation sung a Christian psalm over the grave of the forgiven suicide.

We cannot patronise the practice of walking in large parties of ten or a score, ram-stam and helter-skelter, on to the front-green or gravel-walk of any private nobleman's or gentleman's house, to enjoy, from a commanding station, an extensive or picturesque view of the circumjacent country. It is too much in the style of the Free and Easy. The family within, sitting perhaps at dinner with the windows open, or sewing and reading in a cool dishabille, cannot like to be stared in upon by so many curious and inquisitive pupils all a-hunt for prospects; nor were these rose-bushes planted there for public use, nor that cherry-tree in vain netted against the blackbirds. Not but that a party may now and then excusably enough pretend to lose their way in a strange country; and looking around them in well-assumed bewilderment, bow hesitatingly and respectfully to maid or matron at door or window, and, with a thousand apologies, lingeringly offer to retire by the avenue gate, on the other side of the spacious lawn, that terrace-like hangs over vale, lake, and river. But to avoid all possible imputation of impertinence, follow you our example, and make all such incursions by break of day. We hold that, for a couple of hours before and after sunrise, all the earth is common property. Nobody surely would think for a moment of looking black on any number of freebooting lakers coming full sail up the avenue, right against the front, at four o'clock in the morning? At that hour, even the poet would grant them the privilege of the arbour where he sits when inspired, and writing for immortality. He feels conscious that he ought to have been in bed; and hastens, on such occasions, to apologise for his intrusion on strangers availing themselves of the rights and privileges of the Dawn.

Leaving Ivy-cottage, then, and its yet unbreathing chimneys, turn in at the first gate to your right (if it be not built up, in which case leap the wall), and find your way the best you can through among old pollarded and ivied ash-trees, intermingled with yews, and over knolly ground, brier-woven, and here and there whitened with the jagged thorn, till you reach, through a slate-stile, a wide gravel walk, shaded by pine-trees, and open on the one side to an orchard. Proceed--and little more than a hundred steps will land you on the front of Rydal-mount, the house of the great Poet of the Lakes. Mr Wordsworth is not at home, but away to cloudland in his little boat so like the crescent moon. But do not by too much eloquence awaken the family, or scare the silence, or frighten "the innocent brightness of the new-born day." We hate all sentimentalism; but we bid you, in his own words,

"With gentle hand
Touch, for there is a spirit in the leaves."

From a quaint platform of evergreens you see a blue gleam of Windermere over the grove-tops--close at hand are Rydal-hall and its ancient woods--right opposite the Loughrigg-fells, ferny, rocky, and sylvan, but the chief breadth of breast pastoral--and to the right Rydal-mere, seen, and scarcely seen, through embowering trees, and mountain-masses bathed in the morning light, and the white-wreathed mists for a little while longer shrouding their summits. A lately erected private chapel lifts its little tower from below, surrounded by a green, on which there are yet no graves--nor do we know if it be intended for a place of burial. A few houses are sleeping beyond the chapel by the river-side; and the people beginning to set them in order, here and there a pillar of smoke ascends into the air, giving cheerfulness and animation to the scene.

The Lake-Poets! ay, their day is come. The lakes are worthy of the poets, and the poets of the lakes. That poets should love and live among lakes, once seemed most absurd to critics whose domiciles were on the Nor-Loch, in which there was not sufficient water for a tolerable quagmire. Edinburgh Castle is a noble rock--so are the Salisbury Craigs noble craigs--and Arthur's seat a noble lion couchant, who, were he to leap down on Auld Reekie, would break her backbone and bury her in the Cowgate. But place them by Pavey-ark, or Red-scaur, or the glamour of Glaramara, and they would look about as magnificent as an upset pack of cards. Who, pray, are the Nor-Loch poets? Not the Minstrel--he holds by the tenure of the Tweed. Not Campbell--"he heard in dreams the music of the Clyde." Not Joanna Baillie--her inspiration was nursed on the Calder's sylvan banks and the moors of Strathaven. Stream-loving Coila nurtured Burns; and the Shepherd's grave is close to the cot in which he was born--within hearing of the Ettrick's mournful voice on its way to meet the Yarrow. Skiddaw overshadows, and Greta freshens the bower of him who framed,

"Of Thalaba, the wild and wondrous song."

Here the woods, mountains, and waters of Rydal imparadise the abode of the wisest of nature's bards, with whom poetry is religion. And where was he ever so happy as in that region, he who created "Christabelle," "beautiful exceedingly;" and sent the "Auncient Mariner" on the wildest of all voyagings, and brought him back with the ghastliest of all crews, and the strangest of all curses that ever haunted crime?

Of all Poets that ever lived Wordsworth has been at once the most truthful and the most idealising; external nature from him has received a soul, and becomes our teacher; while he has so filled our minds with images from her, that every mood finds some fine affinities there, and thus we all hang for sustenance and delight on the bosom of our mighty Mother. We believe that there are many who have an eye for Nature, and even a sense of the beautiful, without any very profound feeling; and to them Wordsworth's finest descriptive passages seem often languid or diffuse, and not to present to their eyes any distinct picture. Perhaps sometimes this objection may be just; but to paint to the eye is easier than to the imagination--and Wordsworth, taking it for granted that people can now see and hear, desires to make them feel and understand; of his pupil it must not be said,

"A primrose by the river's brim
A yellow primrose is to him,
And it is nothing more;"

the poet gives the something more till we start at the disclosure as at a lovely apparition--yet an apparition of beauty not foreign to the flower, but exhaling from its petals, which till that moment seemed to us but an ordinary bunch of leaves. In these lines is a humbler example of how recondite may be the spirit of beauty in any most familiar thing belonging to the kingdom of nature; one higher far--but of the same kind--is couched in two immortal verses--

"To me the humblest flower that blows, can give
Thoughts that too often lie too deep for tears."

In what would the poet differ from the worthy man of prose, if his imagination possessed not a beautifying and transmuting power over the objects of the inanimate world? Nay, even the naked truth itself is seen clearly but by poetic eyes; and were a sumph all at once to become a poet, he would all at once be stark-staring mad. Yonder ass licking his lips at a thistle, sees but water for him to drink in Windermere a-glow with the golden lights of setting suns. The ostler or the boots at Lowood-inn takes a somewhat higher flight, and for a moment, pausing with curry-comb or blacking-brush in his suspended hand, calls on Sally Chambermaid for gracious sake to look at Pull-wyke. The waiter, who has cultivated his taste from conversation with Lakers, learns their phraseology, and declares the sunset to be exceedingly handsome. The Laker, who sometimes has a soul, feels it rise within him as the rim of the orb disappears in the glow of softened fire. The artist compliments Nature, by likening her evening glories to a picture of Claud Lorraine--while the poet feels the sense sublime

"Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."

Compare any one page, or any twenty pages, with the character given of Wordsworth's poetry in the obsolete criticism that sought to send it to oblivion. The poet now sits on his throne in the blue serene--and no voice from below dares deny his supremacy in his own calm dominions. And was it of him, whom devout imagination, dreaming of ages to come, now sees, placed in his immortality between Milton and Spenser, that the whole land once rang with ridicule, while her wise men wiped their eyes "of tears that sacred _pity_ had engendered," and then relieved their hearts by joining in the laughter "of the universal British nation?" All the ineffable absurdities of the bard are now embodied in Seven Volumes--the sense of the ridiculous still survives among us--our men of wit and power are not all dead--we have yet our satirists, great and small--editors in thousands, and contributors in tens of thousands--yet not a whisper is heard to breathe detraction from the genius of the high-priest of nature; while the voice of the awakened and enlightened land declares it to be divine--using towards him not the language merely of admiration but of reverence--of love and gratitude due to the benefactor of humanity, who has purified its passions by loftiest thoughts and noblest sentiments, stilling their turbulence by the same processes that magnify their power, and showing how the soul, in ebb and flow, and when its tide is at full, may be at once as strong and as serene as the sea.

There are few pictures painted by him merely for the pleasure of the eye, or even the imagination, though all the pictures he ever painted are beautiful to both; they have all a moral meaning--many a meaning more than moral--and his poetry can be comprehended, in its full scope and spirit, but by those who feel the sublimity of these four lines in his "Ode to Duty,"--

"Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,
And fragrance in thy footing treads;
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong."

Is thy life disturbed by guilty or sinful passions? Have they gained a mastery of thee--and art thou indeed their slave? Then the poetry of Wordsworth must be to thee

"As is a picture to a blind man's eye;"

or if thine eyes yet see the light in which it is enveloped, and thy heart yet feels the beauty it reveals, in spite of the clouds that overhang and the storms that trouble them, that beauty will be unbearable, till regret become remorse, and remorse penitence, and penitence restore thee to those intuitions of the truth that illumine his sacred pages, and thou knowest and feelest once more that

"The primal duties shine aloft--like stars,"

that life's best pleasures grow like flowers all around and beneath thy feet.

Nor are we not privileged to cherish a better feeling than pride in the belief, or rather knowledge, that WE have helped to diffuse Wordsworth's poetry not only over this Island, but the furthest dependencies of the British empire, and throughout the United States of America. Many thousands have owed to us their emancipation from the prejudices against it, under which they had wilfully remained ignorant of it during many years; and we have instructed as many more, whose hearts were free, how to look on it with those eyes of love which alone can discover the Beautiful. Communications have been made to us from across the Atlantic, and from the heart of India--from the Occident and the Orient--thanking us for having vindicated and extended the fame of the best of our living bards, till the name of Wordsworth has become a household word on the banks of the Mississippi and the Ganges. It would have been so had we never lived, _but not so soon_; and many a noble nature has worshipped his genius, as displayed in our pages, not in fragments but in perfect poems, accompanied with our comments, who had no means in those distant regions of possessing his volumes, whereas Maga flies on wings to the uttermost parts of the earth.

As for our own dear Scotland--for whose sake, with all her faults, the light of day is sweet to our eyes--twenty years ago there were not twenty copies--we question if there were ten--of the "Lyrical Ballads" in all the land of the mountain and the flood. Now Wordsworth is studied all Scotland over--and Scotland is proud and happy to know, from his Memorials of the Tours he has made through her brown heaths and shaggy woods, that the Bard's heart overflows with kindness towards her children--that his songs have celebrated the simple and heroic character of her olden times, nor left unhonoured the virtues that yet survive in her national character. All her generous youth regard him now as a great Poet; and we have been more affected than we should choose to confess, by the grateful acknowledgment of many a gifted spirit, that to us it was owing that they had opened their eyes and their hearts to the ineffable beauty of that poetry in which they had, under our instructions, found not a vain visionary delight, but a strength and succour and consolation, breathed as from a shrine in the silence and solitude of nature, in which stood their father's hut, sanctifying their humble birthplace with pious thoughts that made the very weekdays to them like Sabbaths--nor on the evening of the Sabbath might they not blamelessly be blended with those breathed from the Bible, enlarging their souls to religion by those meditative moods which such pure poetry inspires, and by those habits of reflection which its study forms, when pursued under the influence of thoughtful peace.

Why, if it were not for that everlasting--we beg pardon--immortal Wordsworth--the LAKES, and all that belong to them, would be our own--_jure divino_--for we are the heir-apparent to the

"Sole King of rocky Cumberland."

But Wordsworth never will--never can die; and so we are in danger of being cheated out of our due dominion. We cannot think this fatherly treatment of such a son--and yet in our loftiest moods of filial reverence we have heard ourselves exclaiming, while

"The Cataract of Lodore
Peal'd to our orisons,"

O King! live for ever!

Therefore, with the fear of "The Excursion" before our eyes, we took to prose--to numerous prose--ay, though we say it that should not say it, to prose as numerous as any verse--and showed such scenes

"As savage Rosa dash'd, or learned Poussin drew."

Here an English Lake--there a Scottish loch--till Turner grew jealous, and Thomson flung his brush at one of his own unfinished mountains--when lo! a miracle! Creative of grandeur in his very despair, he stood astonished at the cliff that came prerupt from his canvass, and christened itself "the Eagle's Eyrie," as it _frowned serenely_ upon the sea, maddening in a foamy circle at its inaccessible feet.

Only in such prose as ours can the heart pour forth its effusions like a strong spring discharging ever so many gallons in a minute, either into pipes that conduct it through some great Metropolitan city, or into a water-course that soon becomes a rivulet, then a stream, then a river, then a lake, and then a sea. Would Fancy luxuriate? Then let her expand wings of prose. In verse, however irregular, her flight is lime-twigged, and she soon takes to hopping on the ground. Would Imagination dive? Let the bell in which she sinks be constructed on the prose principle, and deeper than ever plummet sunk, it will startle monsters at the roots of the coral caves, yet be impervious to the strokes of the most tremendous of tails. Would she soar? In a prose balloon she seeks the stars. There is room and power of ascension for any quantity of ballast--fling it out, and up she goes! Let some gas escape, and she descends far more gingerly than Mrs Graham and his Serene Highness; the grapnel catches a stile, and she steps "like a dreadless angel unpursued" once more upon _terra firma_, and may then celebrate her aerial voyage, if she choose, in an Ode which will be sure near the end to rise--into prose.

Prose, we believe, is destined to drive what is called Poetry out of the world. Here is a fair challenge. Let any Poet send us a poem of five hundred lines--blanks or not--on any subject; and we shall write on that subject a passage of the same number of words in prose; and the Editors of the Quarterly, Edinburgh, and Westminster, shall decide which deserves the prize. Milton was woefully wrong in speaking of "prose or numerous verse." Prose is a million times more numerous than verse. Then prose improves the more poetical it becomes; but verse, the moment it becomes prosaic, goes to the dogs. Then, the connecting links between two fine passages in verse, it is enjoined, shall be as little like verse as possible; nay, whole passages, critics say, should be of that sort; and why, pray, not prose at once? Why clip the King's English, or the Emperor's German, or the Sublime Porte's Turkish, into bits of dull jingle--pretending to be verses merely because of the proper number of syllables--some of them imprisoned perhaps in parentheses, where they sit helplessly protruding the bare soles of their feet, like folks that have got muzzy, in the stocks?

Wordsworth says well, that the language of common people, when giving utterance to passionate emotions, is highly figurative; and hence he concludes not so well fit for a lyrical ballad. Their volubility is great, nor few their flowers of speech. But who ever heard them, but by the merest accident, spout verses? Rhyme do they never--the utmost they reach is occasional blanks. But their prose! Ye gods! how they do talk! The washerwoman absolutely froths like her own tub; and you never dream of asking her "how she is off for soap?" Paradise Lost! The Excursion! The Task indeed! No man of woman born, no woman by man begotten, ever yet in his or her senses spoke like the authors of those poems. Hamlet, in his sublimest moods, speaks in prose--Lady Macbeth talks prose in her sleep--and so it should be printed. "Out damned spot!" are three words of prose; and who that beheld Siddons wringing her hands to wash them of murder, did not feel that they were the most dreadful ever extorted by remorse from guilt?

A green old age is the most loving season of life, for almost all the other passions are then dead or dying--or the mind, no more at the mercy of a troubled heart, compares the little pleasure their gratification can ever yield now with what it could at any time long ago, and lets them rest. Envy is the worst disturber or embitterer of man's declining years; but it does not deserve the name of a passion--and is a disease, not of the poor in spirit--for they are blessed--but of the mean, and then they indeed are cursed. For our own parts, we know Envy but as we have studied it in others--and never felt it except towards the wise and good; and then 'twas a longing desire to be like them--painful only when we thought that might never be, and that all our loftiest aspirations might be in vain. Our envy of Genius is of a nature so noble, that it knows no happiness like that of guarding from mildew the laurels on the brows of the Muses' Sons. What a dear kind soul of a critic is old Christopher North! Watering the flowers of poetry, and removing the weeds that might choke them--letting in the sunshine upon them, and fencing them from the blast--proclaiming where the gardens grow, and leading boys and virgins into the pleasant alleys--teaching hearts to love and eyes to see their beauty, and classifying, by the attributes it has pleased nature to bestow on the various orders, the plants of Paradise--This is our occupation--and the happiness of witnessing them all growing in the light of admiration is our reward.

Finding our way back as we choose to Ivy-cottage, we cross the wooden bridge, and away along the western shore of Rydal-mere. Hence you see the mountains in magnificent composition, and craggy coppices with intervening green fields shelving down to the lake margin. It is a small lake, not much more than a mile round, and of a very peculiar character. One memorable cottage only, as far as we remember, peeps on its shore from a grove of sycamores, a statesman's pleasant dwelling; and there are the ruins of another on a slope near the upper end, the circle of the garden still visible. Everything has a quiet but wildish pastoral and sylvan look, and the bleating of sheep fills the hollow of the hills. The lake has a reedy inlet and outlet, and the angler thinks of pike when he looks upon such harbours. There is a single boat-house, where the Lady of the Hall has a padlocked and painted barge for pleasure parties; and the heronry on the high pine-trees of the only island connects the scene with the ancient park of Rydal, whose oak woods, though thinned and decayed, still preserve the majestic and venerable character of antiquity and baronial state.

Having taken a lingering farewell of Rydal-mere, and of the new Chapel-tower, that seems among the groves already to be an antique, we may either sink down to the stream that flows out of Grassmere and connects the two lakes, crossing a wooden bridge, and then joining the new road that sweeps along to the Village, or we may keep up on the face of the hill, and by a terrace-path reach the Loughrigg-road, a few hundred yards above Tail-end, a pretty cottage-ornée which you will observe crowning a wooded eminence, and looking cheerfully abroad over all the vale. There is one Mount in particular, whence we see to advantage the delightful panorama--encircling mountains--Grassmere Lake far down below your feet, with its one green pastoral isle, sylvan shores, and emerald meadows--huts and houses sprinkled up and down in all directions--the village partly embowered in groves, and partly open below the shadow of large single trees--and the Church-tower, almost always a fine feature in the scenery of the north of England, standing in stately simplicity among the clustering tenements, nor dwindled even by the great height of the hills.

It is pleasant to lose sight entirely of a beautiful scene, and to plod along for a few hundred yards in almost objectless shadow. Our conceptions and feelings are bright and strong from the nearness of their objects, yet the dream is somewhat different from the reality. All at once, at a turning of the road, the splendour reappears like an unfurled banner, and the heart leaps in the joy of the senses. This sort of enjoyment comes upon you before you reach the Village of Grassmere from the point of vision above described, and a stranger sometimes is apt to doubt if it be really the same Lake--that one island, and those few promontories, shifting into such varied combinations with the varying mountain-ridges and ranges, that show top over top in bewildering succession, and give hints of other valleys beyond, and of Tarns rarely visited, among the moorland wastes. A single long dim shadow, falling across the water, alters the whole physiognomy of the scene--nor less a single bright streak of sunshine, brightening up some feature formerly hidden, and giving animation and expression to the whole face of the Lake.

About a short mile from the Village Inn, you will pass by without seeing it--unless warned not to do so--one of the most singularly beautiful habitations in the world. It belongs to a gentleman of the name of Barber, and, we believe, has been almost entirely built by him--the original hut on which his taste has worked having been a mere shell. The spirit of the place seems to us to be that of Shadowy Silence. Its bounds are small; but it is an indivisible part of a hill-side so secret and sylvan, that it might be the haunt of the roe. You hear the tinkle of a rill, invisible among the hazels--a bird sings or flutters--a bee hums his way through the bewildering wood--but no louder sound. Some fine old forest-trees extend widely their cool and glimmering shade; and a few stumps or armless trunks, whose bulk is increased by a load of ivy that hides the hollow wherein the owls have their domicile, give an air of antiquity to the spot, that, but for other accompaniments, would almost be melancholy. As it is, the scene has a pensive character. As yet you have seen no house, and wonder whither the gravel-walks are to conduct you, winding fancifully and fantastically through the smooth-shaven lawn, bestrewed by a few large leaves of the horse-chestnut or sycamore. But there are clustered verandas where the nightingale might woo the rose, and lattice-windows reaching from eaves to ground-sill, so sheltered that they might stand open in storm and rain, and tall circular chimneys, shaped almost like the stems of the trees that overshadow the roof irregular, and over all a gleam of blue sky and a few motionless clouds. The noisy world ceases to be, and the tranquil heart, delighted with the sweet seclusion, breathes, "Oh! that this were my cell, and that I were a hermit!"

But you soon see that the proprietor is not a hermit; for everywhere you discern unostentatious traces of that elegance and refinement that belong to social and cultivated life; nothing rude and rough-hewn, yet nothing prim and precise. Snails and spiders are taught to keep their own places; and among the flowers of that hanging garden on a sunny slope, not a weed is to be seen, for weeds are beautiful only by the wayside, in the matting of hedge-roots, by the mossy stone, and the brink of the well in the brae--and are offensive only when they intrude into society above their own rank, and where they have the air and accent of aliens. By pretty pebbled steps of stairs you mount up from platform to platform of the sloping woodland banks--the prospect widening as you ascend, till from a bridge that spans a leaping rivulet, you behold in full blow all Grassmere Vale, Village, Church-tower, and Lake, the whole of the mountains, and a noble arch of sky, the circumference of that little world of peace.

Circumscribed as are the boundaries of this place, yet the grounds are so artfully, while one thinks so artlessly, laid out, that, wandering through their labyrinthine recesses, you might believe yourself in an extensive wilderness. Here you come out upon a green open glade (you see by the sun-dial it is past seven o'clock)--there the arms of an immense tree overshadow what is in itself a scene--yonder you have an alley that serpentises into gloom and obscurity--and from that cliff you doubtless would see over the tree-tops into the outer and airy world. With all its natural beauties is intermingled an agreeable quaintness, that shows the owner has occasionally been working in the spirit of fancy, almost caprice; the tool-house in the garden is not without its ornaments--the barn seems habitable, and the byre has somewhat the appearance of a chapel. You see at once that the man who lives here, instead of being sick of the world, is attached to all elegant socialities and amities; that he uses silver cups instead of maple bowls, shows his scallop-shell among other curiosities in his cabinet, and will treat the passing pilgrim with pure water from the spring, if he insists upon that beverage, but will first offer him a glass of the yellow cowslip-wine, the cooling claret, or the sparkling champagne.

Perhaps we are all beginning to get a little hungry, but it is too soon to breakfast; so, leaving the village of Grassmere on the right, keep your eye on Helm-crag, while we are finding, without seeking, our way up Easdale. Easdale is an arm of Grassmere, and in the words of Mr Green the artist, "it is in places profusely wooded, and charmingly sequestered among the mountains." Here you may hunt the waterfalls, in rainy weather easily run down, but difficult of detection in a drought. Several pretty rustic bridges cross and recross the main stream and its tributaries; the cottages, in nook and on hill-side, are among the most picturesque and engaging in the whole country; the vale widens into spacious and noble meadow-grounds, on which might suitably stand the mansion of any nobleman in England--as you near its head, everything gets wild and broken, with a slight touch of dreariness, and by no very difficult ascent we might reach Easdale-tarn in less than an hour's walking from Grassmere--a lonely and impressive scene, and the haunt of the angler almost as frequently as of the shepherd.

How far can we enjoy the beauty of external nature under a sharp appetite for breakfast or dinner? On our imagination the effect of hunger is somewhat singular. We no longer regard sheep, for instance, as the fleecy or the bleating flock. Their wool or their baaing is nothing to us--we think of necks, and jigots, and saddles of mutton; and even the lamb frisking on the sunny bank is eaten by us in the shape of steaks and fry. If it is in the morning, we see no part of the cow but her udder, distilling richest milkiness. Instead of ascending to heaven on the smoke of a cottage chimney, we put our arms round the column, and descend on the lid of the great pan preparing the family breakfast. Every interesting object in the landscape seems edible--our mouth waters all over the vale--as the village clock tolls eight, we involuntarily say grace, and Price on the Picturesque gives way to Meg Dods's Cookery.

Mrs Bell of the Red Lion Inn, Grassmere, can give a breakfast with any woman in England. She bakes incomparable bread--firm, close, compact, and white, thin-crusted, and admirably raised. Her yeast always works well. What butter! Before it a primrose must hide its unyellowed head. Then jam of the finest quality, goose, rasp, and strawberry! and as the jam is, so are her jellies. Hens cackle that the eggs are fresh--and these shrimps were scraping the sand last night in the Whitehaven sea. What glorious bannocks of barley-meal! Crisp wheaten cakes, too, no thicker than a wafer. Do not, our good sir, appropriate that cut of pickled salmon; it is heavier than it looks, and will weigh about four pounds. One might live a thousand years, yet never weary of such mutton-ham. Virgin honey, indeed! Let us hope that the bees were not smothered, but by some gracious disciple of Bonar or Huber decoyed from a full hive into an empty one, with half the summer and all the autumn before them to build and saturate their new Comb-Palace. No bad thing is a cold pigeon-pie, especially of cushats. To hear them cooing in the centre of a wood is one thing, and to see them lying at the bottom of a pie is another--which is the better, depends entirely on time, place, and circumstance. Well, a beef-steak at breakfast is rather startling--but let us try a bit with these fine ingenuous youthful potatoes, from a light sandy soil on a warm slope. Next to the country clergy, smugglers are the most spiritual of characters; and we verily believe that to be "sma' still." Our dear sir--you are in orders, we believe--will you have the goodness to return thanks? Yes, now you may ring the bell for the bill. Moderate indeed! With a day's work before one, there is nothing like the deep broad basis of breakfast.

STROLL TO GRASSMERE.

SECOND SAUNTER.

It is yet only ten o'clock--and what a multitude of thoughts and feelings, sights and sounds, lights and shadows, have been ours since sunrise! Had we been in bed, all would have remained unfelt and unknown. But, to be sure, one dream might have been worth them all. Dreams, however, when they are over, are gone, be they of bliss or bale, heaven or the shades. No one weeps over a dream. With such tears no one would sympathise. Give us reality, "the sober certainty of waking bliss," and to it memory shall cling. Let the object of our sorrow belong to the living world, and, transient though it be, its power may be immortal. Away then, as of little worth, all the unsubstantial and wavering world of dreams, and in their place give us the very humblest humanities, so much the better if enjoyed in some beautiful scene of nature like this, where all is steadfast but the clouds, whose very being is change, and the flow of waters that have been in motion since the Flood.

Ha! a splendid equipage with a coronet. And out steps, handed by her elated husband, a high-born beautiful and graceful bride. They are making a tour of the Lakes, and the honeymoon hath not yet filled her horns. If there be indeed such a thing as happiness on this earth, here it is--youth, elegance, health, rank, riches, and love--all united in ties that death alone can sunder. How they hang towards each other--the blissful pair! Blind in their passion to all the scenery they came to admire, or beholding it but by fits and snatches, with eyes that can see only one object. She hath already learnt to forget father and mother, and sister and brother, and all the young creatures like herself--every one--that shared the pastimes and the confidence of her virgin youthhood. With her, as with Genevieve--

"All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame!"

And will this holy state of the spirit endure? No--it will fade, and fade, and fade away, so imperceptibly, so unconsciously (so like the shortening of the long summer-days, that lose minute after minute of the light, till again we hear the yellow leaves rustling in autumnal twilight), that the heart within that snow-drifted bosom will know not how great has been the change, till at last it shall be told the truth, and know that all mortal emotion, however paradisiacal, is born to die.

Fain would we believe that forebodings like these are, on all such occasions, whispered by a blind and ignorant misanthropy, and that of wedded life it may generally be said,

"O, happy state, where souls together draw,
Where love is liberty, and nature law!"

What profound powers of affection, grief, pity, sympathy, delight, and religion belong, by its constitution, to the frame of every human soul! And if the courses of life have not greatly thwarted the divine dispensations of nature, will they not all rise into genial play within bosoms consecrated to each other's happiness, till comes between them the cold hand of death? It would seem that everything fair and good must flourish under that holy necessity--everything foul and bad fade away; and that no quarrel or unkindness could ever be between pilgrims travelling together through time to eternity, whether their path lead through an Eden or a waste. Habit itself comes with humble hearts to be gracious and benign; they who have once loved, will not, for that very reason, cease to love; memory shall brighten when hope decays; and if the present be not now so blissful, so thrilling, so steeped in rapture as it was in the golden prime, yet shall it without repining suffice to them whose thoughts borrow unconsciously sweet comforts from the past and future, and have been taught by mutual cares and sorrows to indulge tempered expectations of the best earthly felicity. And is it not so? How much tranquillity and contentment in human homes! Calm onflowings of life shaded in domestic privacy, and seen but at times coming out into the open light! What brave patience under poverty! What beautiful resignation in grief! Riches take wings to themselves and flee away--yet without and within the door there is the decency of a changed, not an unhappy lot--The clouds of adversity darken men's characters even as if they were the shadows of dishonour, but conscience quails not in the gloom--The well out of which humility hath her daily drink, is nearly dried up to the very spring, but she upbraideth not Heaven--Children, those flowers that make the hovel's earthen floor delightful as the glades of Paradise, wither in a day, but there is holy comfort in the mother's tears; nor are the groans of the father altogether without relief--for they have gone whither they came, and are blooming now in the bowers of heaven.

Reverse the picture--and tremble for the fate of those whom God hath made one, and whom no one man must put asunder. In common natures, what hot and sensual passions, whose gratification ends in indifference, disgust, loathing, or hatred! What a power of misery, from fretting to madness, lies in that mean but mighty word--Temper! The face, to whose meek beauty smiles seemed native during the days of virgin love, shows now but a sneer, a scowl, a frown, or a glare of scorn. The shape of those features is still fine--the eye of the gazelle--the Grecian nose and forehead--the ivory teeth, so small and regular--and thin line of ruby lips breathing Circassian luxury--the snow-drifts of the bosom still heave there--a lovelier waist Apollo never encircled stepping from the chariot of the sun--nor limbs more graceful did ever Diana veil beneath the shadows of Mount Latmos. But she is a fiend--a devil incarnate, and the sovereign beauty of three counties has made your house a hell.

But suppose that you have had the sense and sagacity to marry a homely wife--or one comely at the best--nay, even that you have sought to secure your peace by admitted ugliness--or wedded a woman whom all tongues call--plain; then may an insurance-ticket, indeed, flame like the sun in miniature on the front of your house--but what Joint-Stock Company can undertake to repay the loss incurred by the perpetual singeing of the smouldering flames of strife, that blaze up without warning at bed and board, and keep you in an everlasting alarm of fire? We defy you to utter the most glaring truth that shall not be instantly contradicted. The most rational proposals for a day or hour of pleasure, at home or abroad, are on the nail negatived as absurd. If you dine at home every day for a month, she wonders why nobody asks you out, and fears you take no trouble to make yourself agreeable. If you dine from home one day in a month, then are you charged with being addicted to tavern-clubs. Children are perpetual bones of contention--there is hatred and sorrow in house-bills--rent and taxes are productive of endless grievances; and although education be an excellent thing--indeed quite a fortune in itself--especially to a poor Scotsman going to England, where all the people are barbarous--yet is it irritatingly expensive when a great Northern Nursery sends out its hordes, and gawky hoydens and hobbletehoys are getting themselves accomplished in the foreign languages, music, drawing, geography, the use of the globes, and the dumb-bells.

"Let observation, with extensive view,
Survey mankind from China to Peru,"

(two bad lines, by the way, though written by Dr Johnson)--and observation will find the literature of all countries filled with sarcasms against the marriage-life. Our old Scottish songs and ballads especially, delight in representing it as a state of ludicrous misery and discomfort. There is little or no talk of horns--the dilemma of English wit; but every individual moment of every individual minute, of every individual hour of every individual day, and so on, has its peculiar, appropriate, characteristic, and incurable wretchedness. Yet the delightful thing is, that in spite of all this jeering and gibing, and grinning and hissing, and pointing with the finger--marrying and giving in marriage, births and christenings, continue their career of prosperity; and the legitimate population doubles itself somewhere about every thirty-five years. Single houses rise out of the earth--double houses become villages--villages towns--towns cities--and our Metropolis is itself a world!

While the lyrical poetry of Scotland is thus rife with reproach against wedlock, it is equally rife with panegyric on the tender passion that leads into its toils. In one page you shudder in a cold sweat over the mean miseries of the poor "gudeman;" in the next you see, unconscious of the same approaching destiny, the enamoured youth lying on his Mary's bosom beneath the milk-white thorn. The pastoral pipe is tuned under a fate that hurries on all living creatures to love; and not one lawful embrace is shunned from any other fears than those which of themselves spring up in the poor man's thoughtful heart. The wicked betray, and the weak fall--bitter tears are shed at midnight from eyes once bright as the day--fair faces never smile again, and many a hut has its broken heart--hope comes and goes, finally vanquishing, or yielding to despair--crowned passion dies the sated death, or, with increase of appetite, grows by what it feeds on--wide, but unseen, over all the regions of the land, are cheated hopes, vain desires, gnawing jealousy, dispirited fear, and swarthy-souled revenge--beseechings, seductions, suicides, and insanities--and all, all spring from the root of Love; yet all the nations of the earth call the Tree blest, and long as time endures, will continue to flock thither panting to devour the fruitage, of which every other golden globe is poison and death.

Smile away then, with all thy most irresistible blandishments, thou young and happy Bride! What business have we to prophesy bedimming tears to those resplendent eyes? or that the talisman of that witching smile can ever lose its magic? Are not the high-born daughters of England also the high-souled? And have not honour and virtue, and charity and religion, guarded for centuries the lofty line of thy pure and unpolluted blood? Joyful, therefore, mayst thou be, as the dove in the sunshine on the Tower-top--and as the dove serene, when she sitteth on her nest within the yew-tree's gloom, far within the wood!

Passing from our episode, let us say that we are too well acquainted with your taste, feeling, and judgment, to tell you on what objects to gaze or glance, in such a scene as the vale and village of Grassmere. Of yourselves you will find out the nooks and corners from which the pretty white-washed and flowering cottages do most picturesquely combine with each other, and with the hills, and groves, and old church-tower. Without our guiding hand will you ascend knoll and eminence, be there pathway or no pathway, and discover for yourselves new Lake-Landscapes. Led by your own sweet and idle, chaste and noble fancies, you will disappear, single, or in pairs and parties, into little woody wildernesses, where you will see nothing but ground-flowers and a glimmering contiguity of shade. Solitude sometimes, you know, is best society, and short retirement urges sweet return. Various travels or voyages of discovery may be undertaken, and their grand object attained in little more than an hour. The sudden whirr of a cushat is an incident, or the leaping of a lamb among the broom. In the quiet of nature, matchless seems the music of the milkmaid's song--and of the hearty laugh of the haymakers, crossing the meadow in rows, how sweet the cheerful echo from Helm-crag! Grassmere appears by far the most beautiful place in all the Lake-country. You buy a field--build a cottage--and in imagination lie (for they are too short to enable you to sit) beneath the shadow of your own trees!

In an English village--highland or lowland--seldom is there any spot so beautiful as the churchyard. That of Grassmere is especially so, with the pensive shadows of the old church-tower settling over its cheerful graves. Ay, its cheerful graves! Startle not at the word as too strong--for the pigeons are cooing in the belfry, the stream is murmuring round the mossy churchyard wall, a few lambs are lying on the mounds, and flowers laughing in the sunshine over the cells of the dead. But hark! the bell tolls--one--one--one--a funeral knell, speaking not of time, but of eternity! To-day there is to be a burial--and close to the wall of the Tower you see the new-dug grave.

Hush! The sound of singing voices in yonder wood, deadened by the weight of umbrage! Now it issues forth into the clear air, and now all is silence--but the pause speaks of death. Again the melancholy swell ascends the sky--and then comes slowly along the funeral procession, the coffin borne aloft, and the mourners all in white; for it is a virgin who is carried to her last home. Let every head be reverently uncovered while the psalm enters the gate, and the bier is borne for holy rites along the chancel of the church, and laid down close to the altar. A smothered sobbing disturbeth not the service--'tis a human spirit breathing in accordance with the divine. Mortals weeping for the immortal--Earth's passions cleaving to one who is now in heaven.

Was she one flower of many, and singled out by death's unsparing finger from a wreath of beauty, whose remaining blossoms seem now to have lost all their fragrance and all their brightness? Or was she the sole delight of her greyhaired parents' eyes, and is the voice of joy extinguished in their low-roofed home for ever? Had her loveliness been beloved, and had her innocent hopes anticipated the bridal-day, nor her heart, whose beatings were numbered, ever feared that narrow bed? All that we know is her name and age--you see them glittering on her coffin--"Anabella Irvine, aged xix years"!

The day seems something dim, now that we are all on our way back to Ambleside; and although the clouds are neither heavier nor more numerous than before, somehow or other the sun is a little obscured. We must not indulge too long in a mournful mood--yet let us all sit down under the shadow of this grove of sycamores, overshadowing this reedy bay of Rydal-mere, and listen to a Tale of Tears.

Many a tame tradition, embalmed in a few pathetic verses, lives for ages, while the memory of the most affecting incidents, to which genius has allied no general emotion, fades like the mist, and leaves heart-rending griefs undeplored. Elegies and dirges might indeed have well been sung amidst the green ruins of yonder Cottage, that looks now almost like a fallen wall--at best, the remnants of a cattle-shed shaken down by the storm.

Thirty years ago--how short a time in national history--how long in that of private sorrows!--all tongues were speaking of the death that there befell; and to have seen the weeping, you would have thought that the funeral could never have been forgotten. But stop now the shepherd on the hill, and ask him who lived in that nook, and chance is he knows not even their name, much less the story of their afflictions. It was inhabited by Allan Fleming, his wife, and an only child, known familiarly in her own small world by the name of LUCY OF THE FOLD. In almost every district among the mountains, there is its peculiar pride--some one creature to whom nature has been especially kind, and whose personal beauty, sweetness of disposition, and felt superiority of mind and manner, single her out, unconsciously, as an object of attraction and praise, making her the May-day Queen of the unending year. Such a darling was Lucy Fleming ere she had finished her thirteenth year; and strangers, who had heard tell of her loveliness, often dropt in, as if by accident, to see the Beauty of Rydal-mere. Her parents rejoiced in their child; nor was there any reason why they should dislike the expression of delight and wonder with which so many regarded her. Shy was she as a woodland bird, but as fond too of her nest; and when there was nothing near to disturb her, her life was almost a perpetual hymn. From joy to sadness, and from sadness to joy; from silence to song, and from song to silence; from stillness like that of the butterfly on the flower, to motion like that of the same creature wavering in the sunshine over the wood-top--was to Lucy as welcome a change as the change of lights and shadows, breezes and calms, in the mountain-country of her birth.

One summer day, a youthful stranger appeared at the door of the house, and after an hour's stay, during which Lucy was from home, asked if they would let him have lodging with them for a few months--a single room for bed and books, and that he would take his meals with the family. Enthusiastic boy! to him poetry had been the light of life, nor did ever creature of poetry belong more entirely than he to the world of imagination. He had come into the free mountain region from the confinement of college walls, and his spirit expanded within him like a rainbow. No eyes had he for realities--all nature was seen in the light of genius--not a single object at sunrise and sunset the same. All was beautiful within the circle of the green hill-tops, whether shrouded in the soft mists or clearly outlined in a cloudless sky. Home, friends, colleges, cities--all sunk away into oblivion, and HARRY HOWARD felt as if wafted off on the wings of a spirit, and set down in a land beyond the sea, foreign to all he had before experienced, yet in its perfect and endless beauty appealing every hour more tenderly and strongly to a spirit awakened to new power, and revelling in new emotion. In that cottage he took up his abode. In a few weeks came a library of books in all languages; and there was much wondering talk over all the countryside about the mysterious young stranger who now lived at the Fold.