following interesting remarks:

"After a careful reading of the passage describing the poet's return
from a festal night, spent in some farm-house beyond the hills, I am
quite unable to say that the path from High Arnside over the Ironkeld
range entirely suits the description. Is it not possible that the lad
had school-fellows whose parents lived in Yewdale? If he had, and was
returning from the party in one of the Yewdale farms, he would, as he
ascended towards Tarn Howes, and faced about south, to gain the main
Coniston road, by traversing the meadows between Berwick ground and
the top of the Hawkshead and Coniston Hill, command a view of the sea
that 'lay laughing at a distance'; and 'near, the solid
mountains'--Wetherlam and Coniston Old Man--would shine 'bright as the
clouds.' I think this is likely to have been the poet's track, because
he speaks of labourers going forth to till the fields; and the Yewdale
valley is one that is (at its head) chiefly arable, so that he would
be likelier to have gazed on them there than in the vale of Hawkshead
itself. One is here, however--as in a former passage, when we fixed on
Yewdale as the one described as being a 'cultured vale'--obliged to
remember that in Wordsworth's boyhood wheat was grown more extensively
than is now the case in these parts. Of course, the Furness Fell,
above Colthouse, might have been the scene. It is eminently suited to
the description."

Ed.

* * * * *

NOTE IV.--DOROTHY WORDSWORTH AT CAMBRIDGE IN 1808. THE ASH TREE AT ST.
JOHN'S COLLEGE

(See p. 224, 'The Prelude', book vi. ll. 76-94)

The following is an extract from a letter of Dorothy Wordsworth's to
Lady Beaumont at Coleorton, dated "14th August," probably in 1808:

"We reached Cambridge at half-past nine. In our way to the Inn we
stopped at the gate of St. John's College to set down one of our
passengers. The stopping of the carriage roused me from a sleepy
musing, and I was awe-stricken with the solemnity of the old gateway,
and the light from a great distance within streaming along the
pavement. When they told me it was the entrance to 'St. John's'
College, I was still more affected by the gloomy yet beautiful sight
before me, for I thought of my dearest brother in his youthful days
passing through that gateway to his home, and I could have believed
that I saw him there e