Fell, from which the 'Pastor' and his companions are
supposed to look upwards to the sky and mountain-tops, and round the
Vale, with the Lake lying immediately beneath them.

'But turned, not without welcome promise given
That he would share the pleasures and pursuits
Of yet another Summer's day, consumed
In wandering with us.'

When I reported this promise of the 'Solitary,' and long after, it was
my wish, and I might say intention, that we should resume our wanderings
and pass the borders into his native country, where, as I hoped, he
might witness, in the society of the 'Wanderer,' some religious
ceremony--a sacrament say, in the open fields, or a preaching among the
mountains, which, by recalling to his mind the days of his early
childhood, when he had been present on such occasions in company with
his parents and nearest kindred, might have dissolved his heart into
tenderness, and so done more towards restoring the Christian faith in
which he had been educated, and, with that, contentedness and even
cheerfulness of mind, than all that the 'Wanderer' and 'Pastor' by their
several effusions and addresses had been enabled to effect. An issue
like this was in my intentions, but alas!

----'mid the wreck of is and was,
Things incomplete and purposes betrayed
Make sadder transits o'er thought's optic glass
Than noblest objects utterly decayed.'

Bydal Mount, June 24. 1843.
St. John Baptist Day.

Of the 'Church' in the 'Excursion' (Book v.) we find this additional
morsel in a letter to Lady Frederick Bentinck (_Memoirs_, i. 156): 'The
Church is a very ancient structure; some persons now propose to ceil
it, a project which, as a matter of taste and feeling, I utterly
disapprove. At present, it is open to the rafters, and is accordingly
spacious, and has a venerable appearance, favourable, when one first
enters, to devotional impressions.'

514. _The Aristocracy of Nature_.

----'much did he see of men.' ['Excursion,' Book i. 1. 344.]

At the risk of giving a shock to the prejudices of artificial society, I
have ever been ready to pay homage to the aristocracy of nature; under a
conviction that vigorous human-heartedness is the constituent principle
of true taste. It may still, however, be satisfactory to have prose
testimony how far a Character, employed for purposes of imagination, is
founded upon general fact. I, therefore, subjoin an extract from an
author who