service. A walk with him in that country was a real treat: I
never met with a man who seemed to know a country and the people so
well, or to love them better, nor one who had such exquisite taste for
rural scenery: he had evidently cultivated it with great care; he not
only admired the beauties, but he could tell you what were the peculiar
features in each scene, or what the incidents to which it owed its
peculiar charm. He combined, beyond any man with whom I ever met, the
unsophisticated poetic delight in the beauties of nature with a somewhat
artistic skill in developing the sources and conditions of them. In
examining the parts of a landscape he would be minute; and he dealt with
shrubs, flower-beds, and lawns with the readiness of a practiced
landscape-gardener. His own little grounds afforded a beautiful specimen
of his skill in this latter respect; and it was curious to see how he
had imparted the same faculty in some measure to his gardener--James
Dixon, I think, was his name. I found them together one morning in the
little lawn by the Mount. 'James and I,' said he, 'are in a puzzle here.
The grass here has spots which offend the eye; and I told him we must
cover them with soap-lees. "That," he says, "will make the green there
darker than the rest." "Then," I said, "we must cover the whole." He
objected: "That will not do with reference to the little lawn to which
you pass from this." "Cover that," I said. To which he replies, "You
will have an unpleasant contrast with the foliage surrounding it."'

Beside this warm feeling and exquisite taste, which made him so
delightful a guide, his favourite spots had a human interest engrafted
on them,--some tradition, some incident, some connection with his own
poetry, or himself, or some dear friend. These he brought out in a
striking way. Apart from these, he was well pleased to discourse on
poetry or poets; and here appeared to me to be his principal
scholarship. He was extremely well read in English poetry; and he would
in his walk review a poem or a poet with admirable precision and
fairness. He did not intrude his own poetry or himself, but he did not
decline to talk about either; and he spoke of both simply, unboastingly,
and yet with a manly consciousness of their worth. It was clear he
thought he had achieved a high place among poets: it had been the aim of
his life, humanly speaking; and he had taken worthy pains to accomplish
and prepare himself for the enterpri