go, because it
was just after the birth of her daughter, a nice comely girl who
attended us at tea. Mr. Quillinan showed great good nature and
unselfishness in the arrangements he made, and the care he took of the
admirable horse, which I saw him feeding out of a tub, a manger being
too great a refinement for Ulpha.

* * * * *

After tea, although it was getting dark, we went to the churchyard,
which commands a beautiful view towards Seathwaite, and we then walked
in that direction, through a lane where the walls were more richly
covered by moss and fern than any I ever saw before. A beautiful
dark-coloured tributary to the Duddon comes down from the moors on the
left hand, about a mile from Ulpha; and soon after we had passed the
small bridge over this stream, Mr. Wordsworth recollected a well which
he had discovered some thirty or forty years before. We went off the
road in search of it, through a shadowy, embowered path; and as it was
almost dark we should probably have failed in finding it, had we not
met a very tiny boy, with a can of water in his hand, who looked at us
in speechless amazement, when the Poet said, 'Is there a well here, my
little lad?' We found the well, and then joined the road again by
another path, leaving the child to ponder whether we were creatures of
earth or air.

* * * * *

Saturday morning was cloudy but soft, and lovely in its hazy effects.
When I went out about seven, I saw Wordsworth going a few steps, and
then moving on, and stopping again, in a very abstracted manner; so I
kept back. But when he saw me, he advanced, and took me again to the
churchyard to see the morning effects, which were very lovely. He said
he had not slept well, that the recollection of former days and people
had crowded upon him, and, 'most of all, my dear sister; and when I
thought of her state, and of those who had passed away, Coleridge, and
Southey, and many others, while I am left with all my many infirmities,
if not sins, in full consciousness, how could I sleep? and then I took
to the alteration of sonnets, and that made the matter worse still.'
Then suddenly stopping before a little bunch of harebell, which, along
with some parsley fern, grew out of the wall near us, he exclaimed, 'How
perfectly beautiful that is!

"Would that the little flowers that grow could live,
Conscious of half the pleasure that they give."'

He then exp