nder Rydal, and folks
could hear sounds like a wild beast coming from the rocks, and childer
were scared fit to be dead a'most.'

Wordsworth's description of himself constantly recurs to one:

And who is he with modest looks,
And clad in sober russet gown?
He murmurs by the running brooks,
A music sweeter than their own;
He is retired as noontide dew,
Or fountain in a noonday grove.

But the corroboration comes in strange guise. Mr. Rawnsley asked one of
the Dalesmen about Wordsworth's dress and habits. This was the reply:
'Wudsworth wore a Jem Crow, never seed him in a boxer in my life,--a Jem
Crow and an old blue cloak was his rig, and _as for his habits, he had
noan_; niver knew him with a pot i' his hand, or a pipe i' his mouth. But
he was a great skater, for a' that--noan better in these parts--why, he
could cut his own naame upo' the ice, could Mr. Wudsworth.' Skating
seems to have been Wordsworth's one form of amusement. He was 'over
feckless i' his hands'--could not drive or ride--'not a bit of fish in
him,' and 'nowt of a mountaineer.' But he could skate. The rapture of
the time when, as a boy, on Esthwaite's frozen lake, he had

wheeled about,
Proud and exulting like an untired horse
That cares not for his home, and, shod with steel,
Had hissed along the polished ice,

was continued, Mr. Rawnsley tells us, into manhood's later day; and Mr.
Rawnsley found many proofs that the skill the poet had gained, when

Not seldom from the uproar he retired,
Into a silent bay, or sportively
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng
To cut across the reflex of a star,

was of such a kind as to astonish the natives among whom he dwelt. The
recollection of a fall he once had, when his skate caught on a stone,
still lingers in the district. A boy had been sent to sweep the snow
from the White Moss Tarn for him. 'Did Mr. Wudsworth gie ye owt?' he was
asked, when he returned from his labour. 'Na, but I seed him tumlle,
though!' was the answer. 'He was a ter'ble girt skater, was Wudsworth
now,' says one of Mr. Rawnsley's informants; 'he would put one hand i'
his breast (he wore a frill shirt i' them days), and t'other hand i' his
waistband, same as shepherds does to keep their hands warm, and he would
stand up straight and sway and swing away grandly.'

Of his poetry they did not think much, and whatever was good in it they
ascribed to his wife, his