up with stone walls built into the
steep ground, where stonecrops grow richly. One of these leads to a
little thatched arbour, where the poet often sat; below it, the ground
falls very rapidly, among rocks and copse and fern, so that you look
out on to the tree-tops below, and catch a glimpse of the steely waters
of the hidden lake of Rydal.

Wordsworth lived there for more than thirty years; and half a century
has passed since he died. He was a skilful landscape gardener; and I
suppose that in his lifetime, when the walks were being constructed and
the place laid out, it must have had a certain air of newness, of
interference with the old wild peace of the hillside, which it has
since parted with. Now it is all as full of a quiet and settled order,
as if it had been thus for ever. One little detail deserves a special
mention; just below the house, there is an odd, circular, low, grassy
mound, said to be the old meeting-place for the village council, in
primitive and patriarchal days,--the Mount, from which the place has
its name.

I thought much of the stately, simple, self-absorbed poet, whom somehow
one never thinks of as having been young; the lines of Milton haunted
me, as I moved about the rooms, the garden-terraces:--

"_In this mount he appeared; under this tree
Stood visible; among these pines his voice
I heard; here with him at this fountain talked._"

The place is all permeated with the thought of him, his deep and
tranquil worship of natural beauty, his love of the kindly earth.

I do not think that Wordsworth is one whose memory evokes a deep
personal attachment. I doubt if any figures of bygone days do that,
unless there is a certain wistful pathos about them; unless something
of compassion, some wish to proffer sympathy or consolation, mingles
with one's reverence. I have often, for instance, stayed at a house
where Shelley spent a few half-rapturous, half-miserable months.
There, meditating about him, striving to reconstruct the picture of his
life, one felt that he suffered much and needlessly; one would have
wished to shelter, to protect him if it had been possible, or at least
to have proffered sympathy to that inconsolable spirit. One's heart
goes out to those who suffered long years ago, whose love of the earth,
of life, of beauty, was perpetually overshadowed by the pain that comes
from realising transitoriness and decay.

But Wordsworth is touched by no such pathos. He was ext