l acquainted
with your taste, feeling, and judgment, to tell you on what objects to
gaze or glance, in such a scene as the vale and village of Grassmere. Of
yourselves you will find out the nooks and corners from which the pretty
white-washed and flowering cottages do most picturesquely combine with
each other, and with the hills, and groves, and old church-tower.
Without our guiding hand will you ascend knoll and eminence, be there
pathway or no pathway, and discover for yourselves new Lake-Landscapes.
Led by your own sweet and idle, chaste and noble fancies, you will
disappear, single, or in pairs and parties, into little woody
wildernesses, where you will see nothing but ground-flowers and a
glimmering contiguity of shade. Solitude sometimes, you know, is best
society, and short retirement urges sweet return. Various travels or
voyages of discovery may be undertaken, and their grand object attained
in little more than an hour. The sudden whirr of a cushat is an
incident, or the leaping of a lamb among the broom. In the quiet of
nature, matchless seems the music of the milkmaid's song--and of the
hearty laugh of the haymakers, crossing the meadow in rows, how sweet
the cheerful echo from Helm-crag! Grassmere appears by far the most
beautiful place in all the Lake-country. You buy a field--build a
cottage--and in imagination lie (for they are too short to enable you to
sit) beneath the shadow of your own trees!

In an English village--highland or lowland--seldom is there any spot so
beautiful as the churchyard. That of Grassmere is especially so, with
the pensive shadows of the old church-tower settling over its cheerful
graves. Ay, its cheerful graves! Startle not at the word as too
strong--for the pigeons are cooing in the belfry, the stream is
murmuring round the mossy churchyard wall, a few lambs are lying on the
mounds, and flowers laughing in the sunshine over the cells of the dead.
But hark! the bell tolls--one--one--one--a funeral knell, speaking not
of time, but of eternity! To-day there is to be a burial--and close to
the wall of the Tower you see the new-dug grave.

Hush! The sound of singing voices in yonder wood, deadened by the weight
of umbrage! Now it issues forth into the clear air, and now all is
silence--but the pause speaks of death. Again the melancholy swell
ascends the sky--and then comes slowly along the funeral procession, the
coffin borne aloft, and the mourners all in white; for it is a virg