pastoral flute among the reeds of Rydal.

Wordsworth is simply a Westmoreland peasant, with considerably less
shrewdness than most border Englishmen or Scotsmen inherit; and no sense
of humor: but gifted (in this singularly) with vivid sense of natural
beauty, and a pretty turn for reflections, not always acute, but, as far
as they reach, medicinal to the fever of the restless and corrupted life
around him. Water to parched lips may be better than Samian wine, but do
not let us therefore confuse the qualities of wine and water. I much
doubt there being many inglorious Miltons in our country churchyards;
but I am very sure there are many Wordsworths resting there, who were
inferior to the renowned one only in caring less to hear themselves
talk.

With an honest and kindly heart, a stimulating egoism, a wholesome
contentment in modest circumstances, and such sufficient ease, in that
accepted state, as permitted the passing of a good deal of time in
wishing that daisies could see the beauty of their own shadows, and
other such profitable mental exercises, Wordsworth has left us a series
of studies of the graceful and happy shepherd life of our lake country,
which to me personally, for one, are entirely sweet and precious; but
they are only so as the mirror of an existent reality in many ways more
beautiful than its picture.

51. But the other day I went for an afternoon's rest into the cottage of
one of our country people of old statesman class; cottage lying nearly
midway between two village churches, but more conveniently for downhill
walk towards one than the other. I found, as the good housewife made tea
for me, that nevertheless she went up the hill to church. "Why do not
you go to the nearer church?" I asked. "Don't you like the clergyman?"
"Oh no, sir," she answered, "it isn't that; but you know I couldn't
leave my mother." "Your mother! she is buried at H---- then?" "Yes, sir;
and you know I couldn't go to church anywhere else."

That feelings such as these existed among the peasants, not of
Cumberland only, but of all the tender earth that gives forth her fruit
for the living, and receives her dead to peace, might perhaps have been,
to our great and endless comfort, discovered before now, if Wordsworth
had been content to tell us what he knew of his own villages and people,
not as the leader of a new and only correct school of poetry, but simply
as a country gentleman of sense and feeling, fond of primroses, k