ract hangs, and does not rush away from you.

John Sterling spent his next five years in this locality. He did not
again see it for a quarter of a century; but retained, all his life, a
lively remembrance of it; and, just in the end of his twenty-first year,
among his earliest printed pieces, we find an elaborate and diffuse
description of it and its relations to him,--part of which piece, in
spite of its otherwise insignificant quality, may find place here:--

"The fields on which I first looked, and the sands which were marked by
my earliest footsteps, are completely lost to my memory; and of those
ancient walls among which I began to breathe, I retain no recollection
more clear than the outlines of a cloud in a moonless sky. But of L----,
the village where I afterwards lived, I persuade myself that every line
and hue is more deeply and accurately fixed than those of any spot
I have since beheld, even though borne in upon the heart by the
association of the strongest feelings.

"My home was built upon the slope of a hill, with a little orchard
stretching down before it, and a garden rising behind. At a considerable
distance beyond and beneath the orchard, a rivulet flowed through
meadows and turned a mill; while, above the garden, the summit of
the hill was crowned by a few gray rocks, from which a yew-tree grew,
solitary and bare. Extending at each side of the orchard, toward
the brook, two scattered patches of cottages lay nestled among their
gardens; and beyond this streamlet and the little mill and bridge,
another slight eminence arose, divided into green fields, tufted and
bordered with copsewood, and crested by a ruined castle, contemporary,
as was said, with the Conquest. I know not whether these things in truth
made up a prospect of much beauty. Since I was eight years old, I have
never seen them; but I well know that no landscape I have since beheld,
no picture of Claude or Salvator, gave me half the impression of living,
heartfelt, perfect beauty which fills my mind when I think of that green
valley, that sparkling rivulet, that broken fortress of dark antiquity,
and that hill with its aged yew and breezy summit, from which I have
so often looked over the broad stretch of verdure beneath it, and the
country-town, and church-tower, silent and white beyond.

"In that little town there was, and I believe is, a school where the
elements of human knowledge were communicated to me, for some hours of
every day,