Speaking of the climate of the district, and of the skiey influences generally, he remarks, "The rain comes down here heartily, and is frequently succeeded by clear bright weather, when every brook is vocal, and every torrent sonorous, brooks and torrents which are never muddy except after a drought. Days of unsettled weather, with partial showers, are frequent; but the showers, darkening or brightening as they fly from hill to hill, are not less grateful to the eye, than finely interwoven passages of gay and sad music are touching to the ear. Vapours exhaling from the lakes and meadows after sunrise, in a hot season, or in moist weather brooding upon the heights, or descending towards the valleys with inaudible motion, give a visionary character to everything around them, and are in themselves so beautiful as to dispose us to enter into the feelings of those simple nations by whom they are taken for the Guardian Deities of the mountains, or to sympathise with others who have fancied these delicate apparitions to be the spirits of their departed ancestors. Akin to these are fleecy clouds resting upon the hill tops. Such clouds cleaving to their stations, or lifting up suddenly their glittering heads from behind rocky barriers, or hurrying out of sight with speed of the sharpest edge, will often tempt an inhabitant to congratulate himself on belonging to a country of mists, and clouds, and storms, and make him think of the blank sky of Egypt, and the cerulean vacancy of Italy, as an unanimated and even a sad spectacle."

Finally, he says that as "in human life there are moments worth ages, so, in the climate of England, there are, for the lover of nature, days which are worth whole months, I might say even years. It is in autumn that days of such affecting influence most frequently intervene; the atmosphere seems refined, and the sky

rendered more crystalline, as the vivifying heat of the year abates; the lights and shadows are more delicate; the colouring is richer and more finely harmonised; and in this season of stillness, the ear being unoccupied, or only gently excited, the sense of vision becomes more susceptible of its appropriate enjoyments. A resident in a country like this which we are treating of, will agree with me that the presence of a lake is indispensable to exhibit in perfection the beauty of one of these days; and he must have experienced, while looking on the unruffled waters, that the imagination, by their aid, is carried into recesses of feeling otherwise impenetrable. The reason of this is that the heavens are not only brought down into the bosom of the earth, but that the earth is necessarily looked at, and thought of, through the medium of a purer element.' "'*

In that chapter in which he speaks of the best time for visiting the district, he mentions successively certain features of Nature,-which afford a good illustration of the way in which he passed from the external features of a scene, of which the senses take cognisance, to its underlying spirit. He first refers to "the tender green of the aftergrass upon the meadows, interspersed with islands of gray or mossy rock." He then alludes to the notes of birds, which, "when listened to, by the side of broad still waters, or heard in unison with the murmuring of mountain brooks, have the compass of their powers enlarged accordingly;" next, of the "imaginative influence of the voice of the cuckoo, when that voice has taken possession of a deep mountain valley." Again he writes: Again he writes: "He is the most fortunate who chances to be involved in vapours which open, and let in an extent of country partially, or, dis

* Guide, section 1.

persing suddenly, reveal the whole region from centre to circumference."

I may here refer to a paper on this little book, written for, and read to the Wordsworth Society, in 1883, by Mr Stopford Brooke, and published in the Transactions of the Society. It is by far the best estimate of it that has been written.

Wordsworth's own opinion of his introduction to Wilkinson's book, and of the "drawings, or etchings, or whatever they may be called," is given in a Letter to Lady Beaumont, written from Allan Bank, on the 10th May 1810.

"MY DEAR LADY BEAUMONT,—I am very happy that you have read the Introduction with so much pleasure, and must thank you for your kindness in telling me of it. I thought the part about the cottages well done; and also liked a sentence where I transport the reader to the top of one of the mountains, or rather, to the cloud chosen for his station, and give a sketch of the impressions which the country might be supposed to make on a feeling mind contemplating its appearance before it was inhabited. what I wished to accomplish was to give a model of the manner in which topographical descriptions ought to be executed, in order to their being either useful or intelligible, by evolving truly and distinctly one appearance from In this I think I have not wholly failed.

another.

But

The drawings, or etchings, or whatever they may be called, are, I know, such as to you and Sir George must be intolerable. You will receive from them that sort of disgust which I do from bad poetry, a disgust which can never be felt in its full strength but by those who are practised in an art, as well as amateurs of it.”

A brief notice of the movements of the household at Allan Bank, from 1810 till they left it as a residence, may conclude this chapter. In March, while Coleridge was absent at Keswick, Sarah Hutchinson-who had for five years been an almost constant inmate in the successive homes of the Wordsworth family-left them, to live with her brother, in his new farm of Hindwell in Radnorshire. In the autumn Wordsworth paid another visit to Coleorton, to Hagley, and the Leasowes, and then to his friend Mr Price, at Foxley, in Herefordshire. The precise time of De Quincey's seven months' visit to Wordsworth I have been unable to ascertain, but it is certain that he and Coleridge were guests together at Allan Bank-that "large house with plenty of room," as Wordsworth described it to Mr Stuart of The Couriers newspaper, when inviting him to come north. In the Edinburgh Literary Gazette De Quincey gives the following account of his first meeting with John Wilson, at Allan Bank :—

'At the time I speak of, both Mr Coleridge and myself were on a visit to Mr Wordsworth; and one room on the ground floor, designed for a breakfasting-room, which commands a sublime view of the three mountains-Fairfield, Arthur's Chair, and Seat Sandal (the first of them within about 400 feet of the highest mountains in Great Britain) -was then occupied by Mr Coleridge as a study. On this particular day, the sun having only just set, it naturally happened that Mr Coleridge-whose nightly vigils were long-had not yet come down to breakfast; meantime, and until the epoch of the Coleridgian breakfast should arrive, his study was lawfully disposable to profaner uses. Here, therefore, it was, that, opening the door hastily in quest of a book, I found seated, and in earnest conversation, two gentlemen: one of them my host, Mr Wordsworth,

a

at that time about thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old; the other was a younger man by good sixteen or seventeen years, in a sailor's dress, manifestly in robust health, fervidus juventa, and wearing upon his countenance powerful expression of ardour and animated intelligence, mixed with much good nature. Mr Wilson of Elleray,' delivered as the formula of introduction, in the deep tones of Mr Wordsworth, at once banished the momentary surprise I felt on finding an unknown stranger where I had expected nobody, and substituted a surprise of another kind."

During the spring of 1810 the Wordsworths became aware that they must leave Allan Bank in the following year, and they found it difficult to hear of any fit residence in the vale; although they were not loathe to remove, since they had been much annoyed (as at Dove Cottage formerly) by smoky chimneys. In May, however, they found they could get the Parsonage, opposite the Church, and concluded a bargain for it a year in advance. Dorothy Wordsworth wrote thus about it

"You will be rejoiced to hear that we shall not be forced to leave Grasmere Vale. We are to have the parsonage house, which will be made a very comfortable dwelling before we enter upon it, which will be next year at this time. But oh my dear friend, this place-the wood behind it and the rocks, the view of Easedale from them, the lake, and church, and village on the other sideis sweeter than paradise itself.”

In the Parsonage they found that they had "at least one sitting-room clear of smoke in all winds." In August 1810, they went down to a cottage near Bootle, on the coast of Cumberland, for sea air, chiefly for the sake of their children. The incidents in this journey—and they were numerous—are described in the Epistle to Sir George