me with asperity; and in the course of what he said, under some movement of ill temper, he asked me, in a way which I felt to be taunting, how I could consent to waste my time as I did. Without any answering warmth, I explained that my guardians, having quarrelled with me, would not grant for my use anything beyond my school allowance of £100 per annum. But was it not possible that even this sum might by economy be made to meet the necessities of the case? I replied that, from what I had heard, very probably it was. Would I undertake an Oxford life upon such terms? Most gladly, I said. Upon that opening, he spoke to my mother; and the result was, that, within seven days from the above conversation, I found myself entering that timehonoured University.

CHAPTER III.

EARLY MEMORIALS OF GRASMERE.

SOON after my return to Oxford in 1807-8, I received a letter from Miss Wordsworth, asking for any subscriptions I might succeed in obtaining, amongst my college friends, in aid of the funds then raising on behalf of an orphan family, who had become such by an affecting tragedy that had occurred within a few weeks from my visit to Grasmere.

Miss Wordsworth's simple but fervid memoir not being within my reach at this moment, I must trust to my own recollections and my own impressions to retrace the story; which, after all, is not much of a story to excite or to impress, unless for those who can find a sufficient interest in the trials and calamities of hard-working peasants, and can reverence the fortitude which, being lodged in so frail a tenement as the person of a little girl, not much, if anything, above nine years old, could face an occasion of sudden mysterious abandonment, and could tower up, during one night, into the perfect energies of womanhood, under the mere pressure of difficulty, and under the sense of newborn responsibilities awfully bequeathed to her, and in the most lonely, perhaps, of English habitations.

The little valley of Easedale, which, and the neighbour

hood of which, were the scenes of these interesting events, is, on its own account, one of the most impressive solitudes amongst the mountains of the Lake district; and I must pause to describe it. Easedale is impressive as a solitude; for the depth of the seclusion is brought out and forced more pointedly upon the feelings by the thin scattering of houses over its sides, and over the surface of what may be called its floor. These are not above six at the most; and one, the remotest of the whole, was untenanted for all the thirty years of my acquaintance with the place. Secondly, it is impressive from the excessive loveliness which adorns its little area. This is broken up into small fields and miniature meadows, separated, not—as too often happens, with sad injury to the beauty of the Lake country -by stone walls, but sometimes by little hedgerows, sometimes by little sparkling, pebbly "becks," lustrous to the very bottom, and not too broad for a child's flying leap; and sometimes by, wild self-sown woodlands of birch, alder, holly, mountain ash, and hazel, that meander through the valley, intervening the different estates with natural sylvan marches, and giving cheerfulness in winter, by the bright scarlet of their berries. It is the character of all the northern English valleys, as I have already remarked-and it is a character first noticed by Wordsworth-that they assume, in their bottom areas, the level, floor-like shape, making everywhere a direct angle with the surrounding hills, and definitely marking out the margin of their outlines; whereas the Welsh valleys have too often the glaring imperfection of the basin shape, which allows no sense of any flat area, or valley surface: the hills are already commencing at the very centre of what is called the level area. The little valley of Easedale is, in this respect, as highly finished as in every other; and in the Westmoreland spring, which

may be considered May and the earlier half of June, whilst the grass in the meadows is yet short from the habit of keeping the sheep on it until a much later period than elsewhere (viz., until the mountains are so far cleared of snow and the probability of storms, as to make it safe to send them out on their summer migration), it follows naturally that the little fields in Easedale have the most lawny appearance, and, from the humidity of the Westmoreland* climate, the most verdant that it is possible to imagine. But there is a third advantage possessed by this Easedale, above other rival valleys, in the sublimity of its mountain barriers. In one of its many rocky recesses is seen a "force" (such is the local name for a cataract), white with foam, descending at all seasons with considerable strength, and, after the melting of snows, with an Alpine violence. Follow the leading of this "force" for three quarters of a mile, and you come to a little mountain lake, locally termed a tarn," the very finest and most gloomily sublime of its class. From this

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*It is pretty generally known, perhaps, that Westmoreland and Devonshire are the two rainiest counties in England. At Kirkby Lonsdale, lying just on the outer margin of the Lake district, onefifth more rain is computed to fall than in the adjacent counties on the same western side of England. But it is also notorious, that the western side of the island universally is more rainy than the east. Collins called it the Showery West.

A tarn is a lake, generally (perhaps always) a small one: and always, as I think (but this I have heard disputed), lying above the level of the inhabited valleys and the large lakes; and subject to this farther restriction, first noticed by Wordsworth, that it has no main feeder. Now, this latter accident of the thing at once explains and authenticates my account of the word, viz., that it is the Danish word taaren (a trickling of tears), a deposit of waters from the weeping of rain down the smooth faces of the rocks.

tarn it was, I doubt not, though applying it to another, that Wordsworth drew the circumstances of his general description. And far beyond this "enormous barrier," that thus imprisons the very winds, tower upwards the aspiring heads (usually enveloped in cloud and mist) of Glaramara, Bow Fell, and the other fells of Langdale Head and Borrowdale. Easedale, in its relation to Grasmere, is a chamber within a chamher, or rather a closet within a chamber a chapel within a cathedral—a little private oratory within a chapel. The sole approach, as I have mentioned, is from Grasmere; and some one outlet there must inevitably be in every vale that can be interesting to a human occupant, since without water it would not be habitable; and running water must force an egress for itself, and, consequently, an ingress for the reader and myself: but, properly speaking, there is no other. For, when you explore the remoter end of the vale, at which you suspect some communication with the world outside, you find before you a most formidable amount of climbing, the extent of which can hardly be measured where there is no solitary object of human workmanship or vestige of animal life, not a sheep-track, not a shepherd's hovel, but rock and heath, heath and rock, tossed about in monotonous confusion. And, after the ascent is mastered, you descend into a second vale--long, narrow, sterile-known by the name of "Far Easedale:" from which point, if you could drive a tunnel under the everlasting hills, perhaps six or seven miles might bring you to the nearest habitation of man, in Borrowdale; but, going over the mountains, the road cannot be less than twelve or fourteen, and, in point of fatigue, at the least twenty. This long valley, which is really terrific at noonday, from its utter loneliness and desolation, completes the defences of little sylvan