Wordsworth was among those stately country gentlemen who believed that with the passage of the great Reform Bill of 1832, England was about to enter upon her decadence. Like many another poet, he had faith in established privileges, and faith in grand traditions. He bestirred himself, too, in the latter years of his life, to defeat--if it might be--the scheme for pushing railways across his quiet and beautiful region among the lakes of Westmoreland and Cumberland. Happily he did not live to see the desecration of his charming solitudes; it would have made him wroth to watch the wreaths of vapor from the engines floating around the chimney-tops of Rydal Mount.[12] The lines he wrote fifty years before his death, he lived by to the last:-- "To her fair works did Nature link The human soul that thro' me ran; {346} And much it grieved my heart to think What man has made of man. The budding twigs spread out their fan To catch the breezy air; And I must think, do all I can, That there was pleasure there." He had not only a poet's, but a Briton's love for that old England--of mossy roofs, and park lands, and smoking chimneys, and great old houses, and gnarled oaks, and way-side cottages. He cherished all Raskin's antipathy to huge manufacturing centres, and the din of machinery and trip-hammers; he would have no pounding to fright the cuckoos, and no reservoirs among the hills to choke the rills; but everywhere the brooks purling their own murmurous ways through leafy solitudes and sweet, open valleys. Well, those are the sights that win most, I think, toward the celestial visions which the good poet always cherished, and which symbolized best the "dear Jerusalem,"-- "Along whose streets, with pleasing sound, The living waters flow, And on the banks, on either side. The trees of life do grow." {347} Only the name--William Wordsworth--is graven upon the simple stone which marks the poet's grave, in a corner of the church-yard at Grasmere; and the bodies of wife and children lie grouped there beside him. [1] Samuel Rogers, b. 1768; d. 1855. His _Pleasures of Memory_, published 1792; _Italy_, 1822-28. [2] Crabb Robinson, chap. ix., 1881, p. 165, vol. ii., says he "was noted for his generosity toward poor artists." The story he tells in confirmation is, that Sir Thomas Lawrence appeared at his door and begged him to save the president of the Royal Academy from disgrace, which must follow except a few thousands were raised next day; he (Sir Thomas) offering his paintings, drawings, etc., in guarantee. Crabb Robinson continues that "Rogers saw Lord Ward [a nobleman of great wealth] next day and arranged for the advance by him;" an advance that never brought loss to either Ward or Rogers. The latter's "generosities" were a good many of them of this color; _i.e._, securing advances which were pretty sure to be repaid.