I have taken the reader upon this stroll through a bit of the Lake country of England that we might find the poet Dr. Southey[1] in his old home at Keswick. It is not properly in the town, but just across the Greta River, which runs southward of the town. There, the modest but good-sized house has been standing for these many years upon a grassy knoll, in its little patch of quiet lawn, with scattered show of trees--but never so many as to forbid full view up the long stretch of Derwent Water. His own hexameters shall tell us something of this view: “I stood at the window beholding Mountain and lake and vale; the valley disrobed of its verdure; Derwent, retaining yet from eve a glassy reflection Where his expanded breast, then still and smooth as a mirror, Under the woods reposed; the hills that calm and majestic Lifted their heads into the silent sky, from far Glaramara, Bleacrag, and Maidenmawr to Grisedal and westernmost Wython, Dark and distinct they rose. The clouds had gathered above them High in the middle air, huge purple pillowy masses, While in the West beyond was the last pale tint of the twilight, Green as the stream in the glen, whose pure and chrysolite waters Flow o’er a schistous bed.” This may be very true picturing; but it has not the abounding flow of an absorbing rural enthusiasm; there is too sharp a search in it for the assonance, the spondees and the alliteration--to say nothing of the mineralogy. Indeed, though Southey loved those country ways and heights, of which I have given you a glimpse, and loved his daily walks round about Keswick and the Derwent, and loved the bracing air of the mountains--I think he loved these things as the feeders and comforters of his physical rather than of his spiritual nature. We rarely happen, in his verse, upon such transcripts of out-of-door scenes as are inthralling, and captivate our finer senses; nor does he make the boughs and blossoms tell such stories as filtered through the wood-craft of Chaucer.