Opposite Rydal Mount, at Nab Cottage, dwelt, for the closing years of his clouded life, the darling of the dalesfolk, "Li'le Hartley," first-born son of Coleridge,--that boy "so exquisitely wild" to whom had descended something of his father's genius crossed by the father's frailty. Hartley's demon was not the craving for opium, but for alcohol. After a sore struggle that crippled but did not destroy, he rests in Grasmere churchyard, his stone bearing the inscription, "By Thy Cross and Passion." It was from Nab Cottage that another soul of high endowment, menaced by the opium lust, De Quincey, took a bride, Margaret, a farmer's daughter, who made him the strong and patient wife his peril needed. They dwelt in Dove Cottage at Townend, Grasmere, the hallowed garden-nest where Wordsworth and his wife and his sister Dorothy--that ardent spirit the thought of whom is still "like a flash of light"--had dwelt before. Wordsworth's later homes at Allan Bank, the Grasmere Rectory, and even at Rydal Mount are less precious to memory than this, where he and Coleridge and Dorothy dreamed the great dreams of youth together. Thither came guests who held high converse over frugal fare,--among them Sir Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, "the frolic and the gentle," and that silent poet, the beloved brother John. It was a plain and thrifty life that Dove Cottage knew, with its rustic little rooms and round of household tasks, but thrift took on magic powers in the Lake Country a century ago. Amazing tales are told of the "Wonderful Walker," schoolmaster of Buttermere and curate of Seathwaite, the Pastor of the "Excursion," but his feats of economy might be challenged by the old-time curate of Patterdale, who, on an income of from sixty to ninety dollars a year, lived comfortably, educated his four children, and left them a tidy little fortune. Such queer turns of fate were his that he published his own banns and married his father. Most of those for whose sake the Lake Country is holy ground lived a contemplative, sequestered life akin to that of the mediæval monks, the scholars and visionaries of a fighting world; but Coniston, on the edge of Lancashire, is the shrine of a warrior saint, Ruskin, whose last earthly home, Brantwood, looks out over Coniston Water, and whose grave in the quiet churchyard, for which Westminster Abbey was refused, is beautifully marked by a symbolically carven cross quarried from the fine greenstone of Coniston Fells. In the Ruskin Museum may be seen many heart-moving memorials of that hero life, all the way from the abstracts of sermons written out for his mother in a laborious childish hand to the purple pall, worked for him by the local Linen Industry he so eagerly founded, and embroidered with his own words: "Unto This Last."