Not in any roll-call of the men of letters who have trodden the Cumbrian Hills should the poet Gray be forgotten. The first known tourist in the Lake Country, he was delighted with Grasmere and Keswick, but Borrowdale, plunged deep amid what the earliest guide-book, that of West in 1774, was to describe as "the most horrid romantic mountains," turned him back in terror. Yet Wordsworth, for all his illustrious compeers, is still the presiding genius of these opalescent hills and silver meres. It is to him, that plain-faced man who used to go "booing" his verses along these very roads, that multitudes of visitants have owed "Feelings and emanations--things which were Light to the sun and music to the wind." It is good for the soul to follow that sane, pure life from its "fair seedtime" on the garden terrace at Cockermouth, where the murmuring Derwent gave "Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind, A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm That Nature breathes among the hills and groves," through the boyhood at Hawkshead--that all-angled little huddle of houses near Esthwaite Water--a boyhood whose inner growth is so marvellously portrayed in "The Prelude," on through the long and fruitful manhood of a poet vowed, "Days of sweet leisure, taxed with patient thought Abstruse, nor wanting punctual service high, Matins and vespers of harmonious verse," to the churchyard beside the Rotha, where Wordsworth and his kin of flesh and spirit keep their "incommunicable sleep." "Blessing be with them, and eternal praise!" THREE RUSH-BEARINGS _Where is the stranger? Rushes, ladies, rushes, Rushes as green as summer for this stranger._ FLETCHER'S "Valentinian." I