_Wednesday, 28th April._-- ... I copied _The Prioress's Tale_. William was in the orchard. I went to him; he worked away at his poem.... I happened to say that when I was a child I would not have pulled a strawberry blossom. I left him, and wrote out _The Manciple's Tale_. At dinner time he came in with the poem of _Children gathering Flowers_,[63] but it was not quite finished, and it kept him long off his dinner. It is now done. He is working at _The Tinker_. He promised me he would get his tea, and do no more, but I have got mine an hour and a quarter, and he has scarcely begun his. We have let the bright sun go down without walking. Now a heavy shower comes on, and I guess we shall not walk at all. I wrote a few lines to Coleridge. Then we walked backwards and forwards between our house and Olliff's. We called upon T. Hutchinson, and Bell Addison. William left me sitting on a stone. When we came in we corrected the Chaucers, but I could not finish them to-night. [Footnote 63: See _Foresight_, vol. ii. p. 298.--ED.] _Thursday, 29th._-- ... After I had written down _The Tinker_, which William finished this morning, Luff called. He was very lame, limped into the kitchen. He came on a little pony. We then went to John's Grove, sate a while at first; afterwards William lay, and I lay, in the trench under the fence--he with his eyes shut, and listening to the waterfalls and the birds. There was no one waterfall above another--it was a sound of waters in the air--the voice of the air. William heard me breathing, and rustling now and then, but we both lay still, and unseen by one another. He thought that it would be so sweet thus to lie in the grave, to hear the peaceful sounds of the earth, and just to know that our dear friends were near. The lake was still; there was a boat out. Silver How reflected with delicate purple and yellowish hues, as I have seen spar; lambs on the island, and running races together by the half-dozen, in the round field near us. The copses greenish, hawthorns green, ... cottages smoking. As I lay down on the grass, I observed the glittering silver line on the ridge of the backs of the sheep, owing to their situation respecting the sun, which made them look beautiful, but with something of strangeness, like animals of another kind, as if belonging to a more splendid world.... I got mullins and pansies....