So far as I know this was the last public work he attempted to do for the place that gave him birth. But at least we cannot regret that his last effort was in a cause near to his heart, the cause of the religious interests and life of his fellow Cumbrians, the cause of reverence, worship, and godly fear, of 'pure religion breathing household laws,' the cause of the worship and praise of Almighty God, here in his native place. The seed he sowed, though it lay dormant, did not fall on barren ground; and in a real sense the present All Saints' Parish Church may stand as a monument to the immortal Poet, who then, as ever, {226} championed 'in perilous times the cause of the poor and simple,' and did what he might in his day for church life and piety in the place of his nativity, Cockermouth. {227} MOUNTAIN SILENCE AND VALLEY SONG. Once more the Heavenly power makes all things new. This was the line from Tennyson's poem that kept ringing in my ears, as on the mid-most day of April I wandered out and away across the vale to the skirts of Skiddaw. Opens a door in Heaven; From skies of glass A Jacob's ladder falls On greening grass, And o'er the mountain walls Young angels pass. Before them fleets the shower And burst the buds, And shine the level lands, And flash the floods, The stars are from their hands Flung thro' the woods. No, no! this last couplet was untrue; the anemones had not yet opened their delicate {228} shells, and the blackthorn buds were only dimmest seed-pearls of yellowish lustre. But as I gazed from the fence halfway up Latrigg and watched the Greta flashing, and the great plain fresh-enamelled with the first faint green of spring, a Jacob's ladder was let down from above Scafell and Glaramara, and all the angels that ever came on earth to fill men's hearts with April jollity came trooping downwards. They took on various forms. Some of them became tortoise-shell butterflies that lay in sunny content upon the moist woodland path. Others sailed out of blue air and became glorious peacock butterflies upon whose underwings in blue and black one clearly saw the head and face of human kind sketched in with lustrous powdery pencillings. Other angels ministered to the pink coral glumes of the sycamore; others, again, daintily untwisted the leafage of the wild rose in the hedge; others delighted to unfold the tufts upon the elder. But the angels that seemed to be busiest were those that made the vivid emerald of the 'dog's mercury' contrast with the faded red of the bracken in the woods, and where the purple birches showed against the flowering larches {229} added moment by moment a deeper, ruddier purple to the trees' beauty and a finer flash of green to the surrounding wood to set the purple off.