Aye, there indeed, your memory is a friend That does not play you false.--On that tall pike, (It is the loneliest place of all these hills) There were two Springs which bubbled side by side, As if they had been made that they might be Companions for each other: ten years back, Close to those brother fountains, the huge crag Was rent with lightning--one is dead and gone, The other, left behind, is flowing still.-- For accidents and changes such as these, Why we have store of them! a water-spout Will bring down half a mountain; what a feast For folks that wander up and down like you, To see an acre's breadth of that wide cliff One roaring cataract--a sharp May storm Will come with loads of January snow, And in one night send twenty score of sheep To feed the ravens, or a Shepherd dies By some untoward death among the rocks: The ice breaks up and sweeps away a bridge-- A wood is fell'd:--and then for our own homes! A child is born or christen'd, a field plough'd, A daughter sent to service, a web spun, The old house cloth is deck'd with a new face; And hence, so far from wanting facts or dates To chronicle the time, we all have here A pair of diaries, one serving, Sir, For the whole dale, and one for each fire-side, Your's was a stranger's judgment: for historians Commend me to these vallies. LEONARD. Yet your church-yard Seems, if such freedom may be used with you, To say that you are heedless of the past. Here's neither head nor foot-stone, plate of brass, Cross-bones or skull, type of our earthly state Or emblem of our hopes: the dead man's home Is but a fellow to that pasture field. PRIEST. Why there, Sir, is a thought that's new to me. The Stone-cutters, 'tis true, might beg their bread If every English church-yard were like ours: Yet your conclusion wanders from the truth. We have no need of names and epitaphs, We talk about the dead by our fire-sides. And then for our immortal part, _we_ want No symbols, Sir, to tell us that plain tale: The thought of death sits easy on the man Who has been born and dies among the mountains: LEONARD. Your dalesmen, then, do in each other's thoughts Possess a kind of second life: no doubt You, Sir, could help me to the history Of half these Graves? PRIEST. With what I've witness'd; and with what I've heard, Perhaps I might, and, on a winter's evening, If you were seated at my chimney's nook By turning o'er these hillocks one by one, We two could travel, Sir, through a strange round, Yet all in the broad high-way of the world. Now there's a grave--your foot is half upon it, It looks just like the rest, and yet that man Died broken-hearted. LEONARD.