“How fluttered then thy anxious heart for me, Beloved mother! Thou whose happy hand Had bound the flowers I wore, with faithful tie; Sweet flowers, at whose inaudible command, Her countenance, phantom like, doth reappear; Oh! lost too early for the frequent tear, And ill-requited by this heart-felt sigh.” With such a mother as this, it is no wonder that Wordsworth--in spite of his occasional devilry--was a happy and joyous boy. He looks back, indeed, in after life, upon the home and scenes of his childhood, as upon some enchanted region. He has no withering recollections of poverty or distress; all is sunshine and delight. The sweet, melodious, and romantic Derwent is the syren of these dreams, and it sings with wondrous music in his verse. All his memories are associated with the fine scenery of his birth-place--are fused into it--and become, at last the real foundation of his life: and here is a description of his native scenery, which I find ready made to my hand: “The whole district may be said to stand single in the world, and to have in the peculiar character of its beauty no parallel elsewhere. It is in the concentration of every variety of loveliness into a compass which in extent does not greatly tax the powers of the pedestrian, that it fairly defies rivalry, and affords the richest pabulum to the poetical faculty. There, every form of mountain, rock, lake, stream, wood, and plain, from the conformation of the country, is crowded with the most prodigal abundance into a few square miles. Coleridge characterises it as a ‘cabinet of beauties.’ ‘Each thing,’ says he, ‘is beautiful in itself; and the very passage from one lake, mountain, or valley to another, is itself a beautiful thing again.’ Wordsworth, in his own ‘Description of the Country of the Lakes,’ dwells with the zest and minuteness of idolatry upon every feature of that treasury of landscape. The idea he gives of the locality is very perfect and graphic. If the tourist were seated on a cloud midway between Great Gavel and Scafell, and only a few yards above their highest elevation, he would look down to the westward on no fewer than nine different valleys, diverging away from that point, like spokes from the nave of a wheel, towards the vast rim formed by the sands of the Irish Sea. These vales--Langdale, Coniston, Duddon, Eskdale, Wastdale, Ennerdale, Buttermere, Borrowdale, and Keswick--are of every variety of character; some with, and some without lakes; some richly fertile, and some awfully desolate. Shifting from the cloud, if the tourist were to fly a few miles eastward, to the ridge of old Helvellyn, he would find the wheel completed by the vales of Wytheburn, Ulswater, Haweswater, Grasmere, Rydal, and Ambleside, which bring the eye round again to Winandermere, in the vale of Langdale, from which it set out. From the sea or plain country all round the circumference of this fairy-land, along the