The square tower of the church rises to my left. The ashes of Wordsworth lie just beyond it--of Wordsworth, and that sister with the “wild eyes,” who is scarcely less sure of immortality than himself, of Mary Wordsworth too, the “perfect woman, nobly planned,” at whose feet, in her white-haired old age, I myself as a small child of five can remember sitting, nearly sixty years ago. A little further, trees and buildings hide what was once the grassy margin of the lake, and the old coach road from Ambleside, with Wordsworth’s cottage upon it. Dove Cottage, where “mighty poets” gathered, and poetry that England will never let die was written, is now, as all the world knows, a national possession, and is full of memorials not only of Wordsworth, his sister and his wife, but of all the other famous men who haunted there--De Quincey, who lived there for more than twenty years, Southey and Coleridge; or of Wordsworth’s younger contemporaries and neighbours in the Lakes, such as Arnold of Rugby, and Arnold’s poet son Matthew. Generally the tiny house and garden are thronged by Americans in August, who crowd--in the Homeric phrase--about the charming place, like flies about the milk pails in summer. But this year there are no Americans, there are few visitors, indeed, of any kind as yet, though the coaches are beginning to bring them--scantily. But Grasmere does not distress itself as it would in other years, Wordsworth’s village is thinking too much about the war. Before the war--so I learn from a gentle lady, who is one of the most eager guardians of Grasmere traditions, and has made remarkable and successful efforts, through the annual “Grasmere play,” which is her creation, to maintain the rich old dialect of the dales--there were _two_ Grasmere men in the Navy, _two_ soldiers in the Regular army, and _three_ Reservists--out of a total male population of all ages of three hundred and eighty-nine. No one ever saw a soldier, and wages, as all over the north, were high. There was some perplexity of mind among the dale-folk when war broke out. France and Belgium seemed a long way off--more than “t’oother side o’ Kendal,” a common measure of distance in the mind of the old folks, whose schooling lies far behind them; and fighting seemed a strange thing to these men of peace. “What!--there’ll be nea fightin’!” said an old man in the village, the day before war was declared. “There’s nea blacks amongst ’em [meaning the Germans]--they’se civilised beings!” But the fighting came, and Grasmere did as Grasmere did in 1803, when Pitt called for volunteers for Home Defence. “At Grasmere,” wrote Wordsworth, “we have turned out almost to a man.” Last year, within a few months of the outbreak of war, seventy young men from the village offered themselves to the army; over fifty are serving. Their women left behind have been steadily knitting and sewing since they left. Every man from Grasmere got a Christmas present of two pairs of socks.