Doubtless this may be the spot,--a green, rocky knoll with a steep face to the north, where a quarry is wrought, and with a plantation to the east. It commands a view of both roads. The other possible place is a crag, not a quarter of a mile from Outgate, a little to the right of the place where the two roads divide. A low wall runs up across it to the top, dividing a plantation of oak, hazel, and ash, from the firs that crown the summit. These firs, which are larch and spruce, seem all of this century. The top of the crag may have been bare when Wordsworth lived at Hawkshead. But at the foot of the path along the dividing wall there are a few (probably older) trees; and a solitary walk beneath them, at noon or dusk, is almost as suggestive to the imagination, as repose under the yews of Borrowdale, listening to "the mountain flood" on Glaramara. There one may still hear the bleak music from the old stone wall, and "the noise of wood and water," while the loud dry wind whistles through the underwood, or moans amid the fir trees of the Crag, on the summit of which there is a "blasted hawthorn" tree. It may be difficult now to determine the precise spot to which the boy Wordsworth climbed on that eventful day--afterwards so significant to him, and from the events of which, he says, he drank "as at a fountain"--but I think it may have been to one or other of these two crags. (See, however, Mr. Rawnsley's conjecture in Note V. in the Appendix to this volume, p. 391.)--Ed.] * * * * * BOOK THIRTEENTH IMAGINATION AND TASTE, HOW IMPAIRED AND RESTORED--concluded. From Nature doth emotion come, and moods Of calmness equally are Nature's gift: This is her glory; these two attributes Are sister horns that constitute her strength. Hence Genius, born to thrive by interchange 5 Of peace and excitation, finds in her His best and purest friend; from her receives That energy by which he seeks the truth, From her that happy stillness of the mind Which fits him to receive it when unsought. [A] 10