After restoration to his ancestral estates, the Shepherd-lord preferred to live in comparative retirement. He spent most of his time at Barden Tower (see notes to _The White Doe of Rylstone_), which he enlarged, and where he lived with a small retinue. He was much at Bolton (which was close at hand), and there he studied astronomy and alchemy, aided by the monks. It is to the time when he lived at Threlkeld, however--wandering as a shepherd-boy, over the ridges and around the coves of Blencathara, amongst the groves of Mosedale, and by the lofty springs of Glenderamakin--that Wordsworth refers in the lines, _Love had he found in huts where poor men lie; His daily teachers had been woods and rills, The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills._ He was at Flodden in 1513, when nearly sixty years of age, leading there the "flower of Craven." From Penigent to Pendle Hill, From Linton to long Addingham, And all that Craven's coasts did till, They with the lusty Clifford came. Compare, in the first canto of _The White Doe of Rylstone_ (p. 117)-- when he, with spear and shield, Rode full of years to Flodden-field. He died in 1523, and was buried in the choir of Bolton Priory. The following is Sarah Coleridge's criticism of the _Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle_, in the editorial note to her father's _Biographia Literaria_ (vol. ii. ch. ix. p. 152, ed. 1847):-- "The transitions and vicissitudes in this noble lyric I have always thought rendered it one of the finest specimens of modern subjective poetry which our age has seen. The ode commences in a tone of high gratulation and festivity--a tone not only glad, but _comparatively_ even jocund and light-hearted. The Clifford is restored to the home, the honours and estates of his ancestors. Then it sinks and falls away to the remembrance of tribulation--times of war and bloodshed, flight and terror, and hiding away from the enemy--times of poverty and distress, when the Clifford was brought, a little child, to the shelter of a northern valley. After a while it emerges from those depths of sorrow--gradually rises into a strain of elevated tranquillity and contemplative rapture; through the power of imagination, the beautiful and impressive aspects of nature are brought into relationship with the spirit of him, whose fortunes and character form the subject of the piece, and are represented as gladdening and exalting it, whilst they keep it _pure and unspotted from the world_. Suddenly the Poet is carried on with greater animation and passion: he has returned to the point whence he started--flung himself back into the tide of stirring life and moving events. All is to come over again, struggle and conflict, chances and changes of war, victory and triumph, overthrow and desolation. I