and dependencies--every one of them thoroughly covered and saturated with the spirit of picturesque and homely beauty; or inland hollows and fields, and old hamlets, lying amid great woods and slopes of wondrous loveliness;--if we could but turn things round, and bring these near us, and unite, at once, city advantages, city society, and them! But it never can be! And there are living in them, from generation to generation, numbers of people who are not to be envied, because they know nothing at all of the enviableness of their situation. We are continually labouring to improve society--to diffuse education--to confer higher and ampler religious knowledge; but these people know little of all this--experience little of its effect; for their abodes, and natural paradises, lie far from the great tracks of travel and commerce; far from our great roads; in the most out-of-the-world places--the very nooks of the world. If you come by chance upon them, you are struck with their admirable beauty, their solemn repose, their fresh and basking solitude. You cannot help exclaiming, What happy people must these be! But, when you come to look closer into them, the delusion vanishes. They do not, in fact, see any beauty that you see. Their minds have never been stirred from the sluggish routine of their daily life; their mental eye has never been unsealed, and directed to survey the advantages of their situation. They have been occupied with other things. Like the farmer’s lad mentioned by Wordsworth, their souls have become encrusted in their own torpor. A sample should I give Of what this stock produces, to enrich The tender age of life, ye would exclaim, “Is this the whistling plough-boy whose shrill notes Impart new gladness to the morning air?” Forgive me, if I venture to suspect That many, sweet to hear of in soft verse, Are of no finer frame;--his joints are stiff; Beneath a cumbrous frock that to the knees Invests the thriving churl, his legs appear, Fellows to those that lustily upheld The wooden-stools, for everlasting use, Whereon our fathers sate. And mark his brow! Under whose shaggy canopy are set Two eyes, not dim, but of a healthy stare; Wide, sluggish, blank, and ignorant and strange; Proclaiming boldly that they never drew A look or motion of intelligence, From infant conning of the Christ-cross-row, Or puzzling through a Primer, line by line, Till perfect mastery crown the pains at last. _The Excursion_, B. 8. This, however, is one of the worst specimens of the most stupified class--farm-servants. Wordsworth himself makes his good and wise _Wanderer_, a shepherd in his youth, and describes him, when a lad, as impressed with the deepest sense of nature’s majesty. He represents him, in one of the noblest passages of the language, as witnessing the sun rise from some bold headland, and