Wordsworth lived there for more than thirty years; and half a century has passed since he died. He was a skilful landscape gardener; and I suppose that in his lifetime, when the walks were being constructed and the place laid out, it must have had a certain air of newness, of interference with the old wild peace of the hillside, which it has since parted with. Now it is all as full of a quiet and settled order, as if it had been thus for ever. One little detail deserves a special mention; just below the house, there is an odd, circular, low, grassy mound, said to be the old meeting-place for the village council, in primitive and patriarchal days,--the Mount, from which the place has its name. I thought much of the stately, simple, self-absorbed poet, whom somehow one never thinks of as having been young; the lines of Milton haunted me, as I moved about the rooms, the garden-terraces:-- "_In this mount he appeared; under this tree Stood visible; among these pines his voice I heard; here with him at this fountain talked._" The place is all permeated with the thought of him, his deep and tranquil worship of natural beauty, his love of the kindly earth. I do not think that Wordsworth is one whose memory evokes a deep personal attachment. I doubt if any figures of bygone days do that, unless there is a certain wistful pathos about them; unless something of compassion, some wish to proffer sympathy or consolation, mingles with one's reverence. I have often, for instance, stayed at a house where Shelley spent a few half-rapturous, half-miserable months. There, meditating about him, striving to reconstruct the picture of his life, one felt that he suffered much and needlessly; one would have wished to shelter, to protect him if it had been possible, or at least to have proffered sympathy to that inconsolable spirit. One's heart goes out to those who suffered long years ago, whose love of the earth, of life, of beauty, was perpetually overshadowed by the pain that comes from realising transitoriness and decay. But Wordsworth is touched by no such pathos. He was extraordinarily prosperous and equable; he was undeniably self-sufficient. Even the sorrows and bereavements that he had to bear were borne gently and philosophically. He knew exactly what he wanted to do, and did it. Those sturdy, useful legs of his bore him many a pleasant mile. He always had exactly as much money as he needed, in order to live his life as he desired. He chose precisely the abode he preferred; his fame grew slowly and solidly. He became a great personage; he was treated with immense deference and respect. He neither claimed nor desired sympathy; he was as strong and self-reliant as the old yeomen of the hills, of whom he indeed was one; his vocation was poetry, just as their vocation was agriculture; and this vocation he pursued in as business-like and intent a spirit as they pursued their farming.