It is round the two small lakes of Grasmere and Rydal that the memories of Wordsworth are most thickly clustered. On one or other of these lakes he lived for fifty years,--the first half of the present century; and there is not in all that region a hillside walk or winding valley which has not heard him murmuring out his verses as they slowly rose from his heart. The cottage at Townend, Grasmere, where he first settled, is now surrounded by the out-buildings of a busy hotel; and the noisy stream of traffic, and the sight of the many villas which spot the valley, give a new pathos to the sonnet in which Wordsworth deplores the alteration which even his own residence might make in the simplicity of the lonely scene. Well may'st thou halt, and gaze with brightening eye! The lovely Cottage in the guardian nook Hath stirred thee deeply; with its own dear brook, Its own small pasture, almost its own sky! But covet not the Abode: forbear to sigh, As many do, repining while they look; Intruders--who would tear from Nature's book This precious leaf with harsh impiety. Think what the home must be if it were thine, Even thine, though few thy wants! Roof, window, door, The very flowers are sacred to the Poor, The roses to the porch which they entwine: Yea, all that now enchants thee, from the day On which it should be touched, would melt, and melt away. The _Poems on the Naming of Places_ belong for the most part to this neighbourhood. _Emma's Dell_ on Easdale Beck, _Point Rash-Judgment_ on the eastern shore of Grasmere, _Mary's Pool_ in Rydal Park, _William's Peak_ on Stone Arthur, _Joanna's Rock_ on the banks of Rotha, and _John's Grove_ near White Moss Common, have been identified by the loving search of those to whom every memorial of that simple-hearted family group has still a charm. It is on Greenhead Ghyll--"upon the forest-side in Grasmere Vale"-- that the poet has laid the scene of _Michael_, the poem which paints with such detailed fidelity both the inner and the outward life of a typical Westmoreland "statesman." And the upper road from Grasmere to Rydal, superseded now by the road along the lake side, and left as a winding footpath among rock and fern, was one of his most habitual haunts. Of another such haunt his friend Lady Richardson says, "The _Prelude_ was chiefly composed in a green mountain terrace, on the Easdale side of Helm Crag, known by the name of Under Lancrigg, a place which he used to say he knew by heart. The ladies sat at their work on the hill-side, while he walked to and fro on the smooth green mountain turf, humming out his verses to himself, and then repeating them to his sympathising and ready scribes, to be noted down on the spot, and transcribed at home."