Mr. Baines takes great care of the archives of his school. In one of the upper rooms there is a library of old and wellbound books. The school was founded by Edwyne Sandys, Archbishop of York, in 1585. The large and elaborate charter issued by Queen Elizabeth is still perfect. The parchment is decorated with a contemporary full-length portrait of Elizabeth on her throne, and with the symbols of her kingdom, as described in her title "Elizabeth Regina, Anglie, Francie, et Hiberne." The lion and unicorn, harp and shamrock, are there, but instead of the Scotch thistle there is the French lily. All these illuminations, including the portrait, were made by the hand. The ancient "Rules" of the school are in Archbishop Sandys's handwriting; they prescribe, among other queer things, that. the master must not enter public-houses on the days of fairs, nor participate in cock-fights, nor wear a dagger. Hawkeshead was a markettown, with four fairs a year, and such regulations were very important. The arch

mar School" represented a master with a
boy before him; the master's left hand
points upward, his right grasps a bundle
of birch rods. The motto is, Docendo
discimus. Mr. Baines has learned enough
by teaching to allow the birch to remain
an antiquarian feature of the school on its
seal. Altogether this school-house, with
its surrounding larches, and the swallows
flitting around it, and the clustering mem-
ories, was a very pleasant object.
As we looked, a tall and aged gentle-

WORDSWORTH'S DESK.

man passed its door, supporting himself by a cane, whom one could almost imagine to be Wordsworth himself revisiting the scenes of his boyhood. He was presently followed by a quaintly dressed old lady. They were on their way to the

near by. I was eager to see the Hawkeshead church, remembering the little picture of it in the "Prelude":

bishop's Bible, metal-bound (1572), containing his family register, is also kept here. Among the sponsors for his grandchildren I observed the name of Washington recurring: Sir John Washington, 1621; Lady Washington, 1629; Mrs. Margaret Washington, 1632 and 1636. It was plea-church, which is on the hill in a field sant to see this name associated with that of the brave chancellor who preferred going to the Tower rather than proclaim Mary queen, and helped to translate the "Bishop's Bible." Edwyne Sandys was born at Hawkeshead, and his devotion to the culture of the young was rewarded in his son George, called by Dryden "the ingenious and learned Sandys, the best versifier of the former age." George was also an accomplished traveller, and wrote a good book about the East. The ancient seal of the "Gram

"The snow-white church upon the hill Sits like a throned lady, sending out A gracious look all over her domain." A "restoration" has changed this snowwhite to stone-gray, but it has also added a very sweet chime of bells, which ring out solemnly on the clear air. Around this church sheep and lambs are grazing, even up to its doors. Its Norman character is preserved. The decorations inside

are rather too new and bright, consisting | Even then, amid the merry scene and the chiefly of colored frescoes framing texts. While I was there alone a man entered and pulled at the ropes which rang the bells; then this bell-ringer disappeared into a room beside him, and presently reappeared in his gown, and moved up the aisle. Bell-ringer and clergyman were one and the same. Seven persons came to hear him read the daily morning service.

Ann Tyson was the name of the woman in whose cottage Wordsworth boarded. The house remains unchanged, and the room where the young poet

"so oft

Had lain awake on summer nights to watch

The moon in splendor couched among the leaves

Of a tall ash, that near our cottage stood." Of Ann he wrote,

"The thoughts of gratitude shall fall like dew Upon thy grave, good creature."

"Fair seed-time had my soul," wrote Wordsworth of his life at Hawkeshead. Rambling in this neighborhood he felt the "first virgin passion of his soul Communing with this glorious universe." It was on neighboring Esthwaite Water that occurred the famous skating scene described in the first book of the "Prelude."

and it would not have been Wordsworth had he not sometimes retired from the uproar into some silent bay "to cut across the reflex of a star." In his tenth year it was, and in this vale of Esthwaite, that he felt

"Gleams like the flashings of a shield, the earth And common face of Nature spake to him Rememberable things."

Among the boys was a beloved minstrel
(Robert Greenwood, afterward Senior
Fellow of Trinity, Cambridge), who used
to take his flute when they went to row.
They used to leave him on an island rock
and go off a little way to listen; and

"while he blew his flute,
Alone upon the rock-oh, then the calm
And dead still water lay upon my mind
Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky,
Never before so beautiful, sank down

Into my heart, and held me like a dream!"

But it is also pleasant to know from the poet that there was a house in this vale where, during summer vacation,

"mid a throng
Of maids and youths, old men and matrons staid,
A medley of all tempers, he had passed
A night in dancing, gayety and mirth."

Wordsworth began writing poetry while at Hawkeshead school, and here partly composed the poem entitled Lines left upon a seat on a Yew-tree which stands near the Lake of Esthwaite, on a desolate part of the Shore, commanding a beautiful Prospect." This yew has been cut down because of a popular belief that its leaves were poisonous, and injured the cattle.

One might pass a long time in this peaceful vale and village, with the "Prelude" for guide; but we must part. Our last thought may well be upon kindly William Taylor, Wordsworth's schoolmaster, buried in Cartwell church-yard, where the poet wrote:

"He loved the Poets, and, if now alive,

Would have loved me, as one not destitute
Of promise, nor belying the kind hope
That he had formed, when I, at his command,
Began to spin, with toil, my earliest songs."

66

scenes of nature, and sat together at the feet of the great poet of Rydal, who loved them. Sometimes, with other friends, they would form a reading party in some charming nook among the lakes. "I came to Fox How about three weeks ago

DR. ARNOLD.

Our next visit is to Fox How, long the residence of Dr. Arnold, and still occupied by his daughter. The name may seem curious, but it was given the place in ancient times. 'How" is a frequent name in the Lake district; it is from O. N. haugr, a sepulchral mound. Sometimes the remains of a warrior have been found in the hills so called, but the word seems to have been applied to any mound- to meet Matt," writes Clough from Patlike hill. The home of the Arnolds is a terdale, July 31, 1844, and goes on to debeautiful place in itself, but made more so scribe their ways. "We began withby the remembrance of the good work breakfast, 8; work, 9.30 to 2.30; bathe, that has been done here. Here the His- dinner, walk, and tea, 2.30 to 9.30; work, tory of Rome was written. Here also 9.30 to 11. We now have revolutionized Arnold used to gather around him the to the following constitution, as yet hardyoung scholars who were children of his ly advanced beyond paper: Breakfast, 8; nurture. Since his death it has remained work, 9.30 to 1.30; bathe, dinner, 1.30 to a hallowed spot for the sons of old Rugby. 3; work, 3 to 6; walk, ad infinitum; tea, John Keble little knew what he was do- ditto. M. has gone out fishing, when he ing when he persuaded Arnold to take ought properly to be working, it being orders in the Church: he was laying the nearly four o'clock, and to-day proceedcorner-stone of the Broad-Church. Along ing in theory according to Constitution these walks, and from these far away over No. 2. It has, however, come on to rain hill and dale, two friends used to walk furiously; so Walrond, who is working whose lives and works are the filtrated sedulously at Herodotus, and I, who am expression of Dr. Arnold's real aim and writing to you, rejoice to think that he work. These two were Matthew Arnold will get a good wetting." The following and Arthur Clough. Together they stud- year Clough writes: "First of all, you ied, thought, succeeded. Fellows of Oriel will be glad to hear that Matt Arnold is when there the reigning spirits were New-elected Fellow of Oriel. This was done man, Pusey, and the other Tractarian on Friday last, March 28, just thirty years leaders, they were brothers amid these after his father's election. Mrs. Arnold

is, of course, well pleased, as also the ven- than any of them, and could never get erable poet at Rydal, who has taken M. too much of walking over it. The most under his special protection. The beau- pathetic incident of modern literary histies of Parson's Pleasure, where we were tory is the death, at forty-three, of Arthur wont to bathe in the early morning, have Clough. What a freight of treasures sank been diminished by the unsightly erec-into that Florentine grave! Though his

tion, by filthy-lucre-loving speculators, of | body is buried there, his heart is enshrined a bathing-house, and I have therefore deserted it.

יי

Clough was always the best swimmer of his party; and he had a curious way of climbing a mountain by throwing his body forward, almost horizontal, toward the slope, and with long strides got ahead quickly. His friends declare that he knew this region, to its minutest detail, better

in the undying love of those who knew him in England and in America. There never was a tenderer love than that which has raised in this beautiful country, where the beauty of nature and friendship evoked from his brain the unique poem "Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich" (notwithstanding its Scotch frame), a monument to that fine genius. In the September of 1861 he was

rambling with Tennyson in the Pyrenees | tion, and in its furrows there were tanned -he seeking health, Tennyson revisiting the spots where he had wandered with Arthur Hallam thirty-one years before. In less than a month from the time they parted, this second of the Arthurs Tennyson loved was dead, and a quatrain from "In Memoriam" is inscribed on the Grasmere cenotaph:

"Now thy brows are cold,

We see thee as thou art, and know Thy likeness to the wise below, Thy kindred with the great of old." Having an introduction to the family now occupying Rydal Mount, we were in no danger of making the mistake of Hawthorne, who passed some time peering about, admiring, and perhaps pilfering ivy leaves from a fictitious Rydal Mount. He discovered next day that his enthusiasm had been lavished on the abode of a respectable Quaker. The affluence of flowers and foliage, which made it seem to Hawthorne as if Wordsworth's poetry had manifested itself in flowers, shrubbery, and ivy, still makes the better part of Rydal Mount. As we passed from room to room, they were filled with the fragrance of flowers. The old walk along the grounds, where the poet had chanted every line of his works, reverently as if at his breviary in nature's cathedral, is still here. We moved beneath the same archway of trees, and sat in the bower at its end, which reminded me of those which Mr. Alcott used to build in the grounds of his friends at Concord. Here the young Emerson sat, and listened to the poet reciting his poems. And here, indeed, or on his beat between this and the house door, was the real study and library of Wordsworth. The bower is made of the branches of trees, and its only ornament is such as has climbed from the earth or been deposited from the air. He must have sat here gazing upon Rydal Water with its islets, and the hills with their shining raiment of cloud and cascade, until he was in a state of absorption, like a holy Hindoo yogi in his sacred grove, on whose lap the serpent unnoted casts its skin.

patches that looked somewhat like lichens. But it was not only in external habit and look that Wordsworth was a true Brahmin: he had strangely repeated in spiritual history the mystical development of his far Aryan ancestors. There was much discussion, soon after the "Ode to Immortality" appeared, as to what the poet meant by his thanksgivings for "fallings from us, vanishings, blank misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds not. realized." A professor at Oxford related to me that, being on a walk with Wordsworth, he asked him what he meant by those phrases. Whereupon the poet grasped the rail of a gate with both hands, and said: “I have again and again in my life been driven to grasp the nearest object, like this, in order to convince myself that the world is not an illusion. It has seemed falling away, vanishing, leaving me, as it were, in a world not realized."

But

We went by the way of Radical Reform to Grasmere. Dr. Arnold gave the three roads between Rydal and Grasmere their names: the highest, "Old Corruption"; the middle, "Bit-by-bit Reform"; the lowest and most level, "Radical Reform." Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy also added to these new Pilgrim's-Progress names, having called a spot “Point Rash Judgment.' Wordsworth never liked "Radical Reform," whereby a fine carriage-road had been carried over a country he had known when it was wild (to him another word for picturesque). this is a region where one could by no effort escape the picturesque. When first the eye rests upon Grasmere Water, and upon the hills and dales everywhere, it really stills conversation; one lapses into a hushed feeling, as if it were dream-land, and a loud word might break the spell. The Grasmere cottages, too, were so charming that I could understand the absoluteness with which Hawthorne said, "This little town of Grasmere seems to me as pretty a place as ever I met with in my life." And among these none is more charming than Dove Cottage. Here, at A lady who in her youth passed some the close of the last century (December 21, time at Rydal Mount, the families being 1799), Wordsworth and his sister came to intimate, told me that when she saw the dwell, in what had formerly been a pubold man out in this or some other haunt lic-house-The Dove and Olive-Bough. of his, silent, motionless, gazing, he ap- There, in 1807, De Quincey visited him. peared like some natural object. The "I was," he wrote, "ushered up a little very homeliness of his face was its attrac-flight of stairs, fourteen in all, to a little