THE ENGLISH LAKES.
The lakes and mountains of Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancashire,
are singularly fitted to supply such elements of moral sustenance as
Nature's aspects can afford to man. There are, indeed, many mountain
regions of greater awfulness; but prospects of ice and terror should
be a rare stimulant rather than an habitual food; and the physical
difficulties inseparable from immense elevations depress the
inhabitant and preoccupy the traveller. There are many lakes under a
more lustrous sky; but the healthy activities of life demand a scene
brilliant without languor, and a beauty which can refresh and satisfy
rather than lull or overpower. Without advancing any untenable claim
to British pre-eminence in the matter of scenery, we may, perhaps,
follow on both these points the judgment which Wordsworth has
expressed in his _Guide to the Lakes_, a work which condenses the
results of many years of intimate observation.
"Our tracts of wood and water," he says, "are almost diminutive in
comparison (with Switzerland); therefore, as far as sublimity is
dependent upon absolute bulk and height, and atmospherical
influences in connexion with these, it is obvious that there can be
no rivalship. But a short residence among the British mountains will
furnish abundant proof, that, after a certain point of elevation, viz.,
that which allows of compact and fleecy clouds settling upon, or
sweeping over, the summits, the sense of sublimity depends more upon
form and relation of objects to each other than upon their actual
magnitude; and that an elevation of 3000 feet is sufficient to call
forth in a most impressive degree the creative, and magnifying, and
softening powers of the atmosphere."
And again, as to climate; "The rain," he says, "here comes down
heartily, and is frequently succeeded by clear bright weather, when
every brook is vocal, and every torrent sonorous; brooks and
torrents which are never muddy even in the heaviest floods. Days of
unsettled weather, with partial showers, are very frequent; but the
showers, darkening or brightening as they fly from hill to hill, are
not less grateful to the eye than finely interwoven passages of gay
and sad music are touching to the ear. Vapours exhaling from the
lakes and meadows after sunrise in a hot season, or in moist weather
brooding upon the heights, or descending towards the valleys with
inaudible motion, give a visionary character to everything around
them; and are in themselves so beautiful as to dispose us to enter
into the feelings of those simple nations (such as the Laplanders of
this day) by whom they are taken for guardian deities of the
mountains; or to sympathize with others who have fancied these
delicate apparitions to be the spirits of their departed ancestors.
Akin to these are fleecy clouds resting upon the hill-tops; they are
not easily managed in picture, with their accompaniments of blue sky,
but how glorious are they in nature! How pregnant with imagination
for the poet! And the height of the Cumbrian mountains is sufficient
to exhibit daily and hourly instances of those mysterious attachments.
Such clouds, cleaving to their stations, or lifting up suddenly
their glittering heads from behind rocky barriers, or hurrying out
of sight with speed of the sharpest edge, will often tempt an
inhabitant to congratulate himself on belonging to a country of mists
and clouds and storms, and make him think of the blank sky of Egypt,
and of the cerulean vacancy of Italy, as an unanimated and even a
sad spectacle."
The consciousness of a preceding turmoil brings home to us best the
sense of perfect peace; and a climate accustomed to storm-cloud and
tempest can melt sometimes into "a day as still as heaven" with a
benignant tranquillity which calmer regions can scarcely know. Such
a day Wordsworth has described in language of such delicate truth
and beauty as only a long and intimate love can inspire:
"It has been said that in human life there are moments worth ages.
In a more subdued tone of sympathy may we affirm, that in the
climate of England there are, for the lover of Nature, days which
are worth whole months, I might say, even years. One of these
favoured days sometimes occurs in springtime, when that soft air is
breathing over the blossoms and new-born verdure which inspired
Buchanan with his beautiful Ode to the First of May; the air which,
in the luxuriance of his fancy, he likens to that of the golden age,--
to that which gives motion to the funereal cypresses on the banks of
Lethe; to the air which is to salute beatified spirits when
expiatory fires shall have consumed the earth with all her
habitations. But it is in autumn that days of such affecting
influence most frequently intervene. The atmosphere seems refined,
and the sky rendered more crystalline, as the vivifying heat of the
year abates; the lights and shadows are more delicate; the colouring
is richer and more finely harmonized; and, in this season of
stillness, the ear being unoccupied, or only gently excited, the
sense of vision becomes more susceptible of its appropriate
enjoyments. A resident in a country like this which we are treating
of will agree with me that the presence of a lake is indispensable to
exhibit in perfection the beauty of one of these days; and he must
have experienced, while looking on the unruffled waters, that the
imagination by their aid is carried into recesses of feeling
otherwise impenetrable. The reason of this is, that the heavens are
not only brought down into the bosom of the earth, but that the
earth is mainly looked at, and thought of, through the medium of a
purer element. The happiest time is when the equinoctial gales are
departed; but their fury may probably be called to mind by the sight
of a few shattered boughs, whose leaves do not differ in colour from
the faded foliage of the stately oaks from which these relics of the
storm depend: all else speaks of tranquillity; not a breath of air,
no restlessness of insects, and not a moving object perceptible--
except the clouds gliding in the depths of the lake, or the
traveller passing along, an inverted image, whose motion seems
governed by the quiet of a time to which its archetype, the living
person, is perhaps insensible; or it may happen that the figure of
one of the larger birds, a raven or a heron, is crossing silently
among the reflected clouds, while the voice of the real bird, from
the element aloft, gently awakens in the spectator the recollection
of appetites and instincts, pursuits and occupations, that deform
and agitate the world, yet have no power to prevent nature from
putting on an aspect capable of satisfying the most intense cravings
for the tranquil, the lovely, and the perfect, to which man, the
noblest of her creatures, is subject."
The scene described here is one as exquisite in detail as majestic
in general effect. And it is characteristic of the region to which
Wordsworth's love was given that there is no corner of it without a
meaning and a charm; that the open record of its immemorial past
tells us at every turn that all agencies have conspired for
loveliness and ruin itself has been benign. A passage of Wordsworth's
describing the character of the lake-shores illustrates this fact
with loving minuteness.
"Sublimity is the result of nature's first great dealings with
the superficies of the Earth; but the general tendency of her
subsequent operations is towards the production of beauty, by
a multiplicity of symmetrical parts uniting in a consistent
whole. This is everywhere exemplified along the margins of
these lakes. Masses of rock, that have been precipitated from
the heights into the area of waters, lie in some places like
stranded ships, or have acquired the compact structure of jutting
piers, or project in little peninsulas crested with native wood.
The smallest rivulet, one whose silent influx is scarcely
noticeable in a season of dry weather, so faint is the dimple made
by it on the surface of the smooth lake, will be found to have
been not useless in shaping, by its deposits of gravel and soil
in time of flood, a curve that would not otherwise have existed.
But the more powerful brooks, encroaching upon the level of the
lake, have, in course of time, given birth to ample promontories
of sweeping outline, that contrast boldly with the longitudinal
base of the steeps on the opposite shore; while their flat or
gently-sloping surfaces never fail to introduce, into the midst of
desolation and barrenness, the elements of fertility, even where
the habitations of men may not have been raised."
With this we may contrast, as a companion picture, the poet's
description of the tarns, or lonely bodies of water, which lie here
and there among the hills:
"They are difficult of access and naked; yet some of them
are, in their permanent forms, very grand, and there are accidents
of things which would make the meanest of them interesting.
At all events, one of these pools is an acceptable sight to
the mountain wanderer, not merely as an incident that diversifies
the prospect, but as forming in his mind a centre or conspicuous
point to which objects, otherwise disconnected or insubordinated,
may be referred. Some few have a varied outline,
with bold heath-clad promontories; and as they mostly lie at the
foot of a steep precipice, the water, where the sun is not shining
upon it, appears black and sullen, and round the margin huge
stones and masses of rock are scattered, some defying conjecture
as to the means by which they came thither, and others
obviously fallen from on high, the contribution of ages! A not
unpleasing sadness is induced by this perplexity, and these
images of decay; while the prospect of a body of pure water,
unattended with groves and other cheerful rural images by
which fresh water is usually accompanied, and unable to give
furtherance to the meagre vegetation around it, excites a sense
of some repulsive power strongly put forth, and thus deepens
the melancholy natural to such scenes."
To those who love to deduce the character of a population from the
character of their race and surroundings the peasantry of Cumberland
and Westmoreland form an attractive theme. Drawn in great part from
the strong Scandinavian stock, they dwell in a land solemn and
beautiful as Norway itself, but without Norway's rigour and penury,
and with still lakes and happy rivers instead of Norway's inarming
melancholy sea. They are a mountain folk; but their mountains are no
precipices of insuperable snow, such as keep the dwellers in some
Swiss hamlet shut in ignorance and stagnating into idiocy. These
barriers divide only to concentrate, and environ only to endear;
their guardianship is but enough to give an added unity to each
group of kindred homes. And thus it is that the Cumbrian dalesmen
have afforded perhaps as near a realization as human fates have yet
allowed of the rural society which statesmen desire for their
country's greatness. They have given an example of substantial
comfort strenuously won; of home affections intensified by
independent strength; of isolation without ignorance, and of a
shrewd simplicity; of an hereditary virtue which needs no support
from fanaticism, and to which honour is more than law.
The school of political economists, moreover, who urge the advantage
of a peasant proprietary--of small independent holdings,--as at once
drawing from the land the fullest produce and rearing upon it the
most vigorous and provident population,--this school, as is well
known, finds in the _statesmen_ of Cumberland one of its favourite
examples. In the days of border-wars, when the first object was to
secure the existence of as many armed men as possible, in readiness
to repel the Scot, the abbeys and great proprietors in the north
readily granted small estates on military tenure, which tenure, when
personal service in the field was no longer needed, became in most
cases an absolute ownership. The attachment of these _statesmen_ to
their hereditary estates, the heroic efforts which they would make
to avoid parting with them, formed an impressive phenomenon in the
little world--a world at once of equality and of conservatism--which
was the scene of Wordsworth's childish years, and which remained his
manhood's ideal.
The growth of large fortunes in England, and the increased
competition for land, has swallowed up many of these small
independent holdings in the extensive properties of wealthy men. And
at the same time the spread of education, and the improved poor-laws
and other legislation, by raising the condition of other parts of
England, have tended to obliterate the contrast which was so marked
in Wordsworth's day. How marked that contrast was, a comparison of
Crabbe's poems with Wordsworth's will sufficiently indicate. Both
are true painters; but while in the one we see poverty as something
gross and degrading, and the _Tales of the Village_ stand out from a
background of pauperism and crime; in the other picture poverty
means nothing worse than privation, and the poet in the presence of
the most tragic outcast of fortune could still
Have laughed himself to scorn, to find
In that decrepit man so firm a mind.[3]
[Footnote 3: The previous page ends midsentence, within an ordinary
paragraph, sentence finished by this verse (probably an excerpt from
a poem).]
Nay, even when a state far below the _Leech-Gatherer's_ has been
reached, and mind and body alike are in their last decay, the life
of the _Old Cumberland Beggar_, at one remove from nothingness, has
yet a dignity and a usefulness of its own. His fading days are
passed in no sad asylum of vicious or gloomy age, but amid
neighbourly kindnesses, and in the sanity of the open air; and a life
that is reduced to its barest elements has yet a hold on the
liberality of nature and the affections of human hearts.
So long as the inhabitants of a region thus solitary and beautiful
have neither many arts nor many wishes, save such as the Nature
which they know has suggested, and their own handiwork can satisfy,
so long are their presence and habitations likely to be in harmony
with the scenes around them. Nay, man's presence is almost always
needed to draw out the full meaning of Nature, to illustrate her
bounty by his glad well-being and to hint by his contrivances of
precaution at her might and terror. Wordsworth's description of the
cottages of Cumberland depicts this unconscious adaptation of man's
abode to his surroundings, with an eye which may be called at
pleasure that of painter or of poet.
"The dwelling-houses, and contiguous outhouses, are in many
instances of the colour of the native rock out of which they have
been built; but frequently the dwelling--or Fire-house, as it is
ordinarily called--has been distinguished from the barn or byre
by roughcast and whitewash, which, as the inhabitants are not
hasty in renewing it, in a few years acquires by the influence of
weather a tint at once sober and variegated. As these houses
have been, from father to son, inhabited by persons engaged in
the same occupations, yet necessarily with changes in their
circumstances, they have received without incongruity additions
and accommodations adapted to the needs of each successive
occupant, who, being for the most part proprietor,
was at liberty to follow his own fancy, so that these humble
dwellings remind the contemplative spectator of a production of
Nature, and may (using a strong expression) rather be said to
have grown than to have been erected--to have risen, by an
instinct of their own, out of the native rock--so little is there
in them of formality, such is their wildness and beauty."
"These dwellings, mostly built, as has been said, of rough unhewn
stone, are roofed with slates, which were rudely taken
from the quarry before the present art of splitting them was
understood, and are therefore rough and uneven in their surface,
so that both the coverings and sides of the houses have furnished
places of rest for the seeds of lichens, mosses, ferns and flowers.
Hence buildings, which in their very form call to mind the
processes of Nature, do thus, clothed in part with a vegetable garb,
appear to be received into the bosom of the living principle of
things, as it acts and exists among the woods and fields, and
by their colour and their shape affectingly direct the thoughts
to that tranquil course of nature and simplicity along which the
humble-minded inhabitants have through so many generations
been led. Add the little garden with its shed for bee-hives, its
small bed of potherbs, and its borders and patches of flowers for
Sunday posies, with sometimes a choice few too much prized to
be plucked; an orchard of proportioned size; a cheesepress, often
supported by some tree near the door; a cluster of embowering
sycamores for summer shade, with a tall fir through which the
winds sing when other trees are leafless; the little rill or
household spout murmuring in all seasons,--combine these
incidents and images together, and you have the representative
idea of a mountain cottage in this country--so beautifully
formed in itself, and so richly adorned by the hand of Nature."
These brief descriptions may suffice to indicate the general
character of a district which in Wordsworth's early days had a
distinctive unity which he was the first fully to appreciate, which
was at its best during his long lifetime, and which has already
begun to disappear. The mountains had waited long for a full
adoration, an intelligent worship. At last "they were enough beloved."
And if now the changes wrought around them recall too often the
poet's warning, how
All that now delights thee, from the day
On which it should be touched, shall melt, and melt away,--
yet they have gained something which cannot be taken from them. Not
mines, nor railways, nor monster excursions, nor reservoirs, nor
Manchester herself, "toute entière à sa proie attachée," can deprive
lake and hill of Wordsworth's memory, and the love which once they
knew.
Wordsworth's life was from the very first so ordered as to give him
the most complete and intimate knowledge both of district and people.
There was scarcely a mile of ground in the Lake country over which
he had not wandered; scarcely a prospect which was not linked with
his life by some tie of memory. Born at Cockermouth, on the
outskirts of the district, his mind was gradually led on to its
beauty; and his first recollections were of Derwent's grassy holms
and rocky falls, with Skiddaw, "bronzed with deepest radiance,"
towering in the eastern sky. Sent to school at Hawkshead at eight
years old, Wordsworth's scene was transferred to the other extremity
of the lake district. It was in this quaint old town, on the banks
of Esthwaite Water, that the "fair seed-time of his soul" was passed;
it was here that his boyish delight in exercise and adventure grew,
and melted in its turn into a more impersonal yearning, a deeper
absorption into the beauty and the wonder of the world. And even the
records of his boyish amusements come to us each on a background of
Nature's majesty and calm. Setting springs for woodcock on the
grassy moors at night, at nine years old, he feels himself "a
trouble to the peace" that dwells among the moon and stars overhead;
and when he has appropriated a woodcock caught by somebody else,
"sounds of undistinguishable motion" embody the viewless pursuit of
Nemesis among the solitary hills. In the perilous search for the
raven's nest, as he hangs on the face of the naked crags of Yewdale,
he feels for the first time that sense of detachment from external
things which a position of strange unreality will often force on the
mind.
Oh, at that time
When on the perilous ridge I hung alone,
With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind
Blow through my ear! The sky seemed not a sky
Of earth--and with what motion moved the clouds!
The innocent rapine of _nutting_ taught him to feel that there is a
spirit in the woods--a presence which too rude a touch of ours will
desecrate and destroy.
The neighbouring lakes of Coniston, Esthwaite, Windermere, have left
similar traces of the gradual upbuilding of his spirit. It was on a
promontory on Coniston that the sun's last rays, gilding the eastern
hills above which he had first appeared, suggested the boy's first
impulse of spontaneous poetry, in the resolve that, wherever life
should lead him, his last thoughts should fall on the scenes where
his childhood was passing now. It was on Esthwaite that the
"huge peak" of Wetherlam, following him (as it seemed) as he rowed
across the starlit water, suggested the dim conception of "unknown
modes of being," and a life that is not ours. It was round Esthwaite
that the boy used to wander with a friend at early dawn, rejoicing
in the charm of words in tuneful order, and repeating together their
favourite verses, till "sounds of exultation echoed through the
groves." It was on Esthwaite that the band of skaters "hissed along
the polished ice in games confederate," from which Wordsworth would
sometimes withdraw himself and pause suddenly in full career, to
feel in that dizzy silence the mystery of a rolling world.
A passage, less frequently quoted, in describing a boating excursion
on Windermere illustrates the effect of some small point of human
interest in concentrating and realising the diffused emotion which
radiates from a scene of beauty:
But, ere nightfall,
When in our pinnace we returned at leisure
Over the shadowy lake, and to the beach
Of some small island steered our course with one,
The minstrel of the troop, and left him there,
And rowed off gently, 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!
The passage which describes the schoolboy's call to the owls--the
lines of which Coleridge said that he should have exclaimed
"Wordsworth!" if he had met them running wild in the deserts of
Arabia,--paint a somewhat similar rush of feeling with a still
deeper charm. The "gentle shock of mild surprise" which in the
pauses of the birds' jocund din _carries far into his heart the
sound of mountain torrents_--the very mingling of the grotesque and
the majestic--brings home the contrast between our transitory
energies and the mystery around us which returns ever the same to
the moments when we pause and are at peace.
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."
The neighbourhood of the poet's later home at Rydal Mount is equally
full of associations. Two of the _Evening Voluntaries_ were composed
by the side of Rydal Mere. The _Wild Duck's Nest_ was on one of the
Rydal islands. It was on the fells of Loughrigg that the poet's
fancy loved to plant an imperial castle. And _Wansfell's_ green
slope still answers with many a change of glow and shadow to the
radiance of the sinking sun.
Hawkshead and Rydal, then, may be considered as the poet's principal
centres, and the scenery in their neighbourhood has received his
most frequent attention. The Duddon, a seldom-visited stream on the
south-west border of the Lake-district, has been traced by him from
source to outfall in a series of sonnets. Langdale, and Little
Langdale with Blea Tarn lying in it, form the principal scene of the
discourses in the _Excursion_. The more distant lakes and mountains
were often visited and are often alluded to. The scene of _The
Brothers_, for example, is laid in Ennerdale; and the index of the
minor poems will supply other instances. But it is chiefly round two
lines of road leading from Grasmere that Wordsworth's associations
cluster,--the route over Dunmailraise, which led him to Keswick, to
Coleridge and Southey at Greta Hall, and to other friends in that
neighbourhood; and the route over Kirkstone, which led him to
Ullswater, and the friendly houses of Patterdale, Hallsteads, and
Lowther Castle. The first of these two routes was that over which
the _Waggoner_ plied; it skirts the lovely shore of Thirlmere,--a
lonely sheet of water, of exquisite irregularity of outline, and
fringed with delicate verdure, which the Corporation of Manchester
has lately bought to embank it into a reservoir. _Dedecorum pretiosus
emptor_! This lake was a favourite haunt of Wordsworth's; and upon a
rock on its margin, where he and Coleridge, coming from Keswick and
Grasmere, would often meet, the two poets, with the other members of
Wordsworth's loving household group, inscribed the initial letters
of their names. To the "monumental power" of this Rock of Names
Wordsworth appeals, in lines written when the happy company who
engraved them had already been severed by distance and death;
O thought of pain,
That would impair it or profane!
And fail not Thou, loved Rock, to keep
Thy charge when we are laid asleep.
The rock may still be seen, but is to be submerged in the new
reservoir. In the vale of Keswick itself, Applethwaite, Skiddaw, St.
Herbert's Island, Lodore, are commemorated in sonnets or inscriptions.
And the Borrowdale yew-trees have inspired some of the poet's
noblest lines,--lines breathing all the strange forlornness of
Glaramara's solitude, and the withering vault of shade.
The route from Rydal to Ullswater is still more thickly studded with
poetic allusions. The _Pass of Kirkstone_ is the theme of a
characteristic ode; Grisdale Tarn and Helvellyn recur again and again;
and Aira Force was one of the spots which the poet best loved to
describe, as well as to visit. It was on the shores of Further
Gowbarrow that the _Daffodils_ danced beneath the trees. These
references might be much further multiplied; and the loving
diligence of disciples has set before us "the Lake-district as
interpreted by Wordsworth" through a multitude of details. But
enough has been said to show how completely the poet had absorbed the
influences of his dwelling-place; how unique a representative he had
become of the lovely district of his birth; how he had made it
subject to him by comprehending it, and his own by love.
He visited other countries and described other scenes. Scotland,
Wales, Switzerland, France, Germany, Italy, have all a place in his
works. His familiarity with other scenery helped him, doubtless, to
a better appreciation of the lake country than he could have gained
had he never left it. And, on the other hand, like Caesar in Gaul, or
Wellington in the Peninsula, it was because he had so complete a
grasp of this chosen base of operations that he was able to come, to
see, and to make his own, so swiftly and unfailingly elsewhere.
Happy are those whose deep-rooted memories cling like his about some
stable home! Whose notion of the world around them has expanded from
some prospect of happy tranquillity, instead of being drawn at
random from the confusing city's roar! Happier still if that early
picture be of one of those rare scenes which have inspired poets and
prophets with the retrospective day-dream of a patriarchal, or a
golden, age; of some plot of ground like the Ithaca of Odysseus,
[Greek: traechsi all agathae koyrotrophos], "rough, but a nurse of
_men_;" of some life like that which a poet of kindred spirit to
Wordsworth's saw half in vision, half in reality, among the
husbandmen of the Italian hills:--
Peace, peace is theirs, and life no fraud that knows,
Wealth as they will, and when they will, repose;
On many a hill the happy homesteads stand,
The living lakes through many a vale expand:
Cool glens are there, and shadowy caves divine,
Deep sleep, and far-off voices of the kine;--
From moor to moor the exulting wild deer stray;--
The strenuous youth are strong and sound as they;
One reverence still the untainted race inspires,
God their first thought, and after God their sires;--
These last discerned Astraea's flying hem,
And Virtue's latest footsteps walked with them.