of acquisition, and she translated the Book of Job, and a good deal from the German,—­introducing Klopstock to us at a time when we hardly knew the most conspicuous names in German literature.  Elizabeth Smith was an accomplished girl in all ways.  There is a damp, musty-looking house, with small windows and low ceilings, at Coniston, where she lived with her parents and sister, for some years before her death.  We know, from Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton’s and the Bowdlers’ letters, how Elizabeth and her sister lived in the beauty about them, rambling, sketching, and rowing their guests on the lake.  In one of her rambles, Elizabeth sat too long under a heavy dew.  She felt a sharp pain in her chest, which never left her, and died in rapid decline.  Towards the last she was carried out daily from the close and narrow rooms at home, and laid in a tent pitched in a field just across the road, whence she could overlook the lake, and the range of mountains about its head.  On that spot now stands Tent Lodge, the residence of Tennyson and his bride after their marriage.  One of my neighbors, who first saw the Lake District in early childhood, has a solemn remembrance of the first impression.  The tolling of the bell of Hawkeshead church was heard from afar; and it was tolling for the funeral of Elizabeth Smith.  Her portrait is before me now,—­the ingenuous, child-like face, with the large dark eyes which alone show that it is not the portrait of a child.  It was through her that a large proportion of the last generation of readers first had any definite associations with Coniston.

Wordsworth had, however, been in that church many a time, above twenty years before, when at Hawkeshead school.  He used to tell that his mother had praised him for going into the church, one week-day, to see a woman do penance in a white sheet.  She considered it good for his morals.  But when he declared himself disappointed that nobody had given him a penny for his attendance, as he had somehow expected, his mother told him he was served right for going to church from such an inducement.  He spoke with gratitude of an usher at that school, who put him in the way of learning the Latin, which had been a sore trouble at his native Cockermouth, from unskilful teaching.  Our interest in him at that school, however, is from his having there first conceived the idea of writing verse.  His master set the boys, as a task, to write a poetical theme,—­“The Summer Vacation”; and Master William chose to add to it “The Return to School.”  He was then fourteen; and he was to be double that age before he returned to the District and took up his abode there.

He had meantime gone through his college course, as described in his Memoirs, and undergone strange conditions of opinion and feeling in Paris during the Revolution; had lived in Dorsetshire, with his faithful sister; had there first seen Coleridge, and had been so impressed by the mind and discourse of that wonderful young philosopher as to remove to Somersetshire to be near him; had seen Klopstock in Germany, and lived there for a time; and had passed through other changes of residence and places, when we find him again among the Lakes in 1779, still with his sister by his side, and their brother John, and Coleridge, who had never been in the District before.