with its one tall white rose-tree.  “You cannot imagine,” she wrote, in 1830, “how I delight in that fair, solitary, neglected-looking tree.”  The tree is not neglected now.  Dovenest is inhabited by Mrs. Hemans’s then young friend, the Rev. R.P.  Graves; and it has recovered from the wildness and desolation of thirty years ago, while looking as secluded as ever among the woods on the side of Wansfell.

All this time, illustrious strangers were coming, year by year, to visit residents, or to live among the mountains for a few weeks.  There was Wilberforce, spending part of a summer at Rayrigg, on the lake shore.  One of his boys asked him, “Why should you not buy a house here? and then we could come every year.”  The reply was characteristic:—­that it would be very delightful; but that the world is lying, in a manner, under the curse of God; that we have something else to do than to enjoy fine prospects; and that, though it may be allowable to taste the pleasure now and then, we ought to wait till the other life to enjoy ourselves.  Such was the strait-lacing in which the good man was forever trying to compress his genial, buoyant, and grateful nature.—­Scott came again and again; and Wordsworth and Southey met to do him honor.  The tourist must remember the Swan Inn,—­the white house beyond Grasmere, under the skirts of Helvellyn.  There Scott went daily for a glass of something good, while Wordsworth’s guest, and treated with the homely fare of the Grasmere cottage.  One morning, his host, himself, and Southey went up to the Swan, to start thence with ponies for the ascent of Helvellyn.  The innkeeper saw them coming, and accosted Scott with “Eh, Sir! ye’re come early for your draught to-day!”—­a disclosure which was not likely to embarrass his host at all.  Wordsworth was probably the least-discomposed member of the party.—­Charles Lamb and his sister once popped in unannounced on Coleridge at Keswick, and spent three weeks in the neighborhood.  We can all fancy the little man on the top of Skiddaw, with his mind full as usual of quips and pranks, and struggling with the emotions of mountain-land, so new and strange to a Cockney, such as he truly described himself.  His loving readers do not forget his statement of the comparative charms of Skiddaw and Fleet Street; and on the spot we quote his exclamations about the peak, and the keen air there, and the look over into Scotland, and down upon a sea of mountains which made him giddy.  We are glad he came and enjoyed a day, which, as he said, would stand out like a mountain in his life; but we feel that he could never have followed his friends hither,—­Coleridge and Wordsworth,—­and have made himself at home.  The warmth of a city and the hum of human voices all day long were necessary to his spirits.  As to his passage at arms with Southey,—­everybody’s sympathies are with Lamb; and he only vexes us by his humility and gratitude at being pardoned by the aggressor, whom he had in fact humiliated in all eyes