[Footnote B:  Mary Hutchinson.—­Ed.]

[Footnote C:  Compare the ‘Ode, Intimations of Immortality’, stanzas v. and ix.—­Ed.]

[Footnote D:  Either amongst the Lorton Fells, or the north-western slopes of Skiddaw.—­Ed.]

[Footnote E:  His sister.—­Ed.]

[Footnote F:  The year was evidently 1783, but the locality is difficult to determine.  It may have been one or other of two places.  Wordsworth’s father died at Penrith, and it was there that the sons went for their Christmas holiday.  The road from Penrith to Hawkshead was by Kirkstone Pass, and Ambleside; and the “led palfreys” sent to take the boys home would certainly come through the latter town.  Now there are only two roads from Ambleside to Hawkshead, which meet at a point about a mile north of Hawkshead, called in the Ordnance map “Outgate.”  The eastern road is now chiefly used by carriages, being less hilly and better made than the western one.  The latter would be quite as convenient as the former for horses.  If one were to walk out from Hawkshead village to the place where the two roads separate at “Outgate,” and then ascend the ridge between them, he would find several places from which he could overlook both roads “far stretched,” were the view not now intercepted by numerous plantations. (The latter are of comparatively recent growth.) Dr. Cradock,—­to whom I am indebted for this, and for many other suggestions as to localities alluded to by Wordsworth,—­thinks that

“a point, marked on the map as ‘High Crag’ between the two roads, and about three-quarters of a mile from their point of divergence, answers the description as well as any other.  It may be nearly two miles from Hawkshead, a distance of which an active eager school-boy would think nothing.  The ‘blasted hawthorn’ and the ‘naked wall’ are probably things of the past as much as the ‘single sheep.’”

Doubtless this may be the spot,—­a green, rocky knoll with a steep face to the north, where a quarry is wrought, and with a plantation to the east.  It commands a view of both roads.  The other possible place is a crag, not a quarter of a mile from Outgate, a little to the right of the place where the two roads divide.  A low wall runs up across it to the top, dividing a plantation of oak, hazel, and ash, from the firs that crown the summit.  These firs, which are larch and spruce, seem all of this century.  The top of the crag may have been bare when Wordsworth lived at Hawkshead.  But at the foot of the path along the dividing wall there are a few (probably older) trees; and a solitary walk beneath them, at noon or dusk, is almost as suggestive to the imagination, as repose under the yews of Borrowdale, listening to “the mountain flood” on Glaramara.  There one may still hear the bleak music from the old stone wall, and “the noise of wood and water,” while the loud dry wind whistles through the underwood, or moans amid the fir trees of the Crag, on the summit