I therefore infer that it was in the spring or early summer of 1800 that the names were cut.

I may add that the late Dean of Westminster—­Dean Stanley—­took much interest in this Rock of Names; and doubt having been cast on the accuracy of the place and the genuineness of the inscriptions, in a letter from Dr. Fraser, then Bishop of Manchester, which he forwarded to me, he entered into the question with all the interest with which he was wont to track out details in the architecture or the history of a Church.

There were few memorials connected with Wordsworth more worthy of preservation than this “upright mural block of stone.”  When one remembered that the initials on the rock were graven by the hands of William and John Wordsworth, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, possibly with the assistance of Dorothy Wordsworth, the two Hutchinsons (Mary and Sarah), and that Wordsworth says of it,

  ’We worked until the Initials took
  Shapes that defied a scornful look,’

this Thirlmere Rock was felt to be a far more interesting memento of the group of poets that used to meet beside it, than the Stone in the grounds of Rydal Mount, which was spared at Wordsworth’s suit, “from some rude beauty of its own.”  There was simplicity, as well as strength, in the way in which the initials were cut.  But the stone was afterwards desecrated by tourists, and others, who had the audacity to scratch their own names or initials upon it.  In 1877 I wrote, “The rock is as yet wonderfully free from such; and its preservation is probably due to the dark olive-coloured moss, with which the ‘pure water trickling down’ has covered the face of the ‘mural block,’ and thus secured it from observation, even on that highway;” but I found in the summer of 1882 that several other names had been ruthlessly added.  When the Manchester Thirlmere scheme was finally resolved upon, an effort was made to remove the Stone, with the view of its being placed higher up the hill on the side of the new roadway.  In the course of this attempt, the Stone was broken to pieces.

There is a very good drawing of “The Rock of Names” by Mr. Harry Goodwin, in ‘Through the Wordsworth Country, 1892’.

“The Muse” takes farewell of the Waggoner as he is proceeding with the Sailor and his quaint model of the ‘Vanguard’ along the road toward Keswick.  She “scents the morning air,” and

  ’Quits the slow-paced waggon’s side,
  To wander down yon hawthorn dell,
  With murmuring Greta for her guide.’

The “hawthorn dell” is the upper part of the Vale of St. John.

’—­There doth she ken the awful form Of Raven-crag—­black as a storm—­ Glimmering through the twilight pale; And Ghimmer-crag, his tall twin brother, Each peering forth to meet the other.’

Raven-crag is well known,—­H.C.  Robinson writes of it in his ‘Diary’ in 1818, as “the most significant of the crags at a spot where there is not one insignificant,”—­a