Lady Franklin, who died in 1875, was still alive at the time we passed through Grasmere.  One of her last acts was to erect a marble monument to Sir John Franklin in Westminster Abbey, and it was her great wish to write the epitaph herself, but as she died before this was accomplished, it was written by Alfred Tennyson, a nephew of Sir John by marriage, and read as follows: 

  Not here! the white North hath thy bones, and thou
    Heroic Sailor Soul! 
  Art passing on thy happier voyage now
    Towards no earthly pole.

Dean Stanley added a note to the effect that the monument was “Erected by his widow, who, after long waiting and sending many in search of him, herself departed to seek and to find him in the realms of light, 18th July, 1875, aged eighty-three years.”

But to return to Grasmere.  Wordsworth lived there from 1803 to 1809 at the Dove Cottage, of which, in the first canto of “The Waggoner,” he wrote: 

  For at the bottom of the brow
  Where once the “Dove and Olive-Bough”
  Offered a greeting of good ale
  To all who entered Grasmere Vale;
  And called on him who must depart
  To leave it with a jovial heart;
  There, where the “Dove and Olive-Bough”
  Once hung, a poet harbours now,
  A simple water-drinking Bard.

When Wordsworth moved to Rydal Mount, this cottage, which had formerly been a public-house, was taken by that master of English prose, Thomas de Quincey, author of the Confessions of an English Opium Eater.

[Illustration:  RYDAL MOUNT.]

[Illustration:  THE POET’S SEAT, RYDAL WATER.]

Wordsworth had the habit of reciting his poetry aloud as he went along the road, and on that account the inhabitants thought he was not quite sane.  When Hartley Coleridge, his great friend, asked an old man who was breaking stones on the road if he had any news, he answered, “Why, nowte varry partic’lar; only awd Wordsworth’s brokken lowse ageean!” (had another fit of madness).  On another occasion, a lady visitor asked a woman in the village whether Wordsworth made himself agreeable among them.  “Well,” she said, “he sometimes goes booin’ his pottery about t’rooads an’ t’fields an’ tak’s na nooatish o’ neabody, but at udder times he’ll say ‘Good morning, Dolly,’ as sensible as owder you or me.”

The annual sports held at Grasmere were of more than local interest, and the Rush-bearing was still kept up, but not quite in the manner prevalent in earlier centuries.  When heating apparatus was unknown in churches, the rushes were gathered, loaded in a cart, and taken to the church, where they were placed on the floor and in the pews to keep the feet of the worshippers warm while they were in the church, being removed and replenished each year when the rush-bearing festival came round again.  One of our earliest recollections was sitting amongst the rushes on the floor of a pew in the ancient country church at Lymm in Cheshire.