The Chartists are well aware of this possibility, and cling to it with all ardour and perseverance which nothing but wiser and more brotherly dealing towards the many on the part of the wealthy few can moderate or remove.

BOOK IX., towards conclusion.

    ’While from the grassy mountain’s open side
    We gazed.’

The point here fixed upon in my imagination is half-way up the northern side of Loughrigg Fell, from which the ‘Pastor’ and his companions are supposed to look upwards to the sky and mountain-tops, and round the Vale, with the Lake lying immediately beneath them.

    ’But turned, not without welcome promise given
    That he would share the pleasures and pursuits
    Of yet another Summer’s day, consumed
    In wandering with us.’

When I reported this promise of the ‘Solitary,’ and long after, it was my wish, and I might say intention, that we should resume our wanderings and pass the borders into his native country, where, as I hoped, he might witness, in the society of the ‘Wanderer,’ some religious ceremony—­a sacrament say, in the open fields, or a preaching among the mountains, which, by recalling to his mind the days of his early childhood, when he had been present on such occasions in company with his parents and nearest kindred, might have dissolved his heart into tenderness, and so done more towards restoring the Christian faith in which he had been educated, and, with that, contentedness and even cheerfulness of mind, than all that the ‘Wanderer’ and ‘Pastor’ by their several effusions and addresses had been enabled to effect.  An issue like this was in my intentions, but alas!

——­’mid the wreck of is and was, Things incomplete and purposes betrayed Make sadder transits o’er thought’s optic glass Than noblest objects utterly decayed.’

    Bydal Mount, June 24. 1843. 
    St. John Baptist Day.

Of the ‘Church’ in the ‘Excursion’ (Book v.) we find this additional morsel in a letter to Lady Frederick Bentinck (Memoirs, i. 156):  ’The Church is a very ancient structure; some persons now propose to ceil it, a project which, as a matter of taste and feeling, I utterly disapprove.  At present, it is open to the rafters, and is accordingly spacious, and has a venerable appearance, favourable, when one first enters, to devotional impressions.’

514. The Aristocracy of Nature.

    ——­’much did he see of men.’ [’Excursion,’ Book i. 1. 344.]

At the risk of giving a shock to the prejudices of artificial society, I have ever been ready to pay homage to the aristocracy of nature; under a conviction that vigorous human-heartedness is the constituent principle of true taste.  It may still, however, be satisfactory to have prose testimony how far a Character, employed for purposes of imagination, is founded upon general fact.  I, therefore, subjoin an extract from an author who had opportunities of being well acquainted with a class of men, from whom my own personal knowledge emboldened me to draw this portrait.