him any plan for finishing it.  Not that he doubted my uncle’s sincerity in his subsequent assertions to the contrary; because, he said, schemes of this sort passed rapidly and vividly through his mind, and so impressed him, that he often fancied he had arranged things, which really and upon trial proved to be mere embryos.  I omitted to ask him, what seems obvious enough now, whether, in conversing about it, he had never asked my uncle how it would end.  The answer would have settled the question.  He regretted that the story had not been made to end the same night in which it begun.  There was difficulty and danger in bringing such a personage as the witch to the daylight, and the breakfast-table; and unless the poem was to have been long enough to give time for creating a second interest, there was a great probability of the conclusion being flat after such a commencement.

[238] You could not walk with him a mile without seeing what a loving interest he took in the play and working of simple natures.  As you ascend Kirkstone from Paterdale, you have a bright stream leaping down from rock to rock, on your right, with here and there silent pools.  One of Wordsworth’s poor neighbours worked all the week over Kirkstone, I think in some mines; and returning on Saturday evenings, used to fish up this little stream.  We met him with a string of small trout.  W. offered to buy them, and bid him take them to the Mount.  ‘Nay,’ said the man, ’I cannot sell them, Sir; the little children at home look for them for supper, and I can’t disappoint them.’  It was quite pleasant to see how the man’s answer delighted the Poet.  J.T.C.

* * * * *

A great number of my uncle’s sonnets, he said, were written from the ‘Cat and Salutation,’ or a public-house with some such name, in Smithfield, where my uncle imprisoned himself for some time; and they appeared in a newspaper, I think he said the Morning Chronicle.

He remembered his writing a great part of the translation of ‘Wallenstein,’ and he said there was nothing more astonishing than the ease and rapidity with which it was done.

Sept. 29th, Foxhow.—­We are just setting out, in a promising day, for a second trip to Keswick, intending, if possible, to penetrate into Wastdale, over the Sty Head.  Before I go, I wish to commemorate a walk with the Poet, on a drizzly muddy day, the turf sponging out water at every step, through which he stalked as regardless as if he were of iron, and with the same fearless, unchanged pace over rough and smooth, slippery and sound.  We went up by the old road[239] from Ambleside to Keswick, and struck off from the table-land on the left, over the fell ground, till he brought me out on a crag, bounded, as it were, by two ascents, and showing me in front, as in a frame, Grasmere Lake, ’the one green island,’ the church, village, &c., and the surrounding mountains.  It is a lovely scene, strikingly described in his verses beginning,