however, a true love and feeling for Nature, and a greater share of poetical imagination, as distinguished from dramatic, than any man between Milton and him.  As he stood looking at Ambleside, seen across the valley, embosomed in wood, and separated from us at sufficient distance, he quoted from Thomson’s ‘Hymn on Solitude,’ and suggested the addition, or rather insertion, of a line at the close, where he speaks of glancing at London from Norwood.  The line, he said, should have given something of a more favourable impression: 

‘Ambition——­ [242] and pleasure vain.’

October 14th, Foxhow.—­We have had a delightful day to-day.  The weather being fine, Wordsworth agreed to go with us into Easedale; so we got three ponies, for Mary and Madge, and Fred and Alley, alternately, and walked from Grasmere, he trudging[243] before, with his green gauze shade over his eyes, and in his plaid jacket and waistcoat.  First, he turned aside at a little farm-house, and took us into a swelling field, to look down on the tumbling stream which bounded it, and which we saw precipitated at a distance, in a broad white sheet, from the mountain.  A beautiful water-break of the same stream was before us at our feet, and he noticed the connection which it formed in the landscape with the distant waterfall.  Then, as he mused for an instant, he said, ’I have often thought what a solemn thing it would be, if we could have brought to our mind, at once, all the scenes of distress and misery, which any spot, however beautiful and calm before us, has been witness to since the beginning.  That water-break, with the glassy, quiet pool beneath it, that looks so lovely, and presents no images to the mind but of peace,—­there, I remember, the only son of his father, a poor man, who lived yonder, was drowned.  He missed him, came to search, and saw his body dead in the pool.’  We pursued our way up the stream, not a very easy way for the horses, near to the waterfall before mentioned, and so gradually up to the Tarn.  Oh, what a scene!  The day one of the softest and brightest in autumn; the lights various; the mountains in the richest colouring, fern covering them with reddish gold in great part; here and there, trees in every variety of autumn foliage; and the rock itself of a kind of lilac tint; the outlines of the mountains very fine; the Tarn, which might almost be called a lake for size and abundance of water, with no culture, or trees, or habitation around it, here and there a great rock stretching into it like a promontory, and high mountains surrounding it on three sides, on two of them almost precipitate; on the fourth side, it is more open, and on this the stream, crossed by four great stepping-stones, runs out of it, and descends into Grasmere vale and lake.  He pointed out the precipitous mountain at the head of the Tarn, and told us an incident of his sister and himself coming from Langdale, which lies on the other side.  He having for some reason parted,