* * * * *

After tea, although it was getting dark, we went to the churchyard, which commands a beautiful view towards Seathwaite, and we then walked in that direction, through a lane where the walls were more richly covered by moss and fern than any I ever saw before.  A beautiful dark-coloured tributary to the Duddon comes down from the moors on the left hand, about a mile from Ulpha; and soon after we had passed the small bridge over this stream, Mr. Wordsworth recollected a well which he had discovered some thirty or forty years before.  We went off the road in search of it, through a shadowy, embowered path; and as it was almost dark we should probably have failed in finding it, had we not met a very tiny boy, with a can of water in his hand, who looked at us in speechless amazement, when the Poet said, ’Is there a well here, my little lad?’ We found the well, and then joined the road again by another path, leaving the child to ponder whether we were creatures of earth or air.

* * * * *

Saturday morning was cloudy but soft, and lovely in its hazy effects.  When I went out about seven, I saw Wordsworth going a few steps, and then moving on, and stopping again, in a very abstracted manner; so I kept back.  But when he saw me, he advanced, and took me again to the churchyard to see the morning effects, which were very lovely.  He said he had not slept well, that the recollection of former days and people had crowded upon him, and, ’most of all, my dear sister; and when I thought of her state, and of those who had passed away, Coleridge, and Southey, and many others, while I am left with all my many infirmities, if not sins, in full consciousness, how could I sleep? and then I took to the alteration of sonnets, and that made the matter worse still.’  Then suddenly stopping before a little bunch of harebell, which, along with some parsley fern, grew out of the wall near us, he exclaimed, ’How perfectly beautiful that is!

    “Would that the little flowers that grow could live,
    Conscious of half the pleasure that they give."’

He then expatiated on the inexhaustible beauty of the arrangements of Nature, its power of combining in the most secret recesses, and that it must be for some purpose of beneficence that such operations existed.  After breakfast, we got into the cart of the inn, which had a seat swung into it, upon which a bolster was put, in honour, I presume, of the Poet Laureate.  In this we jogged on to Seathwaite, getting out to ascend a craggy eminence on the right, which Mrs. Wordsworth admired:  the view from it is very striking.  You see from it all the peculiarities of the vale, the ravine where the Duddon ‘deserts the haunts of men,’ ’the spots of stationary sunshine,’ and the homesteads which are scattered here and there, both on the heights and in the lower ground near protecting rocks and craggy steeps.  Seathwaite I had a perfect recollection of; and the