By the brook-side-'tis gone-and that dark cleft!

To me it does not seem to wear the face which then it had.

PRIEST.

Why, Sir, for aught I know,

That chasm is much the same—

LEONARD.

But, surely, yonder

PRIEST.

Aye, there indeed, your memory is a friend That does not play you false.-On that tall pike,

(It is the loneliest place of all these hills) There were two Springs which bubbled side by side,

As if they had been made that they might be Companions for each other; ten years back, Close to those brother fountains, the huge crag Was rent with lightning-one is dead and gone, The other, left behind, is flowing still.For accidents and changes such as these, Why we have store of them! a water-spout Will bring down half a mountain; what a feast For folks that wander up and down like you, VOL. II.

C 2

To see an acre's breadth of that wide cliff
One roaring cataract-a sharp May storm
Will come with loads of January snow,
And in one night send twenty score of sheep
To feed the raven's, or a Shepherd dies
By some untoward death among the rocks:
The ice breaks up and sweeps away a bridge-
A wood is fell'd:-and then for our own
homes !

A child is born or christen'd, a field plough'd,
A daughter sent to service, a webb spun,
The old house-clock is deck'd with a new face;
And hence, so far from wanting facts or dates
To chronicle the time, we all have here
A pair of Diaries, one serving, Sir,

For the whole dale, and one for each fire-side; Your's was a Stranger's judgment; for histo rians

Commend me to these vallies.

LEONARD.

Yet your church-yard

Seems, if such freedom may be used with you, To say that you are heedless of the past. Here's neither head nor foot-stone, plate of brass,

Cross-bones or skull, type of our earthly state, Or emblem of our hopes; the dead man's home Is but a fellow to that pasture field.

PRIEST.

Why there, Sir, is a thought that's new to me: The Stone-cutters, 'tis true, might beg their bread

If every English church-yard were like ours:
Yet your conclusion wanders from the truth.
We have no need of names and epitaphs;
We talk about the dead by our fire-sides.
And then for our immortal part, we want
No symbols, Sir, to tell us that plain tale:
The thought of death sits easy on the man
Who has been born and dies among the

tains :

LEONARD.

moun

Your dalesmen, then, do in each others thoughts
Possess a kind of second life: no doubt
You, Sir, could help me to the history
Of half these Graves?

PRIEST.

With what I've witness'd, and with what I've heard,

Perhaps I might; and on a winter's evening, If you were seated at my chimney's nook, By turning o'er these hillocks one by one, We two could travel, Sir, through a strange round,

Yet all in the broad high-way of the world.

Now there's a grave-your foot is half upon it, It looks just like the rest, and yet that man

Died broken-hearted!.

LEONARD.

'Tis a common case,

We'll take another: Who is he that lies. Beneath yon ridge, the last of those three

graves;

It touches on that piece of native rock.
Left in the church-yard wall.

PRIEST.

That's Walter Ewbank.

He had as white a head and fresh a cheek
As ever were produc'd by youth and age
Engendering in the blood of hale fourscore.
For five long generations had the heart
Of Walter's forefathers o'erflowed the bounds
Of their inheritance, that single cottage,
You see it yonder, and those few green fields,
They toil'd and wrought, and still, from sire

to son,

Each struggled, and each yielded as before
A little-yet a little-and old Walter,
They left to him the family heart, and land
With other burthens than the crop it bore.
Year after year the old man still preserv'd
A chearful mind, and buffeted with bond,

Interest, and mortgages; at last he sank,
And went into his grave before his time.
Poor Walter! whether it was care that spurr'd
-him

God only knows, but to the very last
He had the lightest foot in Ennerdale:
His pace was never that of an old man:
I almost see him tripping down the path
With his two Grandsons after him-but you,
Unless our landlord be your host to-night,
Have far to travel, and in these rough paths
Even in the longest day of midsummer-

LEONARD.

But these two Orphans!

PRIEST.

Orphans such they were

Yet not while Walter liv'd-for, though their

Lay buried side by side as now they lie,
The old man was a father to the boys,
Two fathers in one father! And if tears
Shed, when he talk'd of them where they were
not,

And hauntings from the infirmity of love,
Are aught of what makes up a mother's heart,
This old man in the day of his old age
Was half a mother to them.If you weep, Sir,