"A pair of friends, though I was young,
And he was seventy-four."

From the rear of his court-yard he showed me Rydal Water, a little lake
about a mile long, the beautiful church, and beyond it, Grassmere, and
still further beyond, Helvelyn, the mountain-king with a retinue of a
hundred hills. I might have spent the whole day in delightful
intercourse with the old man, but my fellow-travellers were going, and I
could make no longer inroads upon their time. When we returned to the
door of his cottage, he gave me a parting blessing; he picked a small
yellow flower and handed it to me, and I still preserve it in my
edition of his works, as a relic of the most profound and the most
sublime poet that England has produced during the nineteenth century I
know of but one other living American who has ever visited Wordsworth at
Rydal Mount.

After passing through Keswick, where the venerable poet Southey was
still lingering in sadly failing intelligence, we reached Carlisle the
same evening. From Carlisle we took the mail-coach for Edinburgh by the
same route over which Sir Walter Scott was accustomed to make his
journeys up to London. The driver, who might have answered to Washington
Irving's description, pointed out to me Netherby Hall, the mansion of
the Grahams, on "Cannobie lea," over which the young Lochinvar bore away
his stolen bride. We passed also Branksome Tower, the scene of the "Lay
of the Last Minstrel," and reached Selkirk in the early evening. The
next day I spent at Abbotsford. The Great Magician had been dead only
ten years, and his family still occupied the house with some of his old
employees who figure in Lockhart's biography. I sat in the great
arm-chair where Sir Walter Scott wrote many of his novels, and looked