what the poet intends. Nor are there many men who, in recounting the
story of their own lives, could combine a candour so absolute with
so much of dignity--who could treat their personal history so
impartially as a means of conveying lessons of general truth--or who,
while chronicling such small things, could remain so great. The
_Prelude_ is a book of good augury for human nature. We feel in
reading it as if the stock of mankind were sound. The soul seems
going on from strength to strength by the mere development of her
inborn power. And the scene with which the poem at once opens and
concludes--the return to the Lake country as to a permanent and
satisfying home--places the poet at last amid his true surroundings,
and leaves us to contemplate him as completed by a harmony without
him, which he of all men most needed to evoke the harmony within.




CHAPTER IV.


THE ENGLISH LAKES.

The lakes and mountains of Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancashire,
are singularly fitted to supply such elements of moral sustenance as
Nature's aspects can afford to man. There are, indeed, many mountain
regions of greater awfulness; but prospects of ice and terror should
be a rare stimulant rather than an habitual food; and the physical
difficulties inseparable from immense elevations depress the
inhabitant and preoccupy the traveller. There are many lakes under a
more lustrous sky; but the healthy activities of life demand a scene