When in our pinnace we returned at leisure
Over the shadowy lake, and to the beach
Of some small island steered our course with one,
The minstrel of the troop, and left him there,
And rowed off gently, while he blew his flute
Alone upon the rock--oh, then the calm
And dead still water lay upon my mind
Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky,
Never before so beautiful, sank down
Into my heart, and held me like a dream!

The passage which describes the schoolboy's call to the owls--the
lines of which Coleridge said that he should have exclaimed
"Wordsworth!" if he had met them running wild in the deserts of
Arabia,--paint a somewhat similar rush of feeling with a still
deeper charm. The "gentle shock of mild surprise" which in the
pauses of the birds' jocund din _carries far into his heart the
sound of mountain torrents_--the very mingling of the grotesque and
the majestic--brings home the contrast between our transitory
energies and the mystery around us which returns ever the same to
the moments when we pause and are at peace.

It is round the two small lakes of Grasmere and Rydal that the
memories of Wordsworth are most thickly clustered. On one or other
of these lakes he lived for fifty years,--the first half of the
present century; and there is not in all that region a hillside walk
or winding valley which has not heard him murmuring out his verses
as they slowly rose from his heart. The cottage at Townend, Grasmere,
where he first settled, is now surrounded by the out-buildings of a
busy hotel; and the noisy stream of traffic, and the sight of the