It is no longer snow-white, a "restoration" having taken place within recent years on architectural principles. The plaster is stripped from the outside of the church, which is now of a dull stone colour. "Apart from poetic sentiment," says Dr. Cradock, "it may be doubted whether the pale colour still preserved at Grasmere and other churches in the district, does not better harmonise with the scenery and atmosphere of the Lake country." The church, however, is still a conspicuous object as you approach Hawkshead by the Ambleside road or from Sawrey. It is the latter approach that Wordsworth describes, in his account of his return to Hawkshead from Cambridge, during a summer vacation. The school in which he was taught (founded by Archbishop Sandys of York, in 1585) is still very much as it was in Wordsworth's time. The main schoolroom is on the ground-floor. One small chamber on the first floor was used in his day by the head-master for teaching a few advanced pupils. In another is a library, formed in part by the donations of the scholars; it being a local custom for each pupil to present a volume on leaving school, or to send one afterwards. On the wall of this room is a tablet recording the names of several masters; and there, in an old oak chest, is kept the original charter of the school. the oak benches downstairs are deeply cut the names and initials of the boys; and amongst them the name of William Wordsworth may be seen. Towards the close of last century, when he and his three brothers were educated at this school, it was one of the best educational institutions in the north of England. The pupils boarded in the houses of the village dames. Ye lowly cottages wherein we dwelt, A ministration of your own was yours;

In

Can I forget you, being as you were
So beautiful among the pleasant fields
In which ye stood? or can I here forget
The plain and seemly countenance with which
Ye dealt out your plain comforts? Yet had ye
Delights and exultations of your own.1

Wordsworth lived with one Anne Tyson, for whose
memory he cherished the warmest regard. Her
cottage, the young poet's residence for nine eventful
years, remains unaltered externally; and little, if at
all, changed in the interior. It is well known, and
easily found. It is reached through a picturesque
archway nearly opposite the principal village inn (the
Lion), and stands on the right of a small open yard
which you enter through this archway; while to the
left a lane leads westwards to the open country.
is a humble dwelling of two stories; the floor of the
basement flat, paved with the blue flags of Coniston
slate, is not likely to have been changed since Words-
worth's time. On the upper flat there are two bed-
rooms to the front, with oaken flooring, one of
which must have been occupied by Wordsworth, as
he could not otherwise have written of

That lowly bed whence I had heard the wind
Roar, and the rain beat hard; where I so oft
Had lain awake on summer nights to watch
The moon in splendour couched among the leaves
Of a tall ash, that near our cottage stood;
Had watched her with fixed eyes while to and fro
In the dark summit of the waving tree

She rocked with every impulse of the breeze.2

It

The ash-tree is gone, but there is no doubt as to the 2 Ibid. book iv. p. 88.

1 Prelude, book i. p. 23.

place where it grew. Mr. Watson, whose father owned and inhabited the house immediately opposite Mrs. Tyson's cottage in Wordsworth's time, and who was himself born in it, tells me that the ash-tree grew on the proper right front of the cottage, where an outhouse is now built. If this be so, Wordsworth's room must have been that on the proper left, with the smaller of the two windows. The cottage faces nearly south-west. Referring to the "old dame so kind and motherly," and her humble dwelling, with its garden, etc., Wordsworth writes :

:

The thoughts of gratitude shall fall like dew

Upon thy grave, good creature! While my heart
Can beat never will I forget thy name.

Heaven's blessing be upon thee where thou liest
After thy innocent and busy stir

In narrow cares, thy little daily growth
Of calm enjoyments, after eighty years,
And more than eighty, of untroubled life,
Childless, yet by the strangers to thy blood
Honoured with little less than filial love.
What joy was mine to see thee once again,
Thee and thy dwelling, and a crowd of things
About its narrow precincts all beloved,
And many of them seeming yet my own !
Why should I speak of what a thousand hearts
Have felt, and every man alive can guess?
The rooms, the court, the garden were not left
Long unsaluted, nor the sunny seat
Round the stone table under the dark pine,
Friendly to studious or to festive hours;
Nor that unruly child of mountain birth,
The famous brook, who, soon as he was boxed
Within our garden, found himself at once,
As if by trick insidious and unkind,
Stripped of his voice and left to dimple down

(Without an effort and without a will)

A channel paved by man's officious care.1

There can be little doubt as to the identity of the "famous brook within our garden." "Persons have visited the cottage," says Dr. Cradock, "without discovering it; and yet it is not forty yards distant, and is still exactly as described. On the opposite side of the lane already referred to, a few steps above the cottage, is a narrow passage through some new stone buildings. On emerging from this, you meet a small garden, the farther side of which is bounded by the brook, confined on both sides by large flags, and also covered by flags of the same Coniston formation, through the interstices of which you may see and hear the stream running freely.2 The upper flags are now used as a footpath, and lead by another passage back into the village. No doubt the garden has been reduced in size by the use of that part of it fronting the lane for building purposes. The stream, before it enters the area of buildings and gardens, is open by the lane side, and seemingly comes from the hills to the westwards. The large flags are extremely hard and durable, and it is probable that the very flags which paved the channel in Wordsworth's time may be still doing the same duty."

The only difficulty in this identification of the garden is that the adjoining house, to which it would naturally be attached, was not dame Tyson's but Mr. Watson's; and, unless it was let to Mrs. Tyson, or unless Wordsworth was inaccurate in this detail, he may possibly be describing another part of the brook farther up the stream. A good way above the

1 Prelude, book iv. p. 87.

2 Therefore, not quite “stripped of its voice.”

village, at a place called Walker Ground, the same brook is certainly "boxed within a garden," and there it is literally "stript of its voice" for a considerable distance. The present house is recent; but in two adjoining cottages, boys attending the grammar school were boarded in the beginning of the century, just as at Mrs. Tyson's. Wordsworth may be describing a garden at Walker Ground; but, on the whole, I think it was the garden in the village. He says, in the last extract, in reference to the cottage he lived in, that there was "a crowd of things about its narrow precincts all beloved." The garden was, I think, close at hand.

There is neither trace nor tradition, however, of the "dark pine" with the " "stone seat" under it. They have disappeared as completely as the

rude mass

Of native rock left midway in the square

Of our small market village,1

which was

the goal,

Or centre of our sports.2

In the fifth book of The Prelude Wordsworth tells

us

Well do I call to mind the very week

When I was first entrusted to the care

Of that sweet Valley; when its paths, its streams,
And brooks were like a dream of novelty

To my half-infant thoughts.3

It is thus that he describes the "fair seed-time" of

his soul:

1 Prelude, book ii. p. 34.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid. book v. p. 124.