brother, Augustus, I am under great obligation for having volunteered the tuition of my elder son, who is at New College, Oxford, and who, though he is not a youth of quick parts, promises, from his assiduity and passionate love of classical literature, to become an excellent scholar. -Believe me, ever sincerely and affectionately yours, WM. WORDSWORTH.

TO SIR GEORGE BEAUMONT

RYDAL MOUNT, May 28, 1825.

. Never, I think, have we had so beautiful a spring; sunshine and showers coming just as if they had been called for, by the spirits of Hope, Love, and Beauty. This spot is at present a paradise, if you will admit the term when I acknowledge that yesterday afternoon the mountains were whitened with a fall of snow. But this only served to give the landscape, with all its verdure, blossoms, and leafy trees, a striking Swiss air, which reminded us of Unterseen and Interlachen. . . . Theologians may puzzle their heads about dogmas as they will, the religion of gratitude cannot mislead us. Of that we are sure; and gratitude is the handmaid to hope, and hope the harbinger of faith. I look abroad upon Nature, I think of the best part of our Species, I lean upon my Friends, and I meditate upon the Scriptures, especially the Gospel of St. John, and my creed rises up of itself, with the ease of an exhalation, yet a fabric of adamant. God bless you, my ever dear friend.

W. WORDSWORTH.

SONNETS ON THE LANGDALE PIKES

I

How clear, how keen, how marvellously bright
The effluence from yon distant mountain's head,
Which, strewn with snow smooth as the sky can shed,
Shines like another sun on mortal sight
Uprisen, as if to check approaching Night,

And all her twinkling stars. Who now would tread, If so he might, yon mountain's glittering head Terrestrial, but a surface, by the flight

Of sad mortality's earth-sullying wing,

Unswept, unstained? Nor shall the aërial Powers
Dissolve that beauty, destined to endure,
White, radiant, spotless, exquisitely pure,
Through all vicissitudes, till genial Spring
Has filled the laughing vales with welcome flowers.

II

THE fairest, brightest, hues of ether fade;
The sweetest notes must terminate and die:
O Friend! thy flute has breathed a harmony 1
Softly resounded through this rocky glade;
Such strains of rapture as the Genius played
In his still haunt on Bagdad's summit high;
He who stood visible to Mirza's eye,

Never before to human sight betrayed.

1 The musician was Rev Samuel Tillbrook of Peter-house, Cambridge, who remodelled the Ivy Cottage at Rydal, after he had purchased it. (Wordsworth's Note.)

Lo, in the vale, the mists of evening spread! The visionary Arches are not there,

Nor the green Islands, nor the shining Seas! Yet sacred is to me this Mountain's head, Whence I have risen, uplifted, on the breeze Of harmony, above all earthly care.

THE PASS OF KIRKSTONE

I

WITHIN the mind strong fancies work.
A deep delight the bosom thrills

Oft as I pass along the fork

Of these fraternal hills :

Where, save the rugged road, we find
No appanage of human kind,

Nor hint of man; if stone or rock
Seem not his handywork to mock
By something cognizably shaped;
Mockery or model roughly hewn,
And left as if by earthquake strewn,
Or from the Flood escaped:

Altars for Druid service fit

(But where no fire was ever lit,

Unless the glow-worm to the skies
Thence offer nightly sacrifice);
Wrinkled Egyptian monument;

Green moss-grown tower; or hoary tent;
Tents of a camp that never shall be razed
On which four thousand years have gazed!

White, radiant, spotless, exquisitely pure,

Through all vicissitudes, till genial Spring

Has filled the laughing vales with welcome flowers."

Sonnets on the Langdale Pikes, p. 297.