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and down like you,

       To see an acre’s breadth of that wide cliff

       One roaring cataract — a sharp May storm

       Will come with loads of January snow,

       And in one night send twenty score of sheep

       To feed the ravens, or a Shepherd dies

       By some untoward death among the rocks:

       The ice breaks up and sweeps away a bridge —

       A wood is fell’d: — and then for our own homes!

       A child is born or christen’d, a field plough’d,

       A daughter sent to service, a web spun,

       The old house cloth is deck’d with a new face;

       And hence, so far from wanting facts or dates

       To chronicle the time, we all have here

       A pair of diaries, one serving, Sir,

       For the whole dale, and one for each fireside,

       Your’s was a stranger’s judgment: for historians

       Commend me to these vallies.

      LEONARD.

      Yet your churchyard

       Seems, if such freedom may be used with you,

       To say that you are heedless of the past.

       Here’s neither head nor foot-stone, plate of brass,

       Cross-bones or skull, type of our earthly state

       Or emblem of our hopes: the dead man’s home

       Is but a fellow to that pasture field.

      PRIEST.

      Why there, Sir, is a thought that’s new to me.

       The Stone-cutters, ‘tis true, might beg their bread

       If every English churchyard were like ours:

       Yet your conclusion wanders from the truth.

      We have no need of names and epitaphs,

       We talk about the dead by our firesides.

       And then for our immortal part, we want

       No symbols, Sir, to tell us that plain tale:

       The thought of death sits easy on the man

       Who has been born and dies among the mountains:

      LEONARD.

      Your dalesmen, then, do in each other’s thoughts

       Possess a kind of second life: no doubt

       You, Sir, could help me to the history

       Of half these Graves?

      PRIEST.

      With what I’ve witness’d; and with what I’ve heard,

       Perhaps I might, and, on a winter’s evening,

       If you were seated at my chimney’s nook

       By turning o’er these hillocks one by one,

       We two could travel, Sir, through a strange round,

       Yet all in the broad highway of the world.

       Now there’s a grave — your foot is half upon it,

       It looks just like the rest, and yet that man

       Died broken-hearted.

      LEONARD.

      ’Tis a common case,

       We’ll take another: who is he that lies

       Beneath yon ridge, the last of those three graves; —

       It touches on that piece of native rock

       Left in the churchyard wall.

      PRIEST.

      That’s Walter Ewbank.

       He had as white a head and fresh a cheek

       As ever were produc’d by youth and age

       Engendering in the blood of hale fourscore.

       For five long generations had the heart

       Of Walter’s forefathers o’erflow’d the bounds

       Of their inheritance, that single cottage,

       You see it yonder, and those few green fields.

       They toil’d and wrought, and still, from sire to son,

       Each struggled, and each yielded as before

       A little — yet a little — and old Walter,

       They left to him the family heart, and land

       With other burthens than the crop it bore.

       Year after year the old man still preserv’d

       A chearful mind, and buffeted with bond,

       Interest and mortgages; at last he sank,

       And went into his grave before his time.

       Poor Walter! whether it was care that spurr’d him

       God only knows, but to the very last

       He had the lightest foot in Ennerdale:

       His pace was never that of an old man:

       I almost see him tripping down the path

       With his two Grandsons after him — but you,

       Unless our Landlord be your host to-night,

       Have far to travel, and in these rough paths

       Even in the longest day of midsummer —

      LEONARD.

      But these two Orphans!

      PRIEST.

      Orphans! such they were —

       Yet not while Walter liv’d — for, though their Parents

       Lay buried side by side as now they lie,

       The old Man was a father to the boys,

       Two fathers in one father: and if tears

       Shed, when he talk’d of them where they were not,

       And hauntings from the infirmity of love,

       Are aught of what makes up a mother’s heart,

       This old Man in the day of his old age

       Was half a mother to them. — If you weep, Sir,

       To hear a stranger talking about strangers,

       Heaven bless you when you are among your kindred!

       Aye. You may turn that way — it is a grave

       Which will bear looking at.

      LEONARD.

      These Boys I hope

       They lov’d this good old Man —

      PRIEST.

      They did — and truly,

       But that was what we almost overlook’d,

       They were such darlings of each other. For

       Though from their cradles they had liv’d with Walter,

       The only kinsman near them in the house,

       Yet he being old, they had much love to spare,

       And it all went into each other’s hearts.

       Leonard, the elder by just eighteen months,

       Was two years taller: ‘twas a joy to see,

       To hear, to meet them! from their house the School

       Was distant three short miles, and in the time

       Of storm and thaw, when every water-course

       And unbridg’d stream, such as you may have

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