Page:The Book of the Homeless (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916).djvu/272

 ruin, the agony, the fury, of this hideous struggle into which Germany plunged the world, a year ago? It is past eight o'clock; but the sun which is just dipping behind Silver How is still full on Loughrigg, the beautiful fell which closes in the southern end of the lake. Between me and these illumined slopes lies the lake—shadowed and still, broken by its one green island. I can just see the white cups of the water-lilies floating above the mirrored woods and rocks that plunge so deep into the infinity below.

The square tower of the church rises to my left. The ashes of Wordsworth lie just beyond it—of Wordsworth, and that sister with the "wild eyes," who is scarcely less sure of immortality than himself, of Mary Wordsworth too, the "perfect woman, nobly planned," at whose feet, in her white-haired old age, I myself as a small child of five can remember sitting, nearly sixty years ago. A little further, trees and buildings hide what was once the grassy margin of the lake, and the old coach road from Ambleside, with Wordsworth's cottage upon it. Dove Cottage, where "mighty poets" gathered, and poetry that England will never let die was written, is now, as all the world knows, a national possession, and is full of memorials not only of Wordsworth, his sister and his wife, but of all the other famous men who haunted there—De Quincey, who lived therefor more than twenty years, Southey and Coleridge; or of Wordsworth's younger contemporaries and neighbours in the Lakes, such as Arnold of Rugby, and Arnold's poet son Matthew. Generally the tiny house and garden are thronged by Americans in August, who crowd—in the Homeric phrase—about the charming place, like flies about the milk pails in summer.

But this year there are no Americans, there are few visitors, indeed, of any kind as yet, though the coaches are beginning to bring them—scantily. But Grasmere does not distress itself as it would in other years, Wordsworth's village is thinking too much about the war. Before the war—so I learn from a gentle lady, who is one of the most eager guardians of Grasmere traditions, and has made remarkable and successful efforts,