The blizzard brought a greater gift of snow to the hills of the English Lake District than had been remembered since 1859. The storm left behind it a bewitching splendour, and Skiddaw and Helvellyn and Glaramara and Grassmoor never shone more fair. Into clear air above the Yorkshire fells the great sun rose. The heavens flushed above Helvellyn, and presently the steep, angular cleft on Grisedale was filled with blue shadow. Then the light splintered upon Causey Pike and Hindscarth, and Scafell shone like a jewel of flame above the sea of deathly white. Five minutes later the blank white snowfield of Derwentwater was changed into a gleaming floor of dazzling light, and all the encircling hills seemed ivory washed with gold. A lilac veil of haze rose from theCrosthwaite Valley and drifted up the snow slopes, growing more gossamer-like as it touched the ridges of the hills, and soon the mountains stood as clear as at the dawn against a cloudless sky.
Such blue of heaven touched the cones of Skiddaw as one sees on a clear May morning above the Oberland peaks, and one wondered why it was that people who have no chance of seeing Switzerland did not take the opportunity of realising a Switzerland in miniature when it was close beside their doors. One reads of excursions to the Palace of Varieties at Manchester and Blackpool. How comes it about that no excursions are planned to such a world of varieties, such ivory palaces of winter's garnishing and nature's building, as, after heavy snowfall, may be found in Cumberland?
The frost was still in the shade within 10 degrees of zero; on Chestnut Hill it had been registered in the early morning as being within 4 degrees. People as they went about the roads felt their feet almost ring upon the snow, and children who tumbled into the powder rose and shook the fine dust from their hair and laughed to find they were as dry as a bone. The rooks above were silentand grave as they sat in solemn conclave on the ash tree at the stable-end and waited for such happy chances as the cook or chicken-man might give them. They were frozen out. Their tools were useless. But the tits were merry enough—blue tit, great tit, and cole tit; how they clung and spun and scooped at the cocoanuts and bones upon their Christmas tree! How the thrush pecked at the suet; how the starling and blackbird gobbled at the softened scraps upon the ground; and how the chaffinch and the robin partook of the crumbs that fell from the rich bird's table, as those crumbs came floating down from suet-lump or cocoanut above!
But we are off for a walk up to that old burial ground of the Viking chieftains from the land of the Frost Giants, which we still call the Ridge of Death—Latrigg of to-day. There, beside the path that leads from the main road, is the golf ground, but golf has been dispossessed by a fitter game for this season, and down the long slide shoot the tobogganers, and up the hill, with glowing faces and in silver clouds of their own breath, the happy people move. As one gazes into the valley another group of people in theneighbouring hollow may be seen hard at work with brush and curling stones, for the Keswick folk are some of them devotees to the rink, and the noise of the curlers fills the air to-day.
We climb Latrigg, noting how the blizzard has swept some of the snow from Skiddaw's western flank, and let the long yellow grasses and umber-coloured heather once more give their beauty of pencilling to the otherwise snow-white damask of their winter cloak. Thence, after far sight of the snow upon the Scotch hills sacred to the name of Cuthbert and the memory of his mission in Strathclyde, and near sight of the island hermitage, like a black jewel in the snow-field of the lake, which keeps the memory of St. Cuthbert's friend Herebert safe in mind, we descend to the vale.
ARCTIC SPLENDOURS AT THE LAKES.ARCTIC SPLENDOURS AT THE LAKES.
As we descend we have a friendly crack with a shepherd from the high fells, whose dog has cleverly found and 'crowned' a handful of the Herdwick sheep prisoned by a snowdrift against a wall. How did he do this? 'Naay, I cannot tell tha, but I suppose t' dog nosed 'em, ye kna; dogs is wonderful keen scented.' And had the sheep taken hurt? 'Naay, naay; they weresafe and warm as could be; they hedn't even begun to woo' yan anudder.' Wool one another, what's that? 'Oh, sheep, poor things, when they git snowbound and hev nowt to eat, teks to eatin' woo' off t' backs, to prevent pinin', ye kna.' So saying, the shepherd goes off, to quest for more, up to the land of loneliness and wintry wild, and I go down into the cheery vale.
How blue the snow is; you might have supposed the fields out 'Wythop' way had been washed with ultramarine; but one's eyes are caught back by the beauty of the snowdrifts by the roadside. These snowdrifts are for all the world as if great waves of milk had curled over to breaking, and at the moment had been fixed or changed into crystalline marble. And now the sun is gathering its glory back into itself, and hangs a globe of flame above 'Whinlatter' Pass. Suddenly the light goes out from all the valley meadows. The day star has sunk behind the hills. But still old Skiddaw flashes back the flame, and shepherds, out Newlands way, can see the bastions of Blencathra glow like molten gold.
For us, as we gaze out south, the range of Helvellyn is the miracle of beauty thatholds our eyes. Far off and ghostly for the haze, it lies upon a background of rosy flushing afterglow, and seems to faint into a kind of impalpable phantom of its former strength—becomes no longer solid mountain, but spectral cloud. A light wind blows, and the oak leaves in the hedge tinkle like iron; the farmer calls the horse to get his hay, the wren chirrups or scolds from the wayside bank, and a partridge cries from the near field. Then all is silent and hushed for the coming of the queen. Over the dark pines upon Skiddaw, and above the silver shoulder of the hill, clear-faced and full, the February moon swims up to rule the night. And such a reign of splendour was then begun as I have no words to chronicle. For the heaven above Helvellyn was rosy pink, melting into blue, and the sky above Skiddaw was, or seemed to be, steel azure, and the west beyond the Wythop range was gleaming amber. There, in the midst of that golden sea, shone Venus like a point of silver fire. Sirius rose and scintillated above Helvellyn's ridge, Jupiter looked clear from near the zenith, and Orion girt his starry sword about him in mid-heaven; but it was the Moon who was the queen of all our hearts. It was she wholaid her mystery upon the lakes, the hills, the valleys, white with snow; she who made one feel that if sunrise and sunsetting had been fair to-day, the moon-rising in a land of Arctic splendour had been fairer still.
It is a pleasant thing for a Cumberland Crosthwaite man to have to speak of a man of the Westmoreland Crosthwaite. It is a special pleasure when one realises how Cumberland helped Westmoreland to give us the gentle mind and life of enthusiasm for Truth and Nature which closed here at Borderside, with 'unbroken trust in God,' and 'in hope of immortal life,' on the 16th December, 1856.
I have read no life that seems to have been so genuinely the fruit of enthusiasm for the poet Wordsworth as was the life of William Pearson. He was ten years the junior of the poet, and survived him six years. We may nevertheless look upon him as a contemporary. He was of the same kind of North yeoman stock, and with greater opportunities might have made himself a namein the annals of literature. As it is, like Elihu Robinson of Egglesfield, like Wilkinson of Yanwath, like the late Wilson Robinson of Winfell, Lorton, Pearson's name was not known far beyond his native valley, but of him, as of the others named, it is truth to say that he was a living monument of what 'the soul of Nature,' if it be received into the heart of man, can do to elevate, to strengthen and refine. Of none other in his simple estatesman rank that I have read of can it be more truly said, that from:
'... Nature and her overflowing soulHe had received so much, that all his thoughtsWere steeped in feeling.'
Wordsworth once wrote that 'Nature never did betray the heart that loved her'; William Pearson proved by all he said and did that Wordsworth spoke the truth. Wordsworth spoke felicitously of the
'Harvest of a quiet eyeThat sleeps and broods on its own heart.'
William Pearson gathered that harvest to the full, ere he too, like a shock of corn, was in a full time garnered. Wordsworth declared that
'Who feels contempt for any living thingHath faculties that he hath never used,'
and William Pearson put that assertion to good proof. Few men in his day and station in this country went down to the grave with larger heart, of wider sympathy and more love for all created things.
William Pearson was born at the Yews in the Winster Vale on the 9th of October, 1780. His father, who died at the age of 81 in the year 1840, was long remembered as a quiet, studious farmer, who would ever read a book at his meals, and made a practice of going afield at nights to gaze upon the heavens. The stars in their courses helped him to reverence and to thought. William's mother—a Little from the Borderland—survived her husband and died at the age of 88 in 1842. While she span at her flax-wheel she used to delight her little son William with folklore stories and fairy tales, but she was chiefly remembered in the village for her bright activity and energy to the last. Many a time, when she was between seventy and eighty years old, on market day morning, though the horse stood saddled at the door, the old lady would say, 'Nay, hang it, I'll never fash wid it,' and would set off on foot to Kendal, with her butter basket containing twenty to thirty pounds of butter, a distanceof six miles and a half, and after 'standing the market' and shopping, would walk home again with her purchases.
As a youngster, William's education was left to the wild beauty of his native vale. If ever there was a boy of whom Nature might have said:
'Myself will to my darling beBoth law and impulse: and with meTheBoy, in rock and plain,In earth and heaven, in glade and bowerShall feel an overseeing powerTo kindle or restrain,'
it was the boy who went afield with his father as soon as he could toddle, and who in Nature's kindly school got to know by heart and eye the hills and scars of the neighbourhood, the tarns and moorlands, the trotting brooks, the rivers running to the sea, the great estuary and marsh, with all their bird and beast and flower life. He never forgot his first sight of Windermere and Morecambe Bay, nor his first journey up Troutbeck over the Kirkstone Pass; and no sooner had he left home for work elsewhere than he felt that there was only one place on this earth where life was worth living and that was the Winster Vale.
It is true that he went to the Crosthwaite school and proved himself early to be a master of figures. The author who fascinated him then was Defoe.The Memoirs of a CavalierandRobinson Crusoewere his teachers. From Crosthwaite school he went to Underbarrow and distinguished himself there chiefly for having the pluck to stand up to the big bully and thrash him in defence of the oppressed youngster. He became out of school times an expert and ardent follower of Isaac Walton. Years after, he wrote an appreciative paper which is extant on Walton and Cotton'sComplete Angler, which he begins with the sentence, 'Among our most favourite books is The Complete Angler of Isaac Walton.' The boys of Underbarrow noticed that he hugged his garret where the owls built, and was often deep in old romances ofAmadis de GaulandRoncesvalleswhen others were out and away up the fells. But in the holidays he followed bark-peeling, not so much as that thus he might earn something that would pay for his schooling, as because in the months of May and June when the bark-peelers went to their fragrant task in the woods, there was a fine chance of becoming acquainted with the life-historyof many of our feathered visitors that were nesting at that time. In autumn his delight was to be after the woodcocks, and great was his joy,
'With store of springes o'er his shoulder hung,To range the open heights where woodcocks runAlong the smooth green turf. Through half the night,Scudding away from snare to snare, he pliedThat anxious visitation.'
In his copy of Wordsworth'sPrelude, the marker, at his death, was found placed at this passage, and he never tired of telling the story of his woodcock adventures.
His first work in life was to act as teacher in the Winster village school; he went thence to be tutor to the four children of a widow body at Cartmel Fell, but at the end of the year gave up teaching to take the place of a grocer's assistant at Kendal.
He was only there a year, but it was an eventful one in William Pearson's life. He made the acquaintance of Benjamin Gough, the blind botanist, and it is possible that he was led by him into enquiry not only into the wonders of plant life, but of the life of that most delicate of all plants, the religious faith of the human soul. It is certain that during this year William Pearson's chiefstudy was the study of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Church Doctrine, and the end of it was that he reasoned and read himself out of Episcopalianism into Unitarianism, as his father had in the past done before him. He found rest to his young soul in the thought of the great Fatherhood of God, and worshipped in the old Presbyterian Meeting House, where sometimes in after years Wordsworth also worshipped, and near by which lie the ashes of the James Patrick of Kendal, who was the original of the Wanderer inThe Prelude. It may be fancy, but I like to think that it was in that chapel that the young lad first saw the man whose writings did more for him all through life than any other—I mean William Wordsworth.
From Kendal, William went, as was the wont of many a Kendal apprentice, to a grocer's shop in London, and at the end of three months he returned to the Winster Vale, broken in health from the stifle of London air, and the fact that he had no better resting place after long days of work in a city store than a shake-down underneath the counter. He was now in his twenty-third year. The 'poddish' and fresh air of theYews set him 'agate' again, and he determined to try Manchester life, and on the 16th March, 1803, he set out for that metropolis of the North. He obtained a situation on the next day after his arrival as clerk in the bank of James Fox & Company, in King Street, and for the next seventeen years he endured
'The fierce confederate stormOf sorrow barricadoed evermoreWithin the walls of cities.'
How simple and frugal his life was there, we may gather from the fact that out of his first year's stipend of £75 he sent back a deposit to one of the Kendal banks. He was not very happy. He wanted friends of his age 'who united,' as he tells us, 'those first of blessings, virtue and knowledge,' and they were not. 'Indeed, sir,' he writes to James Watson of Kendal, 'I think Manchester, in proportion to its population, very deficient in men of cultivated understanding. Immersed in business, or carried down the stream of dissipation, slaves to "Mammon" and to "Bacchus," they have seldom time for the rational amusement of reading or for the calm pleasure of reflection.'
This seems somewhat priggish, but it was the real and earnest William Pearson who spoke. Sociable as he was, fond of seeing a good play, his chief delight, if he was not out in the fields, was a book that would set him thinking or a poem that would touch his imagination, and Pearson was old beyond his years. He joined the Didactical Society, the Mosley Street Library, subscribed to the News Room and made one or two friends for life.
There in most uncongenial surroundings for seventeen years he stuck to 'the drudgery at the desk's dead wood' with one thought, that a time would arrive when he could come back to his native vale, and live a student's and a naturalist's life in simple competence. As a matter of fact his health broke down after five years of Manchester smoke, and he had to come back in 1808 to the Yews in his native vale for country air and restoration.
He was at this time nothing if not a keen sportsman, and he was, if one may judge from a letter he sent at this time to a Kendal paper, vexed at heart by the vigorous application of the game laws as enforced by the worthies of the local bench. Three young men, who, with nothing but a knob-stick, could run downa hare, had been caught hunting on Cartmel Fell. 'We must pity the Robinsons,' he says, 'young men who can run down a hare, an animal that often escapes the fleetest greyhound, who pursued their sport without fear in the open day, and so generously, that they left a hare with the farmer on whose ground they happened to take it. These fine young men have been made to pay £3 13s. 6d. for their sport. The age of chivalry is indeed gone. The ancient Greeks would have crowned them with laurel, but this is the age of taxation and little men. We are fallen on evil days; we only wish the surveyor and commissioner had heard them at their joyous sport, and had heard their shouts, as we did, which made the old mountains ring again even to Gummershow, to be echoed back from the far-off Coniston Fells.'
It was during his Manchester residence that he became a student of William Wordsworth. It was not fashionable then to care for Wordsworth's poetry, but William Pearson was never without the Lyrical Ballads of 1805, or his copy ofPoems by William Wordsworth, of 1807. The young bank clerk, who was often heard muttering, 'I will lift mine eyes unto the hills, whence cometh aid,' felt in thesepoems 'all the beauty of a common dawn.' He knew that Wordsworth walked on the shining uplands of a noble aspiration, and was the apostle, in a time 'that touched monied worldlings with dismay,' of the simpler life of honest poverty and high endeavour. He felt that in Wordsworth he could find that sympathy with all things, that
'Look to the Uncreated with a countenanceOf admiration and an eye of love.'
He knew that Wordsworth had realised the power of Nature to chasten and subdue
'and intertwineThe passions that build up our human soulNot with the mean and vulgar works of manBut with high objects and enduring things.'
He also knew how Wordsworth taught men the secret of the gentle heart,
'Never to blend its pleasure or its pride,With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.'
It was this knowledge that soon made him love rather to watch a wild bird than shoot it. One is not surprised therefore to find him constantly referring to Wordsworth's writings, and yet to feel him so eminent as a man that years after, though communing in spirit withhim day by day, he could not summon courage to go up the path to Rydal Mount, and abashed at his own boldness for venturing to call, came away from the door of the Rydal poet, without seeing his hero, like a thing ashamed.
It was owing to mutual love and admiration for Wordsworth's poetry that he found in a poor Gorton silk-weaver, Thomas Smith by name, so congenial a companion. The last six years of Pearson's life at Manchester can chiefly be known from the letters that passed between these two friends, which towards the end seem almost to degenerate into a series of begging letters from a poor weaver out of work and 'thrice dispirited.' But this at any rate is seen in their correspondence, that even in abject poverty high thinking is possible, and Wordsworth's poems seem to be medicine for the mind; while on the other hand there is always the ready and generous response of the yeoman of Winster Vale, and such delicacy in act of gift as makes one feel how finely strung, how nobly sensitive was the mind of the benefactor.
Pearson sends Thomas Smith a copy ofThe Excursion. 'Your tidings about Wordsworth,' says the poor weaver, under date of April 15,1821, 'I will not call him Mr., he is too great for that, were good tidings indeed; hisExcursionI have been longing for ever since it was first published, but the price has been an unsurmountable obstacle to a weaver.'
The two friends unbosom their hearts to one another in these letters, and there is seen something of the deep religious side of Pearson's character in some of them. 'I cannot,' he writes to Smith in 1831, 'conclude without a word about what you write of your being unhappy. Read your Bible. Trust in that Good Being who gave you your existence. Consider the many in your situation who from ignorance and want of education have not the arguments of hope that you have; ... only the wicked need be unhappy; at anyrate do not despair.' And again in 1838, 'I wish I could console you under your troubles. Be thankful you have not a guilty conscience—the greatest of evils. Read your Bible, read Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Milton. Do you go to worship, public, I mean? You have a chapel at the foot of your hill, join yourself to them.'
When Smith lay dying, Pearson wrote a letter full of tender sympathy. 'So long as reason and memory remain, I shall never forgetthe many delightful hours we have passed together, whether in reading some favourite poet or rambling among the beautiful scenes of Nature.' 'I believe,' he added, 'that seldom have two persons come together more in sympathy than we two, and I have often felt that my separation from you was one of my greatest losses in leaving your part of the country.'
Those rambles he mentions were walking-tours he took in 1817 through Derbyshire, and in 1818 in the Craven country of Yorkshire. He kept journals, and full of delightful observation of men and things they are, redolent of real joy in sunshine and cloud. He writes, 'We walked forward on this delightful morning with vigorous steps. The lark was our constant companion, cheering us overhead with her song, the fresh air of the mountains bathed our cheeks, there was freedom from care and the feeling of liberty
'When the fretful stirUnprofitable, and the fever of the worldHung not upon the beatings of our hearts.'
'We felt something,' he adds, 'of
"That blessed moodIn which the burden of the mystery,In which the heavy and the weary weightOf all this unintelligible worldIs lightened: that serene and blessed moodIn which the affections gently lead us on."
At the end of his Derbyshire journal he says that 'the remembrance of those happy days in Derbyshire will lie in the landscape of his memory, like spots of stationary sunshine; they will be to him and his friend as wells of pure water amid desert sands to which their souls may fly for refreshment hereafter in hours of weariness amid the din of towns and cities and the many shapes of joyless delight.'
Did ever city man take back to city roar and barrenness more quiet and more profit from a country ramble?
In his last letter to Thomas Smith, he spoke of having left the Manchester neighbourhood. In the autumn of 1820 he gave up his work in the Manchester Bank. He never could think of his native vale without a sense of heartsickness; his work was irksome and city life hateful. In his poem to the river Winster dated 1821, he writes:
'And in the heavy time of after life,When buried in the midst of toil and strifeIn trading towns, if intermission sweetI sought from my dull toil, my fancy fleetWas straight amid thy vernal meads and flowers,Thy hanging fields, wild woods, and leafy bowers.Nor could I think of beauty on this earth,But still 'twas seen with thee—as if thy birthAnd mine had been together. Now at easeAnd free to wander whereso'er I please,What charms I find along thy simple stream,Beloved Winster!'
It is no wonder that a yeoman farmer's son who could thus write, should have felt irresistibly drawn from exile in Manchester to his native vale, and we find him back at the Yews, in correspondence, now with the editor of a county paper, now with Miss Wordsworth, now writing a ballad or a poem, now a natural history note, now wandering off down Duddon Vale, and through the Lake District, and now keenly interested in a little dilapidated estate in the Crosthwaite township called sometimes Borderside, sometimes Balderside, or perhaps more accurately in Viking phrase, Bauta-side, and determining to go into the farming line.
He became purchaser of the Borderside estate in 1822; at once he determined to let it for five years, and gave his whole time and the rent to boot, to the improvement of it.
In the summer of the same year that he became an estatesman, he planned a tour into Scotland. Wordsworth wrote him a full andparticular itinerary, and William Pearson followed the footsteps of the bard, and really made the same journey as Wordsworth's first excursion to Scotland.
There is an interesting note of the peasants recollection of Burns in Ayrshire, and of the Sabbath manners of certain of the Auchterarder folk, but the journal otherwise is a little tiresome.
The next ten years were spent in the not very profitable work of mending the fences and outbuildings of Borderside, and then of attempting to make its crops pay the rent and leave something over. But in 1841 he 'declined' farming, not without the secret joy of getting back to his mother's house at the Yews, where all his books were stored, and where theEncyclopædia, just bound, was awaiting him.
He had not been idle, he had made the Corn Laws a study, and had concluded that they were unjust, cruel, and impolitic. He had done what he could to get the Kendal folk to abolish the old system of selling fruit by baskets, or paniers containing sixteen quarts, and had introduced the better system of selling by weight.
In the spring of 1842 his mother died, andnow, at the age of sixty-two, William Pearson felt free to marry. He married Ann Greenhow of Heversham in May.
He was by instinct a tiller of the ground; he used to say that 'no one felt more dependence upon God than the farmer in his fields.' He turned his attention to fruit culture, planted a large orchard with 300 trees and two lesser ones, and felt that he had not lived in vain. It was during this period that he began making notes of the habits of the bird and beast life round about him. Some observations on the habits of the hedgehog which he sent in 1836 to Mr. Wordsworth were sent by the poet to the members of the Kendal Natural History Society, of which Pearson had been a member almost from the first.
The result of this communication evoked, so Cornelius Nicholson, the then secretary, tells us, so much enthusiasm, that a class was determined on for mutual instruction in the habits and distinctive faculties of birds and beasts. It was Pearson's habit to attend the monthly discussion meeting of this Society, and he thought nothing of setting off after an early tea and walking in nearly seven miles to Kendal and walking back by starlight after the lecture.
It was to this part of his life between the years 1825 and 1833 that belong the glimpses of his intimacy with the Rydal Mount family, as shown by the letters, chiefly from Dorothy Wordsworth, that have been preserved to us. It is clear that William Pearson was a most welcome guest at Rydal. Excursions up Helvellyn are planned with the Wordsworths, and natural history notes are exchanged. The letters are chiefly interesting as giving us hints of the simplicity of the life there, and are often full of thanks to him for a panier of apples, or a leash of partridges, they contain a request for straw for the stables, they seek his advice in purchase of a pony, they send requisition for more potatoes and the like. William Pearson was looked upon as the henchman who could be best trusted to supply the Rydal Mount with farm produce, and it is clear that to do the bidding of the bard and be steward of his stable economics was a real pleasure to him.
He also sent to Dorothy Wordsworth's sick-room just those delightful little nature anecdotes which cheered her in her retirement. He admired and honoured the poet's sister. 'Never,' says he in one of his letters to Smith in 1832, 'have I known a moreamiable woman. Her understanding and judgment are of the highest order. I have heard Mr. Wordsworth say that he had been more indebted to her judgment than to that of any other person.'
The correspondence gives little facts and dates of household matters that are interesting to students of the poet's life at Rydal. For example, we learn on May 5, 1830, that on the next day will be finished the new terrace, to the poet's satisfaction; we learn also of Wordsworth's constant trouble from 1833 and onward by reason of the inflammation of his eyes. We hear incidentally how poor a horseman, but how good a walker the poet is, and the simplicities and hospitalities of Rydal Mount are brought before us.
But it was not only as steward of the farm and orchard that Pearson was so truly honoured by the Wordsworths. It was because the poet felt that in him he had a real lover of his art, and a real understander of his poetry and his philosophy. One is not surprised to find that Wordsworth thanked him on the occasion when, in the Kendal paper, the worthy yeoman took up pen in defence of the poet. And those who years after honoured the dead poet's memory—hispersonal friends, Dr. Davy and others—were grateful to William Pearson when, in 1854, he championed, in a letter full of feeling and knowledge, the Protestantism of the bard, which had been called in question by a lecturer of the Protestant Alliance in Kendal, who had described Wordsworth's poetry as being 'one of the principal means of the revival of priestly domination in the Church of England.'
It is very touching to see how really he valued the friendship of the poet he so well understood and so honoured. 'What claim have I,' he wrote to Dorothy Wordsworth, 'on the notice of a man like your brother? My chief obligations to him for conferring on me his society and hospitable notice I hope I shall feel to the latest hours of my life.' Writing to Wordsworth from Borderside under date 1849, he says, 'I felt very grateful for your letter. On reading the first few lines I was sorry to think how much Mrs. Wordsworth's handwriting had changed, but when I found it was indeed your own hand the tears came into my eyes. I shall preserve this kind memorial and shall not part with it till I part with everything in life.' These were the words of a real hero-worshipper, and he had cause for hero-worship.
What Wordsworth's poetry did to inspire and keep pure and true and serene the heart of William Pearson, it will still do for men of humble country life in the years that are to be. We need to-day more of soul among our farmer folk, we want avade mecumfor the tiller of the soil that shall lift his soul to Heaven. I cannot doubt that if men would study Wordsworth and receive his 'heart into their own,' there would be dignity and happiness added to many a daleside home.
To return to William Pearson. He found the farm life on the whole a happy one. He would not have given it up had he not determined to marry. His orchards prospered, and his hay grass was generally well got. His frugal ways ensured him competency, and all day and every day he was learning more of Nature's secrets, more of the pleasant ways of birds and beasts about him. He was making observations, too, on the changes that had come over the vale of Lythe and the neighbouring fells and common lands, since the packhorse had ceased to be, and the common enclosures and the larch planters had come in.
But his ears were open also to the quaint sayings and superstitions, and his eyes were on the quaint ways and customs of the dalesmenamongst whom he dwelt and moved, and these observations bore good fruit in the paper written in 1841, the year before his marriage, for the Kendal Natural History Society, entitled 'A Sketch of some of the Existing and Recent Superstitions of Westmoreland.'
It was doubtless a source of gratification to William Pearson that the son of the poet should be the officiating minister in Bowness Church the day he led his wife to the altar, in May of 1842. And he must needs have been pleased on his return to Low House after a wedding jaunt through the lakes, to find that Hartley Coleridge, who had called to congratulate him on his marriage, left behind him an impromptu sonnet. It had, as most of Hartley's sonnets have, a little touch of description of the life both of himself and of his friend, the gentle estatesman:
'A little man of solitary lifeAnd half an idiot too—more helpless still—Can wish all joy to thee and to thy wife;Thy love must be as constant as thy will.My gentle friend, how happy mayst thou be!Thou hast a wife to pray—and pray with thee.'
During the coming June of 1842 Pearson took his wife to the Continent. He had longplanned this trip; writing to his friend Thomas Smith in April of 1841, to tell him of his intended venture on 'that variety of untried being,' marriage, he says that Mr. Wordsworth has advised him to make a Swiss and Italian tour before age renders him unfit for foot-travel, and adds that his future wife 'is an excellent walker, and is quite willing to share the fatigue, and he is sure she will share the pleasure.' There is a note of simplicity in this intention to see the Swiss and Italian lakes afoot—the bridegroom now more than three score years, but a 'young heart travels many a mile,' and William Pearson's heart was young to the last.
Wordsworth supplied him with an itinerary which he faithfully followed. After the tour they stayed on until the spring at Versoix, near Geneva, and his journal shows that he was busy making naturalist notes all the while. There is a touching note in his journal of his delight on getting back to his Westmoreland home. The blue mountains and the well-known fells, and the ivy-covered cottage of Low House, and the happy greetings from beloved friends. These deeply moved him.
There was no suitable house for the happy couple in Crosthwaite, and after staying atLow House for the winter, he went into lodgings at High Crag. Lodgings were not William Pearson's ideal of home life, and though he was a man of sixty-seven he determined in 1847 to build a house on his own estate.
It was a glad day for him when, as he tells us, on the last day of July, 1848, he crept into the bosom of his own cheerful cot 'with measureless content,' a cottage 'unclothed by rough-cast,' as he told Wordsworth, 'but exhibiting a goodly row of chimneys with pretty round tops on square pedestals, the only specimens yet in Crosthwaite of the revived good old fashion.'
We have a poet's description of this Borderside home from the pen of Perceval Graves, who, writing from Dovenest in 1862, thus describes it:
'Red roses flush its native stone,The grassy slope, the rocky mountAre gay with flowers,—a shadowy fountMurmurs with cool delicious tone.Beneath, an orchard far and wideIts blossom on its front displays;Across the valley friendly raysFrom neighbour houses hail Borderside.'
Here for the next eight years dwelt the refined and thoughtful yeoman, reading suchbooks as he felt he could afford to buy, such books as he could borrow from Kendal, or were lent him by Coleridge or Perceval Graves or Wordsworth; corresponding with such naturalists as Waterton and Gough, such students as Perceval Graves and Dr. Davy, keeping up constant communion with the friends at Rydal Mount; getting hold of the best that could be had of the scientific treatises of the day; dipping here and there into theologic problems; studying his Shakespeare and his Milton, enjoying his Carlyle, his Burns, and his Scott, his Reed'sEnglish Literature, impressing, when he met him, such a man as Sir William Hamilton, examining the theories of Agazziz and Brewster as to moraine and glacier action, comparing his own natural history observations with those of Waterton and White of Selborne; and from time to time, when he had returned from some ride on 'Nep' or 'Camel,' his favourite ponies, sitting down to chronicle the beauty of the day's outing, or the wild life of bird and beast he had observed. Amongst the latter must be noted his papers on the partridge and the squirrel, in 1846; on the woodgrouse, that 'new bird' which appears to have come to Colthouse first in the autumn of 1845 (this paper waswritten in 1850), and again on the hagworm, 1852; 'Notes on Characters and Habits of Domestic Animals, 1854'; and 'A few Recent Notices in Natural History, 1855.'
All Pearson's prose has a dignity and simplicity and directness that makes one realise he had been a reader of the masters of English style, but it makes one feel also that he is a poet at heart, as he writes his prose. Take for example his account of the glede or kite—alas! long vanished from our land, though nesting at the ferry as late as the beginning of last century;—'I have seen,' says he, 'the glede and his beautiful flight, no words of mine can adequately describe it. It was on a windy day in autumn or winter that he generally made his appearance. Imagine a bird measuring five feet between the tips of his wings. To glide along it required apparently no mechanical effort, no fluttering of the wings, not the tremor of a feather. It was not flying but sailing on the bosom of the air, as if by an effort of the will, such ease, such grace, such dignity.'
The evenings at Borderside were spent in reading. A mellow musical voice with much feeling in it, would render a passage from some favourite poet, and as often as not theold man's voice would falter and he would say, 'I cannot go on,' and with tears rolling down his cheeks he would put the book down. Perceval Graves, his great friend of the later years, would ofttimes come over for high discourse and heart communion from Dovenest to Borderside. He described those pleasant visits thus:
'And when our cheerful meal was o'er,A meal which friendship seemed to blessAnd elegance and homelinessWith charm we scarce had known before.
How swiftly flew the hours away,As thought and feeling deeply storedBy mind and heart all forth were pouredIn loving faith and lively play!'
The summer of 1856 was memorable for a waterspout that fell in hay-time on the 8th of August, upon Carnigill, near Borrow Bridge; we who travel by the L.N.W.R. from Tebay to the south can still see the wounds upon the mountain side the fury of the torrent made. The phenomenon was minutely described by the old meteorologist in a letter to Mr. Davy. It was the last August he would see.
The long walks over fell and moor gave way to pony-back, and pony-back gave wayto a carriage. It was clear to all who knew that delicately chiselled face and noble brow of the yeoman poet and naturalist, that with all his mental powers clear and his eye undimmed, his natural strength was abating. In the spring of 1856 the Winster folk noticed that though he visited, as was his wont, all the orchards for miles round, he visited them in his gig, and men knew by his constant cough that his old enemy, bronchitis, was pressing him sore. But every sunny day found him sitting with his book under the shadow of the famous ash tree at Borderside, and still at night time, if the stars were clear, they saw a tall figure wrapped in a plaid, and stick in hand, pacing slowly the garden path, before the door was shut and lights went out.
As for his own light, that went out, painlessly almost as it seemed, on December 16th. A day or two before, he had gone to the window of his sick room, and said, 'In another month the snowdrops will be here.' The snowdrops came, but alas! for eyes of others almost too dim for tears to see them. On the day of his death, or more properly, his falling on sleep, the sunset brightened in the west, and the dying man with the instinct of an observer keen to the last, turned hisface to the window to see the glory grow. Then he sighed and passed to other glory beyond all sunsetting.
Of his work that remains, little need be said. It is always thoughtful, accurate of observation, pure in style, refined in diction, and delicate in poetic appreciation. One much regrets that he who had in 1808 espoused the 'Terza Rima' should have so soon quitted the sonnet's scanty plot of ground and left so few examples of his work. Amongst the miscellaneous papers and letters on natural history that remain are three which we of this county cannot be too thankful for. One is a paper 'On certain changes that have taken place of late years in a part of the Lake District,' with its notes of 'pack-horse-routes,' 'implements of primitive husbandry,' 'the introduction of larch planting,' 'commons enclosure,' and with its interesting account of the ancient Lythe Marsh.
Another is a paper in form of six letters to Thomas Gough containing 'notes on a few subjects in the natural history of Crosthwaite and Lythe, and the valley of Winster.' He prefaced this series of letters with an apparent quotation which really was his own saying and which, as a lover of St. Francis and ofall his true followers, I dare to repeat.—'These lonely denizens of the earth, our fellow pilgrims on the journey of life, have their appointed tasks as we have, set out by the great Creator.' There spoke the heart of the wise old Winster estatesman, who long had known the bond of love that binds the travailing creation into one, who as he moved among his brother birds and flowers, and felt the glory of his brother sun, or of his sister the homeside fire, also then
'With bliss ineffableCould feel the sentiment of Being spreadO'er all that moves and all that seemeth stillO'er all that leaps and runs and shouts and singsOr beats the gladsome air, or all that glidesBeneath the wave, yea, in the wave itselfAnd mighty depth of waters.'
The last two papers to be mentioned are 'The Sketches of some of the existing and recent Superstitions of Westmoreland': most valuable these are, as written just in the nick of time. The two generations that have passed since he collected his material and penned his notes, have ceased to hand on the traditional sayings and become too matter of fact to be 'boddered wid sic things as Charms or Boggles or Dobbies or Barguests or Wisemen or Witches.'
There is no one in the county of Westmoreland to-day who would care to take their children when plagued with the kink-cough up to Cartmel-fell, on chance of clipping a hair from the cross on an ass's back and then tying it round the bairn's neck as a sovereign remedy for the troublesome whoop.
But if it had not been for William Pearson I doubt if we should have known that the Winster dalesfolk, notwithstanding that the Cross was set here in the clearing so many centuries ago, were actually fire-worshippers and carrying on the rites of Baal with their Beltane-fires as late as the year of Our Lord 1840. Pearson tells us he talked with a farmer who had actually been present at the sacrifice by fire of a calf in this neighbourhood, and that there were two places within the memory of men then living, Fell Side in Crosthwaite and Hodge Hill on Cartmel-fell, where, to prevent the death of calves after birth, large fires were kindled in the open air near to the farm house and a living calf laid upon them and burnt to death.
As for the reality of this superstitious relic of sun-worship, in the year 1840, William Pearson actually witnessed it here in Crosthwaite, and, with a quotation from his paperupon this point, I will close this notice of his life and work:
'The Need Fire has again made its appearance. There is at present a rumour of a dreadful epidemic among cattle, which has shown itself in different places in this part of our country, to which it has been coming slowly up from the South, where it prevailed last summer. On Sunday afternoon, the 15th of last November, returning from Kendal by way of Brigsteer, when I reached the brow of the hill that overlooks that pleasant village, and from whence there is a glorious prospect, I was somewhat surprised to see, in Crosthwaite, two or three large masses of white smoke "rising up like the smoke of a furnace." I thought it was lime-burning, from some kilns that are not usually occupied. But when I reached Crosthwaite, I found myself in the immediate neighbourhood of one of these "smokes," which was rising very thickly below the Church Tower. I enquired of a young woman standing in the road what was the meaning of all this smoke. "Oh," said she, "it is the Need Fire." Well, thought I, much as I have heard of it, I have never seen the Need Fire. I will not miss this opportunity of having ocular evidence of all itsmysteries. On reaching che spot, I found the fire burning in the narrow lane called Kirk Lane, within about twenty yards of the Kirk Tower, and about half a dozen cattle huddled together and kept close to the fire, and amongst the smoke, by a number of men and boys standing on each side of them, in that narrow lane. Sometimes they drove them through the fire, and such was the thickness of the smoke that I could scarcely perceive the actors in this strange ceremony—men and cattle. "So," said I, "you are giving them a smoke." "Yes," replied the owner of the cows, "we wish to be like our neighbours." "But have you got the real Need Fire?" "Yes, we believe so, it came down Crook yesterday." Now I had heard that it had been at Low Levens a few days before, so that this superstitious fire was evidently moving about in all directions through the length and breadth of the land: nor do they appear to give it any rest, even on Sundays!'
Did you know Joseph Hawell of Lonscale?
Nearly everybody within sight of Skiddaw did, and knew him to honour him and to speak well of him.
Not a ram-show nor a Herdwick prize show, not a clipping feast nor shepherd's meeting, but 'kenned' Joseph Hawell; and of later years most of the 'Yellow' or Conservative meetings in the district had seen his manly form and heard his manly words in what he used to call 'the national cause.' For Joseph Hawell was a Conservative and a Unionist; 'thoro'-bred' he used to say, for his father and his mother had felt as he did in matters political, and he thought 'they had mixed a laal bit yaller wid his poddish' when he was a boy. At any rate he would have liked well enough to have branded his fleecySkiddaw darlings with the words 'For King and Country,' and used a yellow 'dip' if such had been in existence.
I knew his old father—him of Longlands in Uldale—later of Lonscale; and a better informed man, a man, that is, better read in the news of the day, was hardly to be found in the farm-houses round Keswick. So like Dean Stanley of Westminster he was in face that I would introduce him to my friends as 'the Dean,' and by his side, as he 'cracked' on the things of state, sat usually one of the sweetest-faced, gentlest-natured of women, his good wife, whose maiden name was Jane Walker, of Stockdale. They had married in the 'fifties' of last century, and she had borne him five children—John, Jane (who died in girlhood), Robert, Joseph, and Ann.
Joseph was a Christmas present to the old oak cradle at Longlands Farm, for he was born on the 24th December, 1854; and he grew up, with John and Robert, to be as passionately fond of sheep as his father. Never a boy for books much at school, he still as a youngster was ever fond of helping on the Fell, and of training the shepherd's dogs; and rare training he had himself.
His father had, from a present of ten gimmer lambs, given him by his father when he was a young man, reared up quite a fine race of the blackfaced Herdwicks, and was, by the time the lads could bear him company, flockmaster of 500 sheep on Frozen Fell and Wylie Ghyll, and of 300 in the Forest, as it is called—the great heathery waste in the basin at the back of Skiddaw.
Joseph grew up strong and lusty as a shepherd should grow, and together with his brothers, took to wrestling as all shepherds in Cumberland ought to do; but the lads, as they grew up, became so fond of the sheep and so devoted to their father, that as soon as he, seeing that they were likely to be drawn into the ring, and to lose some of their interest in the Herdwick sheep, begged them to give up the wrestling, they gave it up; and henceforth these brothers' one aim in life seemed to be how they could most help their father to improve the Herdwick breed, and maintain his honour as a shepherd.
In 1869 the family migrated from Uldale to the secluded farm on Col. Watson's estate, between Lonscale and Saddleback; and what success the Hawells, father and sons, obtainedas breeders of pure Herdwicks can be seen by any who will call to-day at the Farm, and ask to be shown the prizes and cards that literally cover the walls from floor to ceiling.
The old man, who had struggled with storm on Skiddaw through his laborious life, failed in health, suffered as shepherds often do from terrible rheumatism, and was troubled with asthma. At last he felt obliged to leave the ingle-nook and take to his bed upstairs; but his love of the shepherd's life was still so strong upon him that a few days before he died he insisted on seeing one of the prize Herdwick rams, and the sons had a tough job to get it to 'clim' the 'stee' and stand in the presence of the dying man. The old man felt death coming upon him shortly after, but he told those who watched they need not trouble to fetch the doctor, as he knew his hour had come, and he was ready to 'gang' home.
I wrote this sonnet at the time of his death:
The sheep are bleating in the fell-side field,The kine call sadly from the homestead near,But thou art far away, thou dost not hear.A greater Shepherd, for thy feet, doth wieldThe rod that thro' the vale of death can yieldSole comfort. Round thy bed and round thy bierThe trophies of thy hand in letters clear,Speak; but we speak not: grief our lips has sealed.
Farewell, where Glenderaterra pours apaceRich music from her thousand upland springs!Thy name, old friend, the Lonscale streamlet sings;King-Shepherd thou of Skiddaw's fleecy race;And still in memory we behold thy face,Lined by laborious morns and evenings.
And on the headstone in Greystoke churchyard, that records Edward Hawell's burial, may be seen the following lines:
Here lies a simple shepherd, one who stroveTo leave behind a fairer, fuller flock;Lead him, Great Master Shepherd, in thy love,To wells of life from the Eternal Rock!
Before he died he had the comfort of seeing Joseph wedded to as good a daughter-in-law as ever lived. It was but in keeping with the whole life of the household that Joseph should have first met Margaret Roberts at the Gillbanks' clipping. The love for all time that first began at the shearing, went on smoothly till that other Master of the Shears, one men call Death, cut so cruelly the knot that Love in this life had tied. Married in 1886, Joseph was happy as man could be; hewas blessed with a son John, and a daughter Sarah Jane.
With plenty of work on the Fells by day for himself, his brother, and his men to do, he yet found time to study at night. He took to politics as his father before him had taken to them, and, having gained confidence in public speaking, he worked hard at his speeches and the preparing of them.
Of books he had not many but good; and he specially delighted in biographies and history. He never tired of reading of theSpacious Times of Great Elizabeth, theHistory of Wellingtons Wars, or ofNelson's Exploits; and when the Royal Jubilee and Armada Tercentenary came round, no stronger hand or more willing heart was found in the whole neighbourhood to build up the huge bonfire stack on Skiddaw top than Joseph Hawell's. As I write I can see him, the perspiration streaming down his honest face, building away with the peats, and handing up the paraffin, bucket by bucket; and hoping, as he told us then, there was not a man in canny Cumberland but would feel the fiery glow of a patriot's heart that night.
But he will never help us on Skiddaw top more; and never, alas, shall we go to theshepherds' meeting in Wylie Ghyll with him again, or see him at the ram fair, or hear him at a 'yaller' speech day, or sit with him at his own fireside and 'crack' on about the Herdwicks.
It is thought that influenza laid its deadly hand upon him early in the year 1891, and simultaneously he had some ailment of the gums—toothache he called it. It must have been something more serious; he went off to Keswick to see the doctor: the doctor lanced the gum, but the wound took bad ways, and within a day or so the strong man was in bed, weak and delirious.
He wished to be up and after the sheep. Must be about his father's business! And, on a cold Spring day, Friday, February 20th, an angel came to the lonely farmstead of Lonscale, to bid the brave man's spirit fare the way that all who really wish to do that Heavenly Father's business must go uncomplainingly. And still Joseph Hawell's heart was where it had ever been—at home in England. He thought that some strange hands were taking him away by force to another land, and the last words that he spoke were these:
'No! if I must die, I will at least die anEnglishman on English ground!' And so he died.
The strong hand of one stronger than man had taken him; and in a few days more, on February 23rd, hands tender and strong, the hands of an affectionate brother and true friends, bore the body of a shepherd, dead in his prime—for he was but 36 years old—down through the cow-pasture and over the gurgling Glenderaterra, and so through the silent Brundholme woods above the wailing Greta away to its rest in English earth beneath the shadow of the old church of St. Kentigern, in the Crosthwaite valley, within sight of that horned hill of Skiddaw he had loved so well. The people of Keswick begged that his body might be carried through their sorrowful town that opportunity might be given of showing sympathy and respect. And many a stalwart yeoman came to the Homegoing. Little they said, but they felt much as they moved in their dark market-carts toward the burial.
'Eh, but what! it's a terrible loss for us all!' 'The best man amang us gone.' 'We all mun ga when t' time comes, but it's hard bearing is this.' 'Niver a handier man wi't' sheep i' t' whoale forest.' 'Niver a better man clim't t' fell; a decent, stiddy man as iver was; niver heard a wrang word from him.' 'Eh, but! it's past finding out t' way young uns goes, and auld ones stays.' 'Poor lass, she's lost as good a mate as ever woman had.' 'Poor barns, they've lost a fadder afore they kent him.' And so sorrowfully they turned away from the grave, whereon flowers had been strewn and wreaths laid by hands of men who in their common regret forgot all party differences and thought only of Joseph Hawell, as a man the 'Blues and Yellows' were alike proud of in life, and alike determined to honour in death.
I was a traveller in foreign lands when the news of Joseph Hawell's death reached me, and I felt for a moment stunned. As I realised it, it seemed to me as if I did not care to see Skiddaw again. He was a piece of it; and Skiddaw without him would be no Skiddaw at all, such an ideal yeoman shepherd; so tender-hearted to the yeanlings; so true to his mountain flock; such a man among men, honest and upright, reliable; one always knew somehow that if Joe was present, men right and left of him wouldbehave like gentlemen; so high-minded and bent on the 'Just and True'; and, 'as the great ones only are, in his simplicity sublime.' His influence was wider and deeper than he had dreamed of, and I felt that with Joe Hawell a power that had worked for righteousness in a whole fell-side community, had passed as far as visible form goes from the earth.
On reaching home, it was with a sad heart that I neared the solitary fell-side farm that had been so darkened with loss. There was the same kitchen; the fiddle was on the wall; the bacon flitches hung from the rafter; the stuffed heads of the two old favourite shepherd dogs, 'Dainty' and 'Rob,' looked out from under the triumphal arch of sickles from the wall; the gun rested close by; the medicine horn and lambing bottle were in their places, and the old row of books that the father and he had so often turned to for thought and inspiration, were in their shelf—but there was no Joe! Robert took me by the hand and bade me sit on the settle, and he would tell me all about it. The poor wife said nothing, but just rose quietly and began to spread the table and set on tea, and when I urged that I would not have her fashherself so or put herself out of the way for me, she urged that it would have been Joe's wish, and I said no more.
Then the dogs came in. 'Ah,' said Robert, 't' rough un, "Jess," has not forgitten her master yet. She was sair put out o' t' way when my brother lay ill, whined at nights and would not be comforted; and she has only just now, after ten weeks' coaxing, consented to follow me when I go to the Fell.'
JOSEPH HAWELL.JOSEPH HAWELL.
'And did you have no thought of Joseph's worsening,' I said, 'when he took ill?'
'No,' said Robert, 'but rather a strange thing happened just a week before. I am not superstitious, and I said little about it. But I woke early just as it was beginning to be dawn and saw a sad face looking upon me. I knew the face well, it was Joe's wife's sister, and I thought I was dreaming and sat up, and the face still looked very sadly and then faded away, and I felt it must be a vision. I have wondered since if it was meant as a token to us. She was the first person, however, that came to help us when Joe died. It is singular, is it not? Eh dear! but it's a sair heart that I have as I go shepherding now; for it's when I'm amangt' sheep I mostly what seem to miss him. It comes ower me t' warst when I am looking at t' ewes that we used to talk ower together. You would like to see some of the letters, I daresay, we received when poor Joe went.' And saying this, the stalwart man, who loved his brother as tenderly as a woman, put a bundle of letters into my hand.
'But,' said I, as I gave back these precious documents to the owner, 'did he not leave any papers behind him? He is spoken of in one letter as gifted beyond ordinary measure as a public speaker.'
'Well,' replied the brother, 'he left very little in writing; but you know we kept his speeches. They are scattered up and down the newspapers.' And following into the Herdwick-prize room, I soon found myself deep in the speeches Joseph Hawell had from time to time delivered in the political cause he championed.
I asked if he took much trouble in the preparing of his speeches, and I was told that he did; worked hard for nights beforehand, and sometimes, as our greater orators have done, learned a bit of his intended speech by heart. Joseph had as library, up there in the rafter-smoke, some old 17th and18th century tomes, full of the breath of English spoken pure. English history was his chief study; but 'here,' said the good wife sadly, 'is a book he oft read in, particularly on Sunday afternoons.' It was a magnificent folio copy ofThe Whole Duty of Man,The Gentleman's Calling,The Art of Contentment, andThe Christian Birthright, printed by Norton, at Oxford, in 1695. As I turned over its well-thumbed pages I thought that Joseph Hawell had gone to good models for his masterful English, and had drunk wholesome draughts of goodly thought and wisdom as he studied.
'Did he leave no other written papers?'
'Yes, he left a few songs he wrote from time to time.'
I asked to see them. 'God Save Ireland from Disunion,' was the title of one; another, in rough copy, was a sheep-shearing song.
Had Joseph written anything else? Yes; there was just one letter or two he had left behind him in rough copy, and I was welcome to see them if I cared. I did care; and was rewarded.
He had latterly been a bit troubled in his mind by a friend who had what are called 'free-thinking notions.' And Joe, who wasas dead against that kind of cant as any religious cant—and he was, as I can testify, hard upon this latter—had delivered his soul.
The letter was written on February 9th, 1891, and the hand that wrote it was cold and stiff on February 20th. I dare to look upon this letter as the yeoman shepherd's last will and testament. It runs as follows:
'DEAR FRIEND,—I have received your books, and am much obliged. I have not yet got them read thoroughly, but so far they have but caused a reaction in my mind in favour of the Christian religion, and led me to have recourse to some fine old books written more than a hundred years ago, in a bold and intelligent hand, proving that astronomy and science are a powerful proof of the might and majesty of an Almighty Creator.
'Could you follow up your science by winging your way to the highest star of observation, you would there see other skies expanded and other planets and systems established, each giving harmony and perfection of attention to time by the nicest rule. Then wend your way past other ten thousand worlds, and at the end of this vast tour you would still be muddling in the suburbs of creation, only to find that no imagination canfix the limits of His creating hand, and that conceited, ignorant, and insignificant man is absolutely unable to comprehend the grandeur and correctness of His magnificent workmanship. Then am I to be told that the builder of this stupendous structure is incapable of such a paltry performance as taking possession of our souls and restoring our lifeless bodies at His own good will and pleasure?
'I find,' he adds, 'Carlyle's work very instructive, and many of the passages furnish evidence of the existence of the great Disposer of all events.'
I said this should stand as Joseph Hawell's last will and testament. No; there was another letter, written evidently just at the end of last year, in which he begs of a neighbour the loan of a horse and gear to enable him to bring down on a sledge from Lonscale Crag one of the finest single stones there. He wishes to set it up in some field on the farm, and have his father's name upon it and his father's deeds and prowess as a breeder of Herdwick sheep, with a single verse of descriptive poetry beneath, and he feels sure that his friend will lend a hand 'to erect a monument to at least one member of the Hawell family whose stainless, honourable,and straightforward life will always be pointed to with pride by his descendants.'
Joseph Hawell! the horses have gone, and the sledge has brought its heavy burden to the home-farm; and on it are engraved two names instead of one, for there are those who honour the son who would so have honoured his sire. There by that mountain path they both of them knew so well of old is the grey memorial cross set, and on it is carved, in symbol of eternity, the endless knot their Norse forefathers used. A simple verse is engraved at the base.
Those who pass the 'gale' for the meadows of Lonscale, to breast the back of Blencathra, or to climb the slopes of Skiddaw, shall surely learn that our Cumberland mountains still as of old breed men of high purpose and noble endeavour; and that still, from following the sheep, God calls His chosen ones by lives of kindliness, simplicity, and straightforward goodness, to guide their brothers in the path of duty, righteousness, and truth.