dale, on the edge of the great uplands
that stretch northwards towards Richmond and Barnard Castle, and form an
outwork of the Pennine range and the backbone of northern England. The
scene has been described in that biography of his Sister Dora, which he
here so unceremoniously despatches as a romance. 'Hauxwell is a tiny
village lying on the southern slope of a hill, from whence an extensive
view of the moors and Wensleydale is obtained. It contains between two
and three hundred inhabitants. The rectory is a pretty little dwelling,
some half-mile from the church, which is a fine old building much shut
in by trees. The whole village, even on a bright summer day, gives the
traveller an impression of intense quiet, if not of dulness; but in
winter, when the snow lies thickly for weeks together in the narrow
lane, the only thoroughfare of the place; when the distant moors also
look cold in their garment of white, and the large expanse of sky is
covered with leaden-coloured clouds; when the very streams with which
the country abounds are frozen into silence--then indeed may Hauxwell be
called a lonely village.'

Pattison's father had been educated, badly enough, at Brasenose, but
though his own literary instincts were of the slightest, he had social
ambition enough to destine his son from the first to go to Oxford and
become the fellow of a college. But nothing systematic was done towards
making the desired consummation a certainty or even a probability. The
youth read enormously, but he did not remember a tenth of what he read,
nor did he even take in the sense of half of it as he went along. 'Books
as books,' he says, 'were my delight, irrespective of their contents. I
was already marked out for the life of a student, yet little that was in
the books I read seemed to find its way into my mind.' He found time for
much besides reading. He delighted in riding, in shooting rooks in the
Hall rookery, and in fishing for trout with clumsy tackle and worm.
Passion for country sports was followed by passion for natural history
in the ordinary shape of the boy's fancy for collecting insects and
observing birds. He fell in with White's _Natural History of Selborne_,
read it over and over again, and knew it by heart.

The love of birds, moths, butterflies, led on to the love of
landscape; and altogether, in the course of the next six or seven
years, grew and merged in a conscious and declared poetical
sentiment a