readers of his poetry and his letters will
have formed for themselves, that they would be worse than superfluous."
And, indeed, perhaps I have already said too much. I can not, however,
resist quoting here some lines by the friend above alluded to, which
describe admirably in brief my father's whole character:

"Two friends
Lent me a further light, whose equal hate
On all unwholesome sentiment attends,
Nor whom may genius charm where heart infirm attends.

"In all things else contrarious were these two:
The one a man upon whose laureled brow
Gray hairs were growing! glory ever new
Shall circle him in after years as now;
For spent detraction may not disavow
The world of knowledge with the wit combined,
The elastic force no burden e'er could bow,
The various talents and the single mind,
Which give him moral power and mastery o'er mankind.

"His sixty summers--what are they in truth?
By Providence peculiarly blest,
With him the strong hilarity of youth
Abides, despite gray hairs, a constant guest,
His sun has veered a point toward the west,
But light as dawn his heart is glowing yet--
That heart the simplest, gentlest, kindliest, best,
Where truth and manly tenderness are met
With faith and heavenward hope, the suns that never set."[4]

What further I will venture to say relates chiefly to the external
circumstances of his life at Keswick.

His greatest relaxation was in a mountain excursion or a pic-nic by the
side of one of the lakes, tarns, or streams; and these parties, of which
he was the life and soul, will long live in the recollections of those
who shared them. An excellent pedestrian (thinking little of a walk of
twenty-five miles when upward of sixty), he usually headed the
"infantry" on these occasions, looking on those gentlemen as idle
mortals who indulged in the luxury of a mountain pony; feeling very
differently in the bracing air of Cumberland to what he did in Spain in
1800, when he delighted in being "gloriously lazy," in "sitting sideways
upon an ass," and having even a boy to "propel" the burro.

Upon first coming down to the Lakes he rather undervalued the pleasures
of an al-fresco repast, preferring chairs and tables to the greensward
of the mountains, or the moss-grown masses of rock by the lake shore;
but these were probably the impressions of a cold, wet summer, and
having soon learned thoroug