tty a place as ever I met with in my life. It is quite shut
in by hills that rise up immediately around it, like a neighborhood of
kindly giants. These hills descend steeply to the verge of the level on
which the village stands, and there they terminate at once, the whole
site of the little town being as even as a floor. I call it a village;
but it is no village at all, all the dwellings standing apart, each in
its own little domain, and each, I believe, with its own little lane
leading to it, independently of the rest. Most of these are old
cottages, plastered white, with antique porches, and roses and other
vines trained against them, and shrubbery growing about them; and some
are covered with ivy. There are a few edifices of more pretension and of
modern build, but not so strikingly as to put the rest out of
countenance. The post-office, when we found it, proved to be an ivied
cottage, with a good deal of shrubbery round it, having its own pathway,
like the other cottages. The whole looks like a real seclusion, shut out
from the great world by these encircling hills, on the sides of which,
whenever they are not too steep, you see the division-lines of property,
and tokens of cultivation,--taking from them their pretensions to savage
majesty, but bringing them nearer to the heart of man.

Since writing the above, I have been again with S---- to see
Wordsworth's grave, and, finding the door of the church open, we went
in. A woman and little girl were sweeping at the farther end, and the
woman came towards us out of the cloud of dust which she had raised. We
were surprised at the extremely antique appearance of the church. It is
paved with bluish-gray flagstones, over which uncounted generations have
trodden, leaving the floor as well laid as ever. The walls are very
thick, and the arched windows open through them at a considerable
distance above the floor. And down through the centre of the church runs
a row of five arches, very rude and round-headed, all of rough stone,
supported by rough and massive pillars, or rather square stone blocks,
which stand in the pews, and stood in the same places, probably, long
before the wood of those pews began to grow. Above this row of arches is
another row, built upon the same mass of stone, and almost as broad, but
lower; and on this upper row rests the framework, the oaken beams, the
black skeleton of the roof. It is a very clumsy contrivance for
supporting the roof, and if it were