f
individually. I could not very well understand all that he said, owing
to his provincial dialect; and when he spoke to his own countrymen, or
to the women of the house, I really could but just catch a word here and
there. How long it takes to melt English down into a homogeneous mass!
He told me that there was a public library in Grasmere, to which he has
access in common with the other inhabitants, and a reading-room
connected with it, where he reads the "Times" in the evening. There was
no American smartness in his mind. When I left the house, it was
showering briskly; but the drops quite ceased, and the clouds began to
break away, before I reached my hotel, and I saw the new moon over my
right shoulder.

* * * * *

_July 21._--We left Grasmere yesterday, after breakfast, it being a
delightful morning, with some clouds, but the cheerfullest sunshine on
great part of the mountain-sides and on ourselves. We returned, in the
first place, to Ambleside, along the border of Grasmere Lake, which
would be a pretty little piece of water, with its steep and
high-surrounding hills, were it not that a stubborn and straight-lined
stone fence, running along the eastern shore, by the roadside, quite
spoils its appearance. Rydal water, though nothing can make a lake of
it, looked prettier and less diminutive than at the first view; and, in
fact, I find that it is impossible to know accurately how any prospect
or other thing looks until after at least a second view, which always
essentially corrects the first. This, I think, is especially true in
regard to objects which we have heard much about, and exercised our
imagination upon; the first view being a vain attempt to reconcile our
idea with the reality, and at the second we begin to accept the thing
for what it really is. Wordsworth's situation is really a beautiful one;
and Nab Scaur behind his house rises with a grand, protecting air. We
passed Nab's cottage, in which De Quincey formerly lived, and where
Hartley Coleridge lived and died. It is a small, buff-tinted, plastered,
stone cottage, immediately on the roadside, and originally, I should
think, of a very humble class; but it now looks as if persons of taste
might some time or other have sat down in it, and caused flowers to
spring up about it. It is very agreeably situated, under the great,
precipitous hill, and with Rydal water close at hand, on the other side
of the road. An advertisement